contradictions and hesitation in internal affairs, which could
not but bring him to grief. He tried first of all to
govern in accordance with public opinion, and was
induced to flatter it beyond measure; in an extreme
Internal policy
of Louis XVI.
of inconsistency he re-established the parlements,
the worst enemies of reform, at the very moment when he was
calling in the reformers to his councils.
Turgot, the most notable of these latter, was well fitted to play his great part as an enlightened minister, as much from the principle of hard work and domestic economy traditional in his family, as from a maturity of mind developed by extensive study at the Sorbonne and Turgot 1774–1776. by frequenting the salons of the Encyclopaedists. He had proved this by his capable administration in the paymaster’s office at Limoges, from 1761 to 1774. A disciple of Quesnay and of Gournay, he tried to repeat in great affairs the experience of liberty which he had found successful in small, and to fortify the unity of the nation and the government by social, political and economic reforms. He ordained the free circulation of grain within the kingdom, and was supported by Louis XVI. in the course of the flour-war (guerre des farines) (April-May 1775); he substituted a territorial subsidy for the royal corvée—so burdensome upon the peasants—and thus tended to abolish privilege in the matter of imposts; and he established the freedom of industry by the dissolution of privileged trade corporations (1776). Finance was in a deplorable state, and as controller-general he formulated a new fiscal policy, consisting of neither fresh taxation nor loans, but of retrenchment. At one fell stroke the two auxiliaries on which he had a right to count failed him: public opinion, clamouring for reform on condition of not paying the cost; and the king, too timid to dominate public opinion, and not knowing how to refuse the demands of privilege. Economy in the matter of public finance implies a grain of severity in the collection of taxes as well as, in expenditure. By the former Turgot hampered the great interests; by the second he thwarted the desires of courtiers not only of the second rank but of the first. Therefore, after he had aroused the complaints of the commercial world and the bourgeoisie, the court, headed by Marie Antoinette, profited by the general excitement to overthrow him. The Choiseul party, which had gradually been reconstituted, under the influence of the queen, the princes, parlement, the prebendaries, and the trade corporations, worked adroitly to eliminate this reformer of lucrative abuses. The old courtier Maurepas, jealous of Turgot and desirous of remaining a minister himself, refrained from defending his colleague; and when Turgot, who never knew how to give in, spoke of establishing assemblies of freeholders in the communes and the provinces, in order to relax the tension of over-centralization, Louis XVI., who never dared to pass from sentiment to action, sacrificed his minister to the rancour of the queen, as he had already sacrificed Malesherbes (1776). Thus the first governmental act of the queen was an error, and dissipated the hope of replacing special privileges by a general guarantee given to the nation, which alone could have postponed a revolution. It was still too early for a Fourth of August; but the queen’s victory was none the less vain, since Turgot’s ideas were taken up by his successors.
The first of these was Necker, a Genevese financier. More able than Turgot, though a man of smaller ideas, he abrogated the edicts registered by the lits de justice; and unable or not daring to attack the evil at its root, he thought he could suppress its symptoms by a curative process Necker, 1776–1781. of borrowing and economy. Like Turgot he failed, and for the same reasons. The American war had finally exhausted the exchequer, and, in order to replenish it, he would have needed to inspire confidence in the minds of capitalists; but the resumption in 1778 of the plan of provincial assemblies charged with remodelling the various imposts, and his compte-rendu in which he exhibited the monarchy paying its pensioners for their inactivity as it had never paid its agents for their zeal, aroused a fresh outburst of anger. Necker was carried away in his turn by the reaction he had helped to bring about (1781).
Having fought the oligarchy of privilege, the monarchy next
tried to rally it to its side, and all the springs of the old régime
were strained to the breaking-point. The military
rule of the marquis de Ségur eliminated the plebeians
from the army; while the great lords, drones in the
The return of feudalism to
the offensive.
hive, worked with a kind of fever at the enforcement
of their seigniorial rights; the feudal system was making
a last struggle before dying. The Church claimed her right
of ordering the civil estate of all Frenchmen as an absolute
mistress more strictly than ever. Joly de Fleury and D’Ormesson,
Necker’s successors, pushed their narrow spirit of reaction and
the temerity of their inexperience to the furthest limit; but
the reaction which reinforced the privileged classes was not
sufficient to fill the coffers of the treasury, and Marie Antoinette,
who seemed gifted with a fatal perversity of instinct, confided
the finances of the kingdom to Calonne, an upper-class official
and a veritable Cagliostro of finance.
From 1783 to 1787, this man organized his astounding system
of falsification all along the line. His unbridled prodigality,
by spreading a belief in unlimited resources, augmented
the confidence necessary for the success of perpetual
loans; until the day came when, having exhausted the
Calonne,
1783–1787.
system, he tried to suppress privilege and fall back upon
the social reforms of Turgot, and the financial schemes of Necker,
by suggesting once more to the assembly of notables a territorial
subsidy from all landed property. He failed, owing to the same
reaction that was causing the feudal system to make inroads
upon the army, the magistracy and industry; but in his fall he
put on the guise of a reformer, and by a last wild plunge he left
the monarchy, already compromised by
the affair of the Diamond Necklace (q.v.), hopelessly exposed (April 1787).
The volatile and brilliant archbishop Loménie de Brienne was charged with the task of laying the affairs of the ancien régime before the assembly of notables, and with asking the nation for resources, since the monarchy could no longer provide for itself; but the notables refused, and Loménie de Brienne. referred the minister to the states-general, the representative of the nation. Before resorting to this extremity, Brienne preferred to lay before the parlement his two edicts regarding a stamp duty and the territorial subsidy; to be met by the same refusal, and the same reference to the states-general. The exile of the parlement to Troyes, the arrest of various members, and the curt declaration of the king’s absolute authority (November 9, 1787) were unsuccessful in breaking down its resistance. The threat of Chrétien François de Lamoignon, keeper of the seals, to imitate Maupeou, aroused public opinion and caused a fresh confederation of the parlements of the kingdom. The royal government was too much exhausted to overthrow even a decaying power like that of the parlements, and being still more afraid of the future representatives of the French people than of the supreme courts, capitulated to the insurgent parlements. The recalled parlement seemed at the pinnacle of power.
Its next action ruined its ephemeral popularity, by claiming the convocation of the states-general “according to the formula observed in 1614,” as already demanded by the estates of Dauphiné at Vizille on the 21st of July 1788. The exchequer was empty; it was necessary to comply. Recall of Necker. The royal declaration of the 23rd of September 1788 convoked the states-general for the 1st of May 1789, and the fall of Brienne and Lamoignon followed the recall of Necker. Thenceforward public opinion, which was looking for something quite different from the superannuated formula of 1614, abandoned the parlements, which in their turn disappeared from view; for the struggle beginning between the privileged classes and the government, now at bay, had given the public, through the states-general, that means of expression which they had always lacked.
The conflict immediately changed ground, and an engagement began between privilege and the people over the twofold question of the number of deputies and the mode of voting. Voting by head, and the double representation of the third estate (tiers état); this was the great revolution; voting by order meant the
