"French Economist" Léon Faucher Hand Written Letter Dated 1846 JG Autographs COA For Sale

Léonard Joseph (Léon) Faucher (French:[leɔ̃ foʃe];8 September 1803 – 14 December 1854) was a French politician and economist. Faucher was born at Limoges,Haute-Vienne. When he was nine years old the family moved to Toulouse,where the boy was sent to school. His parents were separated in 1816, and LéonFaucher, who resisted his father's attempts to put him to a trade, helped tosupport himself and his mother during the rest of his school career bydesigning embroidery and needlework. As a private tutor in Paris he continuedhis studies in the direction of archaeologyand history, but with the revolution of1830 he was drawn into active political journalism on the Liberalside. He was on the staff of the Temps from 1830 to 1833, when he becameeditor of the Constitutionnel for a short time. A Sunday journal of hisown, Le Bien public, proved a disastrous financial failure; and hispolitical independence having caused his retirement from the Constitutionnel,he joined in 1834 Le Courrier français,of which he was editor from 1839 until 1842, when the paper changed hands. Faucherwas an early member of the Société d'économie politique organized in1842 by Pellegrino Rossi Faucher belonged in policy tothe dynastic Left, and consistently preached moderation to the more ardentLiberals. On resigning his connection with the Courrier français he gavehis attention chiefly to many economic questions. He advocated a customs unionbetween the Latin countries to counterbalance the German Zollverein,and in view of the impracticability of such a measure narrowed his proposal in1842 to a customs union between France and Belgium.In 1843 he visited England to study the English social system, publishing theresults of his investigations in a famous series of Etudes sur l'Angleterre(2 vols., 1845), published originally in the Revue des deux mondes. He helped toorganize the Bordeauxassociation for free-trade propaganda, and it was as an advocate of free tradethat he was elected in 1847 to the chamber of deputies for Reims. After the revolution of 1848 heentered the Constituent Assembly for the department of Marne, where he opposed many Republicanmeasures – the limitation of the hours of labour, the creation of the nationalrelief works in Paris, the abolition of the death penalty and others. Under thepresidency of Louis Napoleon he became minister of publicworks, and then minister of the interior, but his action in seeking toinfluence the coming elections by a circular letter addressed to the prefectswas censured by the Constituent Assembly, and he was compelled to resign officeon 14 May 1849. In 1851 he was again minister of the interior until Napoleondeclared his intention of resorting to universal suffrage. After the coupd'état of December he refused a seat in the consultative commission institutedby Napoleon. He had been elected a member of the Academy of Moral and PoliticalScience in 1849, and his retirement from politics permitted a returnto his writings on economics. He had been to Italy in search of healthin 1854, and was returning to Paris on business when he was seized by typhoidat Marseilles,where he died. His miscellaneous writings were collected (2 vols., 1856)as Mélanges d'economie politique et de finance, and his speeches in thelegislature are printed in vol. ii. of LéonFaucher, biographie et correspondance (2 vols., 2nd ed., Paris, 1875).