![Put an end to the false “yellow peril” Put an end to the false “yellow peril”](https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/6643a6b1a3a47b0efe202a9e/1280x720/0110897924910-web-tete.jpg)
By Jean-Marc Daniel (professor emeritus at ESCP Business School, columnist for “Echos”)
Nowadays, in public debate, the defense of free trade seems incongruous. It is stigmatized as the expression of immeasurable naivety. And therefore, in the dominant discourse of the political class in France, lucidity is equated with votes against trade treaties – such as recently that of the Senate against CETA with Canada – and with the recurring denunciation of Chinese economic duplicity.
This situation is certainly not new. In 1863, Michel Chevalier, professor of economics at the Collège de France and signatory, on January 23, 1860, of the treaty liberalizing trade between France and the United Kingdom, debated with Victor Cousin. The latter, considered the most prominent French philosopher of the moment, sees himself as a supporter of liberalism, at least on the political level. He closed the debate with a phrase that has become famous: “I understand that an economist is in favor of free trade, but a patriot must be in favor of protection”!