The king appeared at the bed of justice; the princes, the dukes, and the peers were present; the magistrates were introduced. “The king my grandfather,” said Louis XVI., “compelled by your resistance to his repeated orders, did what the maintenance of his authority and the obligation of rendering justice to his people required of his wisdom. Today I recall you to functions which you never ought to have given up. Appreciate all the value of my bounties, and do not forget them.” At the same time the keeper of the seals read out an edict which subjected the restored Parliament to the same jurisdiction which had controlled the Maupeou Parliament. The latter had been sent to Versailles to form a grand council there.
Stern words are but a sorry cloak for feeble actions: the restored magistrates grumbled at the narrow limits imposed upon their authority; the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Chartres, the Prince of Conti supported their complaints; it was in vain that the king for some time met them with refusals; threats soon gave place to concessions; and the parliaments everywhere reconstituted, enfeebled in the eyes of public opinion, but more than ever obstinate and Fronde-like, found themselves free to harass, without doing any good, the march of an administration becoming every day more difficult. “Your Parliament may make barricades,” Lord Chesterfield had remarked contemptuously to Montesquieu, “it will never raise barriers.”
M. Turgot, meanwhile, was continuing his labors, preparing a project for equitable redistribution of the talliage and his grand system of a graduated scale (hierarchie) of municipal assemblies, commencing with the parish, to culminate in a general meeting of delegates from each province; he threatened, in the course of his reforms, the privileges of the noblesse and of the clergy, and gave his mind anxiously to the instruction of the people, whose condition and welfare he wanted to simultaneously elevate and augment; already there was a buzz of murmurs against him, confined as yet to the courtiers, when the dearness of bread and the distress which ensued till the spring of 1775 furnished his adversaries with a convenient pretext. Up to that time the attacks had been cautious and purely theoretical. M. Necker, an able banker from Geneva, for a long while settled in Paris, hand and glove with the philosophers, and keeping up, moreover, a great establishment, had brought to the comptroller-general a work which he had just finished on the trade in grain; on many points he did not share M. Turgot’s opinions. “Be kind enough to ascertain for yourself,” said the banker to the minister, “whether the book can be published without inconvenience to the government.” M. Turgot was proud and sometimes rude. “Publish, sir, publish,” said he, without offering his hand to take the manuscript; “the public shall decide.” M. Necker, out of pique, published his book; it had an immense sale; other pamphlets, more violent and less solid, had already appeared; at the same moment a riot, which seemed to have been planned and to be under certain guidance, broke out in several parts of France. Drunken men shouted about the public thoroughfares, “Bread! cheap bread!”
Burgundy had always been restless and easily excited. It was at Dijon that the insurrection began; on the 20th of April, the peasantry moved upon the town and smashed the furniture of a councillor in the Maupeou Parliament, who was accused of monopoly; they were already overflowing the streets; exasperated by the cruel answer of the governor, M. de la Tour du Pin: “You want something to eat? Go and graze; the grass is just coming up.” The burgesses trembled in their houses; the bishop threw himself in the madmen’s way and succeeded in calming them with his exhortations. The disturbance had spread to Pontoise; there the riot broke out on the 1st of May, the market was pillaged; and the 2d, at Versailles, a mob collected under the balcony of the castle. Everywhere ruffians of sinister appearance mingled with the mob, exciting its passions and urging it to acts of violence: the same men, such as are only seen in troublous days, were at the same time scouring Brie, Soissonnais, Vexin, and Upper Normandy; already barns had been burned and wheat thrown into the river; sacks of flour were ripped to pieces before the king’s eyes, at Versailles. In his excitement and dismay he promised the mob that the bread-rate should for the future be fixed at two sous; the rioters rushed to Paris.
M. Turgot had been confined to his bed for some months by an attack of gout; the Paris bakers’ shops had already been pillaged; the rioters had entered simultaneously by several gates, badly guarded; only one bakery, the owner of which had taken the precaution of putting over the door a notice with shop to let on it, had escaped the madmen. The comptroller-general had himself put into his carriage and driven to Versailles: at his advice the king withdrew his rash concession; the current price of bread was maintained. “No firing upon them,” Louis XVI. insisted. The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, had shown weakness and inefficiency; Marshal Biron was intrusted with the repression of the riot. He occupied all the main thoroughfares and cross-roads; sentries were placed at the bakers’ doors; those who had hidden themselves were compelled to bake. The octroi dues on grain were at the same time suspended at all the markets; wheat was already going down; when the Parisians went out of doors to see the riot, they couldn’t find any. “Well done, general in command of the flour (general des farina),” said the tremblers, admiring the military arrangements of Marshal Biron.
The Parliament had caused to be placarded a decree against street assemblies, at the same time requesting the king to lower the price of bread. The result was deplorable; the severe resolution, of the council was placarded beside the proclamation of the Parliament; the magistrates were summoned to Versailles. The prosecution of offenders was forbidden them; it was intrusted to the provost’s department. “The proceedings of the brigands appear to be combined,” said the keeper of the seals; “their approach is announced; public rumors indicate the day, the hour, the places at which they are to commit their outrages. It would seem as if there were a plan formed to lay waste the country-places, intercept navigation, prevent the carriage of wheat on the high-roads, in order to starve out the large towns, and especially the city of Paris.” The king at the same time forbade any “remonstrance.” “I rely,” said he on dismissing the court, “upon your placing no obstacle or hinderance in the way of the measures I have taken, in order that no similar event may occur during the period of my reign.”
The troubles were everywhere subsiding, the merchants were recovering their spirits. M. Turgot had at once sent fifty thousand francs to a trader whom the rioters had robbed of a boat full of wheat which they had flung into the river; two of the insurgents were at the same time hanged at Paris on a gallows forty feet high; and a notice was sent to the parish priests, which they were to read from the pulpit in order to enlighten the people as to the folly of such outbreaks and as to the conditions of the trade in grain. “My people, when they know the authors of the trouble, will regard them with horror,” said the royal circular. The authors of the trouble have remained unknown; to his last day M. Turgot believed in the existence of a plot concocted by the Prince of Conti, with the design of overthrowing him.
Severities were hateful to the king; he had misjudged his own character, when, at the outset of his reign, he had desired the appellation of Louis le Severe. “Have we nothing to reproach ourselves with in these measures?” he was incessantly asking M. Turgot, who was as conscientious but more resolute than his master. An amnesty preceded the coronation, which was to take place at Rheims on the 11th of June, 1775.
A grave question presented itself as regarded the king’s oath: should he swear, as the majority of his predecessors had sworn, to exterminate heretics? M. Turgot had aroused Louis XVI.‘s scruples upon this subject. “Tolerance ought to appear expedient in point of policy for even an infidel prince,” he said; “but it ought to be regarded as a sacred duty for a religious prince.” His opinion had been warmly supported by M. de Malesherbes, premier president of the Court of Aids. The king in his perplexity consulted M. de Maurepas. “M. Turgot is right,” said the minister, “but he is too bold. What he proposes could hardly be attempted by a prince who came to the throne at a ripe age and in tranquil times. That is not your position. The fanatics are more to be dreaded than the heretics. The latter are accustomed to their present condition. It will always be easy for you not to employ persecution. Those old formulas, of which nobody takes any notice, are no longer considered to be binding.” The king yielded; he made no change in the form of the oath, and confined himself to stammering out a few incoherent words. At the coronation of Louis XV. the people, heretofore admitted freely to the cathedral, had been excluded; at the coronation of Louis XVI. the officiator, who was the coadjutor of Rheims, omitted the usual formula addressed to the whole assembly, “Will you have this king for your king?” This insolent neglect was soon to be replied to by the sinister echo of the sovereignty of the people. The clergy, scared by M. Turgot’s liberal tendencies, reiterated their appeals to the king against the liberties tacitly accorded to Protestants. “Finish,” they said to Louis XVI., “the work which Louis the Great began, and which Louis the Well-beloved continued.” The king answered with vague assurances; already MM. Turgot and de Malesherbes were entertaining him with a project which conceded to Protestants the civil status.
M. de Malesherhes, indeed, had been for some months past seconding his friend in the weighty task which the latter had undertaken. Born at Paris on the 6th of December, 1721, son of the chancellor William de Lamoignon, and for the last twenty-three years premier president in the Court of Aids, Malesherbes had invariably fought on behalf of honest right and sound liberty; popularity had followed him in exile; it had increased continually since the accession of Louis XVI., who lost no time in recalling him; he had just presented to the king a remarkable memorandum touching the reform of the fiscal regimen, when M. Turgot proposed to the king to call him to the ministry in the place of the Duke of La Vrilliere. M. de Maurepas made no objection. “He will be the link of the ministry,” he said, “because he has the eloquence of tongue and of heart.” “Rest assured,” wrote Mdlle. de Lespinasse, “that what is well will be done and will be done well. Never, no never, were two more enlightened, more disinterested, more virtuous men more powerfully knit together in a greater and a higher cause.” The first care of M. de. Malesherbes was to protest against the sealed letters (lettres de cachet—summary arrest), the application whereof he was for putting in the hands of a special tribunal; he visited the Bastille, releasing the prisoners confined on simple suspicion. He had already dared to advise the king to a convocation of the states-general. “In France,” he had written to Louis XVI., “the nation has always had a deep sense of its right and its liberty. Our maxims have been more than once recognized by our kings; they have even gloried in being the sovereigns of a free people. Meanwhile, the articles of this liberty have never been reduced to writing, and the real power, the power of arms, which, under a feudal government, was in the hands of the grandees, has been completely centred in the kingly power. . . . We ought not to hide from you, Sir, that the way which would be most simple, most natural, and most in conformity with the constitution of this monarchy, would be to hear the nation itself in full assembly, and nobody should have the poltroonery to use any other language to you; nobody should leave you in ignorance that the unanimous wish of the nation is to obtain states-general or at the least states-provincial. . . . Deign to consider, Sir, that on the day you grant this precious liberty to your people it may be said that a treaty has been concluded between king and nation against ministers and magistrates: against the ministers, if there be any perverted enough to wish to conceal from you the truth; against the magistrates, if there ever be any ambitious enough to pretend to have the exclusive right of telling you it.”