The Eve of the French Revolution

by Edward J. Lowell

From an early time the custom of selling public offices had taken root in France. Before the middle of the fourteenth century we find Louis X. selling judicial places to the highest bidder, and less than a hundred years later the practice had extended so that all manner of petty offices were sold by the government. This method of raising money was so easy that, in spite of the remonstrances of estates general and the promises of kings, it was continually extended. In the sixteenth century, as a greater inducement to purchasers, the offices were made transferable on certain conditions, and in 1605 they became subjects of inheritance. Places under government were thus assimilated to other property and passed from the holder to his heirs. The law which established this state of things was called Édit de la Paulette, after one Paulet, a farmer of the revenue.

This sale of offices bore a certain resemblance to a loan and to a tax. The services to be performed were often unimportant, sometimes worse than useless. But the salary attached to the office might be considered the interest of money lent to the crown; or if the office-holder were paid by fees, he was enabled to make good to himself the advance made to the government by drawing money from the tax-payers. Very generally the two forms of profit to the incumbent were combined, together with a third, the possession, namely, of privileges, or exemption from taxation, attached to the office.

In managing its revenue from this source, the treasury dealt fairly neither with the office holders nor with the public. Places were created only to be sold, and before long were abolished, either without any promise of compensation to the buyers, or with promises destined never to be fulfilled. This want of faith kept down the price, which was often but ten years' purchase of the income of the place. Yet rich and poor were eager to buy. "Sir," said a minister of finance to King Louis XIV., "as often as it pleases your Majesty to make an office, it pleases God to make a fool to fill it."

Thus it came to pass that most places about the royal person, in the courts of justice and in the treasury, and many in the municipal governments, the professions, and the trades, were subject to sale and purchase. Numberless persons waited at the royal table, sat in the high courts of Parliament, weighed, measured, gauged, sold horses, oysters, fish, or sucking pigs, shaved customers or gave hot baths, as public functionaries and by virtue of letters patent sold to them by the crown. The clerk kept his register, not because the information it contained would be useful to the government, but because he or some one else had lent money, on which the public was now paying interest in the form of registration fees. Thus the custom of selling offices was cumbrous and objectionable.[Footnote: Montesquieu defends the custom, however. He maintains that the offices in a monarchy should be venal; because people do as a family business what they would not undertake from virtue; every one is trained to his duty, and orders in the state are more permanent. If offices were not sold by the government they would be by the courtiers. Montesquieu, iii. 217 (Esprit des Lois, liv. v. cxix.). See also De Tocqueville, iv. 171 (Anc. Reg. ch. xi.). In many cases offices were desired more for the sake of distinction and privilege than for profit. The income was often very small. Clamageran, ii. 196, 378, 569, 615, 665; iii. 23, 24, 102, 155, 200, 319. Necker, De l'Administration, iii. 147. Thierry, i. 163. Pierre de Lestoile, 390, n.]

While the taxes of France were thus devised without system and levied without skill, the attention of a thoughtful part of the nation had been turned to financial matters. About the middle of the century arose the Physiocrats, the founders of modern political economy. Their leader, Quesnay, believed that positive legislation should consist in the declaration of the natural laws constituting the order evidently most advantageous for men in society. When once these were understood, all would be well, for the absurdity of all unreasonable legislation would become manifest. He taught two cardinal principles; first, "that the land was the only source of riches, and that these were multiplied by agriculture;" and, second, that agriculture and commerce should be entirely free. The former of these doctrines, after exercising a good deal of influence by calling attention to the injustice and oppression with which the agricultural class in France was treated, has ceased to be believed as a statement of absolute truth. The latter, adopted with great enthusiasm by many generous minds, has exercised a deep influence on modern thought.

Manufactures, according to Quesnay, do no more than pay the wages and expenses of the workmen engaged in them. But agriculture not only pays wages and expenses, but produces a surplus, which is the revenue of the land. He divides the nation into three classes: (1) the productive, which cultivates the soil; (2) the proprietary, which includes the sovereign, the land-owners, and those who live by tithes, in other words the nobility and the clergy; and (3) the sterile, which embraces all men who labor otherwise than in agriculture, and whose expenses are paid by the productive and proprietary classes. Therefore he argues that taxes should be based directly on the net product of real estate, and not on wages nor on chattels. In other words, all taxes should be levied directly on the income derived from land, and indirect taxation in every shape should be abolished.

Liberty of agriculture, liberty of commerce! "Let every man be free to cultivate in his field such crops as his interest, his means, the nature of the ground may suggest as rendering the greatest possible return." "Let complete liberty of commerce be maintained; for the regulation of commerce, both internal and external, which is most safe, most accurate, most profitable to the nation, consists in full liberty of competition." These doctrines of Quesnay, joined with the ideas of property and security, form the basis of the modern school of individualism. [Footnote: Lavergne, Les Économistes, 105. Quesnay, Oeuvres, 233, 306, 331 (Maximes du gouvernement économique d'un royaume agricole Maxime, iii. v. xiii. xxv.). Turgot, iv. 305. Bois-Guillebert appears to have been the principal precursor of the Physiocrats. Horn, _L'Économie politique avant les Physiocrates, passim;[Greek physis] = nature,[Greek kratos] = power.]

The body of doctrines long known as "political economy," (for the words seem now to be used in a larger sense), bore the mark of their origin in the eighteenth century. Here, as elsewhere, it was the belief of Frenchmen of that age that the application of a few simple rules derived from natural laws would solve the difficulties of a complicated subject. The principles of political economy were conceived as forming "a true science, which does not yield to geometry itself in the conviction which it carries to the soul, and which certainly surpasses all others in its object, since that is the greatest well-being, the greatest prosperity of the human race upon the earth."[Footnote: 2. Abbé Beaudeau, quoted in Lavergne, Les Économistes, 179.] Quesnay and Gournay founded branches of the economic school. The latter, who printed nothing, is chiefly known through the encomiums of Turgot. Gournay was a merchant, and recognized that commerce and manufactures are hardly less advantageous to a state than agriculture. This is the chief difference of his teaching from that of Quesnay. Gournay is the author of the famous maxim: Laissez faire; laissez passer; and his whole system depended on the idea "that in general every man knows his own interest better than another man to whom that interest is entirely indifferent;" and that "hence, when the interest of individuals is exactly the same as the general interest, the best thing to do is to leave every man to do as he likes."[Footnote: Turgot, iii. 336 (Éloge de M. de Gournay).]

The best known member of the economic school in France was Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, born in Paris on the 10th of May, 1727, of a family belonging to the higher middle class. His father was prevost des marchands, or chief magistrate of the city. Young Turgot was at first educated for the ecclesiastical life, and indeed pursued his studies in that direction until a bishopric seemed close at hand. But he felt no vocation to enter the priesthood. Turgot was too much the child of his century to be content to put his great powers into the harness of the Roman Church; he was, as he told his friends who remonstrated with him on abandoning his brilliant prospects, too honest a man to wear a mask all his life.

At the age of twenty-four, Turgot turned finally from the study of divinity to that of law and administration. He was rapidly promoted to the place of a maître des requêtes, a member of the lowest board of the royal council, and nine years later he became intendant of the district of Limoges. It was the poorest in France, but Turgot soon became so much interested in its welfare that he refused to exchange it for a richer one. In spite of years of dearth and of the extraordinary measures of relief which they made necessary, he went energetically to work at all manner of permanent reforms. He effected improvements in the apportionment and levy of the taille. He abolished the onerous corvée. He diminished the terror of compulsory service in the militia, by permitting the engagement of substitutes. He encouraged agriculture by distributing seeds and offering prizes for the destruction of wolves, which were still numerous in his district, and he waged a successful war on a moth that was ravaging the wheat crop. He assisted in the introduction of the manufacture of pottery, still one of the leading industries of Limoges. His reports are among the most valuable material in existence for the study of the condition of old France.