The Christian Faith in the Thought and Life of Frédéric Bastiat

by
Claudio Restani
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“[L]iberty…is an act of faith in God and in His works.”

This is how Frédéric Bastiat—a French economist known for his pioneering libertarian economic thought—concludes The Law, his most famous work. Reading his various writings and pamphlets, we can very often notice a recurring mention of God, or at least of a Creator, and of the morality that today we call “Judeo-Christian”; however, this faith found in his works can be found just as often in his life. This article aims to expose the role of the Catholic faith in the intellectual and personal aspect of Frédéric Bastiat.

Bastiat’s Thought

As already introduced, The Law is a very important work by Bastiat, and here we find the profound definition of freedom mentioned above but, we also find other statements with a religious background. Turning to the collectivist theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples, horrified, Bastiat comments with a touch of irony:

But, oh! sublime writers, deign to remember sometimes that this clay, this sand, this manure, of which you are disposing in so arbitrary a manner, are men, your equals, intelligent and free beings like yourselves, who have received from God, as you have, the faculty of seeing, of foreseeing, of thinking, and of judging for themselves!

Bastiat was a natural law scholar. For him, every individual is endowed by his Creator with rights and faculties that no one can justly take away from him. This is the same case with another famous statement he wrote in The Law:

Nature, or rather God, has bestowed upon every one of us the right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property, since these are the three constituent or preserving elements of life;...

This is what is expressed in The Law by Bastiat as far as philosophy is concerned. It is a philosophical thought enlightened by a deep Christian faith that sees each individual as the image and likeness of the Lord. As far as economic thought is concerned, Bastiat expresses substantially the same natural law, to explain it we use his own words taken from Economic Harmonies and from the first edition of Economic Sophisms:

…the thought that put harmony into the movement of the heavenly bodies was also able to insert it into the internal mechanisms of society….

…freedom and public interest can be reconciled with justice and peace; that all these great principles follow infinite parallel paths without conflicting with each other for all eternity;... [This] we know of the goodness and wisdom of God as shown in the sublime harmony of physical creation…

He is convinced that the harmony that exists in the natural sciences is also present in society and in interpersonal relationships, as a marvelous work of God. Again, in the introduction to Economic Harmonies, he writes about the harmony of individual interests:

It [the harmony of interests] is religious, for it assures us that it is not only the celestial but the social mechanism that reveals the wisdom of God, and declares His glory.

Economic Harmonies, although less famous than The Law, is by far his most important work. Here economics, philosophy, and theology merge and give life to the best and complete expression of Bastiat’s thought. In one of the last pages he writes:

To impair man’s liberty is not only to hurt and degrade him; it is to change his nature; it is (in the measure and proportion in which such oppression is exercised) to render him incapable of improvement; it is to despoil him of his resemblance to the Creator; it is to dim and deaden in his noble nature that vital spark that glowed there from the beginning.

The fulcrum of Bastiat’s philosophical and economic thought is precisely the idea of spontaneous order, of natural harmony placed by God in human relationships because of the intelligence and free will with which the Creator has provided individuals.

Bastiat’s Life

Bastiat was born in Bayonne in 1801 to a Catholic family, like the majority of French families of the time. He received all the sacraments required by the Catholic Catechism but, for most of his life, he was not religious. He returned to the Catholic world in the last years of his life, in conjunction with the writing of his best-known works, but also in conjunction with the development of a serious respiratory disease due to which he struggled to speak. To treat this disease, doctors invited him to travel to Italy, hoping that the Mediterranean climate of the peninsula could help him. He made a first brief stop in Pisa and then moved permanently to Rome where he continued to write. Bastiat died on December 24, 1850 at the age of 49.

Bastiat’s last days of life are the ones that most interest us for this article. His confessor, the abbot du Montclar, writes about the morning of Sunday, December 22: “He absolutely wanted to kneel to receive Holy Communion and his religious feeling exploded, to our great edification” (author’s translation).

On December 23, Bastiat dictated his will, beginning with, “I commend my soul to God.” The abbot reports a private conversation he had the same day with the dying man, where he revealed to him that his conscience was at peace and stammered his last words with difficulty: “The truth... Now I understand.” Then he fell asleep.

The next day was his last day of life, at a quarter past five the abbot gave Extreme Unction to Bastiat—tired and dying—who died a few moments later making a last effort: he died kissing the Crucifix that had been approached to him by the religious. The funeral was officiated in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome and attended by the entire French embassy in the city. He was buried in the left aisle of that same church, where he still rests today. His tomb was often visited by the italian president Luigi Einaudi, a politician but also an important classical liberalism supporter.

This was Bastiat: a man who wanted, throughout his life, to make men understand the harmony that God has placed in the freedom and interests of individuals, which always lead to the well-being and peace of all. Bastiat produced a sublime apologetic of capitalism, whose perfection is also an image of the perfection of God. But above all, he wanted to live what he professed.