The Duke of Aiguillon, always hostile to the Choiseuls and the House of Austria, had lent his countenance to the murmurs; Marie Antoinette was annoyed, and, in her turn, fostered the distrust felt by the people towards the late ministers of Louis XV. In the place of the Duke of Aiguillon, who had the ministry of war and that of foreign affairs both together, the Count of Muy and the Count of Vergennes were called to power. Some weeks later, the obscure minister of marine, M. de Boynes, made way for the superintendent of the district (generalite) of Limoges, M. Turgot.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, born at Paris on the 10th of May, 1727, was already known and everywhere esteemed, when M. de Maurepas, at the instance, it is said, of his wife whom he consulted on all occasions, summoned him to the ministry. He belonged to an ancient and important family by whom he had been intended for the Church. When a pupil at Louis-le-Grand college, he spent his allowance so quickly that his parents became alarmed; they learned before long that the young man shared all he received amongst out-of-college pupils too poor to buy books.
This noble concern for the wants of others, as well as his rare gifts of intellect, had gained young Turgot devoted friends. He was already leaning towards philosophy, and he announced to his fellow-pupils his intention of giving up his ecclesiastical status; he was a prior of Sorbonne; the majority disapproved of it. “Thou’rt but a younger son of a Norman family,” they said, “and, consequently, poor. Thou’rt certain to get excellent abbotries and to be a bishop early. Then thou’lt be able to realize thy fine dreams of administration and to become a statesman at thy leisure, whilst doing all manner of good in thy diocese. It depends on thyself alone to make thyself useful to thy country, to acquire a high reputation, perhaps to carve thy way to the ministry; if thou enter the magistracy, as thou desirest, thou breakest the plank which is under thy feet, thou’lt be confined to hearing causes, and thou’lt waste thy genius, which is fitted for the most important public affairs.” “I am very fond of you, my dear friends,” replied M. Turgot, “but I don’t quite understand what you are made of. As for me, it would be impossible for me to devote myself to wearing a mask all my life.” He became councillor-substitute to the attorney-general, and before long councillor in the Parliament, on the 30th of December, 1752. Master of requests in 1753, he consented to sit in the King’s Chamber, when the Parliament suspended the administration of justice. “The Court,” he said, “is exceeding its powers.” A sense of equity thus enlisted him in the service of absolute government. He dreaded, moreover, the corporate spirit, which he considered narrow and intolerant. “When you say, We,” he would often repeat, “do not be surprised that the public should answer, You.”
Intimately connected with the most esteemed magistrates and economists, such as MM. Trudaine, Quesnay, and Gournay, at the same time that he was writing in the Encyclopaedia, and constantly occupied in useful work, Turgot was not yet five and thirty when he was appointed superintendent of the district of Limoges. There, the rare faculties of his mind and his sincere love of good found their natural field; the country was poor, crushed under imposts, badly intersected by roads badly kept, inhabited by an ignorant populace, violently hostile to the recruitment of the militia. He encouraged agriculture, distributed the talliages more equitably, amended the old roads and constructed new ones, abolished forced labor (corvees), provided for the wants of the poor and wretched during the dearth of 1770 and 1771, and declined, successively, the superintendentship of Rouen, of Lyons, and of Bordeaux, in order that he might be able to complete the useful tasks he had begun at Limoges. It was in that district, which had become dear to him, that he was sought out by the kindly remembrance of Abbe de Wry, his boyhood’s friend, who was intimate with Madame de Maurepas. Scarcely had he been installed in the department of marine and begun to conceive vast plans, when the late ministers of Louis XV. succumbed at last beneath the popular hatred; in the place of Abbe Terray, M. Turgot became comptroller-general.
The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbe Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him. Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation’s eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting. The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goezman had contributed to decry it, thanks to the uproar the able pamphleteer had managed to cause; the families of the former magistrates were powerful, numerous, esteemed, and they put pressure upon public opinion; M. de Maurepas determined to retract the last absolutist attempt of Louis XV.‘s reign; his first care was to send and demand of Chancellor Maupeou the surrender of the seals. “I know what you have come to tell me,” said the latter to the Duke of La Vrilliere, who was usually charged with this painful mission, “but I am and shall continue to be chancellor of France,” and he kept his seat whilst addressing the minister, in accordance with his official privilege. He handed to the duke the casket of seals, which the latter was to take straight to M. de Miromesnil. “I had gained the king a great cause,” said Maupeou; “he is pleased to reopen a question which was decided; as to that he is master.” Imperturbable and haughty as ever, he retired to his estate at Thuit, near the Andelys, where he drew up a justificatory memorandum of his ministry, which he had put into the king’s hands, without ever attempting to enter the court or Paris again; he died in the country, at the outset of the revolutionary storms, on the 29th of July, 1792, just as he had made the State a patriotic present of 800,000 livres. At the moment when the populace were burning him in effigy in the streets of Paris together with Abbe Terray, when he saw the recall of the parliamentarians, and the work of his whole life destroyed, he repeated with his usual coolness: “If the king is pleased to lose his kingdom—well, he is master.”
Abbe Terray had been less proud, and was more harshly treated. It was in vain that he sought to dazzle the young king with ably prepared memorials. “I can do no more,” he said, “to add to the receipts, which I have increased by sixty millions; I can do no more to keep down the. debts, which I have reduced by twenty millions. . . . It is for you, Sir, to relieve your people by reducing the expenses. This work, which is worthy of your kind heart, was reserved for you.” Abbe Terray had to refund nearly 900,000 livres to the public treasury. Being recognized by the mob as he was passing over the Seine in a ferry-boat, he had some difficulty in escaping from the hands of those who would have hurled him into the river.
The contrast was great between the crafty and unscrupulous ability of the disgraced comptroller-general and the complete disinterestedness, large views, and noble desire of good which animated his successor. After his first interview with the king, at Compiegne, M. Turgot wrote to Louis XVI.:—“Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to permit me to place before your eyes the engagement you took upon yourself, to support me in the execution of plans of economy which are at all times, and now more than ever, indispensable. I confine myself for the moment, Sir, to reminding you of these three expressions: 1. No bankruptcies; 2. No augmentation of imposts; 3. No loans. No bankruptcy, either avowed or masked by forced reductions. No augmentation of imposts the reason for that lies in the condition of your people, and still more in your Majesty’s own heart. No loans; because every loan always diminishes the disposable revenue: it necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or augmentation of imposts. . . . Your Majesty will not forget that, when I accepted the office of comptroller-general, I perceived all the preciousness of the confidence with which you honor me; . . . but, at the same time I perceived all the danger to which I was exposing myself. I foresaw that I should have to fight single-handed against abuses of every sort, against the efforts of such as gain by those abuses, against the host of the prejudiced who oppose every reform, and who, in the hands of interested persons, are so powerful a means of perpetuating disorder. I shall be feared, shall be even hated by the greater part of the court, by all that solicit favors. . . . This people to whom I shall have sacrificed myself is so easy to deceive, that I shall perhaps incur its hatred through the very measures I shall take to defend it against harassment. I shall be calumniated, and perhaps with sufficient plausibility to rob me of your Majesty’s confidence. . . . You will remember that it is on the strength of your promises that I undertake a burden perhaps beyond my strength; that it is to you personally, to the honest man, to the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I commit myself.”
It is to the honor of Louis XVI. that the virtuous men who served him, often with sorrow and without hoping anything from their efforts, always preserved their confidence in his intentions. “It is quite encouraging,” wrote M. Turgot to one of his friends, “to have to serve a king who is really an honest and a well-meaning man.” The burden of the necessary reforms was beyond the strength of the minister as well as of the sovereign; the violence of opposing currents was soon about to paralyze their genuine efforts and their generous hopes.
M. Turgot set to work at once. Whilst governing his district of Limoges, he had matured numerous plans and shaped extensive theories. He belonged to his times and to the school of the philosophers as regarded his contempt for tradition and history; it was to natural rights alone, to the innate and primitive requirements of mankind, that he traced back his principles and referred as the basis for all his attempts. “The rights of associated men are not founded upon their history but upon their nature,” says the Memoire au Roi sur les Municipalites, drawn up under the eye of Turgot. By this time he desired no more to reform old France; he wanted a new France. “Before ten years are over,” he would say, “the nation will not be recognizable, thanks to enlightenment. This chaos will have assumed a distinct form. Your Majesty will have quite a new people, and the first of peoples.” A profound error, which was that of the whole Revolution, and the consequences of which would have been immediately fatal; if the powerful instinct of conservatism and of natural respect for the past had not maintained between the regimen which was crumbling away and the new fabric connections more powerful and more numerous than their friends as well as their enemies were aware of.
Two fundamental principles regulated the financial system of M. Turgot, economy in expenditure and freedom in trade; everywhere he ferreted out abuses, abolishing useless offices and payments, exacting from the entire administration that strict probity of which he set the example. Louis XVI. supported him conscientiously at that time in all his reforms; the public made fun of it. “The king,” it was said, “when he considers himself an abuse, will be one no longer.” At the same time, a decree of September 13, 1774, re-established at home that freedom of trade in grain which had been suspended by Abbe Terray, and the edict of April, 1776, founded freedom of trade in wine. “It is by trade alone, and by free trade, that the inequality of harvests can be corrected,” said the minister in the preamble of his decree. “I have just read M. Turgot’s masterpiece,” wrote Voltaire to D’Alembert “it seems to reveal to us new heavens and a new earth.” It was on account of his financial innovations that the comptroller-general particularly dreaded the return of the old Parliament, with which he saw himself threatened every day. “I fear opposition from the Parliament,” he said to the king. “Fear nothing,” replied the king warmly, “I will stand by you;” and, passing over the objections of the best politician amongst his ministers, he yielded to M. de Maurepas, who yielded to public opinion. On the 12th of November, 1774, the old Parliament was formally restored.