Read these undoubted truths together and decide whether the Faith has advanced or receded in a hundred years.
Who was Loménie de Brienne? He had had, these twenty years, a reputation for what is vaguely called in aristocracies “ability.” He had presented the address of the Clergy in the Coronation year. He was Archbishop of Toulouse. He suited La Fayette’s idea of honesty. He had inordinate passions. He was yet further and later Archbishop of Sens—for the sake of the pickings. He had led with no scruple of honour the opposition to Calonne in the Notables. Mercy favoured him. Vermond, the Queen’s old tutor, who owed all to him, supported his claim, and Marie Antoinette imposed him. But who was he?
He was an active, careful, and laborious atheist to whom the King, by a scruple, refused the See of Paris, holding that the See of Paris was peculiar and had always better be held by a man who believed in God. He was a wit, he loved wealth inordinately—and that was all. He had his reputation with the wealthy, but no action of his remains. Such was the hierarchy that moment, and to a circle of such men was power restricted. And Loménie de Brienne was made and put into his seat by the advice of Vermond, Marie Antoinette’s old tutor, by the advice of Joseph II., a protector of religious doubt; he repaid her by a constant devotion.
It was on May Day 1787 that this personage was put, with an inferior title, at the head of the finances, a position which—now more than ever—was necessarily the chief post in the French State. On the 25th the Notables, from whom he came and whom he had led, were dissolved....
Fersen, eager to spend one last day in Versailles, had come for a few flying hours. He watched their dissolution as a show ... he did not return till the eve of the Revolution, and, once returned, he remained a pledged sacrifice, a servant, to the end....
The Notables had done nothing, and Loménie himself proceeded to do much the same; or rather to bring forward for the third time as an active proposition—for the millionth as a theory propounded—the scheme of financial reform which every predecessor had, in one shape or another, presented. The destruction of the fossil compartments—walls which separated various antique forms of taxation, a larger total tax, a more equitable distribution; the abolition of imposts uselessly vexatory; loans to oil the wheels of change.
The Notables had gone: but to register such decrees a power parallel to that of the Throne must—as we saw in the case of Turgot—concur. The permanent body of legal advisers to the Prince—a conception as old as Rome and morally in continuity with the Empire—the body which had tried Rohan—the Parlement—pleading the absence of a regular budget and of public discussion, refused to register, and within three months of Loménie de Brienne’s appointment, the Parlement in session had proceeded from Sabattier’s famous pun[[8]] to affirm that no permanent impost could be levied upon the nation without the summons and consent of the States-General.
[8]. “Vous demandez l’état des recettes—ces sont les états generaux qu’il nous faut.”
The reader should pause upon that phrase.