Galiani, the Economist

1. Ferdinando Galiani had most remarkable good fortune. A Neapolitan through and through, in the history of culture he was the typical representative of the French esprit at the time when Voltaire and the encyclopaedists predominated in the European intellectual world, and when the Paris literary salons were the favourite gathering place of all the celebrated men of the world. ‘L’abbé Galiani étoit de sa personne le plus joli petit arlequin qu’eut produit l’Italie, mais sur les épaules de cet arlequin étoit la tête de Machiavel’ wrote Marmontel (Mémoires, II, p. 12). When the Dialogue sur le commerce des bleds appeared (1770), Voltaire offered the following verdict in a letter: ‘Il me semble que Platon et Molière ce soient réuni pour composer cet ouvrage … On n’a jamais raisonné ni mieux ni plus plaisamment’, and later confirmed in his Dictionnaire philosophique: ‘Il trouva le secret de faire, même en français, des dialogues aussi amusans que nos meilleurs romans, et aussi instructifs que nos meilleurs livres sérieux’. Propagated by Grimm, the fame of this petit être, né au pied du mont Vésuve’, of the new ‘Platon, avec la verve et les gestes d’Arlequin’ spread from the salons of Mme D’Epinay, Mme Necker, Mme Geoffrin and Baron d’Holbach to the whole of Europe. Frederick II was grateful to him for this chance to adorn the large library of the court in Berlin with a copy of the volume Doveri dei principi neutrali, which he called Monument perpétuel; Catherine II referred to him as ‘le petit cousinet du Vésuve’ and, eighty years later, Sainte-Beuve, in one of his Causeries du Lundi, after defining him as ‘une des figures les plus vives, les plus originales et les plus gaies du XVIIIe siècle’ and stating that the emblem to be displayed on his volumes should perhaps consist of ‘un Silène, une tête de Platon, un Polichinelle, et une Grâce’, claimed him as belonging to French literature: ‘il appartient à notre littérature autant qu’aucun étranger naturalisé chez nous; presque autant qu’Hamilton lui-même’.