1806–1879
Michel Chevalier was a French engineer, economist, and statesman, one of the leading champions of free trade in nineteenth-century Europe. Born 13 January 1806 in Limoges, he graduated top of his class from the École Polytechnique (1823) and trained as a mining engineer at the École des Mines (1825–1829).
In the early 1830s he embraced Saint-Simonian doctrine, editing the movement's journal Le Globe until it was suppressed in 1832. Arrested for "outraging public morality," he served roughly six months in the Sainte-Pélagie prison alongside Prosper Enfantin before being pardoned. From 1833 to 1835, sent by Interior Minister Adolphe Thiers to study industry and infrastructure in the United States and Mexico, he filed dispatches that ran as a 39-part series in the Journal des Débats (November 1833–October 1835), later collected as Lettres sur l'Amérique du Nord (1836). He remained a Débats contributor on economic affairs into the 1840s, alongside writing for the Revue des Deux Mondes; his 1837 book Des intérêts matériels de la France established his reputation as an economist.
He held the chair of political economy at the Collège de France from 1840 until his death, sat on the Conseil d'État (from 1838) and the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (from 1850), and served as a Second Empire senator (1860–1870). His crowning achievement was negotiating the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with Richard Cobden, opening Anglo-French trade and triggering a wave of European tariff liberalization. He died 28 November 1879 near Lodève, Hérault, still defending free trade to the end.