Although the Guillaumin edition was generally chronological, the volumes in this series have been arranged thematically:
The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics
“The Law,” “The State,” and Other Political Writings, 1843-1850
Economic Sophisms and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen”
Miscellaneous Works on Economics: From “Jacques-Bonhomme” to Le Journal des Économistes
Economic Harmonies
The Struggle Against Protectionism: The English and French Free-Trade Movements
The initial Guillaumin edition of the Œuvres complètes, published shortly after Bastiat’s death, comprised six volumes. Later on, Prosper Paillottet, Bastiat’s editor and executor, inherited a number of unpublished letters and articles, some of which were drafts, sometimes not even complete, but always meaningful enough to be of interest. After due consultation with Bastiat’s intellectual friends, including Richard Cobden, Paillottet decided to publish everything in a seventh volume. The drafts themselves were regrouped under the heading ébauches (drafts), and this volume contains some of them.
There are three kinds of notes in this edition: footnotes by the editor of the Guillaumin edition (Prosper Paillottet), which are preceded by “(Paillottet’s note)”; new editorial footnotes to this edition, which stand alone (unless they are commenting on Paillottet’s notes, in which case they are in square brackets following Paillottet’s note); and source notes, which are given in the last line of the heading for each letter or article. For those items taken from the Œuvres complètes, which constitutes the source for the majority of the items, the source note consists of the volume number and the beginning page number2 plus any additional source information if the item has been previously published in a journal or similar publication.
In the text, Bastiat (and Paillottet in the notes) makes many passing references to his works, for which we have provided an internal cross-reference if the work is found in this volume. For those works not in this volume, we have provided the location of the original French version in the Œuvres complètes (indicated in a footnote by “OC,” followed by the Guillaumin volume number, beginning page number, and French title of the work).
In addition, we have made available two online sources3 for the reader to consult. The first source is a table of contents of the seven-volume Œuvres complètes and links to PDF facsimiles of each volume. The second source is our “Comparative Table of Contents of the Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat,” which is a table of contents of the complete Liberty Fund series. Here, the reader can find the location of the English translation of the work in its future Liberty Fund volume. These contents will be filled in and updated as the volumes come out and will eventually be the most complete comparative listing of Bastiat’s works.
In order to avoid multiple footnotes and cross-references, three glossaries have been provided for the identification of the persons, places, and subjects and terms mentioned in the text that were important to Bastiat in his time. The glossaries also provide historical context and background for the reader as well as a greater understanding of Bastiat’s work. If a name as it appears in the text is ambiguous or is in the Glossary of Persons under a different name, a brief footnote has been added to the text to identify the name as it is listed in the glossary.
It should be remembered that when the Guillaumin edition was issued a number of people who knew Bastiat personally were still alive. The ellipses added by Paillottet, which precede or end some letters and which signal the omission of expressions of politeness or affection, have been reproduced in this edition. Ellipses are also used to indicate either a missing portion of the drafts or a deliberate cut by Paillottet when he thought that the passage in question was too private in nature. Finally, original italics as they appear in the Guillaumin edition have been retained.
Jacques de Guenin Saint-Loubouer, France
In this translation we have made a deliberate decision not to translate Frédéric Bastiat’s French into modern, colloquial American English. Wherever possible we have tried to retain a flavor of the more florid, Latinate forms of expression that were common among the literate class in mid-nineteenth-century France. Bastiat liked long, flowing sentences, in which idea followed upon idea in an apparently endless succession of dependent clauses. For the sake of clarity, we have broken up many but not all of these thickets of expression. In those that remain, you, dear reader, will have to navigate.
As was the custom in the 1840s, Bastiat liked to pepper his paragraphs with exclamations like “What!” and aphoristic Latin phrases like Quid leges sine moribus? (What are laws without customs?). We have translated the latter and left most of the former as a reminder that this was written in a bygone age when tastes were very different. We have also kept personal names, titles of nobility, and the like in their original French if the persons were French; thus, “M.” instead of “Mr.”; “Mme” instead of “Mrs.”; “Mlle” instead of “Miss”; and “MM” instead of “Messrs.”
Because Bastiat was a political theorist and an economist, he used many technical terms and expressions in his writings, some of which need explanation as they have no exact translation into today’s speech. One example is liberté, which could be translated as either “liberty” (if one wanted to retain a more eighteenth-century flavor) or “freedom” (if one wanted a more modern sense). We have used both depending on the context and how it sounded to our ears. Another is pouvoir, which we have variously translated as “power,” “government,” or “authority,” again depending on the context. A third example consists of the words économie politique and économiste. In both French and English throughout the eighteenth, and for most of the nineteenth, centuries, the term political economy was used to describe what we now call “economics.” Toward the end of the nineteenth century as economics became more mathematical, the adjective “political” was dropped and not replaced. We have preferred to keep the term political economy both because it was still current when Bastiat was writing and because it better describes the state of the discipline, which proudly mixed an interest in moral philosophy, history, and political theory with the main dish, which was economic analysis; similarly, with the term économiste. Today one can be a free-market economist, a Marxist economist, a Keynesian economist, a mathematical economist, an Austrian economist, or whatever. The qualifier before the noun is quite important. In Bastiat’s day it was assumed that any “economist” was a free-market economist, and so the noun needed no adjectival qualifier. Only during the 1840s, with the emergence of socialist ideas in France and Germany, did there emerge a school of economic thinking that sharply diverged from the free market. But in Bastiat’s day this had not yet become large enough to cause confusion over naming. Even in 1849, when Gustave de Molinari published his charming set of dialogues, Les Soirées de la rue St. Lazare, between three stock characters—the socialist, the conservative, and the economist—it was perfectly clear who was arguing for what, and that the economist was of course a