Economic Liberalism and Penal Reform: The Physiocrats, Adam Smith, and Beccaria

François Quesnay founded the French Physiocratic school, arguing that agriculture was the sole true source of economic wealth. Originally a physician at the court of Louis XV, he turned to economic theory and in 1758 published the "Tableau économique," the first systematic attempt to model a nation's economic flows mathematically, depicting the circulation of wealth among farmers, landowners, and a "sterile" class of artisans and merchants. The Physiocrats championed the principle of "laissez-faire, laissez-passer" — a phrase actually coined by Vincent de Gournay — against mercantilist state intervention, and their finance minister Anne Robert Jacques Turgot tried to put these liberal reforms into practice between 1774 and 1776, including a liberalization of the grain trade that met fierce opposition from guilds and privileged interests and triggered the 1775 "flour war" riots before his political downfall in 1776.