The fabrication of a myth: Clement Juglar's commercial crises in the secondary literature

Clément Juglar is widely perceived nowadays as the pioneer of the theory of the business cycle, the one who developed in the early 1860s the view that economic life follows a rhythmic pattern and thereby lay the main bricks for the evolution of the older theories of crises into a theory of the cycle. Yet this view is largely hyperbolic, as most of the ingredients of Juglar’s approach had circulated in the literature for decades before him. This paper explores, by means of an examination of the secondary literature on Juglar, how this interpretation was born and propagated.