[Symposium Paper] The Analysis of Financial Crises by French Economists, from 1825 to 1860

This article will examine how French economists dealt with the financial and economic crisis which occurred in Britain in 1825 and whose effects were felt in France from 1828. The crisis of 1825 was one of the first crises (after that of 1817-1818 perhaps) to be perceived by French economists as a periodic modern crisis. By studying the crisis of 1825 in England and its effect in France, in the years that followed or several decades later, they began to identify a sequence and causal relationships explaining the outbreak of the crisis. The material used will be the economic press, but also books − treatises, manuals or dictionaries, as well as the positions taken by liberals in the circles of thought they occupy. This paper will attempt to identify the way in which this crisis influenced the monetary thinking of liberal economists, from Jean-Baptiste Say and before Clément Juglar, via the moderate liberal Adolphe Blanqui and the orthodox Charles Coquelin, both in their conceptions of the theoretical mechanisms at work and in their recommendations for monetary and banking regulation. We will examine the status of crises in their thinking: are they merely inevitable bumps in a long trajectory of prosperity, or do they reflect deeper imbalances?