History of European Ideas 33 (2007) 411–426 French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne Michael Sonenscher King’s College, Cambridge, UK Available online 24 September 2007 Abstract Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Physiocracy; Mirabeau; Quesnay; Machiavelli; Rousseau; International relations; Agriculture; Free trade; Berne; Switzerland It has not been usual to pay much attention to the fact that Physiocracy took shape during the period of the Seven Years’ War or that, at the same time as the marquis de Mirabeau was writing the memorandum which he sent to the Economic Society of Berne late in 1759, he was also speculating (to put it no higher) about the possibility of a royal coup d’ e´tat to impose the new system upon a kingdom which had recently been humiliated by Prussia on land and Britain at sea. 1 This paper is something of a guess about how the ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas 0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2007.07.004 E-mail address: ms138@hermes.cam.ac.uk 1 George Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 a` 1770), 2 vols. (Paris, 1910), vol. 1, p. 73; Michael Sonenscher ‘‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: the French Fiscal Deficit and the