MORELLET, André (1727-1819), economist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Lyons on the 7th of March 1727. He was long regarded as almost the last survivor of the Philosophe school; and in this character he figures in many memoirs,—for instance in Madame de Remusat’s. He was educated by the Jesuits in his native town, then at a seminary in Paris, and finally at the Sorbonne; and he took holy orders, but his designation of abbé was the chief thing clerical about him. He early joined the Philosophe party, and was a frequenter of most of their salons, being something of a butt (especially to his fellow-abbé and rival in political economy, Galiani), but having the credit of a ready and biting pen. Voltaire called him “I.’Abbé Mord-les.” His work was chiefly occasional, and the most notable parts of it were a smart pamphlet in answer to Palissot’s scurrilous play Les Philosophes (which procured him a short sojourn in the Bastille for an alleged libel on Palissot’s patroness, the princesse de Robeck), and a reply to Galiani’s Commerce des Blés (1770). Later, he made himself useful in quasi-diplomatic communications with English statesmen, and was pensioned, being, moreover, elected a member of the Academy in 1785. The outbreak of the Revolution (soon after which he was engaged in a controversy with Chamfort on the question of the advantages and deserts of the Academy) did not, as it did with many of his friends, drive him from the country or put his life in danger, but it put him in considerable straits of fortune. He maintained a kind of moderate liberal tone, and the return of something like order under the Consulate and the Empire restored him to prosperity and pensions. A year before his death, at the great age of ninety-two, on the 12th of January ...