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All of these works contain the forthright approach to the reform of French social, economic, and political institutions—redolent of the long reformist career of the abbé St. Pierre (1658–1743)—that are found in the two articles reproduced in this anthology, MASTERSHIPS and SAVINGS.
FRANÇOIS VÉRON DE FORBONNAIS, 1722–1800 (10 articles). From an old and distinguished cloth-making family in Le Mans, Forbonnais (or Fortbonnais) attended a Jansenist secondary school in Paris before joining the family business, traveling to Spain, Italy, and elsewhere as an agent. In his twenties he pursued a career in letters, writing poems, tragedies, and in 1750 a critical study of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. When Vincent de Gournay, another distinguished merchant, became royal intendant of commerce in 1751, Forbonnais became a member of his circle and found his niche, becoming perhaps the leading writer on economic matters in the 1750s before the Physiocrats emerged to prominence. He was the author of Considérations sur les finances d’Espagne [Considerations on Spanish finances] (1753); Recherches et considerations sur les finances de France depuis l’année 1595 jusqu’à l’année 1721 [Studies and considerations on French finances from the year 1595 to the year 1721] (1758), which was widely cited; and Elémens du commerce [Elements of commerce] (1754), partly drawn from his Encyclopédie articles, which was one of the leading statements of economic theory available at that time.4
For unknown reasons, Forbonnais stopped writing for the Encyclopédie with volume 5, in 1755, and in the late 1750s, he had a falling out with Diderot and Grimm. By then he was flirting with a career in government service, becoming an important adviser to the controller-general Silhouette in 1759 and achieving a reputation for both probity and prickliness. But in the end, he did more in the coming years as an informal adviser than as the holder of specific offices. After 1759 he mainly returned to business, investing in glass manufacture and becoming a gentleman farmer. In 1762 he established a model farm based on renunciation of his personal tax exemption and imposition of taxes on the basis of land possession rather
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than income, thereby illustrating a reformist theme discussed in Quesnay’s article CEREALS and in Damilaville’s FIVE PERCENT TAX in this volume. In 1763 he purchased a judgeship in the Parlement of Metz, which led to nobility after twenty years.
Forbonnais was active during the Revolution as a Third Estate deputy, as a supporter of reforms in government finances, and as a royalist until the summer of 1792, at which time he retreated from the scene, calling Robespierre’s republic a “sanguinary tyranny.” He died in March 1800, optimistic at the prospect of Napoleon’s rule.
PAUL-HENRI THIRY, BARON D’HOLBACH, 1723–89 (414 articles). Born Paul Heinrich Dietrich, d’Holbach moved from his native Palatinate, a region close to Lorraine and influenced by French culture, to Paris at the age of twelve. In the 1740s, he studied law in Leiden, returning to Paris to become a lawyer (avocat) and a naturalized French subject in 1749. He received family property in 1750, was conferred the title of baron of the Holy Roman Empire in 1753 upon the death of his uncle, and bought a nobility-conferring office, secrétaire du roi, in 1755; he also had real estate in France and Holland. By the end of the 1750s, he was a wealthy man.
In the middle of that decade, he began to host his salon, one of the most brilliant and sought-after in Paris, which met every Thursday and Sunday. Regulars included Diderot, Grimm, Morellet, Saint-Lambert, Chastellux, Galiani, Helvétius, and Raynal. Less-regular participants included d’Alembert, Boulanger, Damilaville, Jaucourt, Rousseau, Turgot, and many others.
His intellectual interests were complex and wide-ranging. His translations of German chemical work into French helped prepare the way for Lavoisier’s breakthroughs in the 1770s. Probably recruited by his friend Diderot into the Encyclopédie, he wrote voluminously, though often anonymously, for it, accelerating his production after the government crackdown of March 1759. At first he wrote on science and German culture, then increasingly on political and religious matters. From 1766 until 1776, he poured out a number of anonymous or pseudonymous works on these controversial topics: Le Christianisme dévoilé [Christianity unmasked] (1766); Théologie portative [Portable theology] (1767); La Contagion sacrée
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[The Sacred contagion] (1768); Système de la nature (1769); La Politique naturelle (1773); Système sociale (1773); Ethocratie, ou le gouvernement fondé sur la morale [Ethocracy: or Government founded on morality] (1776), and La Morale universelle [Universal morality] (1776). These works, on which he received help from Naigeon and perhaps others, marked him as a man of bold, indeed even atheistic views and wide-ranging criticism of current political regimes, leavened by a certain conservative skepticism about the alternatives. His article REPRESENTATIVES, included in this volume, is one of the most important sustained statements of political theory in our compendium.
His writing stopped in 1776; it is not clear what he thought of the American Revolution or the French pre-Revolution. He died just months before the French Revolution began in earnest.
LOUIS, CHEVALIER DE JAUCOURT, 1704–80 (17,288 articles). Author of no fewer than forty-three of the eighty-one articles translated here, Louis de Jaucourt was born in Paris on September 26, 1704, into a family of traditional sword nobility of Huguenot (Calvinist) background. Jaucourt’s father had officially reconverted to Catholicism but secretly raised his family in the old faith. Though there is some disagreement about how active the family’s Protestant professions were by the eighteenth century, there is little doubt that the Jaucourts were well connected in international Protestant circles and that Louis’s education profited from these connections. At the age of eight, he was sent to Geneva, where he stayed with an aunt and a Protestant uncle and received an education at the Academy of Geneva (1719) and at the University of Geneva. By this time, he could speak several modern European languages.
In 1727 he went to London, where his sister had married John Carmichael, a Scottish gentleman. It seems that he briefly entertained the prospect of becoming a Calvinist pastor, but his parents counseled strongly against it, and his religious fervor seems to have waned precipitously while in the eclectic and skeptical ambience of his English friends. Most of the rest of his life he appears to have spent as a kind of deist. One of his best friends from Geneva, Theodore Tronchin, joined him both in abandoning plans for a pastoral vocation and in deciding to study medicine
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instead, a profession almost as disappointing to the Jaucourt family as the ministry.
To pursue this education he went to Holland, studying in Leiden under the great Hermann Boerhaave, whom he praised in some of his Encyclopédie articles. While there, he also fell in with some of the remarkable community of émigré Protestant scholars of the period. When the Bibliothèque raisonnée was founded in 1728, he collaborated on it with Jean Barbeyrac, the editor and translator of the natural-law classics of Pufendorf and Grotius, and remained associated with the project until 1740. In 1734, under his assumed academic name L. de Neufville, he appended a well-regarded biography of Leibniz to his edition of Essais de Théodicée [Essays on Theodicy]. He was already on cordial terms with Voltaire in the 1730s and was elected to the Academy of Bordeaux in 1747, thanks partly to Montesquieu’s influence as well as to his own scientific experiments. By the end of his travels through Geneva, England, and Holland, he returned to France with a worldview not of a nobleman from Catholic France but of a Protestant, middle-class burgher with an indelible sympathy for the cause of civil and political liberty that each of these places had in its own way featured.
His great ambition in this pre-Encyclopedic phase was to make an international name as the leading