the tax collector “M. Lasouche” (Mr. Blockhead); “M. Prohibant” (Mr. Prohibitor or Mr. Prohibitionist); and the two lobby groups the “Sinistrists” (the Left Handers) and the “Dexterists” (the Right Handers).
Another weapon in Bastiat’s lexical armory was parody. He liked to take government institutions or documents, or well-known works of literature, and write a parody of their structure and content. A good example of this is his creation of a “Lower Council of Labor” (for ordinary shopkeepers and workers) to make fun of the protectionist and establishment “Superior Council of Commerce.” Another is his mimicking of government “circulars” (or memoranda) issued in the early months of the Second Republic. As a deputy and vice president of the Finance Committee of the Chamber he would have seen many of these, and he is thus able to mimic their style wonderfully. But the supreme example of his skill as a writer is his parody of Molière’s parody of seventeenth-century doctors. He takes Molière’s acerbic commentary on the primitive medical practices of his day and turns it into a very sharp critique of the behavior of customs officers of his own day. These pose some difficulty for a modern translator; indeed, much has to be explained in the footnotes in order for these parodies to make sense, as he wrote his parody in “dog Latin” for which we have used the excellent translation made by FEE.2
Of all the challenges facing a translator, one of the hardest is explaining puns, which are usually unique to a given language. Bastiat liked to pun, as the footnotes will make clear. A good example is from the sophism “The Right Hand and the Left Hand” (ES2 16) in which the king is asked to expand the amount of work in the country (and thus increase “prosperity”) by forbidding people to use their right hands. Bastiat has a field day creating a
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new lobby group, the “Dexterists,” who campaign for the freedom to work with one’s right hand, and the “Sinistrists,” who lobby for the use of the left hand only. In Bastiat’s mind, all this is so much “gaucherie.” Another good example is the case of the customs barrier across the Bidassoa River, on the border with Spain, which legally permits trade (which is taxed) “over the river,” but which drives the black market in untaxed goods “under the river” (or “underground” as it were).3 He also puns on the names of the streets on which various lobby groups were located. For example, the main protectionist lobby group, the Association for the Defense of National Employment, had its headquarters on the rue de Hautville (Highville Street) and thus is an open target for puns on whether or not they are in favor of high prices or low prices.
Some of Bastiat’s funniest moments come with his frequent wordplay, which is especially hard for a translator to convey. We have attempted to do this without intruding too much on the reader’s patience. England was seen as both a real military enemy because of its role in the war against the French Republic and then Napoléon’s Empire, and as an economic enemy because of its advocacy of free trade. England was known as “Perfidious Albion” (Deceitful England), and so to show the absurdity of this idea Bastiat invents the notion of “Perfidious Normandy,”4 which threatens Paris because it can produce butter more cheaply.
French word order is also used to make a political point. In French an adjective can precede a noun or follow it without too much difference in meaning. In English this makes no sense. Bastiat has a protagonist argue with an opponent of free trade (libre-échange) who despises the very idea because it is English, but quite likes the idea of being free to buy and sell things because this is an example of échange libre (trade which is free).5
Plain Speaking
Bastiat was torn between using a more lighthearted style which used humor, puns, wordplay, and satire to make his important economic and political points, or using a more serious and sober style. He made a name for himself as a witty and clever economic journalist when he wrote for the free trade journal Le Libre-échange, which he edited between 1846 and early 1848, in
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which he pilloried his opponents.6 However, as the political and economic situation got worse in France, he seemed unable to make up his mind which was the best strategy and flip-flopped on the matter. A good example of this self-doubt appears in “Theft by Subsidy” (ES2 9), in which he called for an “explosion of plain speaking” and the avoidance of circumlocutions and euphemisms when describing government policies and their impact on ordinary taxpayers and consumers. We have tried to capture his outrage, anger, and sense of injustice at protectionism and government interventionism in our choice of words by not toning down his language, which is at times very harsh, even extending to curses. In this sophism Bastiat uses a variety of words in his attempt to speak plainly and brutally. Here is a list with our preferred translation for each: dépouiller (to dispossess), spolier (to plunder), voler (to steal), piller (to loot or pillage), raviser (to ravish or rape), filouter (filching), and variants, such as le vol de grand chemin (highway robbery).
There was also some debate in Bastiat’s time about what to call the compulsory conscription of young men into the French Army. It was called requisition in 1793, conscription in 1798, and, more euphemistically, recrutement, during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Bastiat rejected the euphemism used during the 1840s, preferring to see it as a violation of individual liberty, and hence conscription was his preferred term.
The theory of plunder which Bastiat was working on in the last couple of years of his life, most notably in “The Physiology of Plunder” (ES2 1) and “Two Moral Philosophies” (ES2 2), is a good example of the application of his more brutal style to an analysis of how the state goes about extracting the revenue it needs to carry out its activities. Bastiat described taxation as nothing less than “plunder” (la spoliation), where the more powerful, the plunderers (les spoliateurs), use force to seize the property of others (the plundered) in order to provide benefits for themselves or favored vested-interest groups like the aristocracy or the church, resulting in what he termed “aristocratic” or “theocratic plunder.” He uses a number of closely linked expressions to describe this process of plunder: the plunderers (les spoliateurs) use a combination of outright coercion (la force), fraud (la ruse), and deception (la duperie) to acquire resources from ordinary workers and consumers. They also resort to the use of misleading and deceptive arguments (sophismes) to deceive ordinary people, the dupes (les dupes), and to convince them that these actions are taken in their own interests and not those of the ruling elites. We have
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retained this language in our translation and have indicated in the footnotes when Bastiat is using this form of “plain speaking.”
At times Bastiat resorts to cursing, which we have not hesitated to translate as accurately as we can. His best-known example of this is his essay on money titled “Maudit argent!” (Damned Money!, 1849). Other examples include the expressions que Dieu maudisse (what God would damn, or God-damned),7 malédiction sur les machines! (a curse on machines!), le fesse-mathieu, which is a coarse expression for a usurer or moneylender,8 and où diable l’économie politique va-t-elle se nicher? (where the devil is political economy taking us?).
Opposition to Circumlocutions and Euphemisms
The use of the words “plunder” and “dupes” is not the only example of Bastiat’s attempts to avoid circumlocutions and euphemisms in describing government policies like taxation and tariff protection. In the sophism “The Tax Collector” (ES2 10), Bastiat makes a concerted effort to distinguish clearly between two types of “representation,” and we have tried to follow closely the specific set of terms he uses to describe each one. In the first type of representation, an individual contracts with another party, perhaps a business representative or a lawyer with power of attorney, to act on their behalf in a strictly limited manner. For this Bastiat uses phrases such as s’arranger directement (to engage in an exchange directly with a supplier of a good or service) or placer une procuration (to appoint someone to act with one’s power of attorney). He contrasts this with political représentation, where a voter