A biographical sketch

Walras's life in France

Léon Walras was the founder of the modern theory of general economic equilibrium. He noted in his autobiography (1965, 1, pp. 1–15), from which most of the information in this sketch is drawn, that he was born on December 16, 1834, in Evreux in the Department of Eure in France, and christened Marie Esprit Léon. His father was Antoine Auguste Walras, a secondary school administrator and an amateur economist and literary critic; his mother was Louise Aline de Sainte Beuve, the daughter of an Evreux notary. After studying at the College of Caen from 1844 to 1850, he entered the lycée of Douai, where he received a bachelier-ès-lettres in 1851 and a bachelier-ès-sciences in 1853. He entered the School of Mines of Paris in 1854, but finding the course of preparation of an engineer not to his liking, he gradually abandoned his academic studies in order to cultivate literature, philosophy, and social science. Although those efforts resulted in a short story and a novel, Francis Sauveur (1858), it rapidly became apparent to him that social science was his true interest. Accordingly, in 1858 he agreed to his father's request that he give up literature and devote himself to economics, and promised to continue his father's investigations.

During his youth in Paris, Walras became a journalist for Journal des Economistes and La Presse from 1859 to 1862, the author of a refutation (1860) on philosophical grounds of the normative economic doctrines of P.-J.Proudhon, an employee of the directors of the Northern Railway in 1862, and managing director of a cooperative association bank in 1865.