There is a cliché according to which the French are genetically against classical liberalism and free-market economics.

The Big, Bad Market: 

A French Psychosis?

by Louis Rouanet

There is a cliché according to which the French are genetically against classical liberalism and free-market economics. 

However, that wasn’t always the case. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, most French politicians and bureaucrats admitted that the State is globally inefficient and should be as small as possible. 

Even a large number of leftists, inspired by the anarcho-socialist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, were strongly opposed to taxation and big government. 

They criticized the wastefulness and the parasitism of the State. 

In his Théorie de l’impôt (Theory of Taxation) published in 1861, Proudhon described taxation as an “illusion” and accused the progressive income tax of being a “joujou fiscal” (tax plaything) used by self-proclaimed progressives in order to amuse the people. 

Opposition to income tax was so strong in France that it was fervently rejected, and almost created an outcry. 

The libertarian politician and economist Yves Guyot was fiercely opposed to income tax and did much for the cause of liberty. In 1898, he wrote “Les tribulations de M. Faubert” (“Tribulations of Mr. Faubert”), in which he warned about the danger of income taxes to liberty and prosperity. 

The income tax appeared in France in 1914 (after the United States!) along with the war and the decline of the French school of political economy.

How can it be that the French have such a statist mentality? 

• Wars are greatly responsible for the growth of omnipotent government, on one hand. 

• On the other hand, after World War II, the Communist Party gained influence: in the 1945 parliamentary elections, they received more than 25 percent of the vote, and in 1976, they had elected the most mayors in France. 

In 2013, a poll showed that 80 percent of the French disapprove of the capitalist system and 25 percent of those interviewed considered that we should abandon capitalism.

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