CHARLES RICHARD DE BUTRÉ: AN ECONOMIST IN THE SHADOW OF FRANÇOIS QUESNAY

Abstract

From 1759 to 1762, François Quesnay regularly appealed to Charles Richard de Butré (1725–1805) when he had to make numerical estimates or perform non-elementary computations (Charles and Théré 2008). Although scarcely mentioned in the secondary literature, Butré was indeed an important collaborator of Quesnay’s. The present article gives a detailed account of Butré’s contribution to Physiocracy by concentrating on the period from 1766 to 1768, when Quesnay conceived and published his last versions of theTableau économique. We show that Butré developed a sophisticated economic model. Although his model contains significant deviations from Quesnay’s, Butré’s intent was to complement rather than criticize it.