In the home circle of the royal family, the queen had not found any intimate; the king’s aunts had never taken to her; the crafty ability of the Count of Provence and the giddiness of the Count of Artois seemed in the prudent eye of Maria Theresa to be equally dangerous; Madame Elizabeth, the heroic and pious companion of the evil days, was still a mere child; already the Duke of Chartres, irreligious and debauched, displayed towards the queen, who kept him at a distance, symptoms of a bitter rancor which was destined to bear fruit. Marie Antoinette, accustomed to a numerous family, affectionately united, sought friends who could “love her for herself,” as she used to say: an illusive hope, in one of her rank, for which she was destined to pay dearly. She formed an attachment to the young Princess of Lamballe, daughter-in-law of the Duke of Penthievre, a widow at twenty years of age, affectionate and gentle, for whom she revived the post of lady-superintendent, abolished by Mary Leczinska. The court was in commotion, and the public murmured; the queen paid no heed, absorbed as she was in the new delights of friendship; the intimacy, in which there was scarcely any inequality, with the Princess of Lamballe, was soon followed by a more perilous affection. The Countess Jules de Polignac, who was generally detained in the country by the narrowness of her means, appeared at court on the occasion of a festival; the queen was pleased with her, made her remain, and loaded her, her and her family, not only with favors, but with unbounded and excessive familiarity. Finding the court circles a constraint and an annoyance, Marie Antoinette became accustomed to seek in the drawing-room of Madame de Polignac amusements and a freedom which led before long to sinister gossip. Those who were admitted to this royal intimacy were not always prudent or discreet, they abused the confidence as well as the generous kindness of the queen; their ambition and their cupidity were equally concerned in urging Marie Antoinette to take in the government a part for which she was not naturally inclined. M. de Calonne was intimate with Madame de Polignac; she, created a duchess and appointed governess to the children of France (the royal children), was all-powerful with her friend the queen; she dwelt upon the talents of M. de Calonne, the extent and fertility of his resources; M. de Vergennes was won over, and the office of comptroller-general, which had but lately been still discharged with lustre by M. Turgot and M. Necker, fell on the 30th of October, 1784, into the hands of M. de Calonne.
Born in 1734 at Douai, Charles Alexander de Calonne belonged to a family of magistrates of repute and influence in their province; he commenced his hereditary career by the perfidious manoeuvres which contributed to the ruin of M. de la Chalotais. Discredited from the very first by a dishonorable action, he had invariably managed to get his vices forgotten, thanks to the charms of a brilliant and fertile wit. Prodigal and irregular as superintendent of Lille, he imported into the comptroller-generalship habits and ideas opposed to all the principles of Louis XVI. “The peace would have given hope a new run,” says M. Necker in his Memoires, “if the king had not confided the important functions of administering the finances to a man more worthy of being the hero of courtiers than the minister of a king. The reputation of M. de Calonne was a contrast to the morality of Louis XVI., and I know not by what argumentation, by what ascendency such a prince was induced to give a place in his council to a magistrate who was certainly found agreeable in the most elegant society of Paris, but whose levity and principles were dreaded by the whole of France. Money was lavished, largesses were multiplied, there was no declining to be good-natured or complaisant, economy was made the object of ridicule, it was daringly asserted that immensity of expenditure, animating circulation, was the true principle of credit.”
M. de Calonne had just been sworn in at the Court of Aids, pompously attended by a great number of magistrates and financiers; he was for the first time transacting business with the king. “Sir,” said he, “the comptrollers-general have many means of paying their debts: I have at this moment two hundred and twenty thousand livres’ worth payable on demand; I thought it right to tell your Majesty, and leave everything to your goodness.” Louis XVI., astounded at such language, stared a moment at his minister, and then, without any answer, walked up to a desk. “There are your two hundred and twenty thousand livres,” he said at last, handing M. de Calonne a packet of shares in the Water Company. The comptroller-general pocketed the shares, and found elsewhere the resources necessary for paying his debts. “If my own affairs had not been in such a bad state, I should not have undertaken those of France,” said Calonne gayly to M. de Machault, at that time advanced in age and still the centre of public esteem. The king, it was said, had but lately thought of sending for him as minister in the room of M. de Maurepas, he had been dissuaded by the advice of his aunts; the late comptroller-general listened gravely to his frivolous successor; the latter told the story of his conversation with the king. “I had certainly done nothing to deserve a confidence so extraordinary,” said M. de Machault to his friends. He set out again for his estate at Arnonville, more anxious than ever about the future.
If the first steps of M. de Calonne dismayed men of foresight and of experience in affairs, the public was charmed with them, no less than the courtiers. The bail des fermes was re-established, the Caisse d’escompte had resumed payment, the stockholders (rentiers) received their quarters’ arrears, the loan whereby the comptroller-general met all expenses had reached eleven per cent. “A man who wants to borrow,” M. de Calonne would say, “must appear rich, and to appear rich he must dazzle by his expenditure. Act we thus in the public administration. Economy is good for nothing, it warns those who have money, not to lend it to an indebted treasury, and it causes decay among the arts which prodigality vivifies.” New works, on a gigantic scale, were undertaken everywhere. “Money abounds in the kingdom,” the comptroller-general would remark to the king; “the people never had more openings for work; lavishness rejoices their eyes, because it sets their hands going. Continue these splendid undertakings, which are an ornament to Paris, Bordeaux, Lyons, Nantes, Marseilles, and Nimes, and which are almost entirely paid for by those flourishing cities. Look to your ports, fortify Havre, and create a Cherbourg, braving the jealousy of the English. None of those measures which reveal and do not relieve the straits of the treasury! The people, whom declaiming jurisconsults so vehemently but vainly incite to speak evil of lavishness, would be grieved if they saw any interruption in the expenditure which a silly parsimony calls superfluous.”
The comptroller-general’s practice tallied with his theories; the courtiers had recovered the golden age; it was scarcely necessary to solicit the royal favor. “When I saw everybody holding out hands, I held out my hat,” said a prince. The offices abolished by M. Turgot and M. Necker were re-established, the abuses which they had removed came back, the acceptances (acquits de comptant) rose in 1785 to more than a hundred and thirty-six millions of livres. The debts of the king’s brothers were paid; advantageous exchanges of royal lands were effected to their profit; the queen bought St. Cloud, which belonged to the Duke of Orleans; all the great lords who were ruined, all the courtiers who were embarrassed, resumed the pleasant habit of counting upon the royal treasury to relieve their wants. The polite alacrity of the comptroller-general had subdued the most rebellious; he obtained for Brittany the right of freely electing its deputies; the states-hall at Rennes, which had but lately resounded with curses upon him, was now repeating a new cry of “Hurrah for Calonne!” A vote of the assembly doubled the gratuitous gift which the province ordinarily offered the king. “If it is possible, it is done,” the comptroller would say to applicants; “if it is impossible, it will get done.”
The captivation was general, the blindness seemed to be so likewise; a feverish impulse carried people away into all newfangled ways, serious or frivolous. Mesmer brought from Germany his mysterious revelations in respect of problems as yet unsolved by science, and pretended to cure all diseases around the magnetic battery; the adventurer Cagliostro, embellished with the title of count, and lavishing gold by handfuls, bewitched court and city, and induced Councillor d’Epremesnil to say, “The friendship of M. de Cagliostro does me honor.” At the same time splendid works in the most diverse directions maintained at the topmost place in the world that scientific genius of France which the great minds of the seventeenth century had revealed to Europe. “Special men sometimes testify great disdain as regards the interest which men of the world may take in their labors, and, certainly, if it were merely a question of appraising their scientific merit, they would be perfectly right. But the esteem, the inclination of the public for science, and the frequent lively expression of that sentiment, are of high importance to it, and play a great part in its history. The times for that sympathy, somewhat ostentatious and frivolous as it may be, have always been, as regards sciences, times of impulse and progress, and, regarding things in their totality, natural history and chemistry profited by the social existence of M. de Buffon and of M. Lavoisier as much as by their discoveries” [M. Guizot, Melanges biographiques, Madame de Rumford].
It was this movement in the public mind, ignorant but sympathetic, which, on the eve of the Revolution, supported, without understanding them, the efforts of the great scholars whose peaceful conquests survived the upheaval of society. Farmer-general (of taxes) before he became a chemist, Lavoisier sought to apply the discoveries of science to common and practical wants. “Devoted to the public instruction, I will seek to enlighten the people,” he said to the king who proposed office to him. The people were to send him to the scaffold. The ladies of fashion crowded to the brilliant lectures of Fourcroy.
The princes of pure science, M. de Lagrange, M. de Laplace, M. Monge, did not disdain to wrench themselves from their learned calculations in order to second the useful labors of Lavoisier. Bold voyagers were scouring the world, pioneers of those enterprises of discovery which had appeared for a while abandoned during the seventeenth century. M. de Bougainville had just completed the round of the world, and the English captain, Cook, during the war which covered all seas with hostile ships, had been protected by generous sympathy. On the 19th of March, 1779, M. de Sartines, at that’ time minister of marine, wrote by the king’s order, at the suggestion of M. Turgot: “Captain Cook, who left Plymouth in the month of July, 1776, on board the frigate Discovery, to make explorations on the coasts, islands, and seas of Japan and California, must be on the point of returning to Europe. As such enterprises are for the general advantage of all nations, it is the king’s will that Captain Cook be treated as the commander of a neutral and allied power, and that all navigators who meet this celebrated sailor do inform him of his Majesty’s orders regarding him.”