Cantillon the man
The honour of being called the ‘father of modern economics’ belongs, then, not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Richard Cantillon (c. early 1680s–1734) is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of social or economic thought. Little is known about Cantillon's life despite the fact that he died a multimillionaire, but the best modern researches show that he was born in Ireland in County Kerry of a family of Irish landed gentry, who had been dispossessed by the depredations of the English puritan invader Oliver Cromwell. Cantillon's first cousin once removed, also named Richard, emigrated to Paris to become a successful banker, thereby perpetuating the tradition, born in the sixteenth century, of religio-political exiles from Britain emigrating to France.1 The Cantillons were part of the Catholic emigration, centring, by the end of the seventeenth century, around the Stuart pretender to the throne of Great Britain.
Richard Cantillon joined the emigration to Paris in 1714, quickly becoming the chief assistant to his cousin at the latter's bank. Moreover, Richard's mother's uncle, Sir Daniel Arthur, was a prominent banker in London and Paris, and Arthur had named Richard's cousin as the Paris correspondent of his London-based bank.2 In two years, Cantillon was in a position to buy his cousin's ownership of the bank.
Richard Cantillon was now in the important position of banker for the Stuart court in exile, as well as for the bulk of the British and Irish emigrés in Paris. But his most important coup came from his association with the Scottish adventurer and arch-inflationist John Law (1571–1729), who had captured the imagination and the greed of the regent of France. The death of the aged Louis XIV in 1715 had inaugurated a looser and more optimistic regime, control of which had been seized by the regent, the duke of Orleans. John Law persuaded the regent that France could find permanent prosperity and need have no further worries about the public debt. The French government need only finance heavy deficits by a massive infusion of the relatively new device of government paper money. Becoming the leading financier of the French government, and even controller-general of the finances of France, Law set loose a rampant inflation that generated the wildly speculative Mississippi bubble (1717–20). The bubble created instant millionaires before it collapsed, leaving John Law in poverty and disgrace. Indeed, the very word ‘millionaire’ was coined during the heady years of the Mississippi bubble.
But when the dust had settled, the shrewd Richard Cantillon emerged, after being a top partner in John Law's Mississippi speculations, as a multimillionaire. Legend has it that, at the beginning of his meteoric career running French finances, John Law had come to Cantillon and warned him that ‘If we were in England we would have to strike a deal and settle matters, but as we are in France, I can send you this evening to the Bastille, if you do not give me your word to leave the kingdom within twenty-four hours’. To which Cantillon is supposed to have replied: ‘Hold on, I will not go and I will make your system succeed’. In any case, we know that Law, Cantillon, and the English speculator, Joseph Edward (‘Beau’) Gage, formed a private company in November 1718. Gage was so wealthy from paper speculation in Law's government-sponsored paper-issue bank, the Mississippi Company, that he seriously attempted, in this period, to purchase the kingdom of Poland from its king, Augustus.
As the Mississippi bubble careened onward, Cantillon, an astute analyst of monetary affairs, saw deeply that the bubble was bound to burst soon, and he took steps to make millions out of the foolishness of his partners and clients. Lending money to Gage and others with which to buy inflated Mississippi Company shares, Cantillon quietly sold all of his own shares as well as the inflated shares that his borrowers had left him as collateral, locked all his papers in a strongbox, took his accumulated millions and left town for Italy, there to await in safety ‘the financial storm that he could see developing’. After Gage and the other Cantillon clients went broke in the 1720 crash, Cantillon pursued them to repay his loans, for which they had been happy to pay a rate of interest up to 55 per cent, which had incorporated a huge inflation premium.
Richard Cantillon returned to Paris a multimillionaire, albeit unpopular with his former associates and debtors. Soon he married Mary Anne, daughter of the late Count Daniel O'Mahony, an Irish general. His mother-in-law, Charlotte Bulkeley, was the sister-in-law of James Fitzjames, the duke of Berwick, marshal of France and the natural son of the English King James II; he was, therefore, the Stuart pretender, James III. Cantillon thus married into an Irish military family closely connected with the Stuarts and with the French court.
At some time during the early 1730s, probably around 1730, this successful banker and speculator wrote his great work, in French, the Essai sur la nature du commerce en général. In the fashion of the day, the result of the censorship of that era, this treatise was not published, but circulated widely in manuscript, in literary and intellectual circles, until it was finally published two decades later, in 1755.
Richard Cantillon's exit from this life was as mysterious and adventurous as his overall career. In May 1734, while living in London, in one of his many houses in the leading cities of Europe, Cantillon died in a fire that burned his house to the ground. It was subsequently found that he was murdered inside the house, the fire being presumably set to cover the murder. Three of his servants were tried for his murder and found not guilty, while his French cook, who had been dismissed three weeks earlier, fled overseas with a considerable amount of valuables. The runaway cook was never found. Earl Egmont, whose brother lived next door to Cantillon, wrote in his diary that Cantillon ‘was a debauched man, and his servants of bad reputation’. And so ended, under highly mysterious circumstances, the only leading economist in history who lost his life as a victim of murder.
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