Chevalier Michel

Chevalier, Michel, economist, was born in 1806 at Limoges. He joined the St. Simonians, and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for being associated with Pere Enfantin in editing Le Livre Nouveau. Subsequently he retracted what he had written. He was in 1833 sent by Thiers to the United States to inquire into their railway and water systems of communication. His great work, Des Interets Materiels en France, appeared in 1837; in 1838 he was made a councillor of State, and in 1840 professor of political economy in the College de France. He was an able opponent of Louis Blanc's socialism, which he attacked in Lettres sur l'Organisation du Travail et la Question des Travailleurs. He was an advocate of free trade, and aided Cobden in carrying through the commercial treaty between England and France. He died in 1879 at Montpellier.