The Political Failure

of an Economic Theory:

Physiocracy

Yves Charbit*

One overwhelming fact was obvious to all contemporary observers at the end of the ancien régime: in this large and fundamentally rural kingdom of France, the economic weight of agriculture could not be ignored. "All the authors of the period, Utopists, exiled Huguenots, Economists (...) valued the cultivation of land" and, for Vauban and Boisguibert especially, "agricultural activity has a primacy that is both historical (in the development of humanity) and logical (in the causal explanation of the productive process)", notes Jean-Claude Perrotf1). A third reason can be added: land's symbolic value, since the acquisition of land was the key to gaining titles of nobility for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is therefore appropriate to relate ideas on population to the thinking about agriculture. Physiocracy — the "rule of nature" — presents a twofold originality in relation to the other intellectual currents of the period. It holds agriculture to be the exclusive source of wealth, and on this con-

Population-E 2002, 57(6), 855-884