This course is an introduction to Frédéric Bastiat, an unrecognized genius and a beacon for our times. In this brief introduction, I aim to help you discover who Frédéric Bastiat was and the major themes we will cover during this series.

Indeed, Frédéric Bastiat, born in 1801 and active during the first half of the 19th century, remained a prominent author for some time. And then, gradually, he disappeared, and today, no one hears about him, no one knows who he is. Yet, paradoxically, this author has been translated into many languages, including Italian, Russian, Spanish, and English.

It turns out that after World War II, one of his books was published in the United States. It became very famous, to the point that Ronald Reagan himself said it was his favorite book, and this little book is called "The Law." Bastiat is thus one of the two most famous French authors in the United States, the other being well known in France too, Alexis de Tocqueville.

So, an unrecognized genius, yet a beacon for our times. Indeed, Frédéric Bastiat, born in Bayonne, spent part of his life in the Landes, where he managed an agricultural estate he had inherited, and ultimately led a life as an entrepreneur. And then, very early on, he became interested in economics. He traveled to England and met Richard Cobden, a leader of the free trade movement. Bastiat was fascinated by this movement; he was convinced that free trade was a solution for France, and he subsequently decided to spread his ideas throughout the country. He wrote articles that were very successful, and he moved to Paris to run a newspaper called, at the time, the Journal des économistes.

He was also a philosopher and a thinker on society, social order, justice, law, and human rights. And in that regard, we can say that Bastiat is a light for our times. And I would like to conclude with that. He is someone who tried to understand the workings of the political market. Of course, he is also a defender of the market economy, for whom ultimately the market economy is the best way to create wealth. However, aside from that, and this is where he remains unrecognized, he understood the mechanisms of the political market.

When he was elected as a deputy, it was during the Second Republic, and from that point forward, it was the people who made the laws. At that time, Bastiat witnessed a proliferation of laws in all directions, including the creation of public services, social rights, and taxes.

And he realized that fundamentally, nothing had really changed. People disposed of others' property through voting and the law, which he referred to as legal plunder. This phenomenon of legal plunder was at the center of his work, especially in this short text he wrote towards the end of his life, "The Law," where he contrasts legal plunder with property, the right to property. He shows that, fundamentally, the real solution to the social problem is freedom, namely, property; the control over oneself and the fruits of one's labor.

In this course, we will travel together through the thought of Frédéric Bastiat, starting from the influences of the authors who shaped him very early on in his youth, then we will look into his economic sophisms, and finally, we will conclude with this great text, "The Law," which will introduce us to the analysis of the political market, to the analysis of society.