The sun struggles to pierce the fog over a paddock near Herstmonceux Castle in East Sussex. The target of Bastiat’s ‘Petition’ is protectionism, whereby a Government bolsters selected domestic industries and discriminates against competition from abroad. Over time, such policies can be extremely dangerous. Favoured industries flourish at the expense of the rest, prices rise, inefficiency grows, and before long it is armies and not merchants who are crossing international borders. Bastiat’s views were formed in part by his reading of British free-market economists such as Adam Smith (1723-1790) and Richard Cobden (1804-1865).
Part 1 of 2
WE are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreign rival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to ours for the production of light, that he absolutely inundates our national market with it at a price fabulously reduced. The moment he shows himself, our trade leaves us — all consumers apply to him and a branch of native industry, having countless ramifications, is all at once rendered completely stagnant.
This rival, who is no other than the Sun, wages war to the knife against us, and we suspect that he has been raised up by Perfidious Albion (good policy as times go);* inasmuch as he displays towards that haughty island a circumspection with which he dispenses in our case.*
What we pray for is, that it may please you to pass a law ordering the shutting up of all windows, sky-lights, dormer-windows, outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull’s-eyes; in a word, of all openings, holes, chinks, clefts, and fissures, by or through which the light of the sun has been in use to enter houses, to the prejudice of the meritorious manufactures with which we flatter ourselves we have accommodated our country, — a country which, in gratitude, ought not to abandon us now to a strife so unequal.
* ‘Albion’ is England, so named from the White Cliffs of Dover; describing her as perfidious (treacherous) has a long history reaching back into the Middle Ages, but it was given a boost in France by Augustin Louis de Ximénès, who in 1793 used the phrase ‘perfidious Albion’ in his poem L’Ère des Français.
* A reference to England’s reputation as a rainy, foggy land.
Précis
In 1845, French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote a tongue-in-cheek ‘Petition’ to his Government, in which candlemakers asked for legal protection from a business rival. The rival was the sun, which (they said) ate into their profits by providing a steady source of free daylight, and they demanded that every opening from windows to peep-holes be blocked up by law. (60 / 60 words)
Part Two
A field of rape under bright broken cloud in Alsace, France. Bastiat’s petition imagined a world in which the sun was somehow shut out not just from a few forcing sheds in Yorkshire’s ‘rhubarb triangle’ but from every field, fell and forest in France, just so candlemakers did not have to face ‘unfair competition’ from the sun. Nor was this the sun’s only crime. Bastiat’s candlemakers also complained that the sun appeared to favour the English, by failing to shine as brightly there as in France.
IF you shut up as much as possible all access to natural light, and create a demand for artificial light, which of our French manufactures will not be encouraged by it?
If more tallow is consumed, then there must be more oxen and sheep; and, consequently, we shall behold the multiplication of artificial meadows, meat, wool, hides, and, above all, manure, which is the basis and foundation of all agricultural wealth.
If more oil is consumed, then we shall have an extended cultivation of the poppy, of the olive, and of rape. These rich and exhausting plants* will come at the right time to enable us to avail ourselves of the increased fertility which the rearing of additional cattle will impart to our lands.*
Our heaths will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will, on the mountains, gather perfumed treasures, now wasting their fragrance on the desert air, like the flowers from which they emanate.* No branch of agriculture but will then exhibit a cheering development.
* In French, ‘Ces plantes riches et épuisantes’, i.e. high-yield, but not the kind of crop that can be grown in the same field season after season. Fortunately, say Bastiat’s candlemakers, by the time that intense cultivation of these plants (under artificial light of course) has stripped the soil of its nutrients, animal husbandry will have provided a solution.
* In their excited planning, the candlemakers are in danger of counting their chickens before they are hatched, like The Country Milkmaid in Aesop’s fable.
* The translator has taken the liberty of making an explicit literary reference here to Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Grey (1716-1771), which is not so plain in the original French. For Grey’s verses, see Unsung Heroes.
Précis
The candlemakers went on to envision a France in which (though they did not explain how) even the fields, forests and mountainsides were lit only by artificial light. Step by step, they showed how both arable and animal farming would boom if the sun were shut out, benefiting not only candlemakers but the wider French economy. (56 / 60 words)
