Chapter Eleven - “Is the Feeling of Humanity not More Sacred than The Right of Property?”: Diderot's Antiphysiocracy in His Apology of Abbé Galiani

Summary

Friendship alone could not explain Denis Diderot's decision to intervene in the clash between two abbés, Ferdinando Galiani and André Morellet, and thus between two visions of governance, especially of the articulation of the political, the economic, and the social: it constituted, however, its personal and quasi-institutional framework. Having actively encouraged the Italian abbé to draw up his critique of Physiocracy and its specific application in 1763–64, having then undertaken to correct, perhaps to improve the text, and to place it with a publisher, to reread the proofs, and prepare the terrain for the Dialogues’ appearance, Diderot had clearly chosen his camp intellectually. Humanly also, no doubt, even if he did not know at the beginning of this adventure that his comrade Morellet would agree to take down their close common friend, Galiani.

A triangular, asymmetrical relationship

In any event, this triangular relationship had never been symmetrical. Galiani remained fond of Morellet and grateful to him for having sponsored his Parisian socialization from the moment he arrived. The Frenchman, who made a point of remaining on close terms with all the influential men and women of the Republic of Letters, no doubt overestimated Diderot's attachment to him, perhaps because he was a member of the Encylopedia team; he believed in it even after the printing of his book against Galiani. Even before the clash between the two abbés, the head Encyclopedist felt closer to the Neapolitan. His irritations at Morellet increased in number and virulence in the wake of the latter's polemical—and commissioned—text against the Compagnie des Indes. Indignantly rejecting the suggestion that he was seeking to please the government in the interest of his constant quest for income and protection, both to support him and to realize his ambitious projects, Morellet had justified himself intellectually by the coherence of his actions in the direct line of his promotion of freedom of trade (a pamphlet in favor of painted or printed cloths (“indiennes”) in 1758, a memoir for overhaul of the customs system in 1761, various texts pleading for freedom of the grain trade in 1763 and 1764). The philosophe was greatly displeased by the memoir against the “monopoly” of the Compagnie des Indes and never missed an opportunity to lecture the abbé and challenge his position.