CHARLES RICHARD DE BUTRE: AN ECONOMIST IN THE SHADOW OF FRANCOIS QUESNAY

From 1759 to 1762, Francois Quesnay regularly appealed to Charles Richard de Butre (1725-1805) when he had to make numerical estimates or perform non-elementary computations (Charles and There 2008). Although scarcely mentioned in the secondary literature, Butre was indeed an important collaborator of Quesnay's. The present article gives a detailed account of Butre's contribution to Physiocracy by concentrating on the period from 1766 to 1768, when Quesnay conceived and published his last versions of the Tableau economique. We show that Butre developed a sophisticated economic model. Although his model contains significant deviations from Quesnay's, Butre's intent was to complement rather than criticize it.