A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times Volume VI Part 21

The active charity of Madame Necker had won her the esteem of the Archbishop of Paris, Christopher de Beaumont, a virtuous, fanatical priest; he had gained a great lawsuit against the city of Paris, which had to pay him a sum of three hundred thousand livres. "It is our wish,"

said the archbishop, "that M. Necker should dispose of these funds to the greatest advantage for the state, trusting to his zeal, his love of good, and his wisdom, for the most useful employment of the said funds, and desiring further that no account be required of him, as to such employment, by any person whatsoever." The prelate's three hundred thousand livres were devoted to the internal repairs of the Hotel-Dieu.

"How is it," people asked, "that the archbishop thinks so highly of M.

Necker, and even dines with him?" "0!" answered the wicked wags, "it is because M. Necker is not a Jansenist, he is only a Protestant."

Notwithstanding this unusual tolerance on the part of Christopher de Beaumont, his Protestantism often placed M. Necker in an awkward position. "The t.i.tle of liberator of your Protestant brethren would be a flattering one for you," said one of the pamphlets of the day, "and it would be yours forever, if you could manage to obtain for them a civil existence, to procure for them the privileges of a citizen, liberty and tolerance. You are sure of a diminution in the power of the clergy.

Your vigorous edict regarding hospitals will pave the way for the ruin of their credit and their wealth; you have opened the trenches against them, the great blow has been struck. All else will not fail to succ.u.mb; you will put all the credit of the state and all the money of France in the hands of Protestant bankers, Genevese, English, and Dutch. Contempt will be the lot of the clergy, your brethren will be held in consideration.

These points of view are full of genius, you will bring great address to bear upon them." M. Necker was at the same time accused of being favorable to England. "M. Necker is our best and our last friend on the Continent," Burke had said in the House of Commons. Knowing better than anybody the burdens which the war imposed upon the state, and which he alone had managed to find the means of supporting, M. Necker desired peace. It was for Catholics and philosophers that the honor was reserved of restoring to Protestants the first right of citizens, recognition of their marriages and a civil status for their children. The court, the parliaments, and the financiers were leagued against M. Necker. "Who, pray, is this adventurer," cried the fiery Epremesnil, "who is this charlatan who dares to mete out the patriotism of the French magistracy, who dares to suppose them lukewarm in their attachments and to denounce them to a young king?" The a.s.sessment of the twentieths (tax) had raised great storms; the ma.s.s of citizens were taxed rigorously, but the privileged had preserved the right of themselves making a declaration of their possessions; a decree of the council ordered verification of the income from properties. The Parliaments burst out into remonstrances.

"Every owner of property has the right to grant subsidies by himself or by his representatives," said the Parliament of Paris; "if he do not exercise this right as a member of a national body, it must be reverted to indirectly, otherwise he is no longer master of his own, he is no longer undisturbed owner." Confidence in personal declarations, then, is the only indemnity for the right, which the nation has not exercised but has not lost, of itself granting and a.s.sessing the twentieths. A bold principle, even in a free state, and one on which the income-tax rests in England, but an untenable principle, without absolute equality on the part of all citizens and a common right to have their consent asked to the imposts laid upon them.

M. Necker did not belong to the court; he had never lived there, he did not set foot therein when he became minister. A while ago Colbert and Louvois had founded families and taken rank among the great lords who were jealous of their power and their wealth. Under Louis XVI., the court itself was divided, and one of the queen's particular friends, Baron do Besenval, said, without mincing the matter, in his Memoires: "I grant that the depredations of the great lords who are at the head of the king's household are enormous, revolting. . . . Necker has on his side the depreciation into which the great lords have fallen; it is such that they are certainly not to be dreaded, and that their opinion does not deserve to be taken into consideration in any political speculation."

M. Necker had a regard for public opinion, indeed he attached great importance to it, but he took its influence to be more extensive and its authority to rest on a broader bottom than the court or the parliaments would allow. "The social spirit, the love of regard and of praise," said he, "have raised up in France a tribunal at which all men who draw its eyes upon them are obliged to appear: there public opinion, as from the height of a throne, decrees prizes and crowns, makes and unmakes reputations. A support is wanted against the vacillations of ministers, and this important support is only to be expected from progress in the enlightenment and resisting power of public opinion. Virtues are more than ever in want of a stage, and it becomes essential that public opinion should rouse the actors; it must be supported, then, this opinion, it must be enlightened, it must be summoned to the aid of ideas which concern the happiness of men."

M. Necker thought the moment had come for giving public opinion the summons of which he recognized the necessity he felt himself shaken at court, weakened in the regard of M. de Maurepas, who was still puissant in spite of his great age, and jealous of him as he had been of M.

Turgot; he had made up his mind, he said, to let the nation know how its affairs had been managed, and in the early days of the year 1781 he published his _Compte rendu au roi_.

It was a bold innovation; hitherto the administration of the finances had been carefully concealed from the eyes of the public as the greatest secret in the affairs of state; for the first time the nation was called upon to take cognizance of the position of the public estate, and, consequently, pa.s.s judgment upon its administration. "The princ.i.p.al cause of the financial prosperity of England, in the very midst of war, said the minister, "is to be found in the confidence with which the English regard their administration and the source of the government's credit." The annual publication of a financial report was, M. Necker thought, likely to inspire the same confidence in France. It was paying a great compliment to public opinion to attribute to it the power derived from free inst.i.tutions and to expect from satisfied curiosity the serious results of a control as active as it was minute.

The Report to the king was, moreover, not of a nature to stand the investigation of a parliamentary committee. In publis.h.i.+ng it M. Necker had a double end in view. He wanted, by an able exposition of the condition of the treasury, to steady the public credit which was beginning to totter, to bring in fresh subscribers for the loans which were so necessary to support the charges of the war; he wanted at the same time to call to mind the benefits and successes of his own administration, to restore the courage of his friends and reduce his enemies to silence. With this complication of intentions, he had drawn up a report on the ordinary state of expenditure and receipts, designedly omitting the immense sacrifices demanded by the land and sea armaments as well as the advances made to the United States. He thus arrived, by a process rather ingenious than honest, at the establishment of a budget showing a surplus of ten million livres. The maliciousness of M. de Maurepas found a field for its exercise in the calculations which he had officially overhauled in council. The Report was in a cover of blue marbled paper. Have you read the _Conte bleu_ (a lying story)?" he asked everybody who went to see him; and, when he was told of the great effect which M. Necker's work was producing on the public: "I know, I know," said the veteran minister, shrugging his shoulders, "we have fallen from Turgomancy into Necromancy."

M. Necker had boldly defied the malevolence of his enemies. "I have never," said he, "offered sacrifice to influence or power. I have disdained to indulge vanity. I have renounced the sweetest of private pleasures, that of serving my friends or winning the grat.i.tude of those who are about me. If anybody owes to my mere favor a place, a post, let us have the name." He enumerated all the services he had rendered to the king, to the state, to the nation, with that somewhat pompous satisfaction which was afterwards discernible in his Memoires. There it was that he wrote: "Perhaps he who contributed, by his energies, to keep off new imposts during five such expensive years; he who was able to devote to all useful works the funds which had been employed upon them in the most tranquil times; he who gratified the king's heart by providing him with the means of distributing among his provinces the same aids as during the war, and even greater; he who, at the same time, proffered to the monarch's amiable impatience the resources necessary in order to commence, in the midst of war, the improvement of the prisons and the hospitals; he who indulged his generous inclinations by inspiring him with the desire of extinguis.h.i.+ng the remnants of serf.a.ge; he who, rendering homage to the monarch's character, seconded his disposition towards order and economy; he who pleaded for the establishment of paternal administrations in which the simplest dwellers in the country-places might have some share; he who, by manifold cares, by manifold details, caused the prince's name to be blest even in the hovels of the poor,--perhaps such a servant has some right to dare, without blus.h.i.+ng, to point out, as one of the first rules of administration, love and care for the people."

"On the whole," says M. Droz, with much justice, in his excellent _Histoire du regne de Louis XVI.,_ "the Report was a very ingenious work, which appeared to prove a great deal and proved nothing." M. Necker, however, had made no mistake about the effect which might be produced by this confidence, apparently so bold, as to the condition of affairs in a single year, 1781, the loans amounted to two hundred and thirty-six millions, thus exceeding in a few months the figures reached in the four previous years. A chorus of praises arose even in England, reflected from the minister on to his sovereign. "It is in economy," said Mr.

Burke, "that Louis XVI. has found resources sufficient to keep up the war. In the first two years of this war, he imposed no burden on his people. The third year has arrived, there has as yet been no question of any impost, indeed I believe that those which are a matter of course in time of war have not yet been put on. I apprehend that in the long run it will no doubt be necessary for France to have recourse to imposts, but these three years saved will scatter their beneficent influence over a whole century. The French people feel the blessing of having a master and minister devoted to economy; economy has induced this monarch to trench upon his own splendor rather than upon his people's subsistence.

He has found in the suppression of a great number of places a resource for continuing the war without increasing his expenses. He has stripped himself of the magnificence and pomp of royalty, but he has manned a navy; he has reduced the number of persons in his private service, but he has increased that of his vessels. Louis XVI., like a patriotic king, has shown sufficient firmness to protect M. Necker, a foreigner, without support or connection at court, who owes his elevation to nothing but his own merit and the discernment of the sovereign who had sagacity enough to discover him, and to his wisdom which can appreciate him. It is a n.o.ble example to follow: if we would conquer France, it is on this ground and with her own weapons that we must fight her: economy and reforms."

It was those reforms, for which the English orator gave credit to M. Necker and Louis XVI., that rendered the minister's fall more imminent every day. He had driven into coalition against him the powerful influences of the courtiers, of the old families whose hereditary destination was office in the administration, and of the parliament everywhere irritated and anxious. He had lessened the fortunes and position of the two former cla.s.ses, and his measures tended to strip the magistracy of the authority whereof they were so jealous. "When circ.u.mstances require it," M. Necker had said in the Report, "the augmentation of imposts is in the hands of the king, for it is the power to order them which const.i.tutes sovereign greatness;" and, in a secret Memoire which saw publicity by perfidious means: "The imposts are at their height, and minds are more than ever turned towards administrative subjects. The result is a restless and confused criticism which adds constant fuel to the desire felt by the parliaments to have a hand in the matter. This feeling on their part becomes more and more manifest, and they set to work, like all those bodies that wish to acquire power, by speaking in the name of the people, calling themselves defenders of the nation's rights; there can be no doubt but that, though they are strong neither in knowledge nor in pure love for the well-being of the state, they will put themselves forward on all occasions as long as they believe that they are supported by public opinion. It is necessary, therefore, either to take this support away from them, or to prepare for repeated contests which will disturb the tranquillity of your Majesty's reign, and will lead successively either to a degradation of authority or to extreme measures of which one cannot exactly estimate the consequences."

In order to apply a remedy to the evils he demonstrated as well as to those which he foresaw, M. Necker had borrowed some shreds from the great system of local a.s.semblies devised by M. Turgot; he had proposed to the king and already organized in Berry the formation of provincial a.s.semblies, recruited in every district (_generalite_) from among the three orders of the n.o.blesse, the clergy, and the third estate. A part of the members were to be chosen by the king; these were commissioned to elect their colleagues, and the a.s.sembly was afterwards to fill up its own vacancies as they occurred. The provincial administration was thus confided almost entirely to the a.s.semblies. That of Berry had already abolished forced labor, and collected two hundred thousand livres by voluntary contribution for objects of public utility. The a.s.sembly of Haute-Guyenne was in course of formation. The districts (_generalites_) of Gren.o.ble, Montauban, and Moulins claimed the same privilege. The parliaments were wroth to see this a.s.sault upon their power. Louis XVI.

had hesitated a long while before authorizing the attempt. "The presidents-born, the councillors, the members of the states-districts (_pays d'etats_), do not add to the happiness of Frenchmen in the districts which are under their administration," wrote the king in his marginal notes to M. Necker's scheme. "Most certainly Brittany, with its states, is not happier than Normandy which happens to be without them.

The most just and most natural among the powers of the parliaments is that of hanging robbers of the finances. In the event of provincial administrations, it must not be taken away. It concerns and appertains to the repose of my people to preserve privileges."

The instinct of absolute power and the traditions of the kings.h.i.+p struggled in the narrow mind and honest heart of Louis XVI. against the sincere desire to ameliorate the position of his people and against a vague impression of new requirements. It was to the former of these motives that M. de Vergennes appealed in his Note to the king on the effect of the Report. "Your Majesty," he said, "is enjoying the tranquillity which you owe to the long experience of your ancestors, and to the painful labors of the great ministers who succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng subordination and general respect in France. There is no longer in France clergy, or n.o.blesse, or third estate; the distinction is fact.i.tious, merely representative and without real meaning; the monarch speaks, all else are people, and all else obey.

"M. Necker does not appear content with this happy state of things. Our inevitable evils and the abuses flowing from such a position are in his eyes monstrosities; a foreigner, a republican, and a Protestant, instead of being struck with the majestic totality of this harmony, he sees only the discordants, and he makes out of them a totality which he desires to have the pleasure and the distinction of reforming in order to obtain for himself the fame of a Solon or a Lycurgus.

"Your Majesty, Sir, told me to open my heart to you: a contest has begun between the regimen of France and the regimen of M. Necker. If his ideas should triumph over those which have been consecrated by long experience, after the precedent of Law, of Mazarin, and of the Lorraine princes, M. Necker, with his Genevese and Protestant plans, is quite prepared to set up in France a system in the finance, or a league in the state, or a 'Fronde' against the established administration. He has conducted the king's affairs in a manner so contrary to that of his predecessors that he is at this moment suspected by the clergy, hateful to the grandees of the state, hounded to the death by the heads of finance (_la haute finance_), dishonored amongst the magistracy. His Report, on the whole, is a mere appeal to the people, the pernicious consequences whereof to this monarchy cannot as yet be felt or foreseen. M. Necker, it is true, has won golden opinions from the philosophy and the innovators of these days, but your Majesty has long ago appraised the character of such support. In his Report M. Necker lays it down that advantage has been taken of the veil drawn over the state of the finances in order to obtain, amidst the general confusion, a credit which the state would not otherwise be ent.i.tled to. It is a new position, and a remarkable one in our history is that of M. Necker teaching the party he calls public opinion that under a good king, under a monarch beloved of the people, the minister of finance has become the sole hope, the sole security, by his moral qualities, of the lenders and experts who watch the government.

It will be long before your Majesty will close up the wound inflicted upon the dignity of the throne by the hand of the very person in the official position to preserve it and make it respected by the people."

The adroit malevolence of M. de Vergennes had managed to involve in one and the same condemnation the bold innovations of M. Necker and the faults he had committed from a self-conceit which was sensitive and frequently hurt. He, had not mentioned M. de Maurepas in his long exposition of public administration, and it was upon the virtue of the finance-minister that he had rested all the fabric of public confidence.

The contest was every day becoming fiercer and the parties warmer. The useful reforms, the generous concern for the woes and the wants of the people, the initiative of which belonged to M. Necker, but which the king always regarded with favor, were by turns exclusively attributed to the minister and to Louis XVI. in the pamphlets published every day. Madame Necker became anxious and heartbroken at the vexation which such attacks caused her husband. "The slightest cloud upon his character was the greatest suffering the affairs of life could cause him," writes Madame de Stael; "the worldly aim of all his actions, the land-breeze which sped his bark, was love of reputation." Madame Necker took it into her head to write, without her husband's knowledge, to M. de Maurepas to complain of the libels spread about against M. Necker, and ask him to take the necessary measures against these anonymous publications this was appealing to the very man who secretly encouraged them.. Although Madame Necker had plenty of wits, she, bred in the mountains of Switzerland, had no conception of such an idiosyncrasy as that of M. de Maurepas, a man who saw in an outspoken expression of feeling only an opportunity of discovering the vulnerable point. As soon as he knew M. Necker's susceptibility he flattered himself that, by irritating it, he would drive him to give in his resignation." [_onsiderations sur la Revolution frangaise,_t. i. p. 105.]

M. Necker had gained a victory over M. de Maurepas when he succeeded in getting M. de Sartines and the Prince of Montbarrey superseded by MM. de Castries and de Segur. Late lieutenant of police, with no knowledge of administration, M. de Sartines, by turns rash and hesitating, had failed in the difficult department of the ministry of marine during a distant war waged on every sea; to him were attributed the unsatisfatory results obtained by the great armaments of France; he was engaged in the intrigue against M. Necker. The latter relied upon the influence of the queen, who supported MM. de Castries and de Segur, both friends of hers. M. de Sartines was disgraced; he dragged down with him in his fall the Prince of Montbarrey, the heretofore indifferent lieutenant of M. de Saint- Germain. M. de Maurepas was growing feeble, the friends of M. Necker declared that he drivelled, and the latter already aspired to the aged minister's place. As a first step, the director-general of finance boldly demanded to be henceforth admitted to the council.

Louis XVI. hesitated, perplexed and buffeted between contrary influences and desires. He was grateful to M. Necker for the courageous suppressions he had accomplished, and for the useful reforms whereof the honor was to remain inseparable from his name; it was at M. Necker's advice that he had abolished mortmain in his dominions. A remnant of feudal serfdom still deprived certain of the rural cla.s.ses, subject to the tenement law, of the right to marry or bequeath what they possessed to their children without permission of their lord. If they left the land which made them liable to this tyranny, their heritage reverted of right to the proprietor of the fief. Perfectly admitting the iniquity of the practice, Louis XVI. did not want to strike a blow at the principle of property; he confined himself to giving a precedent which the Parliament enregistered with this reservation: "Without there being anything in the present edict which can in any way interfere with the rights of lords." A considerable number of n.o.blemen imitated the sovereign; many held out, amongst others the chapter of St. Claude; the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the serfs of the Jura, in whose favor Voltaire had but lately pleaded, would have cost the chapter twenty-five thousand livres a year; the monks demanded an indemnification from government. The body serfs, who were in all places persecuted by the signiorial rights, and who could not make wills even on free soil, found themselves everywhere enfranchised from this harsh law. Louis XVI. abolished the _droit de suite_ (henchman-law), as well as the use of the preparatory question or preliminary torture applied to defendants. The regimen of prisons was at the same time ameliorated, the dark dungeons of old times restored to daylight the wretches who were still confined in them.

So many useful and beneficent measures, in harmony with the king's honest and generous desires, but opposed to the prejudices still potent in many minds and against the interests of many people, kept up about M. Necker, for all the esteem and confidence of the general public, powerful hatreds, ably served: his admission to the council was decidedly refused.

"You may be admitted," said M. de Maurepas with his, usual malice, "if you please to abjure the errors of Calvin." M. Necker did not deign to reply. "You who, being quite certain that I would not consent, proposed to me a change of religion in order to smooth away the obstacles you put in my path," says M. Necker in his Memoires, "what would you not have thought me worthy of after such baseness? It was rather in respect of the vast finance-administration that this scruple should have been raised. Up to the moment when it was intrusted to me, it was uncertain whether I was worth an exception to the general rules. What new obligation could be imposed upon him who held the post before promising?"

"If I was pa.s.sionately attached to the place I occupied," says M: Necker again, "it is on grounds for which I have no reason to blush. I considered that the administrator of finance, who is responsible on his honor for ways and means, ought, for the welfare of the state and for his own reputation, to be invited, especially after several years' ministry, to the deliberations touching peace and war, and I looked upon it as very important that he should be able to join his reflections to those of the king's other servants: A place in the council may, as a general rule, be a matter in which self-love is interested; but I am going to say a proud thing: when one has cherished another pa.s.sion, when one has sought praise and glory, when one has followed after those triumphs which belong to one's self alone, one regards rather coolly such functions as are shared with others."

"Your Majesty saw that M. Necker, in his dangerous proposal, was sticking to his place with a tenacity which lacks neither reason nor method," said M. de Vergennes in a secret Note addressed to the king; "he aspires to new favors, calculated from their nature to scare and rouse that long array of enemies by whom his religion, his birth, his wife, the epochs and improvements of their fortune, are, at every moment of his administration, exposed to the laughter or the scrutiny of the public.

Your Majesty finds yourself once more in the position in which you were with respect to M. Turgot, when you thought proper to accelerate his retirement; the same dangers and the same inconveniences arise from the nature of their a.n.a.logous systems."

It was paying M. Necker a great compliment to set his financial talents on a par with the grand views, n.o.ble schemes, and absolute disinterestedness of M. Turgot. Nevertheless, when the latter fell, public opinion had become, if not hostile, at any rate indifferent to him; it still remained faithful to M. Necker. Withdrawing his pretensions to admission into the council, the director-general of finance was very urgent to obtain other marks of the royal confidence, necessary, he said, to keep up the authority of his administration.

M. de Maurepas had no longer the pretext of religion, but he hit upon others which wounded M. Necker deeply; the latter wrote to the king on a small sheet of common paper, without heading or separate line, and as if he were suddenly resuming all the forms of republicanism: "The conversation I have had with M. de Maurepas permits me to no longer defer placing my resignation in the king's hands. I feel my heart quite lacerated by it, and I dare to hope that his Majesty will deign to.

preserve some remembrance of five years' successful but painful toil, and especially of the boundless zeal with which I devoted myself to his service." [May 19, 1783.]

M. Necker had been treated less harshly than M. Turgot. The king accepted his resignation without having provoked it. The queen made some efforts to retain him, but M. Necker remained inflexible. "Reserved as he was," says his daughter, "he had a proud disposition, a sensitive spirit; he was a man of energy in his whole style of sentiments." The fallen minister retired to his country-house at St. Ouen.

He was accompanied thither by the respect and regret of the public, and the most touching proofs of their esteem. "You would have said, to see the universal astonishment, that never was news so unexpected as that of M. Necker's resignation," writes Grimm in his _Correspondance litteraire;_ "consternation was depicted on every face; those who felt otherwise were in a very small minority; they would have blushed to show it. The walks, the cafes, all the public thoroughfares were full of people, but an extraordinary silence prevailed. People looked at one another, and mournfully wrung one another's hands, as if in the presence, I would say, of a public calamity, were it not that these first moments of distress resembled rather the grief of a disconsolate family which has just lost the object and the mainstay of its hopes. The same evening they gave, at the Comedie-Francaise, a performance of the _Partie de Cha.s.se de Henri IV_. I have often seen at the play in Paris allusions to pa.s.sing events caught up with great cleverness, but I never saw any which were so with such palpable and general an interest. Every piece of applause, when there was anything concerning Sully, seemed, so to speak, to bear a special character, a shade appropriate to the sentiment the audience felt; it was by turns that of sorrow and sadness, of grat.i.tude and respect; the applause often came so as to interrupt the actor the moment it was foreseen that the sequel of a speech might be applicable to the public feeling towards M. Necker. The players have been to make their excuses to the lieutenant of police, they established their innocence by proving that the piece had been on the list for a week.

They have been forgiven, and it was thought enough to take this opportunity of warning the journalists not to speak of M. Necker for the future-well or ill."

M. Necker derived some balm from these manifestations of public feeling, but the love of power, the ambition that prompted the work he had undertaken, the bitterness of hopes deceived still possessed his soul.

When he entered his study at St. Ouen, and saw on his desk the memoranda of his schemes, his plans for reforming the gabel, for suppressing custom-houses, for extending provincial a.s.semblies, he threw himself back in his arm-chair, and, dropping the papers he held in his hand, burst into tears. Like him, M. Turgot had wept when he heard of the re-establishment of forced labor and jurands.

"I quitted office," says M. Necker, "leaving funds secured for a whole year; I quitted it when there were in the royal treasury more ready money and more realizable effects than had ever been there within the memory of man, and at a moment when the public confidence, completely restored, had risen to the highest pitch.

"Under other circ.u.mstances I should have been more appreciated; but it is when one can be rejected and when one is no longer essentially necessary that one is permitted to fall back upon one's own reflections. Now there is a contemptible feeling which may be easily found lurking in the recesses of the human heart, that of preferring for one's retirement the moment at which one might enjoy the embarra.s.sment of one's successor. I should have been forever ashamed of such conduct; I chose that which was alone becoming for him who, having clung to his place from honorable motives, cannot, on quitting it, sever himself for one instant from the commonwealth."

M. Necker fell with the fixed intention and firm hope of soon regaining power. He had not calculated either the strength or inveteracy of his enemies, or the changeableness of that public opinion on which he relied.

Before the distresses of the state forced Louis XVI. to recall a minister whom he had deeply wounded, the evils which the latter had sought to palliate would have increased with frightful rapidity, and the remedy would have slipped definitively out of hands too feeble for the immense burden they were still ambitious to bear.

CHAPTER LIX.----LOUIS XVI.--M. DE CALONNE AND THE a.s.sEMBLY OF NOTABLES.

1781-1787.

We leave behind us the great and serious attempts at reform. The vast projects of M. Turgot, seriously meant and founded on reason, for all their somewhat imaginative range, had become, in M. Necker's hands, financial expedients or necessary remedies, honorably applied to the most salient evils; the future, however, occupied the mind of the minister just fallen; he did not content himself with the facile gratifications of a temporary and disputed power, he had wanted to reform, he had hoped to found; his successors did not raise so high their real desires and hopes.

M. Turgot had believed in the eternal potency of abstract laws; he had relied upon justice and reason to stop the kingdom and the nation on the brink of the abyss; M. Necker had nursed the illusion that his courage and his intelligence, his probity and his reputation would suffice for all needs and exorcise all dangers; both of them had found themselves thwarted in their projects, deceived in their hopes, and finally abandoned by a monarch as weak and undecided as he was honest and good.

M. de Turgot had lately died (March 20, 1781), in bitter sorrow and anxiety; M. Necker was waiting, in his retirement at St. Ouen, for public opinion, bringing its weight to bear upon the king's will, to recall him to office. M. de Maurepas was laughing in that little closet at Versailles which he hardly quitted any more: "The man impossible to replace is still unborn," he would say to those who were alarmed at M.

Necker's resignation. M. Joly de Fleury, councillor of state, was summoned to the finance-department; but so strong was the current of popular opinion that he did not take up his quarters in the residence of the comptroller-general, and considered himself bound to pay M. Necker a visit at St. Ouen.

Before experience had been long enough to demonstrate the error committed by M. de Maurepas in depriving the king of M. Necker's able and honest services, the veteran minister was dead (November 21, 1784). In the teeth of all inclinations opposed to his influence, he had managed to the last to preserve his sway over the mind of Louis XVI.: prudent, moderate, imperturbable in the evenness of his easy and at the same time sarcastic temper, he had let slide, so far as he was concerned, the reformers and their projects, the foreign war, the wrath of the parliaments, the remonstrances of the clergy, without troubling himself at any shock, without ever persisting to obstinacy in any course, ready to modify his policy according to circ.u.mstances and the quarter from which the wind blew, always master, at bottom, in the successive cabinets, and preserving over all the ministers, whoever they might be, an ascendency more real than it appeared. The king regretted him sincerely. "Ah!"

said he, "I shall no more hear, every morning, my friend over my head."

The influence of M. de Maurepas had often been fatal; he had remained, however, like a pilot still holding with feeble hand the rudder he had handled for so long. After him, all direction and all predominance of mind disappeared from the conduct of the government. "The loss is more than we can afford," said clear-sighted folks already.

For a moment, and almost without consideration, the king was tempted to expand his wings and take the government into his own hands; he had a liking for and confidence in M. de Vergennes; but the latter, a man of capacity in the affairs of his own department and much esteemed in Europe, was timid, devoid of ambition and always disposed to s.h.i.+ft responsibility into the hands of absolute power. Notwithstanding some bolder attempts, the death of M. de Maurepas did not seriously augment his authority. The financial difficulties went on getting worse; on principle and from habit, the new comptroller-general, like M. de Vergennes, was favorable to the traditional maxims and practices of the old French administration; he was, however, dragged into the system of loans by the necessities of the state, as well as by the ideas impressed upon men's minds by M. Necker. To loans succeeded imposts; the dues and taxes were increased uniformly, without regard for privileges and the burdens of different provinces; the Parliament of Paris, in the body of which the comptroller-general counted many relatives and friends, had enregistered the new edicts without difficulty; the Parliament of Besangon protested, and its resistance went so far as to place the comptroller-general on his defence. "All that is done in my name is done by my orders," replied Louis XVI. to the deputation from Franche-Comte.

The deputation required nothing less than the convocation of the States-general. On all sides the nation was clamoring after this ancient remedy for their woes; the most clear-sighted had hardly a glimmering of the transformation which had taken place in ideas as well as manners; none had guessed what, in the reign of Louis XVI., those States-general would be which had remained dumb since the regency of Mary de Medici.

Still more vehement and more proud than the Parliamentarians, the states of Brittany, cited to elect the deputies indicated by the governor, had refused any subsidy. "Obey," said the king to the deputies; "my orders have nothing in them contrary to the privileges which my predecessors were graciously pleased to grant to my province of Brittany." Scarcely had the Bretons returned to the states, when M. Amelot, who had charge of the affairs of Brittany, received a letter which he did not dare to place before the king's eyes. "Sir," said the states of Brittany, "we are alarmed and troubled when we see our franchises and our liberties, conditions essential to the contract which gives you Brittany, regarded as mere privileges, founded upon a special concession. We cannot hide from you, Sir, the direful consequences of expressions so opposed to the constant principles of our national code. You are the father of your people, and exercise no sway but that of the laws; they rule by you and you by them. The conditions which secure to you our allegiance form a part of the positive laws of your realm." Contrary to all received usages during the session of the states, the royal troops marched into Rennes; the n.o.blesse refused to deliberate, so long as the a.s.sembly had not recovered its independence. The governor applied to the petty n.o.bles who preponderated in their order; ignorant and poor as they were, they allowed themselves to be bought, their votes carried the day, and the subsidies were at last voted, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the most weighty of the n.o.blesse; a hundred of them persistently staid away.

Internal quarrels in the cabinet rendered the comptroller-general's situation daily more precarious; he gave in his resignation. The king sent for M. d'Ormesson, councillor of state, of a virtue and integrity which were traditional in his family, but without experience of affairs and without any great natural capacity. He was, besides, very young, and he excused himself from accepting such a post on the score of his age and his feeble lights. "I am only thirty-one, Sir," he said. "I am younger than you," replied the king, "and my post is more difficult than yours."

A few months later, the honest magistrate, overwhelmed by a task beyond his strength, had made up his mind to resign; he did not want to have any hand in the growing disorder of the finances; the king's brothers kept pressing him to pay their debts; Louis XVI. himself, without any warning to the comptroller-general, had just purchased Rambouillet from the Duke of Penthievre, giving a bond of fourteen millions; but Madame d'Ormesson had taken a liking to grandeur; she begged her husband hard to remain, and he did. It was not long before the embarra.s.sments of the treasury upset his judgment: the tax-farming contract, so ably concluded by M.

Necker, was all at once quashed; a _regie_ was established; the Discount- fund (_Caisse d'Escompte+) had lent the treasury six millions: the secret of this loan was betrayed, and the holders of bills presented themselves in a ma.s.s demanding liquidation; a decree of the council forbade payment in coin over a hundred livres, and gave the bills a forced currency. The panic became general; the king found himself obliged to dismiss M.

d'Ormesson, who was persecuted for a long while by the witticisms of the court. His incapacity had brought his virtue into ridicule.