Commerce and Peace in the French Revolution: Rougier-Labergerie’s International Political Economy

This study examines the political economy of international trade and perpetual peace proposed by the agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier-Labergerie under the French Directory. Drawing on Rougier-Labergerie’s treatise on commerce and peace, this article shows how a political economy that was rooted in natural jurisprudence navigated the challenges of subsistence and war through turbulent times that extended beyond the Thermidor. Similar to eighteenth-century intellectuals who witnessed large-scale wars waged with public debt in the name of national interest, Rougier-Labergerie considered the possibility of peace and prosperity to be intricately linked to the question of commercial rivalry between nations. He thereby recognized the pressing need to mitigate—by different means from those deployed by the radicals of Year II—the jealousy of trade that plagued Europe in the 1790s. This examination provides a more nuanced dimension to the established categories in historical inquiries into the international political economy of the revolutionary period.