In February 1864 France's leading political economist, Michel Chevalier (1806–79), pondered the question of how to develop industry in the “conquered territory” of Mexico.Footnote 1 The country had been invaded by French troops in 1862, and Napoleon III sought to lend scientific and cultural legitimacy to the occupation by doing what his uncle had done in the 1798 invasion of Egypt. He created a scientific commission.Footnote 2 The investigative remit of the Mexican Scientific Commission was extensive. Many of its members came from the Institut de France and the Conseil d’état, and were well placed to meet the challenge before them. Chevalier had belonged to both. As France's most prominent political economist and leading advocate of “industrialism” he was eminently well qualified to investigate how industry might develop there. He also knew the country well, having traveled widely throughout it in 1835, and maintained contacts with leading members of its scientific community thereafter. In the years following his Mexican travels he wrote many articles and books about it.Footnote 3
Chevalier's brief was challenging, as Mexico's prospects for industrial development were poor. There were many reasons for this, but one he stressed was the decimation of its natural environment, particularly its forests, by its Spanish conquerors. The result was catastrophic. The Spanish paid no heed, in Chevalier's words, to the “utility of forests in moderating the climate and maintaining the water courses necessary for irrigat[ing]” Mexico's crops and powering its industry.Footnote 4 They transformed a flourishing “Eden” into “a barren and desolate” wasteland.Footnote 5 This had a significant economic and political cost. Deforestation caused a decline in agriculture by depriving the soil of rich humus, starving it of essential nutrients. It altered Mexico's climate, making it prone to frequent droughts. The loss of nutrients and rainfall led to significant soil depletion and erosion. As Mexico's stock of cultivatable land shrank and became more infertile, its population's diet became more impoverished. This led to a drop in productivity, a loss of competitiveness and markets. The fall of Mexico's economic fortunes led to the country's political unrest.Footnote 6
Mexico's economic, social and political woes stemmed from the destruction of its forests: it was therefore logical for Chevalier to begin his investigation by exploring “the extent to which the country could be reforested.”Footnote 7 In this he expressed what had been well known for some time in French scientific and administrative circles: that whole regions and countries could be regenerated through reforestation.Footnote 8 Throughout the 1860s and later decades the French state acted on that knowledge by replanting extensively its domestic and colonial forests.Footnote 9 Chevalier's recommendations on reforesting Mexico therefore pushed at an open door. Yet they were never acted on. France's occupation collapsed in 1867 and with it the work of the scientific commission and Chevalier's sylvicultural and industrial ambitions for Mexico.
INTRODUCTION
The story of Chevalier's attempts to reforest Mexico has never been told. But this should come as no surprise. In his day, Chevalier was one of France's most eminent statesmen and leading intellectuals, yet today he is a relatively neglected figure.Footnote 10 When historians have considered his writings and achievements, they have been almost exclusively concerned with his participation in the Romantic socialist movement of the Saint-Simonians or with his role in negotiating, in 1860, the first major commercial treaty between France and Britain.Footnote 11 The question whether his work, and his political economy in particular, were environmentally informed has never been asked. As a mining engineer by training, and an enthusiastic exponent of infrastructure development—of the construction of railways, roads, canals, telegraphs, transatlantic telegraph cables and even a railway tunnel under the English ChannelFootnote 12—Chevalier's writings appeared to assign little or no space to nature. So asking the question whether his political economy was environmentally informed appeared pointless. This article will challenge that long-standing view, and in doing so it will take aim at a number of orthodoxies about Saint-Simonianism and nineteenth-century French political economy. The main one it will challenge is that nineteenth-century French political economy harbored and transmitted values about growth and development that at bottom adopted, in the words of Michael Löwy, an “optimistic, ‘promethean’ conception of the limitless development of the productive forces.”Footnote 13
This article will show the extent to which such judgments need to be revised, and it will do so by showing how nineteenth-century French political economy was a divided discourse over environmental questions. Many of the advocates—including Chevalier—of a significant school of nineteenth-century French political economy known as “industrialism” were aware of the environmental consequences and environmental limits of the development of productive forces, while other exponents of the same school saw nature as something to be conquered.Footnote 14
These differences stemmed from the radically different intellectual starting points of advocates of industrialism. One group was intellectually grounded in the natural sciences and saw humanity and nature as intimately connected and mutually impacting. This group included the chemist and founder of the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Jean-Antoine Chaptal (1756–1832). It adhered to what we might call a scientific naturalism that meant that it considered nature to be central to considerations in political economy. It was interested in understanding the complex relationship between humanity and nature in order to manage economic development without destroying the environment through the squandering of natural and human resources. The other group was intellectually rooted in law, journalism and politics. Its members, including Jean-Baptiste Say and Charles Dunoyer, founder of the short-lived but influential Le Censeur and Le Censeur européen, subscribed to an unalloyed Enlightenment optimism about the human condition, and were interested in understanding and removing constraints to individual liberty. This group's war against Ancien Régime privilege caused it to view nature under a shadow cast by aristocratic custom. Its adherents viewed with suspicion preoccupations about land and nature, seeing them through an ideological lens that caused such concerns to be interpreted as expressions of an aristocratic pastoralism.Footnote 15 Nature was therefore stereotyped and viewed as an obstacle to human progress.
The existing scholarship on Chevalier situates his work within the school of industrialism, but it is divided over where to place him within it. Scholars that lined up with the neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s embraced F. A. Hayek's critique of Enlightenment rationalism and the kind of scientific mindset that culminated in the writings of Condorcet and Saint-Simon.Footnote 16 They ignored Chevalier's scientific background and saw his break with Saint-Simonianism and defence of free trade as confirming that he followed in the same trajectory as Dunoyer and his allies Joseph Garnier and Frédéric Bastiat.
Scholars interested in Romantic socialism and inspired by Jean Walch's 1975 Michel Chevalier économiste saint-simonien rejected that liberal labeling, and cast Chevalier in the altogether different mold of Saint-Simon: Chevalier needed to be seen as a champion of what the French call les grands projets—large-scale engineering projects that display an optimistic faith in the limitless potential of science and engineering to overcome nature.Footnote 17 Both views are inaccurate. This is not only because Chevalier's thought represented a fusion of free markets and state-sponsored grands projets,Footnote 18 but also because that very fusion emerged out of a scientifically sophisticated understanding of nature.
What I will show in this article is that Chevalier's political economy was far more sophisticated than has been appreciated hitherto, and that its complexity owed much to considerations on nature and the environment. I will show that the origins of what we might call his environmentally sensitive political economy lay in the scientific and technical education he received at the Ecole polytechnique (1823-5) and the Ecole des mines (1825–9). Those who taught in these institutions were at the forefront of a new way of doing science that stressed multidisciplinarity and international collaboration. These scientists viewed science and nature holistically, understanding the latter as a complex circulatory organization whose vitality and coherency could be altered either positively or negatively by human activity. The observations and experiments of Chevalier's teachers at the Ecole polytechnique, François Arago, Louis Gay-Lussac and their close friend and collaborator Alexander von Humboldt,Footnote 19 on an impressive range of environmental questions, were critical to consolidating this view of nature as a complex web of life. Chevalier's teachers at both schools disseminated this knowledge in their courses and thereby made students aware of how humanity altered the natural environment and how nature could in turn affect—and change—humanity. As we will see, this form of instruction fundamentally shaped Chevalier's thinking on economic, political and social questions.
When Chevalier abandoned his career as a mining engineer and joined the Saint-Simonians in the summer of 1830, the place he ascribed to nature grew and took on a decidedly Romantic and imaginative turn. During the three years he was part of the movement, he and its other members reflected on how humanity and nature might be brought into harmony. Humboldt's discoveries and the innovative work of France's leading scientists proved both inspirational and intoxicating to the Saint-Simonians.Footnote 20 The new scientific approach that these leading scientists championed rested on philosophical foundations of diverse sources. But it was the impact of a particular type of German Naturphilosophie—owing much to Goethe and Friedrich Schelling—which was of great importance, as Humboldt made clear at the time.Footnote 21 When the Saint-Simonians looked at nature and humanity through the lens of Naturphilosophie they affected what Goethe and Schelling aimed for: a reconciliation of “the subjective world of the Self and the objective world of nature.”Footnote 22 This opened an extraordinary vista for the Saint-Simonians, and offered a new way to reflect on the political and social unrest that had afflicted France for so long.Footnote 23 In their estimation, the long-standing empiricist belief that an unbridgeable gap existed between the subjective world of the Self and the objective world of nature was the expression of a profound alienation of humanity from nature. This expressed itself politically and socially as the alienation of the classes, sexes and individuals from one another. The Saint-Simonians’ goal became to eradicate social and psychological division. Central to that task was the more fundamental work of establishing a harmony between humanity and nature. This might have recalled the kind of unalienated individual life and social relations depicted in Rousseau's writings, except for the fundamental difference that the Saint-Simonians embraced science as the solution to this disharmony, unlike Rousseau, who saw it as contributing to the problem.Footnote 24 Science, for them, was the key to understanding exactly how nature and humanity worked. With the knowledge accumulated from it, not only would humanity achieve, in the words of the Saint-Simonians, “universal association”; it would also be united with nature. The new understanding of nature therefore delineated the contours of what Chevalier and the other Saint-Simonians called “industrial science.” These considerations underscored the powerful belief that nature was a web of life and humanity was part of it.
Once Chevalier broke with the Saint-Simonians in 1833 he retreated from some of their more imaginative ideas, but not from others, nor did he abandon the basic understanding of nature and humanity as bound together. As we will see, the near totality of his oeuvre from 1833 onward expressed ideas about circulation and web of life through the principal concept of the network.Footnote 25 For Chevalier the network fulfilled circulatory functions and had the power to unify disparate elements. It was akin to a living organism—analogous with nature itself. Its preservation and vitality depended on a well-organized and free circulation flow between its constitutive elements. It also depended on the undistorted growth of these elements. Chevalier's preoccupations with infrastructure development; the economic issue of free trade within and outside national boundaries; and environmental matters, such as the squandering of natural and human resources, including his concerns over food waste, water and soil pollution and deforestation, were critical to his understanding of the network, and ensured that his political economy never deviated in its fundamentals from an industrialism informed by a scientific naturalism. These concerns were evidence of an environmental awareness that was integral to the network itself. Despite this, Chevalier's political economy did not translate into a full-blown ecologism that characterized the writings of other polytechniciens and Saint-Simonians, such as Jean Reynaud and Pierre Leroux, champions of the idea of the circulus.Footnote 26 While he may not have fashioned an ecological political economy, he did offer a version of it that, in stressing circulation, generative capacity and vitality, was congruent with organic organization.Footnote 27 It is this unique feature that would define his political economy and version of industrialism.
DIVIDED OVER NATURE: THE DIVIDED POLITICAL ECONOMY OF “INDUSTRIALISM”
From its inception, the school of industrialism was divided over nature. The leading exponent of industrialism, the chemist and founder in 1801 of the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, J.-A. Chaptal, considered nature to be central to considerations of political economy. As the author of the widely influential De l'industrie française (1819), Chaptal believed that industry could not be separated from nature.Footnote 28 Other leading exponents of industrialism included Charles Dupin (1784–1873), contributing editor to the important Journal du génie civil, and Joseph Dutens (1765–1848). In Dupin's important 1827 Forces productives et commerciales de la France, he described industry as “the combined forces of Man, animals and nature.” When he listed the elements that made up the “forces of nature,” he highlighted water, wind, steam power and other elements, such as soil and organic waste, which contributed to soil's “productive power.”Footnote 29 For Dupin, two critical questions of political economy were, first, how best might these forces be harnessed? And, second, how best might they be sustained? Other advocates of industrie, such as Claude-Lucien Bergery (1787–1863), highlighted the role of the natural sciences, particularly chemistry, in answering Dupin's two key questions.Footnote 30 In setting down these questions Dupin differentiated one form of industrialism from another. The second form was championed by J.-B. Say, Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte. These authors, rather than seeing humanity and nature as intimately connected, saw nature as an obstacle to human progress: nature needed to be conquered, as Dunoyer put it in the opening sentence of his famous 1825 L'industrie et la morale: “Nous ne sortons de l’état de faiblesse et de dépendance où la nature nous a mis que par nos conquêtes sur les choses et par nos victoires sur nous-mêmes; nous ne devons libres qu'en devenant industrieux et moraux.”Footnote 31
The differences between these competing doctrines of industrialism were important. Whereas Say, Dunoyer and Comte's industrialism was narrowly utilitarian—couched in the mechanistic reasoning of “felicific calculus”Footnote 32—and committed to unfettered markets and free trade, Chaptal, Dupin and Dutens's version of it was not, and viewed unfettered markets with some suspicion, seeing in unrestricted competition the evil of speculation, and the squandering of nature's resources: a dangerous combination that led inevitably to economic crisis and the weakening of national economy.Footnote 33 Chaptal, Dupin and Dutens's industrialism embodied a fundamental commitment to the efficient and sustainable use of the nation's resources. There was an obvious environmental imperative to this, but there was a political and geostrategic one too: an imperative that emerged out of the experience of the Revolutionary wars and the Continental blockade.Footnote 34 This form of industrialism understood resources in terms of their wealth-generative “capacity” and saw short-term profit maximization and speculation as squandering that capacity. This was a species of political economy that was much closer to the eighteenth-century physiocracy than the industrialism championed by Say or Dunoyer, whose aim was to free individuals from the constraints of ancien régime privilege—privilege they saw as undermining liberty and free markets. Say and Dunoyer's industrialism was couched largely in political and moral terms, whereas its rival version advanced by Chaptal, Dupin and Dutens was grounded in the natural sciences and a scientific–naturalist worldview, inseparable from developments in chemistry and soil science in particular.Footnote 35 As coeditor of the influential Annales de chimie, Chaptal was one of the main contributors to developments in soil science. Many of his findings appeared in his highly influential and practical work Chimie appliquée à l'agriculture, which described agriculture in vitalist terms, and emphasized the importance of the circulation of animal and plant waste to the improvement of soil nutrients.Footnote 36 In highlighting these elements it also stressed the bonds between man and nature,Footnote 37 offering a version of political economy that stressed circulation and organic growth.Footnote 38 But it also anticipated, along with many other works described in influential journals such as the Annales de l'industrie nationale et étrangère, the important idea of the circulus—an idea that would also be anticipated by Chaptal's later successor to the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, and which Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud sought to popularize in the 1840s.Footnote 39
Dupin and Dutens viewed soil and nature in terms similar to Chaptal.Footnote 40 They were trained engineers and thoroughly immersed in a scientific community that, through the discoveries of its leading chemists, biologists, physicists and geologists, was rapidly coalescing around a conception of nature as a complex web.Footnote 41 For Dupin and Dutens nature harboured a potentiality that, when scientifically harnessed, led to the material improvement of humanity and the advancement of civilization itself.Footnote 42 This was the material stuff of wealth. Chevalier shared that scientific and engineering outlook and was introduced to it through the education he received at the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines.
SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION AND NATURE AS “WEB OF LIFE”
The Ecole polytechnique
By the time Chevalier entered the Ecole polytechnique in 1823, the view of nature as a web of life had become common currency within the institution and its associated schools of application. During his two years at the Ecole polytechnique, a large number of courses he was required to take reinforced this view. Chevalier followed the established curriculum, which was highly theoretical and involved courses in analysis, comprising differential and integral calculus, mechanics, descriptive geometry, physics, theoretical and applied chemistry, geodesy, a course on machinery, industry and statistics. He was also required to take courses in architecture, topographical drawing, portraiture, landscape drawing, history and belles-lettres, though there were significantly fewer lessons in these.Footnote 43 Louis Cauchy and André Ampère taught him analysis and mechanics, and Felix Leroy taught him descriptive geometry and applied analysis. But it was the courses taught by Gay-Lussac, chemistry and physics, and Arago, geodesy, social arithmetic and machines—courses Chevalier excelled inFootnote 44—that introduced him to the theoretical foundations to the new approach to science that would shape his understanding of nature and humanity.
When Chevalier studied under Arago, the latter's adherence to a holistic view of science was firmly established. Arago counted himself one of France's leading champions of the new approach to science that had begun with the work of Monge, Laplace, Lagrange, Levoisier and others. He was, along with Gay-Lussac, a member of the Société d'Arcueil and the Société philomathique. As with the societies’ founders, Berthollet and Laplace, Arago and Gay-Lussac were ardent believers in their aims, which were to transform people's fundamental outlook on nature. In this they sought to displace an outdated scientific tendency toward overspecialization and the separation of the different branches of science by stressing science's multidisciplinarityFootnote 45—a goal that developed out of Berthollet's belief that all natural phenomena were united by a single principle—collaborative international research, and making the latest scientific discoveries widely known and accessible to the wider public.Footnote 46 On this latter point they advanced the work of the Société philomathique through its journals: the Bulletin des sciences and then from 1807 the Nouveau bulletin des sciences; both journals sought to popularize science and explore how theoretical advances could be translated into industrial applications, thereby, in Arago's words, “serving as a sure guide to men of commerce, industrialists, the public and enlightened administration.”Footnote 47
Arago and Gay-Lussac also aimed, like the members of both societies, to make science truly international by establishing close collaborative links with foreign counterparts. As we have already seen, they counted Humboldt as a close friend and collaborator. They also considered themselves allies in furthering the aims of his view of Naturphilosophie.Footnote 48
Arago's inclusive vision of science was rooted in the philosophic and cosmopolitan outlook that stemmed from an important intellectual inspiration, Condorcet. Not only would Arago edit the whole of Condorcet's oeuvre; he also drew on important elements of Condorcet's social mathematics—particularly ideas about scientific method, statistics and probability—in teaching his course on social arithmetic and machines.Footnote 49 Arago's lectures communicated a new template for methods of social investigation, and an important truth believed by Gay-Lussac and other leading French scientists, including Berthollet, Cuvier, Fourcroy, Thénard—and Humboldt himself—that they shared with Condorcet: that the different disciplines were intimately interrelated,Footnote 50 and that this interconnectedness expressed a deeper truth that all nature's phenomena were ultimately united. Arago's lectures also aimed to convey another important objective derived from Condorcet and shared with the members of the Société d'Arcueil and Société philomathique, which was to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the moral sciences.Footnote 51 This had always been Condorcet's aim. But Arago went further, and allied himself more firmly with Humboldt and the aim of his conception of Naturphilosophie, when he stressed the close proximity of reason to imagination.Footnote 52 He illustrated this point in his lectures by showing that since the middle of the eighteenth century there existed in France an important connection between engineers and artistsFootnote 53 —an idea the Saint-Simonians would later develop in novel and interesting ways. This, he contended, injected a certain elan into French engineering, making it highly innovative.Footnote 54 But it involved something more. This was that humanity expressed its vital connectedness with nature through the works it created. Theories about the beautiful and the sublime presented the artist's connection with nature through feeling rather than calculation. And feeling enabled the artist, in the words of Elizabeth Powers, “to fuse all the parts of his subject into an organic whole.”Footnote 55 One of the central messages of Arago's lectures was that nature, art, science, technology and society had to be understood in terms that acknowledged their union and the creative outpourings that came from it.Footnote 56
This fundamental truth was also a feature of Gay-Lussac's research in chemistry, meteorology and agriculture, and it was conveyed in his courses in physics and organic chemistry.Footnote 57 As the champion of a new way of doing chemistry, Gay-Lussac, like his mentor Berthollet, stressed its multidisciplinarity.Footnote 58 His lectures reinforced this by presenting an understanding of natural phenomena in complex relational terms.Footnote 59 He did this by stressing the value of a strict experimental approach to chemistry. He broke from traditional teaching methods and embellished his lectures with experiments and concise diagrams in order to illustrate better the value of experimentation, and to stress the union of theory and practice.Footnote 60 This was intimately bound up with promoting the value of the practical application of chemistry that, as a member of Chaptal's Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, he worked hard to find for industry and agriculture.Footnote 61 His work would prove critical to the development of soil science, a field that chemists such as Boussingault and Liebig would shape in their own distinctive ways, both using developments in organic chemistry to tackle critical environmental questions such as soil depletion, the more efficient use of organic fertilizers such as manure, deforestation and climate change.
Despite Arago's and Gay-Lussac's shared belief in the multidisciplinarity of science, of the need to conjoin it to the moral and political sciences, to popularize its latest developments, they could not agree on one of the major environmental questions of their day: how deforestation impacted on climate.Footnote 62 Whereas Arago's studies concluded that it altered climate negatively, Gay-Lussac thought the question so complicated that he could not give a definitive answer to it.Footnote 63 In his words, “these questions are so complicated that, when we examine them from a climatic point of view, the solution to them is very difficult, if not impossible to find.”Footnote 64
In spite of the differing conclusions Chevalier's professors reached on one of the era's major environmental questions, they agreed on the multidisciplinarity of science and on how nature, society, science and technology interacted in complex ways. This view was reinforced when, after graduating from the Ecole polytechnique in 1825, Chevalier was admitted to his first choice of the ten possible schools of application: the celebrated Ecole des mines.
The Ecole des mines
The course of study at the Ecole des mines was directed toward the practicalities of mining. The curriculum included courses on geology, mineralogy, docimasy (the practice of ascertaining the quality and purity of minerals), mathematics, mine workings, draftsmanship and descriptive geometry, and mining techniques and technology. The famous Brochant de Villiers and his leading disciples Armand Dufrénoy and Elie de Beaumont taught mineralogy and geology respectively. Pierre Berthier, the world's expert on blast furnaces, along with Beaumont a member of the Société philomathique, taught docimasy. Arsènne Baillet taught mine workings (exploitation des mines); André Guenyveau, author of the important 1810 Essai sur la science des machines, taught mineralogy; and Louis-Joseph Girard descriptive geometry and draftsmanship.
The theoretical elements of the curriculum, such as the courses on geology, mineralogy and mathematics, were critical to shaping students’ outlooks on geology, mining techniques, technologies and nature. Brochant, Dufrénoy and Beaumont's courses on geology and mineralogy stressed a holistic understanding of the Earth and a way of looking at the globe that reinforced what students had learned at the polytechnique. The lectures on geology and mineralogy stressed how geology, described as a “science of the Earth,” comprised “all the ways of envisaging” the globe. Brochant, Dufrénoy and Beaumont stressed that they were teaching what the famous German geologist Gottlob Werner called “geognosy.”Footnote 65
The impact of Werner's reflections on geology was significant. He counted Humboldt among his many famous students. In envisaging geology as a comprehensive science of the Earth, Werner, along with other eighteenth-century German-speaking investigators and Naturphilosophen, presented an understanding of nature as a dynamic interconnected entity.Footnote 66 His revolutionary conceptualization of the underground world as a complex network of veins and fissuresFootnote 67 was closely bound up with a belief stemming from Humboldt's professor Johann Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb that nature had to be comprehended in terms of vital forces.Footnote 68 This understanding of nature resonated with the work of eighteenth-century physionomists, such as Xavier Bichat and Félix Vic d'Azyr, and would find echoes in Saint-Simon's writings. It was a feature of what Paul Rabinow called a “biological–ecological model” of society.Footnote 69 As we will see, it featured in Chevalier's mining reports—before he became a Saint-Simonian—and later works.
Where Werner's reflections on geognosy had the most significant impact in France was through Brochant's work and that of his disciples Dufrénoy and Beaumont. Brochant's first course of lectures dating from 1810–11 drew on Werner's understanding of geology.Footnote 70 The lectures he gave with Dufrénoy and Beaumont from 1825 emphasized that the science of geology was defined by a holistic view of the Earth. One way of representing this, as the lectures made clear, was in the spatial representations of the situation and order of strata. Geology required knowledge of the organizational relation of strata forming the globe. This involved knowledge of the vertical and horizontal layering of strata, a topic of the second part of his lectures, which focused on the interior structure of the geological formations that made up the surface of the globe.Footnote 71 Chevalier's writings as a mining student and candidate engineer replicated Brochant's characterization of the interconnectedness of all strata, as did his Saint-Simonian reflections on urban planning.
Brochant, Dufrénoy and Beaumont's lectures on geology also included practical developments in field research. When Chevalier entered the Ecole des mines, Dufrénoy and Beaumont were publishing the results of their six-month investigation of British mines and smelters in the Annales des mines. Their seminal articles, published between 1824 and 1827, included accounts of the role infrastructure played in increasing the efficiency and profitability of mining, and discussions on environmental issues.Footnote 72 An important article entitled “Expériences qui ont été faites pour condenser les vapeurs qui se dégagent des usines à cuivre” examined the air pollution caused by copper smelters of South Glamorgan, and the various attempts to mitigate it by condensing fluorine, arsenic and sulphur dioxide.Footnote 73 Beaumont and Dufrénoy stressed the environmental costs of copper smelting. South Glamorgan was, in their words, “permanently enveloped by a whitish cloud which can be seen from a distance of many miles and whose corrosive effect destroys over several hundred toises the vegetation around it, and affects badly [plant life] from an even larger distance. These same gases are very offensive and are probably harmful to the animals that breathe them.”Footnote 74
These articles, published as Voyage métallurgique en Angleterre (1827), represented the seminal French study on Britain's geology and its mining industry—a fact acclaimed by Chevalier some years laterFootnote 75—by locating them in a complex circulatory system, which comprised a comprehensive assemblage of both natural and human elements. The work, and the approach adopted in writing it—an approach that bore Brochant's imprimatur—had a major impact on how students, such as Chevalier, conducted their own field research.
The place of nature and the environment in Chevalier's mining reports
Field research was a critical component of a student's time at the Ecole des mines. Lectures and laboratory work, which took place in Paris and lasted from November until April, comprised much field study.Footnote 76 But in the summer months, students devoted all their time to field studies, or campagnes, as they were known. These involved visits to mines, smelters and geological sites around France or further afield in Belgium, the Netherlands, various Swiss cantons, German states or parts of Austro-Hungary. At the end of each campagne students wrote a number of reports. Between 1827 and 1828 Chevalier wrote four.Footnote 77 He also wrote several more significant reports in 1829 as an aspiring (aspirant), then practicing, engineer.Footnote 78 The reports resembled those of his contemporaries, which were inspired by Beaumont and Dufrénoy's lectures and modeled on their work. They employed an investigative method that treated questions holistically in examining closely the interaction between people, natural resources, machines, industry and the environment.
The template Chevalier employed was similar in all his reports. He began with a description of the local geography and geology, followed by a general account of the mine. He analyzed how mines were integrated into the environment, the local and wider economy, and how they were connected to transportation infrastructure, especially canals, navigable waterways and railways. He examined the impact of mines and smelters on the local environment, paying particular attention to deforestation, water and air pollution, and their effects on agriculture.Footnote 79 He also analyzed the various industrial and domestic uses of different types of coked peat or coal. His investigations stressed the efficient use of resources and the economics of mining. These reports show that Chevalier was thinking about mines and industry in terms of economies of scale, and their place within the interconnected networks of infrastructure, environment, natural and human resources, and consumption.
During his 1827 campagne Chevalier wrote about mines and foundries in the south of France. His journal de campagne, cowritten with Pierre August Drouot and Louis Etienne Vène,Footnote 80 gave detailed descriptions of the geography, geology, inhabitants, agriculture and industry, and tell us a great deal about working conditions, the technologies employed and the environmental impact that mines and foundries had on miners, agriculture and forests.
The 1828 journal de campagne recorded problems of poverty and ignorance, highlighted well-organized uses of new industrial technologies and techniques,Footnote 81 and stressed the importance of networks and efficient integration and circulation of natural resources to industry and markets.Footnote 82 It also devoted much more time to the geology of the regions visited, especially strata and their vertical and horizontal interlayering: the kind of material that made up Brochant, Dufrénoy and Beaumont's course on geognosy. In addition to his journal, Chevalier's 1828 report “Mémoire sur la géologie des environs de Framont” built on those geological and technological considerations and made clear that nature's transforming powers could be reproduced by humans.Footnote 83
Whereas the 1828 report highlighted the transformative powers of nature, the two 1827 reports emphasized the destructive power of human ignorance.Footnote 84 These reports tell us a great deal about Chevalier's knowledge and interests in mining, smelting and environmental concerns, particularly the important problem of deforestation. Both reports showed how the widespread practice of clear-cutting, which took place in forests near mines and foundries, deprived these industries and nearby villages of a vital natural resource. The consequence was that wood had to be transported long distances on the backs of mules and men, a costly and time-consuming proposition. Chevalier argued that the owners of mines in the valley of Baigorry had to be encouraged to undertake an ambitious programme of replanting, especially of chestnut trees, which he observed grew quickly, were an excellent source of charcoal, as Pierre Berthier's chemical analyses had shown, and an important source of food.Footnote 85 Several pages of this report are devoted to calculating the advantages of replanting and forestry management. Chevalier devoted an important section to showing the interrelationship between mining, forestry management and agriculture, reflecting on how much of the land near Baigorry was left uncultivated and barren, and that with the sustainable development of agriculture this would lower food costs and increase the size and productivity of the workforce through improved diet.Footnote 86 He concluded that the extensive replanting of decimated forests and their proper management would assure the future of mining in the region.Footnote 87 The same considerations were highlighted in his second report, “Mémoire sur l'affinage du fer dans la Vallée de Vicdessos,” which recorded the widespread and damaging effects of deforestation on the local economy.
In commenting on all those deforested regions, Chevalier stressed the pressing need to reestablish once “great forests” before the “erosion” and the “depletion of the soil” made the task impossible.Footnote 88 The issue was of critical importance to him, and became a central feature of his membership of the 1836 Société des maîtres forges d'Ariège and his ambitious plans for a model forge, which involved the extensive reforestation of that region.Footnote 89 It was a central consideration in the 1840s when Chevalier wrote extensively on gold and silver mining in Mexico,Footnote 90 and, as we have already seen, in the 1860s, when he pressed for an ambitious plan to reforest Mexico.Footnote 91
“Mémoire sur l'affinage du Fer dans la Vallée de Vicdessos” also revealed another important environmental issue. This was the foundries’ excessive water consumption and the impact this had on the local environment. In what was a clear use of Werner's Wasserwirtschaft (water economy),Footnote 92 Chevalier showed how the region's foundries drew on considerable amounts of water in order to drive the steam-powered hammers that pounded the iron ore into a powder that could be smelted. This process was inefficient and slow, and wasted much water, draining the reservoir that fed into it. This threatened the forests, the upland pastures and the local population's supply of drinking water.Footnote 93
Additional considerations in Chevalier's 1828 reports show the extent to which he thought of humanity and nature as mutually impacting. His “Mémoire sur la géologie des environs de Framont” focused on the geology of the region, and made important observations on strata in areas of geological transition, especially the transforming power of nature, a power that could be harnessed through technology.Footnote 94 He observed that areas of geological transition were extremely rich in valuable minerals, particularly where one stratum met another. Chevalier understood strata to be in movement, measured in geological time of millions of years. The meeting of moving strata yielded, according to him, tremendous energy, with rich mineral wealth being the result. He highlighted this in an observation about scale and time, reflecting on geology and geological time in a way that uncovered certain fundamental properties about the physical universe, and by extension the human universe.Footnote 95 He established a connection between nature's creative energy, the ordering and synthesis of the globe, and human history. In articles he wrote for the Saint-Simonian journal Le Globe, and in later works, he transposed this idea of nature's ordering, synthesis and energy to civilization. In short, he looked on human evolution in much the same way as he looked upon geological change. In this he anticipated by a couple of decades Marx and Engels's materialist ontology and theory of history, both of which owed a great deal to Hegel's reading of Werner and the stress he placed on geological time and the phenomenon of spontaneous generation, or Generatio aequivoca.Footnote 96
The meeting of the geological strata and the enormous mineral wealth it generated were mirrored in Chevalier's political and economic writings, where he repeatedly contended that the union of different classes and peoples unleashed powerful productive forces that would create a more complex and higher form of synthetic unity.Footnote 97 This union, in turn, would catalyze those same forces and they, in turn, would further consolidate the union.Footnote 98 Geology and civilization obeyed the same natural laws. They were evolving and complex organizations whose constitutive elements related to each other dynamically. The lesson Chevalier had learned as a mining student was that the destruction of nature and the squandering of natural and human resources led to a loss of vitality and collapse of complex natural and human systems.Footnote 99
The threat of that collapse grew considerably with the deteriorating political situation in France, which ultimately culminated in the July Revolution of 1830. The events leading up to the Revolution and the event itself caused Chevalier to reassess his political convictions. The liberal values he upheld seemed unable to respond to France's needs, and in particular to the needs of the destitute and vulnerable. Nor did they reflect fully the organic character of society—a character that was irreducible to a simple sum of parts.Footnote 100 In August he yielded to the views and recruiting efforts of those of his cohort at the Ecole polytechnique and Ecole des mines who joined the Romantic socialist movement the Saint-Simonians.
SAINT-SIMONIANISM, NATURE AND THE ROMANTIC TURN
Chevalier's impact on the Saint-Simonian movement was immediate. Within a couple of months of joining he was writing articles for its journal, L'Organisateur. By the end of the month, Prospère Enfantin, the movement's leader, asked him to edit the Saint-Simonians’ new acquisition, the famous liberal newspaper Le Globe. Chevalier became its zealous editor in chief. Under his stewardship not only did the paper acquire the title Journal de la doctrine de Saint-Simon, but he also wrote most of its articles.
Chevalier's rapid rise coincided with a major schism between Enfantin and the movement's other leader, Saint-Amand Bazard, and Saint-Simon's last disciple, Olinde Rodrigues. It also coincided with the defection of Jules Lechevalier and Abel Transon to Fourierism, with its more thoroughgoing feminism and ecologism.Footnote 101 While a detailed account of these developments would divert us from the topic of this article, two issues stand out as particularly relevant. First, the departure of Bazard and Rodrigues saw the Saint-Simonian movement enter a state of unbounded freethinking. Second, Lechevalier and Transon's readings of Fourier near the end of 1831 and beginning of 1832—before their defection—posed a challenge to the movement's reflections on Saint-Simon. What was at stake was a central pillar to Fourierism and Saint-Simonianism, the idea of “universal association.” The discussions that ensued from Lechevalier and Transon's readings of Fourier drove the Saint-Simonians to reflect anew on the theory and practice of association. And their unique scientific and engineering education, which stressed the interconnectedness of nature and humanity, furnished them with the intellectual resources that allowed them to imagine a world in which nature and technology were no longer in opposition but in union. These reflections, however, did not go far enough for the “dissidents,” and they finally broke with the movement in February.
In a pamphlet entitled Simple écrit d'Abel Transon aux saint-simoniens, Transon challenged the Saint-Simonians’ conceptions of science and nature, arguing that they did not lead to their stated goal of universal association. Underlying this critique was the belief that Fourier was intuitively and scientifically right on nature. Fourier had shown in his 1822 Détérioration matérielle de la planète that “climatic disorders are a vice inherent to civilized culture,” because agricultural and industrial practices pitted humanity against nature.Footnote 102 The objectification of nature led to indiscriminate land clearance, deforestation and climate change.Footnote 103 Against this backdrop, Transon stressed the intimate union between nature and association, and argued that Fourier's thinking was firmly rooted in “incontrovertible” scientific principles that applied to “all theories of association.”Footnote 104 This elicited a painstaking Saint-Simonian response, which involved an unrestrained reflection on nature and visionary and decidedly more Romantic ideas about technology. The role of the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie), and in particular what Michel Espagne called a “Schellingan pantheism applied to social practices,” became important to Saint-Simonian thinking.Footnote 105 The natural properties of circulation and vital impulses were foregrounded in their reflections on universal association. These natural properties were seen as integral to both harmony and generative growth: to the realization of nature's potentialities, which technologies would help unleash. These thoughts were among the Saint-Simonians’ most imaginative on a theory of universal association, and ones that could easily meet the challenge of Fourier's reflections.
The Saint-Simonians explored many questions in this unbridled atmosphere. They reflected on time and space, and humanity's historical and spatial place in the world—important dimensions to a theory of universal association.Footnote 106 Enfantin led discussions on topics that fascinated him, including cellular construction and circulation. Chevalier recorded many of these, and in a direct reference to circulation, he wrote that Enfantin thought: “MOVEMENT was the link between time and space.” Underpinning this discussion was Enfantin's belief that modern science had given insufficient thought to questions of mechanics. The conversations that followed were numerous and touched on matters relating to engineering and architecture. They included one on the cycloid and catenary arc, with Enfantin opining that the “complex idea cantenary–cycloid . . . embraced speed and mass; that is to say that VITAL FORCES must spring from it somewhere.”Footnote 107 There were conversations on “universal dualism,” with Enfantin musing that “the day when we have assimilated sufficiently into our thoughts the new dogma, we will create the new mathematics founded on the universal dualism of those terms joined by a sympathetic element, alive, indefinite, comprised between two limits, oscillating and balanced between them.”Footnote 108 And there were conversations on how vital forces and movement might be integrated into modern architecture and urban planning. In a revealing discussion of 7 September 1832 between Enfantin and his disciples, Chevalier reported that Le Père believed that “architecture, as a theory of constructions, is an incomplete art” because “the notion of motion, of movement, is absent from it.” While buildings were made to “RESIST MOVEMENT,” what was required was for “all buildings to be constructed in such a way as to receive MOVEMENT and to convey it.”Footnote 109 These thoughts were rooted in an understanding about circulation going back to biology, organic chemistry and physiology. They coalesced around the idea that the modern city should adopt a natural form. The physical form of the human body was what Enfantin, like Saint-Simon before him, had in mind.Footnote 110
The ideas to emerge from these conversations found their way into Le Globe and into poems. Chevalier wrote a number of poems, which employed bodily metaphors. “La terre, l'eau, l'air” depicted the Earth like the human body. Water was the blood which circulated through the body's arteries and veins, and air was that which “warmed and stimulated” it.Footnote 111 His long poem “Le temple,” which has been described as “both surrealist and scientific,”Footnote 112 depicted humanity like the human body and saw its union with nature. The same poem also stressed new technologies that might harness the forces of nature, including lightning as a useable source of electricityFootnote 113—an idea that was not entirely fantastical, given Chevalier's familiarity with Gay-Lussac's research into electricity. This reflected the “new dogma,” of which Enfantin spoke and which was alluded to directly by Chevalier in another poem, “La polarité universelle.”Footnote 114 “Science marched toward universal polarity”; the “new science,” “new mathematics,” “new dogma” were all seen as intimately bound up with new technologies. These, in reflecting “new science,” were organic, and not mechanical. Rather than being destructive of nature they would unlock nature's possibilities by promoting circulation and generative growth. The realization of nature's potential translated into the realization of humanity's potential, its “productive forces” and “generative capacity,” which expressed itself in economic, political, cultural and spiritual renewal.
The “voltaic battery temple” that Chevalier described in “Le temple” was to be the microcosmic expression of the life of the Earth. His description of it was full of bodily metaphors. He stressed circulation and the temple's ability to use immense natural forces. It would harness the “light and heat” of the sun, and “electricity and magnetism” of the Earth. It would emit fire and shoot out waves of heat and light. It housed “underground labyrinths and furnaces.” “Heat and electricity and pressurized steam [élastique vapeur]” would “circulate in its limbs.”Footnote 115 It would bring together nature and humanity: “magnificent in the power of variety in its space.” It would contain all music, all the arts, paintings, sculptures, panoramas, dioramas and much more.Footnote 116 What Chevalier envisaged, as he made clear in a conversation with Enfantin, was a temple that brought together “in a single space all of space and all of time.”Footnote 117
The surrealism of these poems should not disguise the fact that the ideas they conveyed emerged out of knowledge of organic chemistry, physics, mathematics and geology that Chevalier and many of his Saint-Simonian confederates gained during their time at the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines. Their abiding preoccupation with circulation and movement, and the more fundamental belief that only by uniting humanity and nature could social division be abolished, defined Chevalier and the Saint-Simonians’ reveries, and their more sober reflections.Footnote 118 They would define Chevalier's most important work as a Saint-Simonian: “Le système de la Meditérranée.”
“Le système de la Meditérranée”
In the winter and spring of 1832, and in the months before he wrote many of his surrealist poems, Chevalier organized a major and wide-ranging project for Le Globe. This was thirteen articles published between January and April under the heading “Religion saint-simonienne: Politique industrielle et système de la Méditerranée.” Chevalier wrote nine of these.Footnote 119 The ideas about cellular structure, circulation, vital forces and new technologies were central to them. Many of the same ideas contained in his poems figured in altogether less fantastical forms in these articles. They would serve to underpin his vision of universal association, which comprised the economic, political and cultural union of a divided Europe, and the integration of Europe and the Ottoman world.
Chevalier's fourth article set out in detail how that union would be achieved. He described a system—the Mediterranean system—that comprised a colossal infrastructure network of railways, navigable rivers, canals, roads, shipping lanes and telegraphs linking the port cities of the Mediterranean to each other and to the major capitals of Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Chevalier envisaged over 60,000 kilometers of railways linking Europe's and Asia's major cities. To these were added many tens of thousands of kilometers of canals, navigable rivers and roads linking smaller towns and cities to major ones. And to these were adjoined scores of Mediterranean shipping lanes linking the major and minor ports of the Mediterranean basin. His scheme centred on the Mediterranean as the meeting point of East and West, and North and South—of the four poles of the globe.
The infrastructure network of the Mediterranean system was understood in terms of organic organization. His description of it relied on bodily metaphors, the vocabulary of “veins and arteries” and “limbs.” He argued that the strength and vigor of circulation determined the system's generative capacity. In his words the Mediterranean system was “a system of veins and arteries through which civilization circulated awakening weary nations by bringing together disjointed limbs and causing them to move from a state of torpor to one of intoxicating activity.”Footnote 120 The system's generative capacity was not confined to nations and civilizations. It extended inward to communities, and down to the molecular level of the individual. Chevalier saw the national and the individual in a dialectical and symbiotic relationship. These ideas, like those expressed in Chevalier's earlier writings, were clearly informed by what he learned in Brochant, Beaumont and Dufrénoy's courses on geology and mineralogy, which, as we saw, stressed the situation, order and organizational relation of the geological strata as being layered both vertically and horizontally, and the interaction of strata and the unleashing of powerful geological forces, yielding rich mineral wealth. As if to replicate the multidisciplinarity stressed in the work of the Arcueil and philomathique societies, these ideas were combined or paralleled with bio-physiological ideas about circularity, interaction, molecular structure, vitality and growth that Chevalier learned in organic chemistry and gleaned from his knowledge of Saint-Simon's reading of the eighteenth-century physiologists Bichat and Vicq d'Azyr.Footnote 121 These ideas defined his thinking on the inner life of the individual and the outer life of society along with the more expansive categories of nations and peoples that he also used. The intricate system that connected the communal, provincial and national he united to a wider geographic network. The resulting synergy, as in a dynamically evolving organism or the overlapping and merging of strata, transformed the nature and internal dynamics of the system, contributing to its growth and harmony. As Chevalier made clear in this work and numerous others, the Mediterranean system would evolve into a global system.Footnote 122
For all its flights of fancy, this visionary work established the fundamental and constitutive elements of the whole of Chevalier's subsequent oeuvre. And it is to an analysis of some of its most important writings that we must now turn.
The cours d’économie politique
The years following the publication of the Le système de la Méditerranée saw an important number of works that stressed the circulatory system and its generative function. Chevalier's famous 1836 Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord emphasized the intricacy and density of America's network of railways, roads, canals, navigable rivers and lakes, and showed how much vaster and more complex it was than that of European nations, including Britain.Footnote 123 This system engendered remarkable economic growth and enormous material abundance, allowing Americans to enjoy high standards of living and a degree of social peace alien to a country like France.Footnote 124 America represented the realization of what remained an ideal for Europe, and Chevalier said so in his technical and lengthy 1840 Histoire et description des voies de communication aux Etats-unis et travaux d'art qui en dépendent.
Chevalier's impressive Des intérêts matériels en France (1837) was his attempt to set out a public-policy agenda for the French state. It stressed the same message of his earlier works on the need to develop France's infrastructure. But it also tackled important environmental questions. It was highly critical of the intensive exploitation of the forests of the Pyrenees, Alps and Vosges, and argued that this practice precipitated flooding, soil erosion and climate change: “With an unregulated deforestation, our temperate provinces become more like southern regions.”Footnote 125 Whole populations were put at risk by deforestation. Its effects, whether drought or flash flooding, threatened water supplies and the utility of navigable waterways for transport, industry and agriculture. The only solution was regulation and the extensive replanting of denuded regions.Footnote 126 Chevalier championed these ideas in administrative and scientific fora, including the Société forestière and the Société d'agriculture of Haute-Vienne.Footnote 127 He was praised for these efforts by leading sylviculturalists, including Henri Vicaire.Footnote 128
Des intérêts matériels en France treated these environmental questions in the round, linking them to local, regional and national agricultural and industrial considerations. Its ideas were buttressed by rigorous theoretical developments in organic chemistry, particularly the idea of the circulus, which was to emerge as an important idea on the use of organic and human waste to improve soil nutrients. There were direct policy implications of this work and of later writings, with their focus on networks, circulation and growth. And there were important theoretical and conceptual implications too, not least on the political questions of equality and liberty. The weight of these considerations was an important factor in his appointment to the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1840.
In the inaugural lecture to his first course of lectures in 1841 and 1842, Chevalier defined political economy as “the science of material interests . . . concerned with how these interests are formed, how they develop, and how they become organized.”Footnote 129 As Walch observed many years ago, the focus on the organization of material interests was very unusual for liberal political economy of this time. The works of Joseph Garnier and Frédéric Bastiat, which dominated liberal political economy in this period, were resolutely wedded to Say, Comte and Dunoyer's thinking. Chevalier's political economy was distinct not only by continuing to be wedded to Saint-Simonian concerns and beliefs, as Walch argued,Footnote 130 but also by remaining firmly tethered to the natural-scientific worldview he inherited from his student days. His theoretical reflections on political economy of the 1840s illustrate this very well.
Chevalier began his inaugural lecture on political economy by stressing the importance of “industry.” It was, he declared, political economy's “most beautiful gem.” But his definitions of both industry and political economy were far from orthodox. He defined industry as comprising three branches, and he ordered them hierarchically. The first was agriculture; then came manufacturing and commerce. He ascribed great importance to agriculture, and in so doing underscored humanity's connection with nature:
When measured by the number of men she employs, by the value of products she creates, alongside her happy influence on the health of the body and spirit, agriculture is the first of the arts . . . Political economy, if she forgot agriculture, would commit the same mistake as an astronomer who omitted the sun from his view of the heavens.Footnote 131
Within a few short paragraphs, Chevalier put to one side this tripartite description of industry, and employed the term generically. In doing this he advanced a conception of industry that in establishing a direct connection between industry and nature—with nature understood in the dual sense of humanity's external environment and of its internal species-nature—was substantially different from that form of industry advanced by Say and Dunoyer, and Chevalier's contemporaries Bastiat and Garnier:
There is no exaggeration in saying that through industry man will really become the king of creation, the master of the universe. With industry, instead of being oppressed by matter, man will hold it subjugated to his will . . . this will be a conquest of the human spirit, and, it is to that topic that I wish to turn . . . as it is the intelligence of the greatest number, lost as it is today in worries of attaining the necessities of life, compromised and brutalized by toilsome labours, that will be emancipated and restored to its natural activity.Footnote 132
Chevalier's declarations that “instead of being oppressed” by nature, man would subject her to “his will,” appeared to present an idea of man in conflict with nature. But this was not the case, and it was a far cry from the view presented by Dunoyer in L'industrie et la morale. Rather, it was an argument against a political economy that, in stressing unrestricted competition, pitted industry against nature. Chevalier—echoing Chaptal, Dupin and Dutens's earlier critique—challenged that political economy by presenting a stark account of unrestricted competition as destructive to nature, industry and social relations. It was competition driven by short-termism, and Chevalier had witnessed its effects as a mining engineer: where foundries decimated local forests, or where coal suppliers clear-cut stands of trees in order to build disposable barges to transport coal to market—barges that, after a single use, were sold for firewood.Footnote 133 It was competition that stifled innovation and investment, and was reflected in cheap but inefficient modes of transportation, which resulted in the waste of valuable resources. He observed firsthand how poor transport led to the deterioration of certain types of coal through prolonged exposure to air,Footnote 134 or how it resulted in the waste of valuable food, such as grain.Footnote 135 The drive to maximize short-term profits led to a lack of investment in new technologies that could improve crop yields, reduce food costs and improve the condition of the working classes.Footnote 136 Chevalier took an active role in promoting new and significantly more efficient harvesting technologies, such as Cyrus McCormick's wheat reaper, and new applications of organic chemistry, such as the use of fertilizers, especially guano, whose effects on improving soil nutrients were well documented, or in experimenting with organic compounds in combating phylloxera.Footnote 137
Chevalier not only detailed the effects of unfettered competition on the environment; he also observed how it pitted industrialists against each other and against their employees. It caused individuals to be alienated from their labours, and impoverished the labouring classes morally, intellectually and culturally. Unfettered competition undermined social peace and cohesion, and led to the disaggregation of social organization:
Unlimited competition, which is the sole law of industry and which makes masters enemies of one another, obliges them on penalty of bankruptcy, that is to say industrial death, to increase relentlessly and without limit the work of the labourer . . . Competition constrains the worker to look upon his neighbour as a rival who challenges him for his bread. It appears that the genius of war, repelled by the good sense of nations and governments, has sought to save itself in industry.Footnote 138
By depicting unfettered markets in this light, Chevalier presented his audience with a stark choice for the future. The first scenario involved a world in which competition resulted in the destruction of small and medium-sized producers and a concentration of capital in the hands of a few producers. The result was a new “industrial feudalism” in which a dangerous opposition between humanity and nature would express itself at the micro level in the alienated individual “compromised and brutalized by toilsome labours” and at the macro level in the fragmented society and divided international order. The second scenario encompassed the idea of organization and an intimate association of competing interests brought together through a complex infrastructure and banking system. Within this scenario he offered a different conception of competition and trade than did liberal political economists. Unlike Dunoyer, Garnier or Bastiat—who adhered to the language of politics and understood competition and free trade as the expression of individual liberty, the absence of constraint on the individual's will—Chevalier viewed them very differently, seeing them as integral to a wider idea of organization based on a sophisticated understanding of the laws of nature and the generative capacity of natural systems. Trade was a form of circulus that acted as a catalyst to innovation and the elimination of damaging environmental practices.Footnote 139 And he contrasted trade within the organization of a system rooted in a deep understanding of nature with the disorder of unrestricted competition:
. . . unlimited competition often causes an excessive fall in prices that appears favourable to the consumer. What occurs after all of these accidents, these extreme depressions, these jolts and these shocks, is not only a transfer of wealth to some and a loss to others; it is rather in the greater number of cases a dead loss. For the theorem of kinetic energies that mathematicians establish in relation to the movement of solid objects, equally subsists in the order of material interests, and perhaps too in the ethical realm. In political economy, just as in rational mechanics [la mécanique rationnnelle], it is true to say that variations subsist and that shocks result in an enormous loss of energy [une énorme déperdition de force].Footnote 140
This account of political economy stressed natural-scientific principles, which pertained to energy and movement. And its origins lay in both geology and organic chemistry. This was an account of political economy that was strongly endorsed by natural scientists, agronomists and sylviculturalists, seeing its value to agriculture, to sylviculture and to public administration.Footnote 141 Journals such as the Annales forestière placed Chevalier's name alongside those major figures who contributed to public service in France, and in particular the administration of its forests: an administration based on, in its words, the “natural and economic sciences.”Footnote 142 This was a vision of political economy very much at odds with the defence of unfettered markets found in the liberal political economy of Dunoyer, Garnier and Bastiat.
Chevalier's political economy was defined by organization and circulatory systems, and these were central to his reflections on commerce and global trade. These systems were organized. They consolidated diverse elements, and gave shape and direction to what would otherwise be chaotic and conflictual activity. Though Chevalier collaborated with both Bastiat and Garnier in writing for the Journal des économistes and in participating in the Association pour la liberté des échanges, his participation was, as David Todd observed, “lukewarm.”Footnote 143 This was because his reflections on commerce were underpinned by a set of wholly different assumptions. He viewed commerce in terms of its ability to bring together disparate elements, to forge common interests, or, as he said, to “create everywhere mutual interests,” to achieve “universal association.”Footnote 144 These interests combined to generate growth and new interests, and these in turn combined to generate additional growth and interests. The circulatory system multiplied interests, connections and development.
The connection Chevalier established between the circulatory system and its generative capacity was thoroughly explored in his lectures when he examined all forms of infrastructure networks, from the physical networks of roads, canals and railways to the networks of financial capital that stimulated investment.Footnote 145 To these were added the knowledge networks—domestic and international—of science and technology, the very stuff of the Arcueil and philomathique societies.Footnote 146 All of these networks fueled the growth of “productive forces” and the associative connections between individuals, classes and nations. They were integral to the “spirit of association” and “human fraternity,” and central to his history of the development of civilization.Footnote 147
Just how important networks and the idea of generative capacity were to Chevalier's economic thought was made crystal clear when he confronted the question of how economic crises came about. He defied the economic orthodoxy of his day, which was itself divided on the nature of crises. Those following Say rejected Simonde de Sismondi's argument from his 1819 Nouveaux principes d’économie politique that economic crises resulted from overproduction. Instead they contended that supply created its own demand and that equilibrium would always be achieved. Chevalier navigated a different course. Like Sismondi he believed that crises resulted largely from overproduction or underconsumption, and he argued for increasing aggregate demand through increasing average wages.Footnote 148 But this solution was inadequate on its own and additional measures were necessary, which involved the development of infrastructure networks, better access to financial capital and sources of credit, the promotion of trade, and the scientific development and management of natural and human resources. Solving the problem of achieving a better economic equilibrium was the focus of much of his 1842–3 lectures, which argued for an expansive role for the state, especially its direct involvement in public works and infrastructure development.Footnote 149 Chevalier, in returning to the tropes of industrie and Saint-Simonianism, contrasted the new industrial state with the warrior state of the Old Regime. The latter “brought about the destruction of men and wealth”; the former “spurred their creation.”Footnote 150 Ten lectures from this period were devoted to the new industrial state and how it could direct the activities of its military away from warfare and toward public works. These lectures rejoined the first of his politique industrielle articles from his time as editor of Le Globe just as they anticipated his important 1848 L'organisation du travail,Footnote 151 and the work he would undertake as a member of Napoleon III's Council of State in developing France's infrastructure.Footnote 152 The underlying assumption of these lectures was contained in his remark about rational mechanics cited earlier. The scientific worldview on the interconnectedness of all phenomena that Chevalier retained from his time at the Ecole polytechnique and the Ecole des mines crystallized in his view of the state. The modern, scientific, state organized the “veins and arteries” of the nation. Through its complex network of canals, rivers, roads, telegraphs and railways, the state developed its natural and human resources and thereby grew the nation's generative capacity. The state was the nation's underlying unifying principle. It bore a striking family resemblance to Bertholet's unifying principle of all organic phenomena or Saint-Simon's principle of universal gravitation. And it was a conception of the state that differed radically from that enunciated by Bastiat, Dunoyer or Garnier, who saw it as interfering and disruptive to economic and social equilibrium.
CONCLUSION
In ascribing a central role to the state in the development of infrastructure and communication networks, Chevalier highlighted two contrasting orders and, by implication, two contrasting visions of political economy. The first order, dominated by unfettered markets and competition, and championed by Dunoyer, Garnier and Bastiat, was characterized by conflict and the waste of human and natural resources. The second order—the new age of industrie—was characterized by an intricate web of networks whose complexity and diversity determined its generative capacity. The more complex and diverse the web the more growth it created. At the heart of this idea was a sophisticated understanding of nature as a circulatory system and complex web of life. What permitted this idea to be mapped onto society was the belief that nature and society were symbiotically united in this system. The consequences of this were immense for Chevalier's political-economic thought. Yet those consequences have never been fully appreciated because his thought has only ever been interpreted through established categories of political and economic theory, and this has left us with an impoverished understanding of nineteenth-century French political economy more generally. Only by being sensitive to the natural-scientific background to nineteenth-century French political economy can its richness and its relevance to our own economic and ecological predicament be fully appreciated.
