Summary of the Molinari Project

Title Page of the original 1849 edition
The photo of Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) which accompanied his obituary in the Journal des économistes

Concurrent with the Bastiat Translation Project we have been translating and editing a book by his younger friend and colleague Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912) entitled Les Soirées de la Rue Saint-Lazare: Entretiens sur les lois économiques et défense de la propriété (Evenings on Saint Lazarus Street: Discussions on Economic Laws and the Defence of Property) (1849). Since their activities overlapped considerably during the 1840s much of the scholarly apparatus such as glossaries about people, places, publications, and historical terms and ideas, and details about the French government budget were common to both projects.

During the course of this project we have been putting online working drafts of the translation and its scholarly apparatus:

As part of the bicentennial celebrations I have been editing a number of anthologies drawn from his vast output over a long life which lasted 92 years. A long but still only partial list of his writings has bene compiled by the Institut Coppet in Paris which posts some 297 items, of which 56 were published books and pamphlets (“Bibliographie Gustave de Molinari”). The anthologies I have produced to date are:

  1. I was able to purchase copies of the street magazine Molinari, Bastiat, and some other friends published during June 1848 and handed out on the streets of Paris. The Institut Coppet published this in 2014: Jacques Bonhomme: L’éphémère journal de Frédéric Bastiat et Gustave de Molinari (11 juin – 13 juillet 1848). Recueil de tous les articles, augmenté d’une introduction. Ed. Benoît Malbranque (Paris: Institut Coppet, 2014). Scans of the originals can be seen here.
  2. The Bicentennial Anthology of Gustave de Molinari’s Writings on the State (Oct. 2018): this contains a detailed biographical essay on his life and work, 24 extracts from his writings between 1846-1911 with brief introductions to each one, and an updated bibliography of all his works
  3. The Collected Articles by Gustave de Molinari from the Dictionnaire de l’économie politique (1852-53) (June 2019). This contains 25 main articles and 5 biographical articles.

For further reading about Molinari, see:

We have the following works by him in the OLL: (en français):

in English: