Trade and the Regeneration of France,1789–91: Liberalism,Protectionism and the Commercial Policy of the National Constituent Assembly

Abstract

The recent rise in the importance of the notion of political culture in French Revolutionary historiography seems to have been accompanied by a degree of neglect of the economic dimension of the Revolution. Some historians, in seeking to salvage something of a notion of ‘bourgeois’ revolution from revisionist onslaughts, have, however, continued to focus their attention on the internal economic policy of the National Constituent Assembly, seeing it as exemplitive of laissez-faire capitalism and arguably ‘bourgeois’ class-interest. More neglected, though, has been the question of the Assembly‘s external economic policy, an examination of which shows that the policy makers involved were driven as much or more by pragmatic conceptions of national interest than by any doctrinaire concern for free trade or specific class-interests.