Frédéric Bastiat

Frédéric Bastiat was born in Bayonne on June 30, 1801, the son of a merchant in the Spanish trade. Orphaned before he was ten, he was raised by his grandfather and an aunt at Mugron in the Landes, left school at seventeen to work in the family export house, and in 1825 inherited the Mugron farm. For nearly twenty years he farmed it without much success, read Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the English free trade press, served as justice of the peace of Mugron from 1831, and sat on the general council of the Landes.

He was forty-three when an article comparing French and English tariffs appeared in the Journal des Économistes in October 1844 and made him known in Paris within months. Cobden and the League followed in 1845, then the first series of Economic Sophisms, which contains the petition in which the candlemakers of France ask the Chamber of Deputies to block out the sun so that their trade may prosper. In 1846 he founded the French Free Trade Association and edited its weekly paper, Le Libre-Échange, carrying Richard Cobden's campaign against the Corn Laws into a country whose manufacturers wanted protection kept.

After the February Revolution of 1848 the Landes elected him to the Constituent Assembly, and again to the Legislative Assembly in 1849. He sat on the finance committee and opposed both the protective tariff and the state workshops urged by Louis Blanc, arguing against the two from a single principle. Tuberculosis of the throat took his voice, and he wrote his last pamphlets at speed: The Law and Economic Harmonies in 1850, and What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen in July of that year. He died in Rome on December 24, 1850, at the age of forty-nine, and is buried in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi.