The king’s speech was short and unimportant. Though honestly impressed with reminiscences of Henry IV., he could not manage, like him, to say to the notables he had just convoked, “I have had you assemble to take your counsels, to trust in them, to follow them, in short, to place myself under tutelage in your hands,—a feeling which is scarcely natural to kings, graybeards, and conquerors; but the violent love I bear my subjects, the extreme desire I have to add the title of liberator and restorer of this realm to that of king, make me find everything easy and honorable.” M. de Calonne had reserved to himself the duty of explaining the great projects he had suggested to the king. “Gentle men,” said he in his exordium, “the orders I am under at present do me the more honor in that the views of which the king has charged me to set before you the sum and the motives have been entirely adopted by him personally.” Henry IV. might have said to the notables assembled by his successor, as he had said regarding his predecessors: “You were summoned hither not long ago to approve of the king’s wishes.”
The state was prosperous, at any rate in appearance; the comptroller-general assumed the credit for it. “The economy of a minister of finance,” he said, “may exist under two forms so different that one might say they were two sorts of economy: one, which strikes the eye by its external strictness, which proclaims itself by startling and harshly uttered refusals, which flaunts its severity in the smallest matters in order to discourage the throng of applicants. It has an imposing appearance which really proves nothing, but which does a great deal as regards opinion; it has the double advantage of keeping importunate cupidity at arm’s length and of quieting anxious ignorance. The other, which considers duty rather than force of character, can do more, whilst showing less strictness and reserve, as regards whatever is of any importance; it affects no austerity as regards that which is of none; it lets the talk be of what it grants, and does not talk about what it saves. Because it is seen to be accessible to requests, people will not believe that it refuses the majority of them; because it has not the useful and vulgar character of inflexibility, people refuse it that of wise discretion, and often, whilst by assiduous application to all the details of an immense department, it preserves the finances from the most fatal abuses and the most ruinously unskilful handling, it seems to calumniate itself by an easy-going appearance which the desire to injure transforms very soon into lavishness.”
So much easy grace and adroitness succeeding the austere stiffness of M. Necker had been powerless to relieve the disorder of the finances; it was great and of ancient date. “A deficit has been existing in France for centuries,” the comptroller-general asserted. It at last touched the figure of a hundred millions a year. “What is left for filling up so frightful a void and for reaching the desired level?” exclaimed M. de Calonne: “abuses! Yes, gentlemen, it is in abuses themselves that there is to be found a mine of wealth which the state has a right to reclaim and which must serve to restore order. Abuses have for their defenders interests, influence, fortune, and some antiquated prejudices which time seems to have respected. But of what force is such a vain confederation against the public welfare and the necessity of the state? Let others recall this maxim of our monarchy: ‘As willeth the king, so willeth the law;’ his Majesty’s maxim is: ‘As willeth the happiness of the people, so willeth the king.’”
Audaciously certain of the success of his project, M. de Calonne had not taken the trouble to disguise the vast consequences of it; he had not thought any the more about pre-securing a majority in the assembly. The members were divided into seven committees presided over by the princes; each committee disposed of one single vote; the comptroller-general had not taken exception to the selections designated by his adversaries. “I have made it a point of conscience,” he said, “to give suitable nominations according to the morality, and talent, and importance of individuals.” He had burned his ships, and without a care for the defective composition of the assembly, he set forth, one after the other, projects calculated to alarm the privileged orders. “More will be paid,” he said in the preamble printed at the head of his notes and circulated in profusion over the whole of France, “undoubtedly more will be paid, but by whom? . . . By those only who do not pay enough; they will pay what they ought, according to a just proportionment, and nobody will be aggrieved. Privileges will be sacrificed! Yes! Justice wills it, necessity requires it! Would it be better to surcharge the non-privileged, the people?”
The struggle was about to begin, with all the ardor of personal interest; the principle of provincial assemblies had been favorably received by the notables; the committees (bureaux) had even granted to the third estate a representation therein equal to that of the two upper orders, on condition that the presidents of the delegates should be chosen from the nobility or the clergy. The recognition of a civil status for Protestants did not seem likely to encounter any difficulty. For more than twenty years past the parliaments, especially the parliament of Toulouse, had established the ruling of the inadmissibility of any one who disputed the legitimacy of children issue of Protestant marriages. In 1778, the parliament of Paris had deliberated as to presenting to the king a resolution in favor of authentic verification of non-Catholic marriages, births, and deaths; after a long interval, on, the 2d of February, 1787, this resolution had been formally, promulgated.
It was M. de Lafayette who had the honor of supporting in the assembly of notables the royal project announced by M. de Calonne and advised by the Parliament. In the ministry, MM. de Castries and De Breteuil had supported the equitable measure so long demanded by Protestants. M. de Rulhieres had drawn up for the king a note, entitled: Historic Evidences as to the Causes of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and M. de Malesherbes had himself presented to Louis XVI. a scheme for a law. “It is absolutely necessary,” said he, “that I should render the Protestants some kind offices; my great-uncle De Baville did them so much injury!” The Assembly of notables appealed to the king’s benevolence on behalf of “that considerable portion of his subjects which groans under a regimen of proscription equally opposed to the general interests of religion, to good morals, to population, to national industry, and to all the principles of morality and policy.” “In the splendid reign of Louis XIV.,” M. de Calonne had said, “the state was impoverished by victories, and the kingdom dispeopled through intolerance.” “Are assemblies of non-Catholics dangerous?” asked M. Turgot. “Yes, as long as they are forbidden; no, when they are authorized.”
The preliminary discussions had been calm, the great question was coming on; in theory, the notables were forced to admit the principle of equal assessment of the impost; in practice, they were, for the most part, resolved to restrict its application. They carried the war into the enemy’s camp, and asked to examine the financial accounts. The king gave notice to the committees that his desire was to have the deliberations directed not to the basis of the question but to the form of collection of taxes. The Archbishop of Narbonne (Dillon) raised his voice against the king’s exclusive right to decide upon imposts. “Your Royal Highness will allow me to tell you,” was the reply made to the Count of Artois, president of his committee, by an attorney-general of the parliament of Aix, M. de Castillon, “that there exists no authority which can pass a territorial impost such as that proposed, nor this assembly, august as it may be, nor the parliaments, nor the several states, nor the king himself; the States-general alone would have that power.”
Thus was proposed, in the very midst of the Assembly intended to keep it out, that great question of the convocation of the States-general which had been so long uppermost in all minds. “It is the States-general you demand!” said the Count of Artois to M. de La Fayette. “Yes, my lord,” replied the latter, “and something better still if possible!” The comptroller-general continued to elude inquiry into the state of the treasury. M. Necker, offended by the statements of his successor, who questioned the truthfulness of the Report, addressed explanatory notes to the several committees of the Assembly. He had already, in 1784, published an important work in explanation and support of his financial system; the success of the book had been immense; in spite of the prohibition issued, at first, against the sale, but soon tacitly withdrawn, the three volumes had sold, it was said, to the extent of eighty thousand copies. In 1787, the late director-general asked leave to appear before the Assembly of notables to refute the statements of M. de Calonne; permission was refused. “I am satisfied with your services,” the king sent word to him, “and I command you to keep silence.” A pamphlet, without any title, was however sent to the notables. “I served the king for five years,” said M. Necker, “with a zeal which knew no limits the duties I had taken upon myself were the only object of my solicitude. The interests of the state had become my passion and occupied all my faculties of heart and mind. Forced to retire through a combination of singular circumstances, I devoted my powers to the composition of a laborious work, the utility of which appears, to me to have been recognized. I heard it said that a portion of those ideas about administration which had been so dear to me formed the basis of the projects which were to be submitted to the Assembly of notables. I rendered homage to the beneficent views of his Majesty. Content with the contributions I had offered to the common weal, I was living happily and in peace, when all at once I found myself attacked or rather assailed in the most unjust and the strangest manner. M. de Calonne, finding it advisable to trace to a very remote period the causes of the present condition of the finances, was not afraid, in pursuance of this end, to have recourse to means with which he will, probably, sooner or later reproach himself; he declared in a speech, now circulated throughout Europe, that the Report to his Majesty, in 1781, was so extraordinarily erroneous, that, instead of the surplus published in that Report, there was, at that very time, an enormous deficit.”
At the moment when M. Necker was publishing, as regarded the statements of M. de Calonne, an able rectification which did not go to the bottom of things any more than the Report had previously gone, the comptroller-general was succumbing beneath his enemies’ attacks and his own errors. Justly irritated at the perfidious manoeuvres practised against him by the keeper of the seals in secretly heading at the Assembly of notables the opposition of the magistracy, Calonne had demanded and obtained from the king the recall of M. Miromesnil. He was immediately superseded by M. de Lamoignon, president of the parliament of Paris and a relative of M. de Malesherbes. The comptroller-general had the imprudence to push his demands further; he required the dismissal of M. de Breteuil. “I consent,” said Louis XVI. after some hesitation; “but leave me time to forewarn the queen, she is much attached to M. de Breteuil.” When the king quitted Marie Antoinette, the situation had changed face; the disgrace of M. de Calonne was resolved upon.
The queen had represented the dissatisfaction and opposition of the notables, which “proceeded solely,” she said, “from the mistrust inspired by the comptroller-general;” she had dwelt upon the merits and resources of the Archbishop of Toulouse. “I don’t like priests who haven’t the virtues of their cloth,” Louis XVI. had answered dryly. He called to the ministry M. Fourqueux, councillor of state, an old man, highly esteemed, but incapable of sustaining the crushing weight of affairs. The king himself presented M. de Calonne’s last projects to the Assembly of notables; the rumor ran that the comptroller-general was about to re-enter the cabinet. Louis XVI. was informed of the illicit manoeuvres which M. de Calonne had authorized in operations on ‘Change: he exiled him to his estate in Berry, and a few days afterwards to Lorraine. M. Necker had just published without permission his reply to the attacks of M. de Calonne the king was put out at it. “The eye of the public annoys those who manage affairs with carelessness,” M. Necker had but lately said in his work on financial administration, “but those who are animated by a different spirit would be glad to multiply lights from every quarter.” “I do not want to turn my kingdom into a republic screeching over state affairs as the city of Geneva is, and as happened during the administration of M. Necker,” said Louis XVI. He, banished his late minister to a distance of twenty leagues from Paris. Madame Necker was ill, and the execution of the king’s order was delayed for a few days.