author
M. (Germain) Garnier
1754–1821
A French economist, translator, and public figure of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, he is best remembered for bringing Adam Smith’s work to a French readership. His career moved between letters, politics, and economic thought, making him an interesting bridge between ideas and power.
1 Audiobook
An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith, M. (Germain) Garnier
About the author
Born in Auxerre in 1754, Germain Garnier trained in law and began his career in Paris. During the upheavals of the French Revolution and the years that followed, he also held public office, and later became a senator and a peer of France.
Garnier is most often remembered as an economist and man of letters. He produced an influential French translation of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, helping introduce Smith’s ideas to readers in France, and he also wrote on political economy and monetary history.
That mix of scholarship and public life gives his work a distinctive character. He was not only commenting on economic ideas from a distance, but doing so as someone who had lived through dramatic political change in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France.