Introduction

In France, during the 1840s, the ‘labour question’, as a main component of the ‘social question’, was discussed by a broad spectrum of people (economists, social reformers, paternalist entrepreneurs, social Catholics, socialists, and so forth), and so we find a wide range of suggestions for solving the problem. The 1840s is the period of the Monarchie de Juillet, and of the February Revolution of 1848, which ended with the (very short-lived) Second Republic. The economic depression began in 1847 and the French economy was in a depression until 1851. Textile industries, metallurgy and railroads were seriously affected, and unemployment strongly increased. Workers’ misery was therefore one of the causes of the February Revolution of 1848.

This period is a very interesting test for studying the way in which the ‘labour question’ was tackled by the liberal economists. So, we will focus our attention on the so-called ‘school’ that emerges with the birth of the Journal des économistes in 1841 and the foundation of the Société d'économie politique de Paris in 1842. Rightly, Schumpeter said that this group had a ‘too exclusive concentration upon economic policy’ and ‘lacked interest in purely scientific questions’. Inside this group, broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish two families:

the ultra-liberal economists: mainly Charles Dunoyer (1796–1862), Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50), Léon Faucher (1803–54), Joseph Garnier (1813–81) and Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912); these orthodox economists were the best supporters of the natural laws of political economy and the most uncompromising about the arbitrariness of the State.