The Marquis de Mirabeau and Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général

Abstract

This article presents a detailed chronology of the creation of L'Ami des hommes and the very special role played by Richard Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général in this process. It shows that Mirabeau obtained the manuscript of the French translation of the Essai made by Cantillon himself through a marquis de Saint-George. We provide a biography of this obscure character and discuss his relationship with both Cantillon and the Marquis de Mirabeau. Then, we study how Mirabeau used Cantillon's text as a source of inspiration for four projects developed in different contexts. We show that, from 1740 to 1757, his relationship to Cantillon's text changed. His first two tries merely abstracted and rewrote the original text of the Essai to adapt it to a general readership. In the early 1750s, motivated by his discussions with his younger brother, the Chevalier de Mirabeau, on political economy, the marquis developed a more ambitious plan. He decided to provide an annotated edition of Cantillon's Essai. By 1756, Mirabeau realized that his ideas and interests had become so much different from those of Cantillon that it was best to reconceive his project as a stand-alone and completely original text, the one he finally published as L'Ami des hommes in 1757.