Today, I spent my time re-reading George Charles Roche's Frederic Bastiat: A Man Alone, a truly wonderful biography of this great Frenchman. Published by Arlington House in 1971, the book is now out of print, but I obtained it second-hand thanks to the Internet. In his foreword, Roche thanks Lew Rockwell, then his editor at Arlington House. When I first read this, I wrote to Lew asking about Roche - and he told me the sad news that George had passed away some years back. But this is a great biography, well worth republishing in India.
In this post I would like to focus on the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, and what Bastiat wrote on that occasion. Bastiat had witnessed two revolutions already, with another around the corner. Why, he asked, was France so prone to political upheavals. Why did social order seem so impossible. At the end of the chapter devoted to those dark days, Roche concludes with these words: "In the setting of another age in which social order is collapsing, we might well ponder Bastiat's question." Roche was probably writing about America in the 1970s - but I find this particular chapter a chilling reminder of our own times right now here in India.
France has seen many bloody revolutions and instituted many republics. But right to this day she struggles for Liberty and remains deeply socialistic - the "sick man of Europe," many call her. In 1789, they cut off their King's head. But failed miserably in their goals. Chaos ensued - not the promised "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." Ten years later, in 1799, the inevitable "strong man" was called in - Napoleon Bonaparte - and this dictator ushered in an era of endless wars and suffering. After Napoleon, the French "restored" the Monarchy, placing on the throne Louis XVII, a brother of the king they had beheaded. After he died, yet another brother, Charles X, ascended to the throne - but this absolutist was a complete failure, and was forced to abdicate in the Revolution of 1830. Bastiat was then a young man, a gentleman-farmer and a private scholar - and he even participated in this Revolution, leading a group of some 600 men to storm the garrison occupying the citadel of the town of Bayonne, quite close to his estate. But no blood was shed; the garrison opened their gates and welcomed Bastiat and his friends in - to an evening of wine, liqueurs, and song. It seems that everyone was quite fed up of the monarchy and the nobility then, and yearned for constitutional government and bourgeois rule. So along came Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King," and this time it was the rising bourgeoisie of France who ruled - and the young Bastiat cheered. However, the French failed yet again to establish good government. By 1848, it was clear that bourgeois rule was corrupt to the core - because the State was deeply involved in business. Hence the Revolution of 1848 - and Louis Philippe had to flee France. This time, Bastiat was older and wiser. He had spent more than 20 years in quiet study - and was quite an intellectual giant. Some of his books and articles had been published - and he was well known as a free trader and an enemy of all protectionists. Roche says this on the difference between the Bastiat of 1830 who welcomed bourgeois rule and the Bastiat of 1848 who was by now in the thick of things right there in Paris:
The young gentleman farmer had always been a man alone in the developing pattern of his life, but what truly set him apart from his times was his growing realization that government, no matter who ran it, no matter in whose interests it was run, could only be a harmful force let loose in human society whenever it exceeded its negative obligations to protect life and property.
The Revolution of 1848 that threw out Louis Philippe now proceeded to institute the Second French Republic. This time, the government was headed by an aristocrat-poet and great orator, Lamartine, with the socialist Louis Blanc as a sort of second-in-command. Roche quotes Alexis de Tocqueville's impression of Lamartine as an "absolutely unprincipled politician":
I do not know that I have ever... met a mind so void of any thought of the public welfare as his... Neither have I known a mind less sincere... When speaking or writing he spoke the truth or lied, without caring which he did, occupied only with the effect he wished to produce at the moment...
Lamartine now proceeded, much to Bastiat's dismay, to institute various measures and programs suggested by the socialists led by Louis Blanc. Among these were the National Workshops where any unemployed Parisian could find paid work to do. This was what the socialists meant then when they called for a "right to work" - a right that Chacha Manmohan S Gandhi also believes in, what with his NREGA ditch-digging. At their height, the National Workshops "employed" more than 1,20,000 people - and the Treasury was going broke. All hell broke loose and these had to be abolished. There was another Revolution in just four months - but that story can be told some other time. Today, let me record Bastiat's words on the occasion, and the extremely important question he raised:
... while the French people have been in advance of all other nations in the conquest of their rights, or rather their political guarantees, they have nonetheless remained the most governed, regimented, administered, imposed upon, shackled, and exploited of all.
France is also, and necessarily, the one nation in which revolutions are most likely to occur.
And what remedy is proposed? To enlarge the domain of the law indefinitely, that is, the responsibility of the government.
But if the government undertakes to raise and regulate wages, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to assist all the unfortunate, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to assure pensions to all workers, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to provide workers with the tools of production, and cannot do so; if it undertakes to make interest-free credit available to all those clamouring for loans, and cannot do so; if, in words that we regret to note were written by M. de Lamartine, "the State assumes the task of enlightening, developing, increasing, spiritualizing, and sanctifying the soul of the people," and it fails; is it not evident that after each disappointment (alas, only too probable!), there will be a no less inevitable revolution?
Once we start from this idea, accepted by all our political theorists, and so energetically expressed by M. Louis Blanc in these words: "The motive force of society is the government"; once men consider themselves as sentient, but passive, incapable of improving themselves morally or materially by their own intelligence and energy, and reduced to expecting everything from the law; in a word, when they admit that their relation to the State is that of a flock of sheep to the shepherd, it is clear that the responsibility of the government is immense. Good and evil, virtue and vice, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty, all proceed from it. It is entrusted with everything, it undertakes everything, it does everything; hence, it is responsible for everything. If we are happy, it has every right to claim our gratitude; but if we are wretched, it alone is to blame...
Thus, there is not a single ill afflicting the nation for which the government has not voluntarily made itself responsible. Is it astonishing, then, that each little twinge should be the cause of revolution?
Wise words, indeed, of a great classical political economist - who, it must be noted, was entirely self-taught, having dropped out of school.
I hope these words will resound throughout India. This benighted nation needs to think.
To conclude: The year 1848 was also the year in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. In the 160 years since, Bastiat was entirely forgotten - he died in 1850 - and Marx and Engels ruled the minds of students in much of the world, including India. In his Foreword, Roche gives thanks to Leonard Read, founder of The Foundation for Economic Education, for "rescuing Bastiat from the ash-heap of history." Read was a friend of Ludwig von Mises, and he started FEE probably because of his influence. If you read Mises' works, you often find favourable references to Bastiat.
In my own case, as I have recorded in my foreword to The Essential Frederic Bastiat (PDF here), I studied Economics formally in Delhi University beginning in 1974 - and I first heard of Bastiat in the early 1990s, and that too, from a dentist! I trust my reader now understands the reasons behind my deep animosity to State education. It is The State that has intentionally and deliberately mistaught this vital subject. I hope my readers will now read Bastiat - and dump Marx. Marxism destroyed much of the world. Bastiat can help save it.
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