Note 255 — Chapter II · : ADAM SMITH (continued 2)

He was born at Lyons on January 5, 1767. After a visit to England he entered the employment of an assurance company, and took part as a volunteer in the campaign of 1792. From 1794 to 1800 he edited a review entitled Décade philosophique, littéraire et politique, par une Société de Républicains. He was nominated a member of the Tribunate in 1799. After the publication of his Traité, the First Consul, having failed to obtain a promise that the financial proposals outlined in the first edition would be eliminated in the second, dismissed him from the Tribunate, offering him the post of director of the Droits réunis as compensation. Say, who disapproved of the new régime, refused, and set up a cotton factory at Auchy-les-Hesdins in the Pas-de-Calais. He realised his capital in 1813, returned to Paris, and in 1814 published a second edition of his treatise. In 1816 he delivered a course of lectures on political economy at the Athénée, probably the first course given in France. These lectures were published in 1817 in his Catéchisme d’Économie politique. In 1819 the Restoration Government appointed him to give a course on “Industrial Economy” (the term “Political Economy” was too terrible). In 1831 he was made Professor of Political Economy in the Collège de France. He died in 1832. His Cours complet d’Économie politique was published, in six volumes, in 1828-29.