The Most Famous

ECONOMISTS from France

This page contains a list of the greatest French Economists. The pantheon dataset contains 414 Economists, 25 of which were born in France. This makes France the birth place of the 4th most number of Economists behind United Kingdom, and Germany.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary French Economists of all time. This list of famous French Economists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of French Economists.

1. Vilfredo Pareto (1848 - 1923)

With an HPI of 74.10, Vilfredo Pareto is the most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 66 different languages on wikipedia.

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (born Wilfried Fritz Pareto; 15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923) was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis. He has been described as "one of the last Renaissance scholars. Trained in physics and mathematics, he became a polymath whose genius radiated into nearly all other major fields of knowledge." He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to claim that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was built on his observations that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to about 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of mathematics and sociology.

2. Frédéric Passy (1822 - 1912)

With an HPI of 72.08, Frédéric Passy is the 2nd most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 70 different languages.

Frédéric Passy (20 May 1822 – 12 June 1912) was a French economist and pacifist who was a founding member of several peace societies and the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He was also an author and politician, sitting in the Chamber of Deputies from 1881 until 1889. He was a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 for his work in the European peace movement. Born in Paris to a prominent Catholic and Orléanist family, Passy was surrounded by military veterans and politicians. After training in law, he worked as an accountant and served in the National Guard. He soon left this position and began travelling around France giving lectures on economics. Following years of violent conflicts across Europe, Passy joined the peace movement in the 1850s, working with several notable activists and writers to develop journals, articles, and educational curricula. While sitting in the Chamber of Deputies, Passy developed the Inter-parliamentary Conference (later the Inter-Parliamentary Union) with British MP William Randal Cremer. Alongside this, he founded several peace societies: the Ligue Internationale et Permanente de la Paix, the Société Française des Amis de la Paix, and the Société Française pour l'Arbitrage entre Nations. Passy's work in the peace movement continued into his later years, and in 1901, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Red Cross founder, Henry Dunant. Passy died in 1912 after a long period of illness and incapacitation. Despite his economic works gaining little traction, his efforts in the peace movement resulted in him being recognised as the "dean of European peace activists".: 34 His son, Paul Passy, published a memoir of his life in 1927, and his works are still being republished and translated into English in the 21st Century.

3. François Quesnay (1694 - 1774)

With an HPI of 71.48, François Quesnay is the 3rd most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.

François Quesnay (French: [fʁɑ̃swa kɛnɛ]; 4 June 1694 – 16 December 1774) was a French economist and physician of the Physiocratic school. He is known for publishing the "Tableau économique" (Economic Table) in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats. This was perhaps the first work attempting to describe the workings of the economy in an analytical way, and as such can be viewed as one of the first important contributions to economic thought. His Le Despotisme de la Chine, written in 1767, describes Chinese politics and society, and his own political support for enlightened despotism.

4. Jean-Baptiste Say (1767 - 1832)

With an HPI of 69.26, Jean-Baptiste Say is the 4th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 46 different languages.

Jean-Baptiste Say (French: [ʒɑ̃batist sɛ]; 5 January 1767 – 15 November 1832) was a liberal French economist and businessman who argued in favor of competition, free trade and lifting restraints on business. He is best known for Say's law—also known as the law of markets—which he popularized, although scholars disagree as to whether it was Say who first articulated the theory. Moreover, he was one of the first economists to study entrepreneurship and conceptualized entrepreneurs as organizers and leaders of the economy. He was also closely involved in the development of the École spéciale de commerce et d'industrie (ESCP), historically the first business school to be established.

5. Jacques Delors (1925 - 2023)

With an HPI of 68.19, Jacques Delors is the 5th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 53 different languages.

Jacques Lucien Jean Delors (French: [ʒak lysjɛ̃ ʒɑ̃ dəlɔʁ]; 20 July 1925 – 27 December 2023) was a French politician who served as the eighth president of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995. Delors played a key role in the creation of the single market, the euro and the modern European Union. As president of the European Commission (EC), Delors was the most visible and influential leader in European affairs. He implemented policies that closely linked the member nations together and promoted the need for unity. He created a single market that made the free movement of persons, capital, goods, and services within the European Economic Community (EEC) possible. He also headed the Delors Committee, which proposed the monetary union to create the euro, a new single currency to replace individual national currencies. This was achieved by the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Delors was a member of the French Socialist Party. Before becoming president of the EC, he was France's finance minister from 1981 to 1984, and a member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1981.

6. Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727 - 1781)

With an HPI of 68.05, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot is the 6th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 45 different languages.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne ( toor-GOH; French: [an ʁɔbɛʁ ʒak tyʁɡo]; 10 May 1727 – 18 March 1781), commonly known as Turgot, was a French economist and statesman. Sometimes considered a physiocrat, he is today best remembered as an early advocate for economic liberalism. He is thought to have been the first political economist to have postulated something like the law of diminishing marginal returns in agriculture.

7. Léon Walras (1834 - 1910)

With an HPI of 66.27, Léon Walras is the 7th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 43 different languages.

Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (French: [valʁas]; 16 December 1834 – 5 January 1910) was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value (independently of William Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger) and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium. The definition of the role of the entrepreneur found in it was also taken up and amplified by Joseph Schumpeter. For Walras, exchanges only take place after a Walrasian tâtonnement (French for "trial and error"), guided by the auctioneer, has made it possible to reach market equilibrium. It was the general equilibrium obtained from a single hypothesis, rarity, that led Joseph Schumpeter to consider him "the greatest of all economists". The notion of general equilibrium was very quickly adopted by major economists such as Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell and Gustav Cassel. John Hicks and Paul Samuelson used the Walrasian contribution in the elaboration of the neoclassical synthesis. For their part, Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu, from the perspective of a logician and a mathematician, determined the conditions necessary for equilibrium.

8. Frédéric Bastiat (1801 - 1850)

With an HPI of 65.96, Frédéric Bastiat is the 8th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 48 different languages.

Claude-Frédéric Bastiat (; French: [klod fʁedeʁik bastja]; 30 June 1801 – 24 December 1850) was a French economist, writer and a prominent member of the French liberal school. A member of the French National Assembly, Bastiat developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced the parable of the broken window. He was described as "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" by economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter. As an advocate of classical economics and the economics of Adam Smith, his views favored a free market and influenced the Austrian School. He is best known for his book The Law, where he argued that law must protect rights such as private property, not "plunder" others' property.

9. Maurice Allais (1911 - 2010)

With an HPI of 65.65, Maurice Allais is the 9th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 60 different languages.

Maurice Félix Charles Allais (31 May 1911 – 9 October 2010) was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks (Value and Capital, 1939) and Paul Samuelson (The Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947), to neoclassical synthesis. They formalize the self-regulation of markets, which Keynes refuted but reiterated some of Allais's ideas. Born in Paris, France, Allais attended the Lycée Lakanal, graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. His academic and other posts have included being Professor of Economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (since 1944) and Director of its Economic Analysis Centre (since 1946). In 1949, he received the title of doctor-engineer from the University of Paris, Faculty of Science. He also held teaching positions at various institutions, including at the university of Paris X–Nanterre. His first works oriented him towards the sciences of the concrete and the experiments of fundamental physics, on which he will also publish numerous works, notably on pendular oscillations and the laws of gravitation. It's after a trip in 1933 to the United States during the Great Depression, that he decides to make the economy. Allais died at his home in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, at the age of 99. Allais considered Léon Walras, Wilfredo Pareto, and Irving Fisher to be his primary influences. He was reluctant to write in or translate his work into English, and many of his major contributions became known to the dominant community only when they were independently rediscovered or popularized by English-speaking economists. At the same time, he claimed Keynes's liberalism and declared himself in favor of an important public sector. Allais attended the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, but he was alone among the attendees to refuse to sign the statement of aims because of a disagreement over the extent of property rights. He exerted an important influence, at the end of the war, on French economists such as Gérard Debreu, Jacques Lesourne, Edmond Malinvaud and Marcel Boiteux. Paul Samuelson said "Had Allais earliest writings been in English, a generation of economic theory would have taken a different course", and felt the Nobel Prize should have been awarded to him much earlier. Assar Lindbeck, the chairman of the selection committee, considered Allais as "a giant within the world of economic analysis".

10. Dominique Strauss-Kahn (b. 1949)

With an HPI of 64.08, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the 10th most famous French Economist. His biography has been translated into 58 different languages.

Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn (French: [dɔminik stʁos kan]; born 25 April 1949), also known as DSK, is a French economist and politician who served as the tenth managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and was a member of the French Socialist Party. He attained notoriety due to his involvement in several sex scandals. He was a professor of economics at Paris West University Nanterre La Défense and Sciences Po, and was Minister of Economy and Finance from 1997 to 1999, as part of Lionel Jospin's Plural Left government. He sought the nomination in the Socialist Party presidential primary of 2006, but was defeated by Ségolène Royal. Strauss-Kahn was appointed managing director of the IMF on 28 September 2007, with the backing of then–President of France Nicolas Sarkozy. He served in that capacity until his resignation on 18 May 2011, in the wake of an allegation that he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid; the charges were later dismissed. Other sexual allegations followed, and resulted in acquittals. These accusations were seen as controversial in France, and prompted prominent conspiracy theories, as well as a debate on the role of the media in debating and determining a suspect's guilt ahead of conviction or legal proceedings having even been initiated. Numerous photos of the handcuffed Strauss-Kahn were banned from publication under French laws, while their publication in the United States prompted outrage. These legal cases led to him dropping out the 2012 French presidential election, where he had been the favorite to win the Socialist Party's nomination (the party's eventual candidate, Francois Hollande, won the presidential election), and put an end to Strauss-Kahn's nascent political career. He then resumed his activities in the private sector, mainly advising governments on their sovereign debts.

People

Pantheon has 26 people classified as French economists born between 1646 and 1972. Of these 26, 7 (26.92%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living French economists include Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Jean-Claude Trichet, and Jean Tirole. The most famous deceased French economists include Vilfredo Pareto, Frédéric Passy, and François Quesnay. As of April 2024, 1 new French economists have been added to Pantheon including Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui.