A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume VI Part 16

"Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature," he says, "it derives its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from the progress of the human mind . . . according to the poet it is gold and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which have civilized men and ruined the human race."

The singularity of his paradox had worn off; Rousseau no longer astounded, he shocked the good sense as well as the aspirations, superficial or generous, of the eighteenth century. The _Discours sur l'Inegalite des conditions_ was not a success. "I have received, sir, your new book against the human race," wrote Voltaire; "I thank you for it. You will please men to whom you tell truths about them, and you will not make them any better. Never was so much good wit expended in the desire to make beasts of us; one feels disposed to walk on all fours when one reads your work. However, as it is more than sixty years since I lost the knack, I unfortunately find it impossible to recover it, and I leave that natural gait to those who are better fitted for it than you or I. No more can I embark upon a visit to the savages of Canada, first, because the illnesses to which I am subject render a European doctor necessary to me; secondly, because war has been introduced into that country, and because the examples of our nations have rendered the savages almost as wicked as ourselves. I shall confine myself to being a peaceable savage in the solitude I have selected hard by your own country, where you ought to be."

Rousseau had, indeed, thought of returning and settling at Geneva. In 1754, during a trip he made thither, he renounced the Catholic faith which he had embraced at sixteen under the influence of Madame de Warens, without any more conviction than he carried with him in his fresh abjuration. "Ashamed," says he, "at being excluded from my rights of citizens.h.i.+p by the profession of a cult other than that of my fathers, I resolved to resume the latter openly. I considered that the Gospel was the same for all Christians, and that, as the fundamental difference of dogma arose from meddling with explanations of what could not be understood, it appertained in every country to the sovereigns alone to fix both the cult and the unintelligible dogma, and that, consequently, it was the duty of the citizen to accept the dogma and follow the cult prescribed by law." Strange eccentricity of the human mind! The shackles of civilization are oppressive to Rousseau, and yet he would impose the yoke of the state upon consciences. The natural man does not reflect, and does not discuss his religion; whilst seeking to recover the obliterated ideal of nature, the philosopher halts on the road at the principles of Louis XIV. touching religious liberties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Rousseau and Madame D'Epinay----338]

Madame d'Epinay had offered Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the Hermitage. There it was that he began the tale of _La Nouvelle Heloise,_ which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency's, when the susceptible and cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions of Grimm. The latter had but lately said to Madame d'Epinay "I see in Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you will do yourself a still more sorry one. Solitude will complete the blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust, ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his country. I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the letters you have shown me."

Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d'Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot; his quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some noise. "Good G.o.d!" said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, "wherever I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Did anybody ever? Fellows who are n.o.body, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a third floor! Positively, one can't stand that sort of thing!" The rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot.

"n.o.body can put himself in my place," wrote Rousseau, "and n.o.body will see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their rules."

Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not forgive him for his independence. His merits as well as his defects annoyed them equally: his "Lettre contre les Spectacles" had exasperated Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger. "It is against that Jean Jacques of yours that I am most enraged," he writes in his correspondence with D'Alembert: "he has written several letters against the scandal to deacons of the Church of Geneva, to my ironmonger, to my cobbler. This arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes' tub and gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled. He writes to me in so many words, 'You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she gave you;' as if I cared to soften the manners of Geneva, as if I wanted an asylum, as if I had taken any in that city of Socinian preachers, as if I were under any obligation to that city!"

More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D'Alembert felt the danger of discord amongst the philosophical party. In vain he wrote to the irritated poet: "I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who thinks be is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous. I grant that he has written you an impertinent letter; I grant that you and your friends have reason to complain of that; in spite of all this, however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words: 'What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?'

We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides, wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to them all. Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his feelings hurt." Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.

Isolated henceforth by the good as well as by the evil tendencies of his nature, Jean Jacques stood alone against the philosophical circle which he had dropped, as well as against the Protestant or Catholic clergy whose creeds he often offended. He had just published _Le Contrat Social,_ "The Gospel,"; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, "of the theory as to the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people."

The governing powers of the time had some presentiment of its danger; they had vaguely comprehended what weapons might be sought therein by revolutionary instincts and interests; their anxiety and their anger as yet brooded silently; the director of publications (_de la librairie_), M. de Malesherbes, was one of the friends and almost one of the disciples of Rousseau whom he s.h.i.+elded; he himself corrected the proofs of the _Emile_ which Rousseau had just finished. The book had barely begun to appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a message from la Marchale de Luxembourg: the Parliament had ordered _Emile_ to be burned, and its author arrested. Rousseau took flight, reckoning upon finding refuge at Geneva. The influence of the French government pursued him thither; the Grand Council condemned _Emile_.

One single copy had arrived at Geneva it was this which was burned by the hand of the common hangman, nine days after the, burning at Paris in the Place de Greve. "The Contrat Social has received its whipping on the back of Emile," was the saying at Geneva. "At the instigation of M. de Voltaire they have avenged upon me the cause of G.o.d," Jean Jacques declared.

Rousseau rashly put his name to his book; Voltaire was more prudent.

One day, having been imprisoned for some verses which were not his, he had taken the resolution to impudently repudiate the paternity of his own works. "You must never publish anything under your own name," he wrote to Helvetius; "La Pucelle was none of my doing, of course. Master Joly de Fleury will make a fine thing of his requisition; I shall tell him that he is a calumniator, that La Pucelle is his own doing, which he wants to put down to me out of spite."

Geneva refused asylum to the proscribed philosopher; he was warned of hostile intentions on the part of the magnific signiors of Berne.

Neuchatel and the King of Prussia's protection alone were left; thither he went for refuge. Received with open arms by the governor, my lord Marshal (Keith), he wrote thence to the premier syndic Favre a letter abdicating his rights of burghers.h.i.+p and citizens.h.i.+p in the town of Geneva. "I have neglected nothing," he said, "to gain the love of my compatriots; n.o.body could have had worse success. I desire to indulge them even in their hate; the last sacrifice remaining for me to make is that of a name which was dear to me."

Some excitement, nevertheless, prevailed at Geneva; Rousseau had partisans there. The success of _Emile_ had been immense at Paris, and was destined to exerciso a serious influence upon the education of a whole generation. It is good," wrote Voltaire, "that the brethren should know that yesterday six hundred persons came, for the third time, to protest on behalf of Jean Jacques against the Council of Geneva, which had dared to condemn the Vicaire savoyard." The Genevese magistrates thought it worth while to defend their acts; the _Lettres ecrites de la Campagne,_ published to that end, were the work of the attorney-general Robert Tronchin. Rousseau replied to them in the _Lettres de la Montagne,_ with a glowing eloquence having a spice of irony. He hurled his missiles at Voltaire, whom, with weakly exaggeration, he accused of being the author of all his misfortunes. "Those gentlemen of the Grand Council," he said, "see M. de Voltaire so often, how is it that he did not inspire them with a little of that tolerance which he is incessantly preaching, and of which he sometimes has need? If they had consulted him a little on this matter, it appears to me that he might have addressed them pretty nearly thus: 'Gentlemen, it is not the arguers who do harm; philosophy can gang its ain gait without risk;' the people either do not hear it at all or let it babble on, and pay it back all the disdain it feels for them. I do not argue myself, but others argue, and what harm comes of it? We have arranged that my great influence in the court and my pretended omnipotence should serve you as a pretext for allowing a free, peaceful course to the sportive jests of my advanced years; that is a good thing, but do not, for all that, burn graver writings, for that would be too shocking. I have so often preached tolerance! It must not be always required of others and never displayed towards them. This poor creature believes in G.o.d, let us pa.s.s over that; he will not make a sect.

He is a bore; all arguers are. If all bores of books were to be burned, the whole country would have to be made into one great fireplace. Come, come, let us leave those to argue who leave us to joke; let us burn neither people nor books and remain at peace, that is my advice. That, in my opinion, is what might have been said, only in better style, by M.

Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice he could have given."

My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there; he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle of the Lake of Bienne. Before long an order from the Bernese senate obliged, him to quit it "within four and twenty hours, and with a prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties."

Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume. There it was that he began writing his _Confessions_.

Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume. The latter flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d'Holbach: "My dear Baron, Rousseau is a scoundrel." Rousseau was by this time mad.

He returned to France. The Prince of Conti, faithful to his philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near Gisors. Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by invisible enemies. Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville, which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life. The disproportion between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and the impa.s.sioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries. By his writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.

He belonged moreover and by antic.i.p.ation to a new era; from the restless working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies, he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work, their world was never his. He had attempted a n.o.ble reaction, but one which was fundamentally and in reality impossible. The impress of his early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in G.o.d, he had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood, he admired the morality and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of adoration and submission. "The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits the moral world, but not that other which is above," M. Joubert has said in his _Pensees_. The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a foregone conclusion. Against the systematic infidelity which was more and more creeping over the eighteenth century, the Christian faith alone, with all its forces, could fight and triumph. But the Christian faith was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel's rigging instead of defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the dikes were breaking one after, another. The religious belief of the Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in _Emile,_ and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the soul and regulate life.

"What the eighteenth century lacked [M. Guizot, _Melanges biographiques_ (Madame la Comtesse de Rumford)], "what there was of superficiality in its ideas and of decay in its morals, of senselessness in its pretensions and of futility in its creative power, has been strikingly revealed to us by experience; we have learned it to our cost. We know, we feel the evil bequeathed to us by that memorable epoch. It preached doubt, egotism, materialism. It laid for some time an impure and blasting hand upon n.o.ble and beautiful phases of human life. But if the eighteenth century had done only that, if such had been merely its chief characteristic, can any one suppose that it would have carried in its wake so many and such important matters, that it would have so moved the world? It was far superior to all its sceptics, to all its cynics. What do I say?

Superior? Nay, it was essentially opposed to them and continually gave them the lie. Despite the weakness of its morals, the frivolity of its forms, the mere dry bones of such and such of its doctrines, despite its critical and destructive tendency, it was an ardent and a sincere century, a century of faith and disinterestedness. It had faith in the truth, for it claimed the right thereof to reign in this world. It had faith in humanity, for it recognized the right thereof to perfect itself and would have had that right exercised without obstruction. It erred, it lost itself amid this twofold confidence; it attempted what was far beyond its right and power; it misjudged the moral nature of man and the conditions of the social state. Its ideas as well as its works contracted the blemish of its views. But, granted so much, the original idea, dominant in the eighteenth century, the belief that man, truth, and society are made for one another, worthy of one another, and called upon to form a union, this correct and salutary belief rises up and overtops all its history. That belief it was the first to proclaim and would fain have realized. Hence its power and its popularity over the whole face of the earth. Hence also, to descend from great things to small, and from the destiny of man to that of the drawing-room, hence the seductiveness of that epoch and the charm it scattered over social, life. Never before were seen all the conditions, all the cla.s.ses that form the flower of a great people, however diverse they might have been in their history and still were in their interests, thus forgetting their past, their personality, in order to draw near to one another, to unite in a communion of the sweetest manners, and solely occupied in pleasing one another, in rejoicing and hoping together during fifty years which were to end in the most terrible conflicts between them."

At the death of King Louis XV., in 1774, the easy-mannered joyance, the peaceful and brilliant charm of fas.h.i.+onable and philosophical society were reaching their end: the time of stern realities was approaching with long strides.

CHAPTER LVI.----LOUIS XVI.--MINISTRY OF M. TURGOT. 1774-1776.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Louis XVI.----347]

Louis XV. was dead; France breathed once more; she was weary of the weakness as well as of the irregularities of the king who had untaught her her respect for him, and she turned with joyous hope towards his successor, barely twenty years of age, but already loved and impatiently awaited by his people. "He must be called Louis le Desire," was the saying in the streets before the death-rattle of Louis XV. had summoned his grandson to the throne. The feeling of dread which had seized the young king was more prophetic than the nation's joy. At the news that Louis XV. had just heaved his last sigh in the arms of his pious daughters, Louis XVI. and Maria Antoinette both flung themselves on their knees, exclaiming, "O G.o.d, protect us, direct us, we are too young."

The monarch's youth did not scare the country, itself everywhere animated and excited by a breath of youth. There were congratulations on escaping from the well-known troubles of a regency; the king's ingenuous inexperience, moreover, opened a vast field for the most contradictory hopes. The philosophers counted upon taking possession of the mind of a good young sovereign, who was said to have his heart set upon his people's happiness; the clergy and the Jesuits themselves expected everything from the young prince's pious education; the old parliaments, mutilated, crushed down, began to raise up their heads again, while the economists were already preparing their most daring projects. Like literature, the arts had got the start, in the new path, of the politicians and the magistrates. M. Turgot and M. de Malesherbes had not yet laid their enterprising hands upon the old fabric of French administration, and already painting, sculpture, architecture, and music had shaken off the shackles of the past. The conventional graces of Vanloo, of Watteau, of Boucher, of Fragonard, had given place to a severer school. Greuze was putting upon canvas the characters and ideas of Diderot's _Drame naturel;_ but Vien, in France, was seconding the efforts of Winkelman and of Raphael Mengs in Italy; he led his pupils back to the study of ancient art; he had trained Regnault, Vincent, Menageot, and lastly Louis David, destined to become the chief of the modern school; Julien, Houdon, the last of the Coustous, were following the same road in sculpture Soufflot, an old man by this time, was superintending the completion of the church of St. Genevieve, dedicated by Louis XV. to the commemoration of his recovery at Metz, and destined, from the majestic simplicity of its lines, to the doubtful honor of becoming the Pantheon of the revolution; Servandoni had died a short time since, leaving to the church of St. Sulpice the care of preserving his memory; everywhere were rising charming mansions imitated from the palaces of Rome. The painters, the sculptors, and the architects of France were sufficient for her glory; only Gretry and Monsigny upheld the honor of that French music which was attacked by Grimm and by Jean Jacques Rousseau; but it was at Paris that the great quarrel went on between the Italians and the Germans; Piccini and Gluck divided society, wherein their rivalry excited violent pa.s.sions. Everywhere and on, all questions, intellectual movement was becoming animated with fresh ardor; France was marching towards the region of storms, in the blindness of her confidence and _joyante;_ the atmosphere seemed purer since Madame Dubarry had been sent to a convent by one of the first orders of young Louis XVI.

Already, however, far-seeing spirits were disquieted; scarcely had he mounted the throne, when the king summoned to his side, as his minister, M. de Maurepas, but lately banished by Louis XV., in 1749, on a charge of having tolerated, if not himself written, songs disrespectful towards Madame de Pompadour. "The first day," said the disgraced minister, "I was nettled; the second, I was comforted."

M. de Maurepas, grandson of Chancellor Pontchartrain, had been provided for, at fourteen years of age, by Louis XIV. with the reversion of the ministry of marine, which had been held by his father, and had led a frivolous and pleasant life; through good fortune and evil fortune he clung to the court; when he was recalled thither, at the age of sixty- three, on the suggestion of Madame Adelaide, the queen's aunt, and of the dukes of Aiguillon and La Vrilliere, both of them ministers and relations of his, he made up his mind that he would never leave it again. On arriving at Versailles, he used the expression, "premier minister."

"Not at all," said the king abruptly. "O, very well," replied M. de Maurepas, "then to teach your Majesty to do without one." n.o.body, however, did any business with Louis XVI. without his being present, and his address was sufficient to keep at a distance or diminish the influence of the princesses as well as of the queen. Marie Antoinette had insisted upon the recall of M. de Choiseul, who had arranged her marriage and who had remained faithful to the Austrian alliance. The king had refused angrily. The sinister accusations which had but lately been current as to the causes of the dauphin's death had never been forgotten by his son.

An able man, in spite of his incurable levity, M. de Maurepas soon sacrificed the Duke of Aiguillon to the queen's resentment; the people attached to the old court accused her of despising etiquette; it was said that she had laughed when she received the respectful condolence of aged dames looking like beguines in their coifs; already there circulated amongst the public bitter ditties, such as,

My little queen, not twenty-one, Maltreat the folks, as you've begun, And o'er the border you shall run. . . .

The Duke of Aiguillon, always hostile to the Choiseuls and the House of Austria, had lent his countenance to the murmurs; Marie Antoinette was annoyed, and, in her turn, fostered the distrust felt by the people towards the late ministers of Louis XV. In the place of the Duke of Aiguillon, who had the ministry of war and that of foreign affairs both together, the Count of Muy and the Count of Vergennes were called to power. Some weeks later, the obscure minister of marine, M. de Boynes, made way for the superintendent of the district (generalite) of Limoges, M. Turgot.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, born at Paris on the 10th of May, 1727, was already known and everywhere esteemed, when M. de Maurepas, at the instance, it is said, of his wife whom he consulted on all occasions, summoned him to the ministry. He belonged to an ancient and important family by whom he had been intended for the Church. When a pupil at Louis-le-Grand college, he spent his allowance so quickly that his parents became alarmed; they learned before long that the young man shared all he received amongst out-of-college pupils too poor to buy books.

This n.o.ble concern for the wants of others, as well as his rare gifts of intellect, had gained young Turgot devoted friends. He was already leaning towards philosophy, and he announced to his fellow-pupils his intention of giving up his ecclesiastical status; he was a prior of Sorbonne; the majority disapproved of it. "Thou'rt but a younger son of a Norman family," they said, "and, consequently, poor. Thou'rt certain to get excellent abbotries and to be a bishop early. Then thou'lt be able to realize thy fine dreams of administration and to become a statesman at thy leisure, whilst doing all manner of good in thy diocese.

It depends on thyself alone to make thyself useful to thy country, to acquire a high reputation, perhaps to carve thy way to the ministry; if thou enter the magistracy, as thou desirest, thou breakest the plank which is under thy feet, thou'lt be confined to hearing causes, and thou'lt waste thy genius, which is fitted for the most important public affairs." "I am very fond of you," my dear friends," replied M. Turgot, "but I don't quite understand what you are made of. As for me, it would be impossible for me to devote myself to wearing a mask all my life." He became councillor-subst.i.tute to the attorney-general, and before long councillor in the Parliament, on the 30th of December, 1752. Master of requests in 1753, he consented to sit in the King's Chamber, when the Parliament suspended the administration of justice. "The Court," he said, "is exceeding its powers." A sense of equity thus enlisted him in the service of absolute government. He dreaded, moreover, the corporate spirit, which he considered narrow and intolerant. "When you say, We,"

he would often repeat, "do not be surprised that the public should answer, You."

Intimately connected with the most esteemed magistrates and economists, such as MM. Trudaine, Quesnay, and Gournay, at the same time that he was writing in the _Encyclopaedia,_ and constantly occupied in useful work, Turgot was not yet five and thirty when he was appointed superintendent of the district of Limoges. There, the rare faculties of his mind and his sincere love of good found their natural field; the country was poor, crushed under imposts, badly intersected by roads badly kept, inhabited by an ignorant populace, violently hostile to the recruitment of the militia. He encouraged agriculture, distributed the talliages more equitably, amended the old roads and constructed new ones, abolished forced labor (_corvees_), provided for the wants of the poor and wretched during the dearth of 1770 and 1771, and declined, successively, the superintendents.h.i.+p of Rouen, of Lyons, and of Bordeaux, in order that he might be able to complete the useful tasks he had begun at Limoges. It was in that district, which had become dear to him, that he was sought out by the kindly remembrance of Abbe de Wry, his boyhood's friend, who was intimate with Madame de Maurepas. Scarcely had he been installed in the department of marine and begun to conceive vast plans, when the late ministers of Louis XV. succ.u.mbed at last beneath the popular hatred; in the place of Abbe Terray, M. Turgot became comptroller-general.

The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbe Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him. Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation's eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting. The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goezman had contributed to decry it, thanks to the uproar the able pamphleteer had managed to cause; the families of the former magistrates were powerful, numerous, esteemed, and they put pressure upon public opinion; M. de Maurepas determined to retract the last absolutist attempt of Louis XV.'s reign; his first care was to send and demand of Chancellor Maupeou the surrender of the seals. "I know what you have come to tell me," said the latter to the Duke of La Vrilliere, who was usually charged with this painful mission, "but I am and shall continue to be chancellor of France," and he kept his seat whilst addressing the minister, in accordance with his official privilege. He handed to the duke the casket of seals, which the latter was to take straight to M. de Miromesnil. "I had gained the king a great cause," said Maupeou; "he is pleased to reopen a question which was decided; as to that he is master."

Imperturbable and haughty as ever, he retired to his estate at Thuit, near the Andelys, where he drew up a justificatory memorandum of his ministry, which he had put into the king's hands, without ever attempting to enter the court or Paris again; he died in the country, at the outset of the revolutionary storms, on the 29th of July, 1792, just as he had made the State a patriotic present of 800,000 livres. At the moment when the populace were burning him in effigy in the streets of Paris together with Abbe Terray, when he saw the recall of the parliamentarians, and the work of his whole life destroyed, he repeated with his usual coolness: "If the king is pleased to lose his kingdom--well, he is master."

Abbe Terray had been less proud, and was more harshly treated. It was in vain that he sought to dazzle the young king with ably prepared memorials. "I can do no more," he said, "to add to the receipts, which I have increased by sixty millions; I can do no more to keep down the.

debts, which I have reduced by twenty millions. . . . It is for you, Sir, to relieve your people by reducing the expenses. This work, which is worthy of your kind heart, was reserved for you." Abbe Terray had to refund nearly 900,000 livres to the public treasury. Being recognized by the mob as he was pa.s.sing over the Seine in a ferry-boat, he had some difficulty in escaping from the hands of those who would have hurled him into the river.

The contrast was great between the crafty and unscrupulous ability of the disgraced comptroller-general and the complete disinterestedness, large views, and n.o.ble desire of good which animated his successor. After his first interview with the king, at Compiegne, M. Turgot wrote to Louis XVI.:--"Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to permit me to place before your eyes the engagement you took upon yourself, to support me in the execution of plans of economy which are at all times, and now more than ever, indispensable. I confine myself for the moment, Sir, to reminding you of these three expressions: 1. No bankruptcies; 2. No augmentation of imposts; 3. No loans. No bankruptcy, either avowed or masked by forced reductions. No augmentation of imposts the reason for that lies in the condition of your people, and still more in your Majesty's own heart. No loans; because every loan always diminishes the disposable revenue: it necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or augmentation of imposts. . . . Your Majesty will not forget that, when I accepted the office of comptroller-general, I perceived all the preciousness of the confidence with which you honor me; . . . but, at the same time I perceived all the danger to which I was exposing myself. I foresaw that I should have to fight single-handed against abuses of every sort, against the efforts of such as gain by those abuses, against the host of the prejudiced who oppose every reform, and who, in the hands of interested persons, are so powerful a means of perpetuating disorder. I shall be feared, shall be even hated by the greater part of the court, by all that solicit favors. . . . This people to whom I shall have sacrificed myself is so easy to deceive, that I shall perhaps incur its hatred through the very measures I shall take to defend it against hara.s.sment. I shall be calumniated, and perhaps with sufficient plausibility to rob me of your Majesty's confidence.

. . . You will remember that it is on the strength of your promises that I undertake a burden perhaps beyond my strength; that it is to you personally, to the honest man, to the just and good man, rather than to the king, that I commit myself."

It is to the honor of Louis XVI. that the virtuous men who served him, often with sorrow and without hoping anything from their efforts, always preserved their confidence in his intentions. "It is quite encouraging,"

wrote M. Turgot to one of his friends, "to have to serve a king who is really an honest and a well-meaning man." The burden of the necessary reforms was beyond the strength of the minister as well as of the sovereign; the violence of opposing currents was soon about to paralyze their genuine efforts and their generous hopes.

M. Turgot set to work at once. Whilst governing his district of Limoges, he had matured numerous plans and shaped extensive theories. He belonged to his times and to the school of the philosophers as regarded his contempt for tradition and history; it was to natural rights alone, to the innate and primitive requirements of mankind, that he traced back his principles and referred as the basis for all his attempts. "The rights of a.s.sociated men are not founded upon their history but upon their nature," says the _Memoire au Roi sur les Munic.i.p.alites,_ drawn up under the eye of Turgot. By this time he desired no more to reform old France; he wanted a new France. "Before ten years are over," he would say, "the nation will not be recognizable, thanks to enlightenment. This chaos will have a.s.sumed a distinct form. Your Majesty will have quite a new people, and the first of peoples." A profound error, which was that of the whole Revolution, and the consequences of which would have been immediately fatal; if the powerful instinct of conservatism and of natural respect for the past had not maintained between the regimen which was crumbling away and the new fabric connections more powerful and more numerous than their friends as well as their enemies were aware of.

Two fundamental principles regulated the financial system of M. Turgot, economy in expenditure and freedom in trade; everywhere he ferreted out abuses, abolis.h.i.+ng useless offices and payments, exacting from the entire administration that strict probity of which he set the example. Louis XVI. supported him conscientiously at that time in all his reforms; the public made fun of it. "The king," it was said, "when he considers himself an abuse, will be one no longer." At the same time, a decree of September 13, 1774, re-established at home that freedom of trade in grain which had been suspended by Abbe Terray, and the edict of April, 1776, founded freedom of trade in wine. "It is by trade alone, and by free trade, that the inequality of harvests can be corrected," said the minister in the preamble of his decree. "I have just read M. Turgot's masterpiece," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert "it seems to reveal to us new heavens and a new earth." It was on account of his financial innovations that the comptroller-general particularly dreaded the return of the old Parliament, with which he saw himself threatened every day. "I fear opposition from the Parliament," he said to the king. "Fear nothing,"

replied the king warmly, "I will stand by you;" and, pa.s.sing over the objections of the best politician amongst his ministers, he yielded to M.

de Maurepas, who yielded to public opinion. On the 12th of November, 1774, the old Parliament was formally restored.

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 reconst.i.tuted, enfeebled in the eyes of public opinion, but more than ever obstinate and Fronde-like, found themselves free to hara.s.s, 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."