Mirabeau’s (and Quesnay’s) Response to the De l’esprit scandal and Quesnay’s Break with the Encyclopédie (Complements to ‘‘La vie de François Quesnay’’ by Jacqueline Hecht)

The paper is a tribute to Jacqueline Hecht (1932-2020), and to her biography of Quesnay. It presents three documents, which enrich the history of the physiocratic movement in the period 1758-1760 and, for the first two, deal with the consequences of the scandal provoked by the publication of De l’esprit on this movement:
- a letter of Mirabeau to Helvétius, the only one recorded between the two men, condemning Helvétius’s book and asking for its withdrawal;
- the fact that the Sorbonne listed and quoted one of Quesnay’s texts, published in the Encyclopédie, among the writings which inspired De l’esprit;
- a proof that a very rare text of Quesnay was printed in march 1760 at Versailles in Madame de Pompadour’s apartments and with her assistance. This establishes a claim of Jacqueline Hecht, whose biography was issued without its notes in its two publications of 1958 and 2005.