BOISGUILBERT, PIERRE LE PESANT, SIEUR DE (1676-1714), French economist, was born at Rouen of an ancient noble family of Normandy, allied to that of Corneille. As judge at Montivilliers near Havre, and then as president of the bailliage of Rouen, he made a close study of local economic con ditions. He was thus led to consider the misery of the people under the burden of taxation. In 1695 he published his principal work, Le Detail de la France, la cause de la diminution de ses biers, et la f acilite du remedy. . . . In it he drew a picture of the general ruin of all classes of Frenchmen caused by the bad economic regime. In opposition to Colbert's views he held that the wealth of a country consists not in the abundance of money which it possesses but in what it produces and exchanges. The remedy for the evils of the time was not so much the reduction as the equalization of the imposts, which would allow the poor to consume more, raise the production and add to the general wealth. In his Factum de la France, published in 1705 or 1706, he gave a more concise resume of his ideas. But his proposal to substitute for all aides and customs duties a single capitation tax of a tenth of the revenue of all property was naturally opposed by the farm ers of taxes and found little support. Upon the disgrace of Vau ban, whose Dime royale had much in common with Boisguilbert's plan, Boisguilbert violently attacked the controller in a pamphlet, Supplement au detail de la France. The book was seized and con demned, and its author exiled for a time to Auvergne.
In 1712 appeared a Testament politique de M. de Vauban, which is simply Boisguilbert's Detail de la France. Vauban's Dime royale was formerly wrongly attributed to him. Boisguilbert's works were col lected by Daire in the first volume of the Collection des grands economistes. His letters are in the Correspondance des controleurs generaux, vol. i., published by M. de Boislisle.