From Malthusianism to Populationism: The French Liberal Economists (1840–1870)

Of the large number of writers interested in population in France in the midnineteenth century, the liberal economists deserve special attention.1 Like the English free-trade economists, they organised in 1841 an opinion and pressure group to press for the abolition of protectionist laws which had become increasingly stringent since the seventeenth century.2 They did not, however, succeed in giving rise to a mass movement in support of free trade like their counterparts across the Channel and their adversaries did not fail to denounce them as a “sect of economists” obsessed by the idea of free trade. This sect was nonetheless quite active.