In the United States, we are familiar with the DuPont company, also known as "E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company", a multinational firm in the field of chemistry and biology.

Today, it has sales of over $35,000 billion and employs nearly 65,000 people worldwide. It turns out that this company is closely linked to the destiny of Samuel-Pierre Dupont de Nemours, a French economist of the Physiocratic school.

Born in 1739, Dupont de Nemours approached Physiocrats at the age of 24. At the time, he was still finding his path in life. One day, he came across a short pamphlet titled The Wealth of the State. He found its economic ideas were nonsense and wrote a critical response called Reflections on the Wealth of the State, published in 1763. The piece was well-received, and readers praised it, saying things like, "You must be a disciple of Mirabeau!" Ironically, Dupont didn't even know who Mirabeau was.

Curious, he began reading Mirabeau's work, Friend of the People and Theory of Taxation. He met Mirabeau and François Quesnay, then joined their school. In 1765, Dupont was offered the position of editor of the Journal de l'agriculture, du commerce et des finances, the leading periodical of its time in the field of economic thought.

There were two reasons for this: Mirabeau and Quesnay had to remain silent, and Dupont was seen as their rising star.

Members of the Physiocratic school agree that Dupont de Nemours quickly became Quesnay's favorite. Quesnay once said, "Take care of this young man, he'll be the one to speak when we're dead". One fellow Physiocrat, Abeille, even grew jealous of the attention Dupont received and distanced himself from Quesnay's school.

Dupont de Nemours always maintained his high regard for Quesnay.

He would later say, "I was just a boy when Quesnay held out his arms to me—he made me a man." It was Quesnay who made him a major economist on the literary scene of the time. After the Journal de l'agriculture, du commerce et des finances, Dupont was appointed editor of Les Éphémérides du Citoyen, which became the official organ of the Physiocrats.

He made this periodical collection a major center for economic theory, supporting it even during the decline of the Physiocrats by personally writing nearly all of the later volumes. It was Dupont de Nemours, moreover, who coined the term "physiocracy", derived from two Greek words meaning "government of nature". He used this term to title a collection of Quesnay's articles published in 1768, and the term ultimately became established in history. It is known that among themselves, the Physiocrats called each other "economists", and they were still referred to as such during the Revolution.

When Turgot briefly served as France's finance minister, Dupont became his close advisor, the only Physiocrat with access to him, as Turgot kept his distance from the others.

At the time of the Revolution, he was elected from the bailiwick of Nemours and found himself at the Assembly, where another Monsieur Dupont was also seated. He was then called Dupont de Nemours, not because he was a noble, but simply to distinguish the two. The name, of course, remained.

During the Revolution, in August 1792, he took up arms to defend the King at the Tuileries Palace against the crowd.

The King said to him: "Monsieur Dupont, we always find you where you are needed!" After miraculously escaping the Terror, condemned and awaiting the guillotine but saved by Robespierre's fall, he was pushed into exile under Napoleon and found happiness in the United States, where one of his sons founded, with his father's assistance, the Dupont company.

Despite this eventful life, during which he published dozens of articles, brochures, and books, he remains relatively little known to this day. Perhaps this was because he remained a staunch Physiocrat when the doctrine had fallen out of fashion. Indeed, as Schumpeter wrote, Dupont de Nemours stayed faithful to Physiocracy "throughout a career during which he had many opportunities to renounce it". He was a man of conviction.