“ As an economist, Sismondi represented a humanitarian protest against the dominant orthodoxy of his time. In his first book he followed Adam Smith, but in his principal subsequent economic work, Nouveaux Principes d'économie politique (1819) , he insisted on the fact that economic science studied the means of increasing wealth too much, and the use of wealth for producing happiness too little. He was not a socialist ”

“ The greater part of the family property was sold, and with the proceeds they emigrated to Italy, bought a small farm at Pescia near Lucca, and set to work to cultivate it themselves. Sismondi worked hard here, both with his hands and his mind, and his experiences gave him the material of his first book, Tableau de l'agriculture toscane, which, after returning to Geneva, he published there in 1801. In 1803 he published his Traité de la richesse commercial, his first work on the subject of political economy, which, with some differences of view, continued to interest him to the end of his life. ”

“ Although a Liberal and in his earlier days almost an Anglomaniac, he did not welcome the fall of the empire. During the Hundred Days he defended Napoleon's constitutional schemes or promises, and had an interview with the emperor himself, which is one of the chief events of a not very eventful life. After the Restoration he left Paris. On completing (1817) his great book on the Italian republics, he undertook (1818) a still greater, the Histoire des Français, which he planned on a vast scale, and of which during the remaining twenty-three years of his life he published twenty-nine volumes. ”