Jacques Rueff

Who was Jacques Rueff?

Jacques Léon Rueff was a French economist and adviser to the French Government.

An influential French conservative and free market thinker, Rueff was born the son of a well known Parisian physician and studied economics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique. An important economic advisor to French President Charles de Gaulle, Rueff was also a major figure in the management of the French economy during the Great Depression. In 1941 Rueff was dismissed from his office as the deputy governor of the Bank of France as a result of the Vichy regime's new anti-Semitic laws. Rueff published several works of political economy and philosophy during his lifetime, including L'Ordre Social, which appeared shortly after Liberation.

After the war Rueff became one of the leading French members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, the president of the Inter-Allied Reparations Agency, and the minister of state of Monaco. Rueff was strongly in favour of European integration and served from 1952 to 1962 as a judge on the European Court of Justice.

He advised General de Gaulle after de Gaulle became French President in 1958.