by Will Durant
Exhausted by repeated crises, the Controller General slowed his revolution. When he extended freedom of internal trade to the wine industry (April, 1776) only the monopolists complained. He urged the King to establish religious liberty. He instructed Du Pont de Nemours to draw up a plan for electoral assemblies in each parish, chosen by men who owned land to the value of six hundred livres or more; these local assemblies would elect representatives to a cantonal assembly, which would elect representatives to a provincial assembly, which would elect deputies to a national assembly. Believing that France was not ready for democracy, Turgot proposed to give these assemblies only advisory and administrative functions; legislative power would remain solely in the king; but through these assemblies the ruler would be informed of the condition and needs of the realm. Turgot also offered the King a sketch of universal education as the necessary prelude to an enlightened citizenship. “Sire,” he said, “I venture to assert that in two years your nation will no longer be recognizable, and through enlightenment and good morals … it will rise above all other states.”82 The minister had no time, the King had no money, to bring these ideas to fulfillment.
Turgot’s edicts—and their preambles—had inflamed all the influential classes against him except the merchants and manufacturers, who flourished in the new freedom. Actually he was attempting to bring about peaceably that emancipation of the businessman which was the basic economic result of the Revolution. Yet some merchants secretly opposed him because he had interfered with their monopolies. The nobility opposed him because he wished to put all taxes upon the land, and was setting the poor against the rich. The Parlement hated him for persuading the King to override its vetoes. The clergy distrusted him as an unbeliever who rarely went to Mass and was advocating religious liberty. The farmers general fought him because he wished to replace them with governmental agents in collecting indirect taxes. Financiers resented his getting loans from abroad at four per cent. Courtiers disliked him because he frowned upon their extravagance, their pensions, and their sinecures. Maurepas, his superior in the ministry, looked with no pleasure upon the growing power and independence of the Controller General of Finance. “Turgot,” wrote the Swedish ambassador, “finds himself the butt of a most formidable coalition.”83.
Marie Antoinette had at first favored Turgot, and had tried to adjust her expenditures to his economies. But soon she resumed (till 1777) her extravagances in gowns and gifts. Turgot did not conceal his dismay at her drafts upon the treasury. To please the Polignacs the Queen had secured the appointment of their friend the Comte de Guines to the French embassy in London; there he engaged in questionable financial dealings; Turgot joined Vergennes in advising the King to recall him; the Queen vowed revenge.
Louis XVI had his own reasons for losing confidence in his revolutionary minister. The King respected the Church, the nobility, even the parlements; these institutions had been mortised in tradition and sanctified by time; to disturb them was to loosen the foundations of the state; but Turgot had alienated them all. Could Turgot be right and all the others wrong? Louis secretly complained about his minister: “Only his friends have merit, and only his own ideas are good.”84 Almost daily the Queen or a courtier sought to influence him against the Controller. When Turgot appealed to him to resist these pressures and Louis made no answer, Turgot returned to his home and wrote to the King (April 30, 1776) a letter that sealed his own fate:
SIRE:
I will not conceal from you the fact that my heart is deeply wounded by your Majesty’s silence last Sunday.... So long as I could hope to retain your Majesty’s esteem by doing right, nothing was too hard for me. Today what is my recompense? Your Majesty sees how impossible it is for me to make head against those who injure me by the evil they do me, and by the good they keep me from doing by thwarting all my measures; yet your Majesty gives me neither aid nor consolation.... I venture to say, Sire, that I have not deserved this. . . .
Your Majesty … has pleaded the lack of experience. I know that at the age of twenty-two, and in your position, you have not the training in the judging of men which private individuals obtain from habitual association with equals; but will you have more experience in a week, in a month? And is your mind not to be made up until this slow experience has come? . . .
Sire, I owe to M. Maurepas the place your Majesty has given me; never shall I forget it, never shall I be wanting in due deference to him. … But, Sire, do you know how weak is the character of M. de Maurepas?—how much he is governed by the ideas of those around him? Everyone knows that Mme. de Maurepas, who has infinitely less mind but much more character, constantly inspires his will.... It is this weakness that moves him to fall in so readily with the clamor of the court against me, and that deprives me of almost all power in my department. . . .
Forget not, Sire, that it was weakness that brought to the block the head of Charles I, … that made Louis XIII a crowned slave, … and that brought about all the misfortunes of the last reign. Sire, you are deemed weak, and upon occasion I have feared lest your character had this defect; nevertheless I have seen you, upon other more difficult occasions, exhibit genuine courage. … Your Majesty cannot, without being untrue to yourself, yield out of complaisance for M. de Maurepas. . . ,85
To this letter the King made no reply. He felt that now he had to choose between Maurepas and Turgot, and that Turgot was asking almost complete submission of the government to his own will. On May 12, 1776, he sent Turgot an order to resign. On the same day, yielding to the Queen and the Polignacs, he made the Comte de Guines a duke. Malesherbes, hearing of Turgot’s removal, handed in his own resignation. “You are a fortunate man,” Louis told him; “would that I too could leave my post.”86 Soon most of Turgot’s appointees were discharged. Maria Theresa was shocked by these developments, and agreed with Frederick and Voltaire that the fall of Turgot presaged the collapse of France;87 she deplored the part that her daughter had played in the matter, and would not believe the Queen’s disclaimer of responsibility. Voltaire wrote to Laharpe: “Nothing is left for me but to die, now that M. Turgot has gone.”88
After his dismissal Turgot lived quietly in Paris, studying mathematics, physics, chemistry, and anatomy. He often saw Franklin, and wrote for him a Mémoire sur l’impôt. His gout became so severe that after 1778 he walked only with crutches. He died on March 18, 1781, after years of pain and disappointment. He could not foresee that the nineteenth century would accept and implement most of his ideas. Malesherbes summed him up lovingly: “He had the head of Francis Bacon and the heart of L’Hôpital.”89
VI. NECKER’S FIRST MINISTRY: 1776-81
Turgot was succeeded as controller of finances by Clugny de Nuis, who re-established the corvée and many guilds, and did not enforce the grain edicts. The Dutch bankers canceled their agreement to lend France sixty million livres at four per cent; and the new minister discovered no better way of luring money into the treasury than by establishing a national lottery (June 30, 1776). When Clugny died (October), the bankers of Paris persuaded the King to call to his service the man who had been the ablest critic of Turgot.
Jacques Necker was a Protestant, born at Geneva in 1732. His father, professor of law in the Geneva Academy, sent him to Paris to work as a clerk in the bank of Isaac Vernet. When Vernet retired he advanced some funds to Necker to start a bank of his own. Necker pooled his resources with another Swiss; they prospered through loans to the government and speculation in grains. At the age of thirty-two Necker was rich, dignified, and unmarried. His desire now was not for more wealth but for high place, a chance for distinguished service and national renown. For this he needed a wife and a home as a point d’appui, or base of operations. He courted the widowed Marquise de Vermenoux; she refused him, but brought from Geneva the pretty and talented, Suzanne Curchod, who had recently escaped marriage with Edward Gibbon. Necker fell in love with Suzanne, and married her in 1764. Their mutual devotion through an eventful life is one of the bright colors in the kal
eidoscope of that troubled age. They made a home over his bank, and there she opened a salon (1765) to which she invited writers and men of affairs, hoping that these friendships would smooth and illuminate her husband’s way.
Necker himself itched to write. He began in 1773 with an Éloge de Colbert, which was crowned by the French Academy. Now he retired from business, and entered the political fray with that essay Sur la Législation des grains which countered Turgot’s policy of laissez-faire. The little book won praise from Diderot, who may have relished a paragraph in which the banker (who had read Rousseau) spoke like a socialist. Necker assailed
the power of the owning class, in exchange for labor, to pay the lowest possible wage, that which merely suffices for strict necessaries. … Almost all civil institutions have been made by property owners. One might say that a small number of men, having divided the earth among themselves, made laws as a union and guarantee against the multitude. … The latter could say: “Of what import to us are your laws of property?—we have no property; or your laws of justice?—we have nothing to defend; or of liberty?—if we do not work tomorrow we shall die!”90
On October 22, 1776, on Maurepas’ recommendation, Louis XVI appointed Necker “director of the Royal Treasury.” It was an apologetic appellation. Some prelates protested against letting a Swiss Protestant rule the nation’s money; Maurepas replied, “If the clergy will pay the debts of the state they can share in choosing the ministers.”91 To cover the reality a French Catholic, Taboureau de Réau, was made controller general of finance as formally Necker’s superior. Clerical opposition subsided as Necker made his piety conspicuous. On June 29, 1777, Taboureau resigned, and Necker was named director general of finance. He refused any salary; on the contrary, he lent to the treasury two million livres of his own.92 He was still denied the title of minister, and was not admitted to the Royal Council.
He did well within the limits of his character and his power. He had been trained to deal with problems of banking rather than of state; he could multiply money more successfully than he could manage men. In the financial administration he established better order, accountability, and economy; he abolished over five hundred sinecures and superfluous posts. Having the confidence of the financial community, he was able to float loans that brought to the treasury 148,000,000 livres within a year. He promoted some minor reforms, reducing inequities in taxation, improving hospitals, and organizing pawnshops to lend money to the poor at low interest. He continued Turgot’s endeavors to check the expenditures of the court, the King’s household, and the Queen. The collection of indirect taxes was restored to the farmers general (1780), but Necker reduced their number, and subjected them to sharper scrutiny and control. He prevailed upon Louis XVI to allow the establishment of provincial assemblies in Berry, Grenoble, and Montauban, and he set an important precedent by arranging that in these gatherings the representatives of the Third Estate (the middle and lower classes) should equal those of the nobility and the clergy combined. The King, however, chose the members of these assemblies, and allowed them no legislative authority. Necker won a substantial victory by inducing the King to free all remaining serfs on the royal domain, and to invite all feudal lords to do likewise. When they refused, Necker advised Louis to abolish all serfdom in France, with indemnities to the masters, but the King, imprisoned in his traditions, replied that-property rights were too basic an institution to be annulled by a decree.93 In 1780, again on Necker’s prompting, he ordered an end to judicial torture, the disuse of subterranean prisons, and the separation of prisoners duly convicted of crimes from those not yet tried, and both of these groups from those arrested for debt. These and other achievements of Necker’s first ministry deserve more acknowledgment than they have generally received. If we ask why he did not cut deeper and faster, we should remember that Turgot had been censured for going too fast and making too many simultaneous enemies. Necker was criticized for floating loans instead of raising taxes, but he felt that the people had been taxed enough.
Mme. Campan, always close to the developing drama, summarized well the attitude of the King to his ministers: “Turgot, Malesherbes, and Necker judged that this prince, modest and simple in his habits, would willingly sacrifice the royal prerogative to the solid greatness of his people. His heart disposed him to reform, but his prejudices and fears, and the clamor of pious and privileged persons, intimidated him, and made him abandon plans which his love for the people had suggested.”94 Yet he dared to say, in a public proclamation (1780) probably prepared by Necker, that “the taxes of the poorest part of our subjects” had “increased in proportion much more than all the rest,” and he expressed his “hopes that rich people will not think themselves wronged when, put back to the general level [of taxation], they will have to meet the charges which long since they should have shared more equally with others.”95 He shuddered at the thought of Voltaire, but his liberal spirit, unwittingly, had been formed by the work that Voltaire, Rousseau, and the philosophes in general had done to expose old abuses and to stir to new life the humanitarian sentiments formerly associated with Christianity. In this first half of his reign Louis XVI began reforms which, if continued and gradually expanded, might have averted revolution. And it was under this weak king that France, despoiled and humiliated by England under his predecessors, struck boldly and with success at proud Britain, and, in the process, helped to free America.
VII. FRANCE AND AMERICA
Philosophy for once agreed with diplomacy: the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Raynal, and a hundred others had prepared the French mind to support colonial as well as intellectual liberation, and many American leaders—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson—were sons of the French Enlightenment. So, when Silas Deane came to France (March, 1776) to seek a loan for the rebellious colonies, public opinion was strongly sympathetic. The ebullient Beaumarchais sent memoir after memoir to Vergennes, urging him to help America.
Vergennes was a nobleman who believed in monarchy and aristocracy, and was no friend of republics or revolutions; but he longed to avenge France against England. He would not sanction any open aid to America, for the British navy was still stronger than the French despite Sartine’s outlays, and in open war it could soon destroy French shipping. But he advised the King to permit some secret aid. If (he argued) Britain crushed the revolt, it would have, in or near America, a fleet capable of taking at will the French and Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. If the revolt could be prolonged, France would be strengthened, England would be weakened, and the French navy could complete its renewal. Louis trembled at the thought of helping a revolution, and he warned Vergennes against any overt act that might lead to war with England.96
In April Vergennes wrote to Beaumarchais:
We will secretly give you one million livres. We will try to obtain an equal sum from Spain. [This was obtained.] With these two millions you will establish a commercial firm, and at your risk and peril you will supply the Americans with arms, munitions, equipment, and all other things that they will need to maintain the war. Our arsenal will deliver to you arms and munitions, but you will either replace them or pay for them. You will not demand money from the Americans, since they have none, but you will ask in return the produce of their soil, which we will help you sell in this country.97
With this money Beaumarchais bought cannon, muskets, gunpowder, clothing, and equipment for 25,000 men; these stores he sent to a port where Deane had assembled and refitted several American privateers. The arrival or assurance of this aid encouraged the colonists to issue their Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). Translated into French, and circulated with the tacit consent of the French government, this pronouncement was greeted with enthusiasm and joy by the philosophes, and by Rousseau’s disciples, who recognized in it some echoes of the Contrat social. In September the American Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee to proceed as commissioners to France, join Deane, and seek not only more supplies, but, if possible, open all
iance.
It was by no means Franklin’s first appearance in Europe. In 1724, not yet nineteen, he went to England; he worked as a printer, published a defense of atheism,98 returned to Philadelphia and deism, married, joined the Freemasons, and won international renown as inventor and scientist. In 1757 he was sent to England to represent the Pennsylvania Assembly in a tax dispute. He stayed in England five years, met Johnson and other notables, visited Scotland, met Hume and Robertson, received a degree from the University of St. Andrews, and was henceforth Dr. Franklin. He was again in England from 1766 to 1775, addressed the House of Commons in opposition to the Stamp Tax, attempted conciliation, and went back to America when he saw that war was imminent. He shared in drafting the Declaration of Independence.
He reached France in December, 1776, bringing two grandchildren with him. He was now seventy years old, and looked like wisdom itself; all the world knows that massive head, the sparse white hair, the face like the full moon at its beaming rise. The scientists covered him with honors, the philosophers and the physiocrats claimed him as their own, the admirers of ancient Rome saw in him Cincinnatus, Scipio Africanus, and both Catos, all reborn. The ladies of Paris dressed their hair in a curly mass to imitate his beaver cap; doubtless they had heard of his many amours. The courtiers were startled by his simplicity of manners, dress, and speech; but instead of his seeming ridiculous in his almost rustic garb, it was their own display of velvet, silk, and lace that appeared now as a vain attempt to cover reality with show. Yet they too accepted him, for he paraded no utopias, talked with reason and good sense, and showed full awareness of the difficulties and the facts. He realized that he was a Protestant, a deist, and a republican seeking help from a Catholic country and a pious King.
