François Quesnay

François Quesnay (1694-1774) was a French physician and economist and the central figure of the Physiocratic school. Trained first as a surgeon and later as a doctor of medicine, he is remembered in the history of economic thought chiefly for the Tableau économique, published in 1758, which attempted to describe the working of the economy in an analytical way. For this reason he is regarded as one of the first important contributors to the discipline.

He was born at Méré, near Paris, into a family of small landowners; the persistent legend that his father was a lawyer has little support. At sixteen he began an apprenticeship in surgery, and later studied medicine and surgery in Paris. He set up practice at Mantes, and in 1737 became perpetual secretary of the surgical academy founded by François Gigot de La Peyronie, the same year he became surgeon to the king. In 1744 he took his doctorate in medicine and eventually became first consulting physician to Louis XV, settling in the Palace of Versailles. The king held him in high regard and called him 'my thinker'. When he ennobled him, he granted him a coat of arms with three pansies, a pun on the French word pensée, which also means thought.

Around 1750 he met Vincent de Gournay, who shared his interest in economic questions, and around the two of them gathered the group of economists later known as the Physiocrats. Their leading followers included the elder Mirabeau, author of L'Ami des hommes and Philosophie rurale; Nicolas Baudeau, Le Trosne, André Morellet, Mercier de La Rivière and Dupont de Nemours. Adam Smith met Quesnay during his time in Paris and praised the Physiocrats' contribution in The Wealth of Nations.

Physiocratic doctrine held that agriculture was the only true source of wealth, and that the net product of the land should stand at the centre of economic policy. Quesnay argued that taxes should fall on landowners rather than on cultivators, whom he saw as the engine of production. His maxims on governing an agricultural kingdom and the motto 'poor peasants, poor kingdom' summed up this conviction. His admiration for imperial China, which he described in Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767), earned him the nickname 'Confucius of Europe', although his defence of enlightened despotism has drawn criticism too.

His influence proved lasting. The Tableau économique met with little immediate popularity because of its abstract form, yet the Physiocrats regarded it as the school's principal manifesto, and its ideas about the circulation of income and the agricultural surplus were debated for decades. Quesnay died at Versailles in 1774, when his disciple Turgot was already serving as minister of finance.