 Our speaker, David Hart, is the online library director at the Liberty Fund, an academic editor of the collected works of Frederick Bastia. Dr. Hart is a historian and a libertarian with interests in the history of classical liberal tradition, especially the French, war and culture, libertarian class theory and film. He has a PhD from King's College in Cambridge, a master's from Stanford University, and a BA honors degree from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He taught in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide in South Australia for 15 years before moving to the US where he now works for a nonprofit foundation. Dr. Hart is the director of the online library of Liberty Project and the academic editor of the collected works of Bastia in six volumes. In volume three, I'm happy to say has just been published last week. In addition to his many academic writings in 2016, Dr. Hart completed a screenplay about the life and work of Frederick Bastia entitled Broken Windows, which is available online and I recommend it. I've known David for several decades now and consider him to be the foremost living authority on the classical liberal tradition, including Bastia. The topic of Dr. Hart's lecture is Frederick Bastia, the Unseen Radical. Thank you, Joe. Thank you to the Mises Institute for inviting me to give this lecture. And I also wanna thank you for arranging Bastia's name so, usefully, above my head. The other person I've written on extensively, his name is just over there, Gustave de Molinari. So there's a pincer movement going on here to restrain me on the stage, I think. Henry Haslet and Bastia both were very important in my own intellectual development. I was a high school student in Sydney, Australia when I discovered the works of Ayn Rand and Audie von Mises and I subscribed, sent away to a Foundation for Economic Education and to Laysay Fair Books, which was based in San Francisco and I would order boxes of books which the postman would laboriously walk up the driveway of my parents' home in Sydney saying, why are you buying all these books from America? Don't we produce books in Australia? Some of those books that came from the Foundation for Economic Education included their editions of Bastia that were done in the 1960s as well as Henry Haslet's economics in one lesson. And that was really my introduction to pre-market economics which was then closely followed by reading of Rothbard and Mises and other people. So I have a profound intellectual debt to both Bastia and Henry Haslet. What I wanna do today is to talk to you about some aspects of Bastia's life and thought that may not be well known to you. And I've called it the unseen radical. And this is obviously a play on words on Bastia's last and perhaps best known work, the seen and the unseen. And if you remember, Bastia defines a bad economist as someone who just looks for the immediately obvious effects of a government policy. The good economist however knows that there's something deeper going on that some of the consequences will be hidden or they will be delayed or they will be difficult to immediately identify. And so he described the things that were immediately seen as the obvious, the unseen as the more complicated. But I think that can also be applied to Bastia. He went through several periods where he was virtually unseen for his contributions, both in his own day and in today. And I wanna try and unpack some of those for you. The word radical by using a number of different ways. First of all, there's the radicalism of his personal style and behavior. And this doesn't come out in the biographies that I've looked at him about him. But it did come out in the correspondence which was in our volume one. He was a really radical, unique individual. And I wanna give you a flavor of that, both in his dress, his language and his attitudes to other people and society in general. Another usage of the word radical is his innovative ideas and his theories. And one of the things that made him unseen to his own colleagues, they did not appreciate the originality and the complexity and the great worth of his theoretical work. They dismissed him as many people have done since as just a good economic journalist. So, frustratingly for him, he wasn't fully appreciated and seen in his own day. And then today we have people who do see different sides of that of Bastia. We have in free market circles, he's widely regarded as for his writings of the economic sophisms, which is some of the most brilliant economic journalism ever written. Conservatives today see him as the author of the state and the law to important essays about limited government and the nature and origin of law. And the Austrians also appreciate and see him because of his quite precocious insights into subjective value theory well ahead of his time. But my argument is that there is much, much more to Bastia. And what I've been uncovering in my editing of the collected works, this is volume three, about 700 pages, has just come out. This is of a projected six volume series. So about 3,000 words in total. One of the problems was with seeing the true Bastia is that when Fee did their translations in the mid 1960s, they translated less than half of his work. And so there's a lot. If that's all you know about Bastia, you're in for a surprise and a pleasant surprise because there is so much more to the man. Let me just give you a brief list of some of the things that I think make him a radical and very interesting libertarian theorist and activist and personality. One of the first things that happened that came to my attention was when I was reading through his letters was he had an initial radicalization as a young man at a private college which had a very innovative curriculum which shows the importance of not having a state education that you want to think in critically and as a real individual. He became in his 20s somewhat of a social radical and bon vivant and a non-conformist outsider. And he took that with him from his provincial origins to Paris when he went there in the mid 1840s much to the consternation of his more conservative, conservative, socially conservative colleagues amongst the economic circle in Paris. Then when he was an economic journalist writing some wonderful essays attacking subsidies and economic protection and tariffs he developed a whole new rhetoric of liberty. It's my expression to describe his style, his rhetoric of liberty and his willingness to use harsh language to describe the bad consequences of government actions. So he would call a spade a spade or as the French say, apollé un char char to call a cat a cat. And I think there's a considerable similarity between Bastia and Rothbard because Rothbard also used harsh language to talk about how the state plundered and murdered and so on. Another factor in his radicalism is it's not well appreciated how much he was opposed to things like military expenditure and war and colonialism. And conservatives who appreciate his writings on free trade often don't want to know that this was intimately connected to his opposition to war. Another factor that made him a radical is he had utopian dreams. I call these utopian dreams utopian because he himself described in one of his great economic sophisms called the utopian. He had utopian dreams about what he would do if he were made dictator for a day which was to drastically slash government both its expenditure and its size and scope. And that wasn't the only time he did this, there are other writings where he expresses his utopian dreams to dismantle a state. Another aspect of his radicalism is his active support for the revolution that broke out in February of 1848 and the inauguration of the Second Republic. And he was very active in the Second Republic as a member of the Chamber of Deputies. But he was also willing to go out on the streets of Paris with a little magazine that he and friends like Gustave de Molinari produced and handed out on the streets to the workers trying to persuade them not to take the socialist ideas seriously to think more about free markets and about private property rights. And he was on the streets of Paris twice once in February, March and then again in June when the troops were called out to put down the rioters and hundreds if not thousands of people were just killed when the French military were firing artillery down the streets of Paris to destroy the barricades. And Bastiat and some of his correspondents talks about how he was caught on the streets while he was handing out these pamphlets and what he did to try and help some of the injured people. He's also played a very important role in the Chamber of Deputies as the Vice President of the Finance Committee. They recognized his, when he was elected to the Chamber in April of 1848 he was immediately appointed to this important position in the Finance Committee and he would make regular reports to the Chamber about the state of French finances and he was constantly telling them we are in a crisis, we have to cut government expenditure, we have to balance the budget and in order to do this we have to slash military expenditure because that was the single biggest item in the budget. On top of all this while he's agitating for free trade while he's in the Chamber of Deputies lobbying to balance the budget he's also realized that he had some important and original economic ideas which he was trying to put together to write his important theoretical treatise economic harmonies. And the tragedy of that of course is he kept getting distracted by the political events around him. I guess you'd call a revolution a kind of distraction. And he never was able to finish writing this book. He knew that he was dying, I think he was dying of throat cancer which was extraordinarily painful and he was probably on Loudoun to try and keep the pain under control and to the very end he kept writing and working on his project but he only was able to finish the first volume which was published in January of 1850 and after his death on Christmas Eve in 1850 his friends and colleagues put together the remnants of his papers in an expanded volume which was about twice the size which came out in mid 1851. But when you read through not just the sketches and chapters of the economic harmonies scattered throughout his other writings I've found about a dozen or so key innovative economic ideas many of them Austrian, some of them public choice others just good economic analysis. And I thought well when did he get some of these ideas? When did he start thinking in this original way? My original hunch was that when he went to Paris it was to work as a journalist and a free trade activist and that he learned economics when he was in Paris mixing with these other economists. But just in the last couple of weeks as I was working through volume four for our collected works I was trying to track when he first used some of these key economic concepts and I kept coming back to one essay that he wrote to criticise Lamartine the famous French poet and in an article that he wrote in January 1845 so before he moved to Paris he already had in his mind eight or 10 of these key economic ideas already in his head. So he went to Paris I think with his mind full of innovative and original ideas and it wasn't the influence of the other Paris economists around him that led him to write economic harmonies. But I'll say a little bit about that more in a moment. So he's an innovative theoretical economist I think ahead of his time by many years if not decades and it took someone like Rothbard back in the 1950s and 60s to see and to recognise Bastiaz's originality and to actually use him as a stimulus to in the first three or four chapters of man economy and state. If you read the footnotes carefully and I love footnotes because I write too many of them in the Bastiaz translation you'll see Rothbard's debt to Bastiaz's methodological individualism and I'll say a bit more about that if you want. In addition to being a theoretical or budding theoretical economist who had his career cut short by his premature death he was a theorist of classical liberal class analysis and his theory of plunder is of course one of the key terms in that theory. He was going to write a history of plunder after he had finished he had a plan to write three volumes. The first volume he planned to write a volume called social harmonies and this was to be about how voluntary action creates cooperation and harmony in the social realm which is the family, the church, society at large and then he found out he was running out of time and he really had to concentrate on one particular type of harmony and he decided to focus on economic harmony so that was meant to be volume two and then the history of plunder was meant to be volume three which was not just a history of plunder but a history of disharmony. The first two volumes were to be about harmony and how harmony's played out when people were left free to cooperate amongst themselves and then of course he realized that history was full of disharmony, full of statist activity which created disharmony and plunder and class rule and so on and that was to be the third volume in his series. So that's just to give you an overview of some of the radical aspects of Bastia's thinking and I won't have time to talk about all of those unfortunately because there is a book here I think and the book is slowly emerging and I'll get around to finishing it one day. The sad thing is that most of the people who've worked on this project have died and I think I'm the last surviving member of the original team so this is like the curse of Bastia on whoever works on this project. We've lost two translators and the original general editor Jacques de Garnet so wish me luck you know. So that's just the overview let me just show you some of the on seeing or not seeing Bastia depends on where you're standing and what I was standing in Sydney in Australia reading Henry Hazlott and Bastia for the first time my initial reaction to Bastia was he is a very clever and smart and witty journalist and left him at that and moved on to more serious economists, serious economists like Mises and Rothbard. It was only when I was asked by Liberty Fund to work on this project about 12 years ago that I went back and read for the first time in French everything that Bastia had written and I was ashamed to say I had completely underestimated and misunderstood the significance of Bastia as a serious social thinker and I'm trying to make some atonement for those that's original sin of not paying full attention to Bastia and part of the problem is that he's such a good writer that you just swept up by his writings and you don't look deeper it's only when you start looking at it more closely and you realize how is this constructed what are the underlying ideas who is he referring to? He's constantly quoting French literature which showed a deep reading of Mollier and Lafontaine and some of the other French classics and so really the perspective understanding of who and what Bastia is depends on time and place and he's had a terrible track record of first of all he's not understood by his colleagues he's forgotten in the late 19th century practically people like Schumpeter say that his famous quote you know what kind of a theorist was Bastia he says I don't think he was a theorist of any kind and then even Hayek grudgingly sort of condemns him with faint praise by saying yes he was a great economic journalist it's best not to ask too much about him as a theorist you know so this is Henry Haslott Economics in One Lesson and if you've read anything if you've read the introduction to this book you'll know that Haslott was deeply indebted to Bastia and he plagiarized Bastia's subtitle in the title of his book this is the edition that Arcee Hoyles he, Arcee Hoyles, was a publisher of newspapers in America he started the Freedom newspapers chain and he moved to Santa Ana, Southern California and came across and he met Leonard Reed who was then the head of the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles and somehow they discovered the writings of Bastia in some 19th century translations I think the story I've read is that Leonard Reed was giving a talk for the Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles and someone came up to him and said you sound just like Frederick Bastia and he said who the hell is Frederick Bastia I never heard of him so he went back and found these 19th century translations of Bastia and talked to Hoyles and Hoyles was on this anti-New Deal, anti-FDR campaign and saw immediately that Bastia's writings was perfectly relevant to 1940s America and so he used the printing presses of the Santa Ana Register to print these wonderful red covered editions of Bastia which I'm interested to see Rothbard has these exact editions in the library outside as does the founder of Liberty Fund, Pierre Goodrich he has copies of this and when I was here last year I took a photograph of Rothbard's copies and he mutilated these books and here is a page from the economic sofisms where he's underlined so much stuff and then he has written magnificent at the bottom because of pure Rothbard so if you want to have a charcoal go out and read some of Rothbard's comments on Bastia but he was discovered by Hoyles and Leonard Reid in the 40s and then Rothbard through then I think discovered Bastia and Bastia has been known by libertarians and conservatives ever since but it wasn't always that way and I want to briefly talk about his background where he came from and you'll have to pardon some of the puns and alliterations I'm going to use like a guy in Gascony because that's how Bastia wrote his writings are full of plays on words and one of the most laborious things I had to do in editing the series was to explain his jokes in English there's nothing funnier than a footnote that explains a joke so that's a horrible faux pas if you'll pardon the French so where did Bastia come from? Well, as we know, Paris is the centre of the universe and he came from a place that he was born in Bayonne which is in Basque country, close to the Spanish border and so he grew up and his grandfather was a business man, an importer and exporter and the business suffered terribly under the Napoleonic restrictions of during the Napoleonic wars the other thing that's of note is that Bayonne is Basque and the Basque people so stupid they don't understand the benefits of nation states and borders and so they have no respect whatsoever for this artificial line drawn between Spain and France because there are Basque people who live on the northern side and there are Basque people who live on the southern side and they're just trading with their kinfolk and so Bastia grows up in a place where there is constant smuggling which drives the French government crazy when he, his grandfather died his parents died when he was very young when his grandfather dies when Bastia was 25 he inherits his grandfather's estate in Mugrand which is a very small place and he lives there for the next 20 years he's a local magistrate his reputation was a very good magistrate, very efficient he was intellectually curious and he read for 20 years everything he could lay his hands on in economics in four different languages French, Italian, English and Spanish and how he got to this interest and this gift with language I'll explain in a moment when he was about 14 his grandfather sent him to a college in Sores there was a Benedictine Abbey in Sores which had a college and it was a private college and what had happened was that it was run by the Benedictines it was turned into a military college in the late 18th century to train young aristocrats the sons of aristocrats who wanted to go into the army and then during the first French Revolution in the 1790s much church property was confiscated and then sold off and some entrepreneurial educator bought the land and turned it into a private college and Bastia went to this private college and this had a transformative experience on him this is the postcard from the 19th century showing the college and what happened was that this college had a reputation when Bastia went there in about 18, 14, 18, 15 the college had 400 students and they came from all over the world mostly from Europe but there was a sizable contingent from England and America which is how Bastia learned English they had a radical curriculum they didn't teach Latin or Greek they taught modern languages they taught modern literature they taught music they taught mathematics and that's where Bastia got this love of reading he was one of the school prize for poetry he also I think had a photographic memory in that he learned all this stuff these passages from La Molière and La Fontaine and others and he could recite them and did repeatedly both in his writings and also in his social networks he was involved in various liberal salons in Paris when he was living there, 1846 to 50 and he used to regale people at these liberal salons with recitations of classic works of French literature but he would also do parodies, impromptu parodies where he would change the names of some of the characters to the names of current politicians and make fun of them he also learned the cello at Sores and he loved the cello and took it with him and played music all the time which he'd also do at these salons in Paris much to the, again, the consternation of some of the more conservative members he also loved singing and this is where, I've called this in vino libertasse in wine there is liberty Bastia, Béranger and Bayonne Béranger was a very important political songwriter of the period and so when Bastia leaves the College of Sores and goes back to work in his grandfather's business he begins to mix with liberal groups in Bayonne at that period though, this is in the early 1820s political meetings and parties were strictly banned so the only way that you could talk this was during the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and they were trying to restore as much of the old regime as possible and the powers of the aristocracy and the powers of the church and one way that they tried to do that was to stop criticism and that was to prevent people from discussing politics but people want to talk about politics so they would gather in bars and talk politics secretly but they would also engage in singing songs political songs and the places where they would go to sing these songs were bars that specialized in this and they were called goguettes and the people who wrote these political songs and these were best-selling items were called goguettiers and Béranger was one of the best-selling goguettiers in France and his books would sell in their thousands he made a comfortable living just writing these songs and he published the books with the libretto with the music, the score and the words and the trick was that the here are some pictures of goguettes this is one by Dormier and there were even goguettes just for women these were women who would run their own goguettes and have gatherings together and run at themselves and so on and Béranger was a very interesting character who spent considerable time in several times he was put in prison for his ridiculing of Louis Philippe sorry for Charles the Tent and one of the songs that was very popular at the time that I'm sure Bastia sang in these goguettes these bars was a song in praise of smugglers and this is an illustration from one of the books that Béranger had published with his songs in it so that's a page from one of these books and this is Béranger's smugglers song and I'll just read you the words I won't sing, you'll be pleased to know I won't sing curse them, curse them the revenue men for we bring happiness and wealth the people always toast our health they are indeed our friends yes everywhere the people are our friends yes everywhere, everywhere the people are our friends men busy themselves with trade but taxes bar the way let us through, exchanges will be made there will be balance this is an economic pun here there will be balance, come what may providence protects us everywhere and asks that in return abundance we will share so wealth there is to earn so you can imagine singing songs or maybe you can't imagine yourself singing songs like this in a bar and of course what the police would do is if they heard people singing these songs they would break into the bars and try and shut them down so quite often the people who were singing the songs would have two different versions of the verse right one innocuous and one praising smuggling let's say and then if someone said oh the bad guy the police are coming so they'd switch to the innocuous words and so this sort of goes on you might think well this is all very well charming men in these 20s going off to the pub singing songs what's the practical use of it well this is the garrison in Bayonne and in 1830 when Bastia was 29 or so people that had enough of the reign of Charles the 10th and he was in the process of being overthrown by what would become the July monarchy under Louis Philippe but the king of France was a Bourbon the king of Spain was a Bourbon the garrison in Bayonne was in crucial if the Spanish Bourbon king wanted to send troops to assist his relative the Bourbon French king he would have to pass through southern France and so depending on which way the officers in the garrison went they could tip the revolution one way or the other and Bastia being a young liberal mixing in circles in Bayonne was very keen that Louis Philippe have a chance to get to the throne and get rid of the tyrannical Charles the 10th and so what he does is he hears that the officers are torn about which way to go whether they should support the king to whom they had sworn an oath of allegiance or should they support the revolution that's taking place in Paris and so what Bastia does is he goes off with some friends to talk to the officers in the garrison and they spend, as one does in France is you spend the night drinking red wine and singing songs and this is, and Bastia is able to persuade the officers of the garrison to side with the revolutionaries and not to allow the support of the overthrown Bourbon king and he writes in his correspondence this is in the 5th of August 1830 and he says the 5th at midnight I was expecting blood but it was only wine that was spilt the citadel has displayed the tricolor flag the military containment of the midi in Toulouse has been declared, has decided that of Bayonne the regiments down there have displayed the flag thus it is all over this evening we fraternize with the garrison officers punch, wine, liqueurs and above all beiranger contributed largely to the festivities perfect cordiality reigned in this truly patriotic gathering the officers were warmer than we were in the same way as horses which have escaped are more joyful than those that are free so he went there and persuaded through his singing of these political songs who was able to participate in the first revolution of his life he was later to participate in the second revolution in 48 so this is the young Bastia who likes to sing political songs and doesn't look as though he's got anything more intellectually to offer but something happens to him in the 30s which is very interesting this is another aspect of his peculiarities as an individual I don't know what he looked like before he went to Paris the pictures we have of Hitler and him as a member of the Chamber of Deputies like the one I showed you at the beginning but I think this is a postcard or a picture from the early 19th century showing how country gentlemen dressed in Le Londe Le Londe was the region where he lived and it's very heathy and even marshy in places and these people on stilts is very common in that part of the world and the reason they wore stilts was because of this heath country they were shepherds and the heath was very difficult to walk through and they couldn't see the sheep unless they were high and so they would wear stilts and they would walk around on these stilts and even today in Bayonne and other places young men when they have market festivals will get on these stilts and do jousting contests to try and knock each other off their stilts so this is seriously weird stuff but Bastia was a landowner he had about 250 hectares which is about 500 acres and he had sharecroppers working his land he had other tenants and so this is what he might have looked like when he went to inspect his properties and he would have had people like that to talk to you about how they were going and how the business was going and so on and this is very interesting because when he goes to Paris he refused to wear the traditional clothes of his contemporary economists they all wore black, serious black black hats, black coats and Bastia I think would have looked like this dressed like this country gentleman and there are some very interesting comments by some of his friends and colleagues when he died they wrote obituaries of him and would reminisce about him and this is a reminiscence by Molinari now Molinari is an interesting case because he was 20 years younger than Bastia and Molinari lived to be 92 he was born in 18, 19 and died in I think 1912 and he lived long enough to write obituaries for everyone he knew in the economist movement including Bastia and this is Molinari's recollection of Bastia he said Molinari was working as a journalist and the magazine that he wrote for had reviewed some of Bastia's writings very favorably and so Bastia went to visit the office and thank them personally for writing such a nice review and he ended up writing material for them which became some of the economic sophisms so this is Molinari's recollection he says we had a chance to see him when he was making his first rounds of the offices of the journals which had shown themselves to be sympathetic to the free trade cause he still hadn't taken time to visit a Parisian tailor or a hatter if he'd ever thought of doing so with his long hair and his small hat his large riding jacket and his oversized umbrella one would have happily taken him for a solid farmer in the middle of sampling the marvels of the capital city but the demeanor of this farmer who was still rough around the edges was impish and witty his large dark eyes were keen and bright his brow was of medium size and somewhat square in shape as if full of ideas and bore the stamp of his thinking at first glance one got the impression that this farmer standing before us came from the country of Montaigne it was Gascony and when one heard him speak one immediately recognized in him a disciple of Benjamin Franklin they Molinari and the other economists greatly admired Benjamin Franklin as a popularizer of economic ideas and that's how Molinari interpreted Bastillard so Bastillard refuses to conform to the dress codes of the economists in Paris and he persisted in wearing clothes much like this he eventually possibly as a reward for supporting Louis Philippe in the revolution of 1830 he was made a magistrate in Le Grand which he had for between 1831 and 1845 and this is the postcard of the town square in Mugrand, this very tiny place only a few hundred people the sort of canton, the larger area around Mugrand was only maybe 10,000 people at the most let me just go back and say something more about Mugrand when he was in Mugrand he was incredibly intellectually curious and from as a result of his going to school in this experimental private school and he and some neighbors set up a book club which they called rather pretentiously the Academy after Plato and in the Academy they would meet every week or so and discuss books that they had read newspaper articles and so on and Bastillard was very important in that circle singing his songs, playing his musical instrument but also challenging them constantly with his new ideas so he spends 20 years or more in Mugrand reading all the stuff and then some of his correspondence with some of his neighbors and friends he talks with great fondness about this time and he was free to think and say anything he liked it's a very important part of his life but something happened to him I think around about 1843 he becomes a bit restless and I'm not quite sure what caused this restlessness perhaps he came across the writings of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Colonial League which was underway in England and he'd read about this in the newspapers and he was really impressed with the strategies and the policies of the Anti-Colonial League and he eventually of course becomes one of the most important people in the French free trade movement which he leads in 1846 when he was living in Paris so about 1843 he comes across the writings of Richard Cobden, this may have unsettled him thinking maybe I have something more to contribute maybe I can lead or create and then lead a French free trade movement like Cobden has done in England another possibility is that he at this time becomes aware that he has this serious throat condition and I think he described about having a polyp in his throat, a lump which I suspect was cancer and they didn't know much about cancer in the 1840s but I think he had a sense that he didn't have a great deal of time left to live and anyway the average lifespan of a working class person male in France at this time was about 46 or 47 and then for someone richer like him who was comfortable it might have been 50 so if he's sort of in his 43, 44 he may have realized that he didn't have long to live anyway and that with his throat condition he may only have a few years left so he may have decided that I need to do something I need to move out of the quietness and security of Mugrand and go to Babylon that's the name he gave Paris, Babylon which if you've been to Paris is not far from the truth another possibility is that he with all his reading of economics sort of private reading he might have had thoughts, original thoughts in his mind that suggested to him that he had something to say and that Mugrand was too much of a confining space and that he had to, would have taken considerable courage to break from his roots in Mugrand and move to a foreign city, a big city and to make a new life for himself so it's possibly his interest in Richard Cobb's and Zanny Cornwall League perhaps this fear that he doesn't have much time to live and then a third option is that maybe he thinks he does have some theory in his head that needs to be written down we don't know of course, but that's my speculation so he goes to Babylon what does Babylon look like? Well, this is an interesting map from 1841 and this is what Bacchio would have seen he would have perhaps they were just starting to build trains, railways he would have come up from the Southwest and you'll notice that there are three rings that surround Paris between 1841 and 44 this outer ring of forts was built and this outer ring of a military wall was built because the Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers was convinced that the English were going to invade again and that something had to be done for the defences of Paris the inner wall is a wall that was built in the 1780s to help with tax collection this was the octwa wall octwa was a city tax anyone entering the city had to go through a barrier or a gate to be inspected and then have to pay taxes on whatever they were bringing into the city there were all sorts of consumer items they had to pay taxes on that wasn't torn down until much later, 1859 but these are other forts this was a huge public works construction they had to reclaim from private owners a huge amount of land to build not just a wall but a road that went inside the wall and then a couple of hundred yards of clear space so they could have a clear line of fire to shoot the English as they approached on Paris and then they built this ring of forts and each of these forts had a certain range for artillery so they could cover the entire area so this was what Paris looked like when Bastia came there and of course what it is is a wonderful symbol of how the state surrounds us with barriers and walls tax walls, military walls and these were the things that really irritated and upset Bastia and he wanted to smash all those walls and barricades by having free trade and by cutting military expenditure to the bone Freddie and the free traders this I'll end on this because I'm running out of time and but if Bastia were to start a band today I immediately thought of Freddie Mercury and then I thought Freddie Freddie and the free traders what a great name for a rock band he made his name with the French Free Trade Association which he was able to set up and work full-time for in 1846 he became the editor and main writer of their magazine Le Livre et Change or Free Trade and it's in that magazine that he wrote a lot of the economic sophisms and they were republished in collected form as the economic sophisms but what he did as a journalist and activist for free trade was to invent a whole new what I call a rhetoric of liberty how he wanted to phrase language that would be persuasive to ordinary people who didn't know much about economics why they should support free trade and be opposed to government subsidies and he did this in a very original way which makes him such a great economic journalist one of the main weapons that he used was the sting of ridicule that's his expression I want to make fun I want to mock everything the government does in order to show it up for what it really is I want to end all this use of euphemisms to describe what governments do he said we have to call a spade a spade or call a cat a cat and he developed a whole vocabulary which is brilliantly illustrated in the economic sophisms where he would call the things that the government did in this harsh, very critical way so he wanted to call what the government did theft or plunder and he came up with a vocabulary to describe this and so some of the key words that he used over and over again in his writings were words like de puie to dispossess spolier to plunder volet to steal piet to loot or pillage filouté to filch and so he had all these abusive words that he was not afraid to use in order to describe what governments did and then in addition to having these words he also invented a whole new way of formulating or presenting his ideas in the form of little plays and dialogues he became an expert at doing this in economic sophisms he'd have a stock representative of a free trade position and a stock representative of a protectionist and have them engage in this conversation and Bastia would lead the advocate of protectionism to a reductio absurdum position and then make fun of them and he did this over and over again and that's what makes some of his sophisms so brilliant he would write fake petitions to the government and that's exactly what the petition of the candle makers is but he did several of those he would do parodies of things like mollier and I wanted to give you an example of this now just bear with me for a moment because he's doing a parody of a parody and again you have to explain this in multiple footnotes in the book mollier hated doctors he was suffering from a very bad disease that would eventually kill him he actually died on stage which is always an embarrassment for an actor anyway so in the play the hypochondriacs he writes, mollier writes an appendix in Latin and then as part of that appendix he has this satirical oath of induction for people who want to become doctors and so this is all in Latin and so the Latin, so this would be doctor who wants to be sworn into the fraternities of the medical profession has to swear in public and so I hope you got all that what that means in English is I give and grant to you the power and authority to practice medicine to purge, to bleed, to stab, to hack, to slash and kill with impunity throughout the whole world. So, what does Bastiat do in one of his great, does his own version of this? This is a etching, a drawing by Dormier showing Louis Philippe as a plunderer, Gargantua. Now, Louis Philippe was the king and he had this unfortunate physical shape that he looked like a pear and so all the cartoonists drew him as a pear and so he would put them in prison and their cartoons would sell more and more cartoonists would draw him as a pear, so it was... Anyway, so this is Bastiat's parody of Mollier's parody where he says this is the oath of induction for a would-be customs inspector. I'll skip some of the introductory stuff. He says, which in English is, I give to you in grant virtue and power to steal, to plunder, to filch, to swindle, to defraud at will along this whole road. This is very funny, but... And that is Bastiat's style and that is what makes him so endearing, I think, to readers. So I'll just... I'll close now and open up for questions, but what I wanted to show you was that behind the economic journalist there is another Bastiat or several Bastias. He is a radical in his style of writing and doing things like he sat eyes and plays on words. He's also personally radical and he's different with his clothing and his behaviour. Bursting into song, he's constantly quoting Mollier. He was notorious for not just singing political songs but bawdy songs, which he would have sung in the bars of Bayonne. Mollinari described him as having a rabbalazian wit, which is a euphemism for saying that he made sexual references constantly in his singing. But he's also, I think, and I haven't gone into this in any detail because I don't have time, but I think there is a strong case to be made that he was, I call him a proto-Austrian. I don't think he was fully there, but he was very, very close and that he had in himself, he had the knowledge and the ideas to write a really great book of economic theory but his throat cancer killed him before he could finish. So I'll leave it there and open it up for questions. We need to get our microphones, don't we? Thank you. Thanks very much for the very entertaining talk. Early on you mentioned that, you believe Vasya had some insights on public choice. I happened to be taking a public choice class and need a paper to write, so if you wouldn't care to expand on that, that'd be great. Thank you. See me, I've got some cheat notes. Oh, excellent, this is great. I didn't plant this guy here to ask that question. I'll give you just a quick summary. In terms of just general economic analysis, he obviously understood the idea of opportunity costs, that's the whole point of the scene and the unseen. He had a very early understanding of Keterus Paribus. He was one of the earliest users of that expression. I think John Stuart Mill has been accredited with being the first and he started writing about it in 1843. Vasya is using it in 1845. I don't think he's read. John Stuart Mill. So where he gets it, I just don't know. There's a whole list here of Austrian stuff, but in purely public choice, they would be things like, he understands that bureaucrats and politicians have self-interest that they pursue and they're trying to maximize power, income, whatever. The state is really a broker for allocating benefits for vested interest groups. He thinks he has a whole theory about state power and that there are limits to state power because the more you steal from people, the more they try to either hide their wealth or they try to resist in some way. So he has a whole theory of how the state functions and how bureaucrats try to expand their power and how there are limits to that. They're sort of built in. In the House, in the Chamber, he gave a talk about the dangers of parties being set up and how parties would be rivals for controlling the Chamber. So there are just a few off the top of my head that I can tell you. But come and see me afterwards and we can do that. He lived at a time where there was a lot of turmoil in Europe. What were his views of the commune? The commune, he's too early for that. I presume you're talking about the commune of 1870, 1871? No, earlier. Earlier? You know, all the riots in the streets and all that stuff. Well, the French are always riding in the streets. The commune is another revolution. This is the 1848 revolution where... Here we are. I was going to talk about this. He was involved in events in 1848 where this was a government inquiry set up after the events of June of 1848. And this is a map showing all the barricades that were set up in the streets of Paris to prevent the troops from coming down and putting people controlling the streets. And they looked like that. The French had developed a whole science of building barricades. They would use carts and iron railings and paving stones and so on. They had a whole culture about... They would have barricade monitors for each block who'd run the barricade. And Bastillard gets caught in the streets. And he was torn about this because on the one hand he thought what they were rioting for was often positive in the sense they wanted lower taxes, especially on food and salt and alcohol. Because, as you know, in France, alcohol is a staple of anyone's diet. But he didn't agree with the socialists who joined forces with some of the barricade operators who wanted to maintain or increase government subsidies and payments to the unemployed. And that was why he was on the streets and why he was caught in this, because he was out there handing newspapers and pamphlets to people, trying to persuade them not to be seduced by socialist claims that they could make their lives better by taxing them more. On the streets of Paris, he and his mate Gustave de Molinari are handing out this newspaper on the streets of Paris. And they also had a version which they could plaster up on the walls. And they would pay people to... And this book is the whole book of things that got plastered up on the walls of Paris in June of 1848. But he was torn. Some he supported, some he didn't. So I too have heard the Leonard Reed story, and the person who came up to him was reported to me to be Thomas Nixon Carver, who was a Harvard economist and then retired and went out to California to live. But my question to you then is what was the relationship between Bastia and Cobden and Bright? I know that they corresponded, but did they come to visit him in France or what was their relationship? When Bastia first read the propaganda and newspapers of the Antiquorn Law League, he wrote to Cobden and told him of his plans to do something in France. And from that time on they became very close friends, at least in terms of correspondence. Bastia went to England twice, I think, both times to talk with Cobden. Cobden came to Europe on a celebration tour after when the repeal of the Cornwalls was finally passed, he went on a victory lap of Europe, and he was welcomed very much in Paris, where they had a banquet and dinner, and Bastia was one of the people who gave a toast to Cobden, probably sang him a few political songs as well, just thrown in for free. I came across some very interesting insinuations in the correspondence that Bastia in October or November 1849 was sent on a secret mission by the French government to try to go and talk to Cobden secretly about disarmament possibilities. So that was... He was a member of the Chamber of Deputies and Cobden was a figure in the parliament. But of course nothing happened, but possibilities of some free trade conspiracy in London. Okay, thank you.