On May 10, 1774, Louis the Sixteenth succeeded to the throne of sixty-six kings; and on July 20, Turgot was made Minister of Marine and thus called to wider and fuller work. The Limogian peasants clung about his knees with tears, and the Limogian nobles rejoiced openly at his departure. The one leave-taking was as great a compliment as the other.
The merits of this ‘virtuous philosophic Turgot, with a whole reformed France in his head,’ had not been in the least the reason of his promotion. But schoolfellow Cicé had whispered pleasant things of him to Madame Maurepas, the wife of the Minister; and Madame had settled the matter with her husband, who was a lively shrewd old man of seventy-four, not inconvenienced by any idea of duty, and with a very strong sense of humour.
Turgot was Minister of Marine for just five weeks; but in that time he had eighteen months’ arrears of wages paid to a gang of workmen at Brest, and made many plans for the improvement of the colonies, which more than twenty years ago, at the Sorbonne, he had significantly compared to ‘fruits which cling to the parent tree, only until they are ripe.’ On August 24, 1774, he was made Controller-General of Finances in the place of Terrai.
It sounded a fine position, but was it? Limoges represented all France in little. A ruined Treasury, a starving people, in high places corruption and exaction, and in low places misery such as has rarely been seen since the world began.
Terrai, profligate and dissolute—‘What does he want with a muff?’ said witty Mademoiselle Arnould when he had appeared with one in winter; ‘his hands are always in our pockets’—had left to his successor, debt, bankruptcy, chaos. The King was not quite twenty, weak with the amiable weakness which is often more disastrous in a ruler than vice. The Queen was nineteen, careless and gay, loving pleasure and her own way, and meaning to have both in spite of all the controllers in the world. Maurepas, being undisturbed by principles, would readily abandon his protégé if he perceived for himself the least danger in that patronage. Voltaire, indeed, wrote that he saw in Turgot’s appointment a new heaven and a new earth, and the enlightened among the people dreamt that the Millennium had come, but Voltaire was but a voice crying in the wilderness, and in the councils of State the people had neither lot nor part.
Once again Turgot, realising to the full the difficulties, the impossibilities even, of his position, resolved to do what he could. Within a few hours of his appointment he wrote a long letter to the King, urging the absolute necessity of economy in every department, denouncing bribes, privileges, exemptions, and pleading—daring to plead—equality in the imposition of taxes. No bankruptcy, no increase of taxation, no loans—this was to be the motto of his Controllership. ‘I feel all the perils to which I expose myself,’ he wrote. He was not even religious in the sense—what a sense!—that officials were expected to be religious. ‘You have given me a Controller who never goes to Mass,’ grumbled Louis to Maurepas. ‘Sire,’ answered the Minister, very happily, ‘Terrai always went.’
The new Controllership was still a nine days’ wonder when Turgot restored throughout France what he had restored in Limoges—free trade in grain. In 1770 he had written on the subject some famous ‘Letters’ in answer to Terrai’s revocation of the edict and the witty ‘Dialogues’ of Galiani which supported that revocation. Then, bolder still, he suppressed an abominable piece of official jobbery, the Pot de Vin, or bribe of 100,000 crowns which the Farmers-General had always presented to the Controller when he signed a new edict. If the Farmers turned away sulkily, angry with a generosity they were by no means prepared to imitate, from the country came a long burst of passionate applause.
‘It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people,’ said the King. Well, this poor Louis did love them, but his was not the love that could stand firm by the man sent to save them. ‘Everything for the people, nothing by them,’ was Turgot’s motto, and, perhaps, his mistake. The King was to be the lever to raise his kingdom; and the weak tool broke in the Minister’s hand.
The first disaster of Turgot’s Controllership was the disaster that spoiled his Intendancy. In 1774-5 scarcity of bread made many distrust his edict restoring to them free trade in grain. With his firm hand over Louis’s shaking one he suppressed the bread riots of that winter, as it was never given to a Bourbon to suppress anything. But he would not in justice suppress, though he might have suppressed, Necker’s adverse pamphlet on the question, called ‘The Legislation and Commerce of Grain;’ though half the Encyclopædists, and many of Turgot’s personal friends, were led thereby to adopt the opinions of the solid Genevan banker.
In the January of 1775, Turgot presented his Budget. The deficit left by Terrai was enormous. Let us pay then, said Turgot’s sound common-sense, the legitimate contracts of Government, not by your dear old remedy, taxation, for the ruined country can yield no more, but by limiting the expenses of that Government and of the Court. Officials and courtiers alike took as a judgment from Heaven the fact, that very shortly after this monstrous proposal, the audacious proposer was sharply attacked by the gout.