This article presents the fiscal theories of Forbonnais (1722 to 1800) and Graslin (1727 to 1790) as a common system. A system that is the first to clearly establish the notion of progressive taxation upon goods inversely proportional with their utility. Thanks to the collation of the works of these two men with the inventories of their libraries and their arithmetic skills, this article is able to reveal their real backgrounds and influences. Finally, the progressive taxation would allow a new allocation of the factors of production that would be the key point for a whole reform of the French Kingdom.Forbonnais, Graslin, indirect taxation, geometric progression, luxury,

The insufficiently criticized story of a secularized pre-Revolutionary France has led historians of economics to consider French political economy as free from the influence of religion from the 1730s through the 1780s. On the contrary, through a study of the “second Jansenism,” the most powerful and intellectually the richest Christian movement in the French Enlightenment, this article shows that religion played a pivotal role in the emergence of French political economy. Having established the theoretical richness of the movement, this article aims to show, through two case studies, in what different ways it affected economics. The first explores the resonance of the Jansenist culture of several members of the Gournay circle on their methodological approaches and their promotion of agriculture and trade. The second case study focuses on the loan at interest. This article shows that the major authors on this issue in the second half of the century were all deeply influenced by Jansenist thinking on the subject.

In the conception of history of the abbe de Condillac, one thing is really original. He establishes a causal relation between the functioning of the human mind and the history of societies. First, the understanding of humankind is not disordered: society develops, stages follow one another. But the commercial stage leads societies to divide into classes, the landowners are interested only in frivolous, luxurious objects: they have become denatured. Their behaviour entails society in a long phase of decline. However, this course is not inevitable. Condillac wishes to reform the individual in order to modify society and he proposes economic safeguards capable of reducing disparities. Life is simple, but history is not halted.

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