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The thesis of an influence of Frédéric Bastiat on Leo XIII has long circulated in Catholic liberal circles, but remains rarely documented. This article tests it against the primary sources.
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Central exhibit: a pastoral letter of Bishop Pecci (1876-1877), more than twelve years before Rerum novarum, in which the future pope names Bastiat — a convert buried in Rome — as the most luminous analyst of social cooperation.
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But the drafting of the encyclical falls to the neo-Thomist Jesuits (Taparelli, Liberatore) and the Dominican Zigliara: Bastiat did not inspire the text, he shaped the reading of the world that the pope introduced into his magisterium.
I. A thesis often stated, rarely documented
The claim that Leo XIII was influenced by Frédéric Bastiat has long circulated in liberal circles, and more particularly in the Anglo-Saxon Catholic-liberal and libertarian current — around the Acton Institute, Father Robert Sirico, Tom Woods or Michael Novak — which uses it to defend the compatibility of a market economy with the social doctrine of the Church. The thesis, however, has a recurrent flaw: it is readily found stated in a general form, rarely documented by the primary sources. The present article proposes to establish precisely what the sources allow us to affirm, what they invalidate, and what they leave open.
The material of this inquiry is threefold. First, the biography of Leo XIII published by Jean-Baptiste Noé under the title Léon XIII, le pape de la modernité (Salvator, 2025), which devotes to the doctrinal relations between the bishop of Perugia turned pope and the economist of Mugron a few pages of great precision, and which provides the central citation from the 1876-1877 pastoral letter. Second, Guy Bedouelle’s standard historiographical study, « De l’influence réelle de l’Union de Fribourg sur la rédaction de Rerum novarum », published in the Publications de l’École française de Rome in 1997. Third, the primary writings of Bastiat himself — Harmonies économiques, Sophismes économiques, La Loi — as well as the chain of the encyclical’s actual drafters: Taparelli, Liberatore, Zigliara.
This article unfolds in five stages. It first examines the Perugia pastoral letter and the citation of Bastiat (II). It then returns to the religious dimension of Bastiat, which illuminates the reading Pecci made of him (III). It reconstructs the real genealogy of Rerum novarum on the side of the neo-Thomist Jesuits and the Roman school of Saint Thomas (IV). It treats the particular case of the Fribourg Union, which did not influence the encyclical in the sense sometimes claimed (V). It finally sets out the points of convergence and the real divergences between Bastiat’s thought and the social doctrine of Leo XIII (VI).
II. The Perugia pastoral letter and the citation of Bastiat
Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII, occupied the episcopal see of Perugia from 1846 to 1877 — that is, for thirty-one years, the longest period of his ecclesiastical career. It is within this framework, and while he was still bishop of Perugia — thus before his election to the See of Peter, on 20 February 1878 — that he signed a pastoral letter in which he evokes the thought of Frédéric Bastiat in these terms:
« A famous French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, has set out as if in a tableau the manifold benefits that man finds in society, and it is a marvel worthy of admiration. »
The citation, reported by Jean-Baptiste Noé in his biography, is doctrinally decisive, for two reasons. First, because it is magisterial: it is not a private opinion, it is an official text — a pastoral letter addressed to the clergy and faithful of the diocese, which engages the episcopal authority of its author. Second, because it is specific: Pecci does not cite Bastiat to criticise him, nor to mention him in passing; he makes him the analyst who, better than others, was able to describe what we would today call the positive externalities of social cooperation — the way in which the involuntary concurrences between men, in a society of exchange, produce a collective well-being that no one, individually, intended to organise.
The expression « as if in a tableau » is itself precise. It refers, almost word for word, to the method of the Harmonies économiques — the work in which Bastiat constructs, in the form of a « tableau » of the functions that combine in economic life, a demonstration of the harmony of legitimate interests. When Pecci writes that Bastiat « has set out as if in a tableau the manifold benefits that man finds in society », he is thinking of the book that appeared in 1850, a few months before the economist’s death. The future pope is therefore not an occasional reader: he knows the work precisely, retains its central thesis, and makes use of it in his episcopal teaching.
This datum sets aside the ordinary objection that the encounter between Leo XIII and Bastiat would be an accidental convergence between two traditions issuing from natural law. There is indeed a personal reading, documented and prior to the pontificate, of Bastiat by Pecci. It remains to measure what it actually nourished.
III. Bastiat, a Catholic reader
The scope of the citation is clarified by another fact: Bastiat is not an economist indifferent to the Catholic faith. He died in Rome on the eve of Christmas 1850, at the age of forty-nine, after converting to Catholicism. He is buried in the French national church of the city, San Luigi dei Francesi, where his tomb is still visible. This circumstance — the conversion and the Roman burial — makes Bastiat, in the Italian memory of the mid-nineteenth century, a liberal economist who is not merely « not hostile » to the Church but who positively entered into its communion in his final hour.
The religious dimension of Bastiat’s thought is not, moreover, a terminal addition. It runs through his entire work. Thus this decisive formula from the Harmonies économiques, which deserves to be quoted in full:
« There is in this book a dominant thought; it hovers over all these pages, it gives life to every line. This thought is the one that opens the Christian Creed: I believe in God. »
The declaration is doubly significant. It posits, at the opening of Bastiat’s major theoretical work, that the economic order of the harmony of interests rests on a prior theological order: there is a Providence — Bastiat names it — that has endowed the human creation with a structure of possible cooperation, and political economy explores its grammar. It is a Christian variant of what would be called, in the Anglo-Saxon liberal tradition, the argument from invisible design — but formulated in the language of the Creed rather than in that of Smithian Providence.
For Pecci, who in 1879, in the very first year of his pontificate, would restore Thomism as Christian philosophy through the encyclical Aeterni Patris, this religious dimension of Bastiat is not a detail. It makes his thought receivable as a contribution to the understanding of the social fact — whereas a strictly utilitarian, Benthamite liberalism would not have been. When Pecci, bishop of Perugia, reads Bastiat, he reads an economist who is inscribed, in his own way, within the tradition of natural law of Christian origin — the very one that the neo-Thomist Jesuits, around Taparelli and Liberatore, were then restoring in the Italian Catholic world.
IV. The neo-Thomist Jesuits and the drafting of Rerum novarum
Pecci’s reading of Bastiat does not, however, make the French economist a direct « inspirer » of Rerum novarum. The drafting of the encyclical belongs to another genealogy, properly Catholic, whose architecture must be reconstructed in order to situate Bastiat’s contribution correctly.
1. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio (1793-1862): the doctrinal matrix
The first milestone of this genealogy is the Piedmontese Jesuit Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, elder brother of Prime Minister Massimo d’Azeglio, rector of the Collegio Romano and then of the college of Naples. His Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (1840-1843), translated into French in 1855, is the work that re-established, in the Italian Catholic world, Thomist natural law as a framework for analysing modern societies. In it Taparelli forges notions that would later pass into the social doctrine: hypotactic right and social right, solidarity and subsidiarity (this last notion would appear explicitly only with Quadragesimo anno in 1931, but Taparelli lays down its terms).
Taparelli is also one of the founders of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit review founded in Naples in 1850, which would become the major doctrinal organ of Italian Catholicism. The institutionalisation of neo-Thomist thought around this review, the Collegio Romano and the future Angelicum college prepared the ground for the future social doctrine. When Pecci is elected pope in 1878, he inherits a Jesuit-Dominican intellectual apparatus already constituted and largely structured by Taparelli’s heirs.
2. Matteo Liberatore, S.J. (1810-1892): the principal drafter
The second milestone, and the most decisive for the drafting of Rerum novarum, is Matteo Liberatore. A Neapolitan Jesuit, a neo-Thomist philosopher, a long-standing collaborator of La Civiltà Cattolica, he published in 1889, two years before the encyclical, a key work: Principii di economia politica (Rome, 1889). The book presents a Catholic political economy founded on natural law: private property as a primordial right, condemnation of socialism, the just wage, the duty of the propertied classes to help the labouring classes. It is, doctrinally, the near-direct matrix of the encyclical.
The scholarly work of Giovanni Antonazzi, who published in 1957 the file of the preparatory drafts preserved in the Vatican Archives, establishes the chronology: it is Liberatore who drafts, from 1890, the first Italian draft, known under the title Schema della futura enciclica sulla questione operaia, from which the encyclical would be elaborated. The manuscript is then passed to several successive revisers, up to the definitive Latin translation and the papal signature, on 15 May 1891.
3. Tommaso Maria Zigliara, O.P. (1833-1893): the Dominican reviser
The drafting file also reveals the considerable role of the Corsican Dominican cardinal Tommaso Maria Zigliara, professor of philosophy at the Collegio di San Tommaso (the future Angelicum), master regent of the Order of Preachers and cardinal created by Leo XIII in 1879. Zigliara takes charge of the philosophical and theological revision of Liberatore’s text. He inflects several paragraphs, notably those dealing with the finality of private property and the social function of labour. The preserved preparatory texts show that he tones down certain overly liberal formulations of the Neapolitan Jesuit and introduces a more marked Thomist accent on the universal destination of goods.
The final drafting is thus the product of a genuine Roman school of natural law — Jesuit in its origin (Taparelli, Liberatore), Dominican in its revision (Zigliara), Thomist in its philosophy. It is within this framework, and only within this framework, that the text Leo XIII would sign is prepared.
4. Bastiat’s place in this genealogy
We see, then, that Bastiat figures nowhere in the direct drafting of the encyclical. He could not figure there: the chain of drafters is ecclesiastical, the sources are Thomist, the philosophy is neo-Thomist, the vocabulary is scholastic. But this observation does not empty the thesis of an influence of Bastiat on Leo XIII: it specifies its nature. The Perugia pastoral letter is the proof: before any Jesuit wrote the slightest preparatory paragraph, Pecci had already cited Bastiat as a luminous analyst of social cooperation.
Bastiat did not inspire the text of Rerum novarum; he contributed to forming the reading that Pecci, once pope, makes of the economic and social world of his time.
The nuance is not slight. It distinguishes a direct intellectual influence on the author — Pecci as bishop, then as pope — from a drafting influence on the text — which belongs to the neo-Thomist Jesuits. The first is attested by the 1876-1877 pastoral letter; the second is not. This is, formulated with precision, the correct version of the Catholic-liberal thesis.
V. The Fribourg Union: an effect, not a source
A second clarification is required, concerning this time no longer Bastiat but the other great pole often invoked as a source of the encyclical: the Catholic Union for Social and Economic Studies, known as the Fribourg Union. Founded in 1888 around Monsignor Gaspard Mermillod, bishop of Lausanne and Geneva, and led by René de La Tour du Pin, Albert de Mun, Caspar Decurtins and their friends, it met annually at Fribourg until 1891.
The frequent thesis that the Fribourg Union « prepared » Rerum novarum is contested by the historians of social Catholicism. Guy Bedouelle, in the study he devoted to this question in 1997 in the Publications de l’École française de Rome, establishes that chronology and causality do not support such a thesis. The Fribourg Union was founded in 1888, ten years after Leo XIII’s election; it met under the explicit patronage of the pope, within a dialogue in which the doctrinal initiative belonged to Rome; and its most characteristic proposals, notably corporatism and the regulation of wages by compulsory intermediate bodies, are not taken up by the encyclical.
Bedouelle’s summary formula has become the reference on this point:
« Rerum novarum meets the aspirations of the friends of Fribourg more than it draws on their inspiration. »
The sentence is elegant and just. It acknowledges a community of concern — the « workers’ question », the defence of the labouring classes, the convergent critique of atomistic liberalism and revolutionary socialism — without granting the Fribourg Union a preparatory magisterium it did not have. The Union, like other contemporary study circles, contributed to the European intellectual ferment that the encyclical comes at once to clarify, surpass and, to a certain extent, correct. On the decisive point of corporatism, in particular, Leo XIII does not follow La Tour du Pin.
This corrective is important for anyone who wishes to understand Bastiat’s exact place in the prehistory of the encyclical. If the Fribourg Union, despite the coincidence of interests and papal frequentation, did not genuinely nourish Rerum novarum, then Pecci’s personal reading of Bastiat, attested by the Perugia pastoral letter, takes on an even more singular relief: it was not a Catholic circle that brought the liberal economist to the pope’s knowledge, it was the pope who, through his personal reading in the 1870s, brought Bastiat into the doctrinal culture that he then introduced into his magisterium.
VI. Points of convergence and divergence
1. Three strong convergences
One can identify, on reading Rerum novarum, three points of convergence with Bastiat’s thought. These three points deserve to be restored precisely, because they outline the common ground of the two bodies of thought.
First, the primacy of the human person. Leo XIII places at the heart of the encyclical that man, created in the image of God, is « prior » to the State, and that all political organisation must respect this priority. It is, transposed into Thomist language, the intuition that Bastiat had formulated in La Loi in 1850 — the common force is legitimate only as the defence of the rights the individual possesses prior to any political organisation. The vocabularies differ; the architecture is common.
Second, the defence of private property. The encyclical, from its very first paragraphs, demonstrates by natural law that private property is inherent in human dignity: « the fruit of labour […] belongs absolutely to the one who has supplied his labour ». Bastiat had written, in almost identical terms, that property is the right of each to « dispose freely of the value created by his labour ». The convergence here is not only doctrinal, it is almost lexical.
Third, and this is perhaps the most suggestive point, the presentation of society as a place of cooperation between social groups and not as a field of irreducible antagonisms. Leo XIII explicitly refuses, in the encyclical, the idea of a « class struggle » in the Marxian sense: he opposes to it the organic cooperation of legitimate interests. Now this is exactly the thesis of the Harmonies économiques: « all legitimate interests are harmonious », and it is, it seems, what Pecci, in his Perugia pastoral letter, designated as the « tableau of manifold benefits » that Bastiat had known how to set out. The two bodies of thought agree on a decisive point against Marx: society is not, in essence, a place of struggle, but a place of cooperation.
2. Three divergences not to be masked
Convergence, however, is not identity. At least three divergences must be noted so as not to yield to Catholic-liberal enthusiasm.
First divergence: the just wage. Rerum novarum posits explicitly that the wage must suffice to maintain a sober and honest worker, and that there is a minimum threshold that justice, and not only the market, imposes. This doctrine is foreign to Bastiat, for whom the wage is strictly the exchange price of a service, fixed by the meeting of supply and demand. On this point, the encyclical introduces a moral requirement that Bastiat’s « law of markets » would not admit as it stands.
Second divergence: the workers’ right of association. Leo XIII devotes several paragraphs to defending the legitimacy of professional associations, guilds and Catholic trade unions. Bastiat, within his liberal framework, would not have fought the individual right of association, but the organic conception of intermediate bodies that the encyclical defends remains foreign to his more contractual view of society.
Third divergence: the duty of State intervention. Rerum novarum admits, against what Bastiat had maintained in Paix et liberté ou le budget républicain in 1849, that the State has a positive role to play in the protection of the weakest: limitation of working hours, protection of children and women, the setting of minimum thresholds. This authorised social doctrine is not a socialism — the encyclical vigorously recalls it — but it exceeds Bastiat’s conception of a State reduced to its sovereign functions.
These divergences do not disqualify the convergence; they specify its boundary. Leo XIII takes up from Bastiat what is, in the thought of the man from Béarn, compatible with Christian natural law — property, cooperation, the critique of socialism — and corrects or completes what stems, in his eyes, from a liberalism insufficiently articulated with the dignity of the person and the solidarity of men. It is, exactly, the work of a Catholic magisterium that knows how to « draw its reflections from outside the world of theology » and « nourishes itself on the intellectual production of its time ».
VII. Conclusion
Four conclusions emerge.
First, the influence of Bastiat on Leo XIII is documentarily attested, contrary to what other neighbouring forms of the thesis would sometimes suggest. The Perugia pastoral letter of 1876-1877, in which Pecci names Bastiat and presents him as the author who best described social cooperation, is its central exhibit. It is not a parallel convergence between two traditions of natural law; it is a personal reading by the bishop turned pope, more than twelve years before the encyclical.
Second, this influence does not bear on the drafting of Rerum novarum, which belongs to the chain of ecclesiastical drafters — Liberatore, a Jesuit; Zigliara, a Dominican; under the philosophical authority of Taparelli and the Roman school of Saint Thomas. Bastiat’s thought does not enter the text by this route. It enters through the author himself — the pope — as the backdrop of a reading of the world.
Third, the role of the Fribourg Union in the drafting of the encyclical has been overestimated. Guy Bedouelle’s study shows that the Fribourg Union « meets the aspirations » rather than provides the inspiration. This leaves, by contrast, an even greater relief to Pecci’s personal reading of Bastiat.
Fourth, the real convergences between Leo XIII and Bastiat — primacy of the person, private property, cooperation against class struggle — are solid, but they do not suppress three important divergences: the just wage, the organic right of association, the duty of State intervention. The social doctrine of the Church does not reduce to a Christianised liberalism; it articulates a Thomist heritage, a selective reception of liberal thought and a social requirement of its own.
The interest of this clarification goes beyond the single case of Bastiat. It shows that the social doctrine of the Church, as Leo XIII inaugurates it, is not a text closed upon the Catholic tradition: it is a magisterium that knows how to « draw its reflections from outside the world of theology » and « nourish itself on the intellectual production of its time ». For anyone who wishes to understand the singularity of Rerum novarum — its openness, its firmness, its capacity to enter into dialogue with the secular thought of its century without dissolving into it — the case of Bastiat is, in this respect, exemplary.
Bibliography
Principal source
Noé, Jean-Baptiste, Léon XIII, le pape de la modernité, Paris, Salvator, 2025, in particular pp. 173-175.
Liberal primary sources
Bastiat, Frédéric, Harmonies économiques, Paris, Guillaumin, 1850; repr. in the Œuvres complètes edited by the Institut Coppet.
Bastiat, Frédéric, La Loi, Paris, Guillaumin, June 1850.
Bastiat, Frédéric, Sophismes économiques, 2 series, Paris, Guillaumin, 1846-1848 (in particular « Physiologie de la spoliation »).
Bastiat, Frédéric, Paix et liberté, ou le budget républicain, Paris, Guillaumin, February 1849.
Catholic primary sources
Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, encyclical of 4 August 1879 on the restoration of the philosophy of Saint Thomas.
Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, encyclical of 15 May 1891 on the condition of the workers.
Liberatore, Matteo, S.J., Principii di economia politica, Rome, 1889.
Taparelli d’Azeglio, Luigi, S.J., Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto, 5 vols., Palermo, 1840-1843; French trans. Essai théorique de droit naturel basé sur les faits, Paris, Casterman, 1855.
Historiographical studies
Antonazzi, Giovanni, L’enciclica Rerum Novarum. Testo autentico e redazioni preparatorie dai documenti originali, Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1957.
Bedouelle, Guy, « De l’influence réelle de l’Union de Fribourg sur la rédaction de Rerum novarum », Publications de l’École française de Rome, 1997, no. 232, p. 254 ff.
Bellocq, Arturo, La Doctrina Social de la Iglesia. Qué es y qué no es, doctoral thesis, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, 2012.
Calvez, Jean-Yves and Perrin, Jacques, S.J., Église et société économique. L’enseignement social des papes de Léon XIII à Pie XII (1878-1958), Paris, Aubier, 1959.
Catholicisme social et démocratie chrétienne, Paris, Cerf, 1986, ch. 3, p. 47.
Soras, Jean de, S.J., Initiation théologique à la doctrine sociale de l’Église, Lyon, Mappus, 1947.
Institut Coppet resources
Institut Coppet, « L’Encyclique du Pape Léon XIII et la question douanière », institutcoppet.org / coppetinstitute.org.
Institut Coppet, « Entretien avec le père Robert Sirico pour le 125ᵉ anniversaire de l’encyclique Rerum Novarum », 2016.
Institut Coppet, « 24 décembre 1850 : la foi religieuse de Frédéric Bastiat ».
Hart, David M., « Frédéric Bastiat sur la spoliation légale », institutcoppet.org.
Jean-Baptiste Noé holds a doctorate in economic history (Sorbonne University) and is a professor of geopolitics and political economy at the Ircom. He is editor-in-chief of Conflits.
