Michel Chevalier

Michel Chevalier (miʃɛl ʃəvalje; 13 January 1806 – 18 November 1879) was a French engineer, statesman, economist and free market liberal. Born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, Chevalier studied at the École Polytechnique, obtaining an engineering degree at the Paris École des mines in 1829. In 1830, after the July Revolution, he became a Saint-Simonian, and edited their paper Le Globe. The paper was banned in 1832, when the "Simonian sect" was found to be prejudicial to the social order, and Chevalier, as its editor, was sentenced to six months imprisonment. After his release, Minister of the Interior Adolphe Thiers sent him in 1834 on a mission to the United States and Mexico, to observe the state of industrial and financial affairs in the Americas. In the United States, Chevalier visited different parts of the country studying American society, its manners and political, social, and economic institutions. He made some keen observations along the way that were published in France by the Journal des débats producing at the time "an immense effect". In Mexico he exchanged ideas with the mineralogist and politician Andrés Manuel del Río. It was during this trip that he also developed the idea that the Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking parts of the Americas shared a cultural or racial affinity with all the European peoples with a Romance culture. Chevalier postulated that this part of the Americas were inhabited by people of a "Latin race," which could be a natural ally of "Latin Europe" in its struggle with "Teutonic Europe," "Anglo-Saxon America" and "Slavic Europe." The idea was later taken up by French and Latin American intellectuals and political leaders of the mid and late nineteenth century, who no longer looked to Spain or Portugal as cultural models, but rather to France, and who coined the term "Latin America". In the end, this was just an excuse for France to invade Mexico, which Chevalier supported. In 1837, he wrote a well received work, Des intérèts matériels en France, after which his career took off.