The Candlemakers’ Petition
Two-Lesson Contents
Frédéric Bastiat’s 1845 satire takes a familiar argument for protecting producers and follows it to an absurd conclusion: if lawmakers should block low-priced foreign competition, why not protect French lighting businesses from their most efficient rival—the sun?
The petition turns protectionism into comedy while moving through period industries and materials such as tallow, oil, resin, shipping, mining, and glassmaking.
This course division preserves the petition’s sequence while creating two teachable stopping points.
| Lesson | Primary-source section | Central question | Possible misconception |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. The Rival Who Works for Free | The petition and its promised benefits | Can making production harder create prosperity? | A policy benefits the whole economy whenever it creates more work for domestic producers. |
| 2. Free Gifts and Costly Work | The objections and Bastiat’s final challenge | Should low cost be treated as a benefit or a threat? | A cheaper product harms a country whenever it requires less domestic labor to obtain. |
Each lesson contains a teacher-created curiosity opening, prediction, reading mission, primary-source passage, modern transfer questions, and comprehension assessment. The header toggle offers both the original supplied translation and a paragraph-aligned Grade 7 adaptation. Teacher-created material is labeled and is not part of Bastiat’s essay.
About this edition
The English text follows the version supplied from Bastiat.org, where the translator is listed as unknown and the text as slightly edited by François-René Rideau. Bastiat first published the French essay in 1845 as chapter 7 of the first series of Economic Sophisms.