From this time all went smoothly. Hume got them introductions from his chief, Lord Hertford, the British Ambassador, to the Duc de Richelieu and others.
On the 21st of October they were again in Toulouse, and Smith wrote in good spirits to thank Hume for his kindness and the Ambassador “for the very honourable manner in which he was so good as to mention me to the Duke of Richelieu in the letter of recommendation which you sent us.” He adds:—
“There was, indeed, one small mistake in it. He called me Robinson instead of Smith. I took upon me to correct this mistake myself before the Duke delivered the letter. We were all treated by the Maréchal with the utmost Politeness and attention, particularly the Duke, whom he distinguished in a very proper manner.... Our expedition to Bordeaux and another we have made since to Bagnères has made a great change upon the Duke. He begins now to familiarise himself to French company, and I flatter myself I shall spend the rest of the time we are to live together not only in peace and contentment, but in gayetty and amusement.”
They went to Montpellier to see the meeting of the States of Languedoc, the most important of the six local parliaments still remaining in France. There they met Horne Tooke, who afterwards called the Wealth of Nations wicked and the Moral Sentiments nonsense, and Cardinal Dillon, the Archbishop of Narbonne, another of the band of Gallicised Scots.
In Montpellier and Toulouse they saw many members of the parliament, and obtained an insight into the legal and administrative system of a province which enlightened Frenchmen were fond of citing as a model for the reformation of their country. Smith took rather a favourable view of French justice. The parliaments, he said, “are perhaps, in many respects, not very convenient courts of justice; but they have never been accused, they seem never even to have been suspected, of corruption.”
But, though incorruptible, the Toulouse Court had been guilty of one scandalous act of fanatical injustice. In 1762 it found the unfortunate Jean Calas, a Protestant, guilty of the murder of his son, who had abjured his faith in order to join the Toulouse Bar, and then in an agony of remorse had committed suicide in his father’s house. Characteristically Smith did not allow this foul episode to distort his perspective. In his last edition of the Moral Sentiments the story is told as one of those fatal accidents which “happen sometimes in all countries, even in those where justice is in general very well administered”:—
“The unfortunate Calas, a man of much more than ordinary constancy (broke upon the wheel and burnt at Toulouse for the supposed murder of his own son, of which he was perfectly innocent), seemed with his last breath to deprecate, not so much the cruelty of the punishment, as the disgrace which the imputation might bring upon his memory. After he had been broke, and was just going to be thrown into the fire, the monk, who attended the execution, exhorted him to confess the crime for which he had been condemned. ‘My Father,’ said Calas, ‘can you yourself bring yourself to believe that I am guilty?’”
To such a man, he thinks, “humble philosophy, which confines its views to this life, can afford but little consolation.” He must seek refuge in religion, which alone can offer him a prospect of another world of more candour, humanity, and justice. But justice was not allowed to sleep. For three years Voltaire assailed the ears of France with impassioned argument. Before Smith left Toulouse a new trial was ordered, and fifty judges, among them Turgot, revised the sentence, pronounced Calas innocent, relieved his family from infamy, and awarded them a large sum of money.
A long stay in Languedoc would necessarily give a foreigner more favourable impressions of the social and economic state of France than he would have gained, say, in the Limousin, where Turgot was doing heroic battle against famine and maladministration. Languedoc, with its two millions of inhabitants, is described by Tocqueville as the best-ordered and most prosperous as well as the largest of all the pays d’états. Its roads, made and repaired without a corvée, were among the best in France. Smith was struck by the great canal of Burgundy, constructed some seventy years before by Riquet and kept in good repair by his family, and he saw the province incessantly spending money on developing and improving its roads and rivers. The charitable workhouses established at the royal expense in other parts of France had not been required in this comparatively happy territory. In fiscal system and credit Languedoc was incomparably superior to the rest of the kingdom. A land-tax instead of a poll-tax, few exemptions for the nobles, no farmers-general to collect taxes and fortunes. The contrast between the good local administration of Languedoc, and the fatal results of centralisation in other parts of France, was often in the mind of the author of the Wealth of Nations; and all that he said is fully confirmed by Tocqueville’s study of French society before the Revolution. Here is a passage that sounds like an echo of Turgot: Smith is speaking of the advantages of local administration from local funds. Under such an administration, he says, “a magnificent highroad cannot be made through a desart country where there is little or no commerce, or merely because it happens to lead to the country villa of the intendant of the province, or to that of some great lord to whom the intendant finds it convenient to make his court. A great bridge cannot be thrown over a river at a place where nobody passes, or merely to embellish the view from the windows of a neighbouring palace: things which sometimes happen in countries where works of this kind are carried on by any other revenue than that which they themselves are capable of affording.”
After eighteen months in Toulouse the party went, we are told, “by a pretty extensive tour, through the south of France to Geneva.” There Smith was able to gratify two of his strongest passions: his admiration for the Republican form of government and for Voltaire. The little Republic was then in a constitutional tumult, for the citizens were pressing for a share in what had till then been a narrow aristocracy. In this they had the support of Voltaire, who lived, the literary potentate of Europe, at Ferney, just outside the city bounds, in the feudal seigniory of Gex. To his château by the lake pilgrims resorted from all parts of Europe to pay their court, and were hospitably received. Smith seems to have visited Ferney five or six times during his short stay, and conversation deepened the admiration which his favourite author had inspired.