Abstract
Claude-Jacques Herbert’s Essay on the general police of grain (Essai sur la police générale des grains) has particular features that could have enabled it to make a crucial contribution to the gradual conversion of French public opinion to free trade at the end of 1753. First, the essay is an explicit criticism of Delamare’s Treatise on the police (Traité de la police) and of the French regulations of the grain trade. Against them, Herbert promotes new principles grounded on a specific conception of free trade and on the central role played by prices in economics. Reviewing these elements, we may suppose that the success of Herbert’s Essay can also be explained by the conceptions it proposes. These could indeed have been approved both by the proponents of internal and moderate free trade and those of total freedom.
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