He was at his desk, drawing up an important decree; he laid down his pen, saying quietly, “My successor will finish;” and when M. de Maurepas hypocritically expressed his regret, “I retire,” said M. Turgot, “without having to reproach myself with feebleness, or falseness, or dissimulation.” He wrote to the king: “I have done, Sir, what I believed to be my duty in setting before you, with unreserved and unexampled frankness, the difficulty of the position in which I stood and what I thought of your own. If I had not done so, I should have considered myself to have behaved culpably towards you. You, no doubt, have come to a different conclusion, since you have withdrawn your confidence from me; but, even if I were mistaken, you cannot, Sir, but do justice to the feeling by which I was guided. All I desire, Sir, is that you may always be able to believe that I was short-sighted, and that I pointed out to you merely fanciful dangers. I hope that time may not justify me, and that your reign may be as happy and as tranquil, for yourself and your people, as they flattered themselves it would be, in accordance with your principles of justice and beneficence.”
Useless wishes, belied in advance by the previsions of M. Turgot himself. He had espied the danger and sounded some of the chasms just yawning beneath the feet of the nation as well as of the king; he committed the noble error of believing in the instant and supreme influence of justice and reason. “Sir,” said he to Louis XVI., “you ought to govern, like God, by general laws.” Had he been longer in power, M. Turgot would still have failed in his designs. The life of one man was too short, and the hand of one man too weak to modify the course of events, fruit slowly ripened during so many centuries. It was to the honor of M. Turgot that he discerned the mischief and would fain have applied the proper remedy. He was often mistaken about the means, oftener still about the strength he had at disposal. He had the good fortune to die early, still sad and anxious about the fate of his country, without having been a witness of the catastrophes he had foreseen and of the sufferings as well as wreckage through which France must pass before touching at the haven he would fain have opened to her.
The joy of the courtiers was great, at Versailles, when the news arrived of M. Turgot’s fall; the public regretted it but little: the inflexible severity of his principles which he never veiled by grace of manners, a certain disquietude occasioned by the chimerical views which were attributed to him, had alienated many people from him. His real friends were in consternation. “I was but lately rejoicing,” said Abbe Very, “at the idea that the work was going on of coolly repairing a fine edifice which time had damaged. Henceforth, the most that will be done will be to see after repairing a few of its cracks. I no longer indulge in hopes of its restoration; I cannot but apprehend its downfall sooner or later.” “O, what news I hear!” writes Voltaire to D’Alembert; “France would have been too fortunate. What will become of us? I am quite upset. I see nothing but death for me to look forward to, now that M. Turgot is out of office. It is a thunderbolt fallen upon my brain and upon my heart.”
A few months later M. de St. Germain retired in his turn, not to Alsace again, but to the Arsenal with forty thousand livres for pension. The first, the great attempt at reform had failed. “M. de Malesherbes lacked will to remain in power,” said Abbe Wry, “M. Turgot conciliatoriness (conciliabilite), and M. de Maurepas soul enough to follow his lights.” “M. de Malesherbes,” wrote Condorcet, “has, either from inclination or from default of mental rectitude, a bias towards eccentric and paradoxical ideas; he discovers in his mind numberless arguments for and against, but never discovers a single one to decide him. In his private capacity he had employed his eloquence in proving to the king and the ministers that the good of the nation was the one thing needful to be thought of; when he became minister, he employed it in proving that this good was impossible.” “I understand two things in the matter of war,” said M. de St. Germain just before he became minister, “to obey and to command; but, if it comes to advising, I don’t know anything about it.” He was, indeed, a bad adviser; and with the best intentions he had no idea either how to command or how to make himself obeyed. M. Turgot had correctly estimated the disorder of affairs, when he wrote to the king on the 30th of April, a fortnight before his disgrace: “Sir, the parliaments are already in better heart, more audacious, more implicated in the cabals of the court than they were in 1770, after twenty years of enterprise and success. Minds are a thousand times more excited upon all sorts of matters, and your ministry is almost as divided and as feeble as that of your predecessor. Consider, Sir, that, in the course of nature, you have fifty years to reign, and reflect what progress may be made by a disorder which, in twenty years, has reached the pitch at which we see it.”
Turgot and Malesherbes had fallen; they had vainly attempted to make the soundest as well as the most moderate principles of pure philosophy triumphant in the government; at home a new attempt, bolder and at the same time more practical, was soon about to resuscitate for a while the hopes of liberal minds; abroad and in a new world there was already a commencement of events which were about to bring to France a revival of glory and to shed on the reign of Louis XVI. a moment’s legitimate and brilliant lustre.
CHAPTER LVII.
LOUIS XVI.—FRANCE ABROAD.
UNITED STATES’ WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 1775-1783.
“Two things, great and difficult as they may be, are a man’s duty and may establish his fame. To support misfortune and be sturdily resigned to it; to believe in the good and trust in it perseveringly. [M. Guizot, Washington].
“There is a sight as fine and not less salutary than that of a virtuous man at grips with adversity; it is the sight of a virtuous man at the head of a good cause and securing its triumph.
“If ever cause were just and had a right to success, it was that of the English colonies which rose in insurrection to become the United States of America. Opposition, in their case, preceded insurrection.