Date: 1888-01-01T07:00:00+00:00
Description: Leon Say Great French Writers Turgot Great French Writers Turgot
Publisher: George Routledge and Sons, London

Great French Writers: Turgot

Leon Say

Great Frc1lth Writers TURCOT BY LEON SAY illem6er of ,Itt Fre"," A,adtlll)' GUSTAVE l\1:ASSON, B.A. UNIV. GALLIC .• OFFICI ••D ACAOiMIIl. ASSISTANT AIASTRR AND LID.A.IA~. HA••OW 'CHOOL LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS BROADWAY LUDGATE HILL GLASGOW AND NEW YORK 1888 GREAT FRENCH WRITERS. ORDER 010' PUBLICATION :..t, ...·MADAME DE SEV'fGNE. By GASTON B01SSIRR(FrenchAcadem}·). Trans!:tted by H. 1.. WILLIAl\I~. :<..... ~MONTF.SQl!IEU. Uy ALBERT SOREr.. Translated by GI.!STAVR MASSON. :V··VICTOR COUSIN. By jl..:LltS SIMON (Frencb Ar.ademy). Translated by.(ksT<\VJI: M.\SSQN • .....···GEORGE SAND. '3y Professor E. CARO (French Academy). Translated by GIlS1'AVIl. MASSON. '.;.-7URGOT. By l.e.oN SAY (French Academy). Translated by GlJ5T'\VI~ MASSON. 6.-VOl,TAJRE. By FlRl). BfwNE·rltIUt. 7.~···RACINE, By ANAT4.lLB FRANCIt. 8.....·BALZ,AC. By PAl'L D()'(JRGBT. ~.-VII"LON. ,By ProCessorGASTON PAals (French Institute).

10.·····D·,AlIBIGNE. By Professor G. GmzoT (College (If f'rance). tl.-IJOll.EA U. By FRRO. BKtlNETlbB. tz.· ..· ROllSSEA U. By VICTOR Cmnt8lJLlllT. (French Academy). 13..... YOSEPH DE MAISTRE. By ViscountE. M. DIl Voc:a:R. 14.-LAMART1Nlt.'. By oM. DB P01wtAIROLS. 1.'5 -··M l.TSSET. By Jur•.Es LJl:r.I.AZ'X'RK. I 6.-··SAINTE·BEUVE. By H. TAINB (French Academy). 11.""GU/ZOT. By Plofes$OrG. MONoo(Hautes Etudes}, GI\I~i\'I' I~l\l~ NC: II vVI\II'I~ I\S. STUDIES BY THE PRINCIPAL FRENCH AUTHORS OF THE DAY ON THE LIFE. WORKS, AND INFLUENCE OF THE PRINCIPAL FRENCH AUTHORS OF THE PAST. OtHt nineteenth century. now drawing to a dose. h.\§ shown fr<..)tll the fir~t, $ind will bequeath to the nut age, a vivid ta~t~ f~)r hi5Ioa°ic.,Jr~~;udl. t<.") whkh it h~a hl(m~bt an ardour, a method, crowned hy l\ suc(.e~:!. unyn:c:edented in ''')t'1llet timeiS. The "tory <.")f the \Vtlfld and iu inhabit.wtSi has bt),-;n entildy n·writH:o, The pid~:u:e of the $i.teh~l)io~'!-t b3.$ rtlStored to l!itht the h.,·melSl)( the hel'~!O of My~~eml.~ .\tld the very fe<4t\lr~~ of Se!>Qs.trls., R\.IJn$ explaine:d, hiertlgiyphs tr:\lls.!ated. have kd to re':'m· atituting the tife t~f the ilhl!HtlOUSdead, W1YI"t,me!ot,~ ~l)!~~mtil)g illto th~ir th')ught, With a still more ;ote[l~ J)lil.$s;iorls be'C'Ul$~ h was. bl~nded whh'ltr~ct;m" emr ctm tury ha~ applied \t!odf to T(Vlvingthe gn<l,t writen \,( ali Hteratufl:ls. tt>,)se doC~}"

~~~':~~1S ~~o't:~):~~~I~d:~t:~t.i~~~r~)~t.:~~ ~;~\ ~lt~I;~Oh~~~l~~~\lt~:~t ~(;~{:.n~:~~f i~~=;)~: up the biography of th<.)s(: illu'Stril>u:sm~ll we cherids a.. tour :~nee$tor.;, and wilt) wn· i~~:~~~ln~~t~I:') ~~~;;l:l~i:~re~a:(!rl~~!:¢$ and eaptah'l'i, to tht\ r(lrtt~l~m'l :..)f mudem For it is i.lrte Qf <.'IU' gIt)rie;o. lha>( lhe M~I\Y <.)f !-'r-.Allee has prnaiItd k:Mi h)' the power of arms If!:,,} by th~ power of dlouKht; and the action of ()ur em.mtrv upon th~ world hall f.'Ver hel:lll independent of bel' military triumph'S; indt\tff, line hM been seen c" predominate in the tTl(>!iC dilltre"!iin~ hmus Qf h<,:1' tl.\ticmal history. Ht\l1¢~ the gH:M thlr.1h~t"S of mu littmture have an intel'tlit nt)t ()l\ly for tn<it, dirt~("t d~''l.~~ndant!)~ hut al'!o\) fm-a h).fg~ F:uwpean p<.,*tefity·sc..aut:red h>\')'orid ~ur frontiers. Jnili~tol'\'l first, tben poputarisel"$, the F'r(tlt;h w,~r!e th~~ foremo:st, in th~ hmn,,,ii preYOlh'::lltat the Q~ning l)f thl:l Middle .Ag~$t t\) ti<;gia a 11~W' ht~r•.lttm~ ~ th(: fil"!,t $ocm~$ beard by ml.'I<!em St>t~kt)' in its ~radl\'$ wert\ F"tt\nchstmg'S. Like GHhk :~rt ;and the in.'ititutj(.lnof uni',;et"Slti~$, rr;t~di~t:vat literature (ommt:u~es in (lur "mintry, th~nce expands throughout Eurt,§.)e_ Here w..~ the b~gilluing.

But this liter..'ture was ignorant of th~ va.lue of form, In<:xkr;Aticlll,and rt~-;et\'e; it wu too 1Sp.-)l'llltn~ou'$, ))1)t sUlSk~itmtly rdle;:dve, too he(:dll~ss. :;:.f qucs.tlt.llS of .~rt. Th~ Frao(¢ of Lmlis. tbe .'ourtMl)th gave dut! honour to form, :and was in the ffil:'an· ~h~: ~~~ E~~o~a~h:~~~i;~i~f th~H~;::{~:~~~ttf ;,:.~~~~;~~;~a~i~in~t1~h~o:cl~~~i~~~od iOdentHk eta in which We Jive; it w.:ts the ~){,:l'kld of tnt.: ditl'usl(m ~)r Jhefilry' doc trines. Had not this l:llsk ken ('o<\lTkd (lut ;liS it W,:~l\. th" dtO~liny· e.-f lile;'at!m~ti would have ~ep dua.ngt:d; AriQ!'>lQ.T;ll-St)tC'arIlOt'tls. Shakcspeart", ",r S~ns,:r. :"ill the f(!t~ign writcr~ tOl;t~lh~r, tht);ie o( 1bt\ Ren;.\lll!S;lf!<.~e ~i>d thot!ti'$1Sb,~qu(:t)t, would not have ~u(fieed 10 brinK ab'out thios tdonn; .\nd our age would perhap~ rt<\,\"';:rh~we known tl'll)(;e imua."tiioned pCict\$,wht) h,u~: bn:n al the !same time perfe(t arti!its, fR'~ef' than ttldr prt~!:tlr~ii of oM, pUH,r in form th;m Hoik~u bAd ,-:over <.11°t:;lmd: the Chl!nier$, Keatll. Goethes,L,:u"w ..rdl"l~~s, I..(:opa.rdis.

!thny workt;~ the publication ot which h <arnpty t~15tifkd by ~H theM: rt~~"')fl~, hAve Ibef¢(Qre been dev{lt~d in i3ur d~y'S too tht: great 1, rellr;h w"lera. .\nd yet, do ~:~t:~t~~~i~bI1$c~~~rr~~i~h~<;:ll~U$j~ ~~c~~~.i~~,~:!~~~e~~$i~ltF~~~I~~t~U:~~~f fi~,~l~t~~~~ reaS(jn~. 10 the fit"5.t phu:lf',aftel" !l.a\Oingt.miiiy re~d ...(:d in lhe hHlt cCfllury lhe fc\Ody.t1cm (.If Nordiern !i(eratllt·~,. (t~clin~ at\ham~d ,of our }lI:.lHmWeC, we bt.'<.:~me ilJ:lFa!o.!;k~n~d f()f J. J. JUSSERAND. fureign works ••lot with(i\lt profit. hut verha~ t,,) excess. to the great prejudic~ at aU eVt~nts (If our natiollal anC¢,$tot:s, Th~~e ances.tor);, l'UQre;JV~rl1t h"'$nut b«n pos!iiblt lI.$ y¢'t ti) as"~~lci3te with 0\11' lives a~; we :;hould h.3"~ wi$.II«1,and to mingle them in the em-rem ,.,four daily idl!;~'!; .and thh. pt(;dsdy ¢l"l account of th¢ nature ofthe works that hav¢ been devoted to th¢'m,it h<l1. ll¢¢%\ no <:'a$.¥thing to do. f'I)f' where do thcs.e de;.\d revlv-e, In thdr work'l-.or \n l'l'eatis¢$ on ht.erature. That i...\. great. de....

no d,~uht; and the ~...utirut and $('.ho~arty editions and tht! wdl~1rdere(1 t~ath~ h.we rendered in Ollt days thh connrmniotl of 5Ouh. k~s. difficl1lt. But lll.at is not yet suflkient; we nr-e aceu,>tQmedrh,lwad.ay-s.to h<l.ve everythin~ rr.ade (,41~Y for us.: ~r<l.mmar5 and s.deflCes.,like tt'avellillg. hav~ hl.~~n :r.impliti¢;.i; yesterda\"$' impQ$.si. hiliti~ti h.w~ betJ,)nl~ l(l·<!i.lY';s matt~r", (If ~Qune. i'hilt is why th~ old iJ~athe$ on literature ofi.i!n r-e?d U& 3.XIU campletl.: edhklll!i do U(IS. aUl'\ct. They <U(: fiultabltt for ~~~~~;::'(~~hl~h h:~:$~~~~ }~~U~~it~hT~;~ ti~~ ~~t ;~e~il~hs. ai)t~l~:. ~~~ll~hi~h ()pen$ .~f it,;dr.· i5 the late~t flQVe]; whilt the works of gl'eat men. cQmplete and f~tllt· lees:'!, Motionless like rami!}' portraiB. "ellerat~(~l but $ddoru cQntemplated, stAnd in their fin" ;;u-rayon the high s.belve$.of Ollr librarks. Tlu:yare loved, yet flr:glectl'ld. Tho'!legre..'\tmelueem tlX) dj~(llnt, t<..,(> dilf*lrent, too Itrarned. IOU inac(;~s.....ible. The id~a (sf an ~titkin in many v(Jlum~. o( the notes.

which.divert OUt attent\t.ln, Qf the ~ck\\tifit: d~"Jlla}' whkn i<urr;;I)md:sth~ln. i)¢rhapl> the vague recollection of st.:hoo13lld d~u'Sk studi(:~. the jl\\'enil~ ta~k, t>N>r$$.$lhe mind; 'the idle :lour we 'md w dispose ~)f ba.$ ,\Ire;.\dy 8(1\\'%'1 aWOl}" and tlm5 we acquiM the habit QfJ.nying al>ide mu old ;.Ulth"lrs, like ~ihmt kings. t:areleu offamiliar con,,'ers\twith them. The object of the pr(:~ent coUf:¢tion i~ to r~c:"ll to our fire-~idC'S those great :nd'ro::r:il~e~1~~~~\4~r~n t~ iJ:~ajSit~;~~~ ;hk~\'~l~n~~~~l¢:~u~:~~(!;i~~ $tanding the cbllnge'1o Wl'ougl,t by time, tre unalloyed pre"ervation 1Jf 1.lUr national genius. III the volumes that are being published will l>t' f'hund pf~dt.e: ll'lfm'ma. lion on the Ii~, "'arks, and infhJen(.t~ of each of tbe wrilen eotlsf·,kuoUfiin universal litl;;ratl)r~. or reprt5t:ntingan original side of French intellect. • ht'!iehlmh will b¢ short. thdr price moderate; they will thu$ be aC<:e'>sible to everyone They will be uniform In size paper, }lrint with the specimt'n now before the r-eader. They Will Silt)}>'>' on doubtful polnt~ the latest result.. of hterary re,.ear~h, and lh(:r~hy ~:.t~ Ui~~l~~he~~~~h~i"i~~ ~a~J~~~~t~~~:~~:~~ :hen~:~p;;~~~~:n Il:r~heo~~s~ able contemporary writers baving been .Setllrea(ot' th~ series., Finally. an 31c<:urate reproduction of an authentic {.ortnUt win enable readers t'i make in some degre~ the acquaintance by sight or our great wril~rs.

In short, to rec:a.l1 the part they pl<1yed~ llaw better kU(lwn. dlanks to c:rudite retit::arches; to !itrengthen dleir action on the prcsent time; to ti&llt~n the bond' :md rnive the affection u'niting us to the pa$t ages of our literature; by contemptatinK tht pa:;t, to inspiTci:onfidence in the future. and !fitence if'it 00 po~~~ble, tnt: doleful voit~s ofthe disheartened/-'lIuch are<lUTchid objetu. ,\..~ also believe that this st:ries will han !.everal other aavantages. It is right that every geneTatioD should reckon up the riches bequeatbed to it by its ancestors,learniDg thu!! to make a bl!ttct use of them. Finally. there is no hetter test ohb¢ quality. power, and limitations of an a~e, than the verdict which it pal'>5CSonthe productions ofthe past. ltjudges itsetfwhde giving judgment on othef'$. h i. hoped that this series may ~~ at once useful in facilitatin~ the comprehension of former periods, and helpful to a knQwledge &)f the presen~ if the lIcheme. favourably received by the: public. should be carried on to final (t)mpl~tenesl;.

TRANSLAT()R'S PREFACE. M. Lt::ON SAY'S work may ~\Imosl be considered as an O1I'vrage dt ct'rtmukl/tcc, to u~e the French expression. Ne"'er perhaps has the controversy raged more vehemently than at the present time, betwetm free trade, fair trad(.~, and protection; never has it b(~en more necessary to study the earnest attc.~mpts madle to break down the ff~strkti",f.~ laws which, under the influence of medhf.~val traditions, hampered the devf..~lopmt.mt of commerce and industry in all their branches. Turgol was a m.an of the school ofMontcsquieu. "His wise and benevolent admini$tration/~ says Sir Jmnes Mackintosh, "though long enough for his glory, was too short, a.nd, per~ haps,too {!ar~y, for thOSf~ salutaryand grand ref()rms which hi~, genius had conceived, and his virtu(~ would have em.:ctf..~d .." At any rate, he has left behind him a reputation both as a politician and as a \vriter which time helps only to (:00 firm, and the person best qualified to give us the history of his eventful life was certainly the author of the present volume, who, a distinguished political economist, has inw herited from two generations of great men the doctrines he maintains w'ith so much ability and perseverance.

TtTRGOT'S \VORKS. ONI.Y a few of Tl1rgot's works appeared during his life time; amongst them are his RtJlcxli.mssur to. fOnllati01t et fa distribution tits rlcltesse$(1766, 12mo), and his poem in metrical verses, a few copie.., only of which were printed, and given away by him to his (ri(~nds. I>idmt,!}()I.WU tIt 7/t' S mllritJlus IleXamdllu, di1.dsl C1t JII dumfs, /radui/.f illl lve "'t/rt~ tie I'E1tHdf! de Virglle, avec Ie C011l1fZenCUntmt de f E,tUde, et Its ll~t VJU~ e.-t x· t~{[I£'I{1lt.s tiu meme (par Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot), 17i8, 108 pp., 4to (reprinted in the edition of the workspublishedby Dupont de Nemours). Turgot's works ha\'e been collected alter his death. (Ettvr~'s d4 ill. rurgi.", m1nistre d'tlat, }"tr/.ccder.st"/ ('tecum pag'IlItsde mlmoires et de 1ZotesJl/.r sa 'Zlit,SOIl atlm,i1zistrali'tm et .res ()1l7/rages (with the motto: "Bonum virum facile crcdercs, magnumlibenter."......Tacitus). Paris: Belin, x809¥ II, 9 vols., 8vo.

(E'zillrestie Turgot, ltOltVelle hti't/Oll dtlSSlt par ordre dt. 1IUltlt'res, (1.1.leC les }J(Jles de ill. Dupon! dt l'lemours, au..{;m~·;t tie de letlres ilddites, des questions St~r Ie commerceet d'()ostr va!l()lls et de 1tOles nOlnlt,'llts par ll,f"l1. l!.~t~~bte lh:ire tl Ilip!,,!;'!e IJtusard, et pricedl d'ZI1U /Jaffee sur fa 'Z'l~~ et les (}U'llr(r...~e-r de TuYcot, pllY At. Eu.rrhu Dain. Paris: Guillau·· min, 1844,2 vols.) large 8vo. Parts of Turgot's correspondence are to be found in various publications, such as the {ollowing: CorresjJOIultlltce'Jzldlle tft~ Ctm(/orct! tI de TttrKo/. J770-79 ; Henry's edition. Paris: Charava}',1882, 8vo. Lift t~nd CorresjJondeltce of ]Ja"l.tid lit/me, b}~ ]. Hill Burton. Edinburgh·: Blackwood,1846, 2 "ols., 8vo. Letters oj Emt'ntl# PerstJIu addressed if) lJa'ldd Humt J published by J. Hill Burton. Edinburgh and London, 1849, 8vo. Duptml de lVcmours t't l'Ecole jJltyslocrallque, by G.

Schelle. Paris: Guillaumin et Cie, 1888, Svo. There are, besides, unpublished letters of l'urgot in the archives of several familie_s, chiefly in those of the Turgat family (at the chateau of Lantbeuil) and of the descendants of Dupont de Nemours, now residing in the United States.

TURGOT. I 1'1 T R () n IT c: T ION A and hiding, whilst yet a child, under the arm <hairs, in order to avoid, out of sheer tlfaidity, the visits which his mother received; we have been told hO\v.. latcr on in his youth, he was wont to play at games of battled ore and shuttle cockJ dressed in his clerical cassock.. with the handsome young Irirl known then as ~Iinette .and who was after \vards to become l\fadame Helvetius. \Ve still possess the speeches he delivered as Prior of the House of Soroonne at the opening and at the closing of the S()r/J()niquesof 1750. 'Ve know what reasonsdetermined him to give up the Church, and how he filled offices in the magistracy, first as deputy..councillor to the solicitor- (pr()curtur)general, then as councillor to the parliament, then as malfn des requetes. \Ve have been asked to witness his first quarrel with the parliament; in 1754, on the day when he con· sented to becomea memberof a RoyalChamber,ordered to deliver justice in the place of the exiled parliament.

B 10 TlIrgot. \Ve have heard the 1II0tS of his friends, joyful at his appointment to the Intendance of Limoges, in 1761 ; and we have been rcminded of thc hopes which this appoint~ ment suggested to Voltaire: "One of our fellow-members has just written to me to say that an intendant is ~mly fit to do mischief; you will, I trust, prove that he c.an do a great deal of good." He remained thirtcen years at Limoges, and during the quarter of a century which elapsed between his admission at the Sorbonne and his departure {rom Limoges, he was the idol of the Elt&yc/{;pedistcsand the ·economists. He knew, in succession, Quesnay, Goumay, Dupont de Nemours, Voltaire, llume, Adam Smith, Condorcet. His correspondence is very extensive. He was the real chief of a school; and although the Due de Choiseul, alluding to him in 1769, said that "he had not a ministerial head," his master, his friends, his disciples already looked upon him as the only minister capable of restoring order to the administration and to the finances of the tottering monarchy.

The letters, plans, memoirs, opinions, decrees, circu~ lars, statements-··all that he wrote during the first part of his life, all has been preserved. \Ve can follow him, almost day by day, for the whole time during which he was in office from J7.~~ to 1774. At last, when forty-sel·en years of age, he became a cabinet-minister, prepared by a whole life of thought, study, and practice as an administrator. He wa.c; then ready to realise the widest and most fruitful reforms.

11tlroductiol1. II He re-established freedom in the corn trade, and con~ jured up popular anger by this measure, nevertheless so justified. He succeeded, to the astonishment of many people, in putting an end to the 1'1'("'( des jan·IIf.S, and crowned his work by prO<.~laiming the freedom of labour. The suppressionof the /lIralldes and mallrist! was the great act of his life, and, as it were, his economic will and testament. His memoirsaddressed to the king have been preserved, also his notes, the decrees of the council which he drew up, the preambles which he wrote at the head of his edicts during the course of his ministry. 'Ve know all that he thought, wrote, and did during an administra~ tion of twenty months-very short, as we sec, but the most admirable, the busiest that can be imagined. He fell at last, after a vigorous struggle, defeated by the coalition of interests and prejudices·~·-the coalition, says Voltaire, of financiers, courtiers (/a/(ms TOUgU), and magis~ trates (bonnt/scon-h) ,; then those who spoke of hi mdis n cussed endlesslythe (~uses of,his (ailure.

Turgot's downfallhas been ascribed to the threefoldfact that he undertook too many things at once; that he was too unbending, and that he was animated by a sectarian spirit. Critics have endeavoured to find out what are the qualities of a statesman which he needed to get on. His biographers follow him in his retreat, in order to understand him better; there they find him busy with scientific experiment.~, resuming the works on prosody which interested him in his early youth. B2 12 Ttt1~ot. He dies at last, at the age of fjfty~four, from an nttack of gout-·a mnlady which for more than twenty years had never ceased troubling him, and which made him answer to :hfalesherbes, who blamed him for being too much in a hurry: U I cannot help it! The needs of the people are immense; and in my family gout carries us off at fifty." For an those who have related to us his life, who have collected with a pious care his most trifling sayings, his slightest writings, TurgQt. isa...great mind, one of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century, the greatestJ perhapsl next to ~Iontesquieu; but they all look upon him as an unlucky reformer, who died at his work under the attacks of adversaries, weaker than himself, it is true, but more cunning; men who were no doubt less anxious' to know and to apply the great truths of political economy, but who were admirably trained to set in motion, for their own profit, aU the springs of court intrigues.

'Ve cannot conceal the fact that an utterance escapes from the bosom of those even who have most constantly lived near him, who have never ceased loving and admiring him. They all say, repeat, and write: Turgot did not possess the qualities which insure victory. ~1)' aim is to deduce from his life and his work a very different conclusion; and whilst speaking of him, I would treat him, not as a defeated man, but as a glorious. The fact is, that if he failed one hundred years ago, he has in reality lorded it over the present day. He has founded the political economy of the nineteenth century, 1'lirodllctiOll. 13 and, thanks to the freedom of labour which he has bequeathed to us, he has stamped upon the nineteenth century the mark which wi11 be its chief characteristic in history. Thanks to the freedom of work, the nineteenth century has been the age of industry on a large scale, the age of the application to the development of work and of riches of the great scientific, geographical, and economic discoveries. By causing the principles of the freedom of work to penetrate deeply into the conscience of France 'and of Europe, Turgot has opened the way to the conquest of the world by the civilisation of the 'Vest, and it is the nineteenth century which has accomplished that conquest.

A very remarkable indication of Turgot's individual action in the movement which has taken place during our own times is this: his inspiration seems still necessary at the present time to keep alive the principles of which he recommended the application. In order to prevent the present century from abandoning the track marked for it by Turgot, we are compelled to cling more than ever to his person, to his life, and to his actions; supported by him, we are obliged to engage once more in struggles very similar to those in which he was en gaged nearly one hundred and twenty years ago. Freedom of work, which was (or him the Alpha and Omega of all economiclaws, is to"day the object of the most spiritedattacks. It is no longer the privileged members of society, the Turgot. rich, the parliamentarians, the directing classes, as they were commonly designated, who, like in ancient times, are coalesced against Turgot.

The present reaction appears among the workmen, the sons of those who were, so to say, mad with joy when he proclaimed the decree abolishing the maUrises and the juranaes. The workmen are doing their best to clutch their broken fetters, in order to fasten them again upon themselves, thinking that they will find a protection in what was in days gone by (but they have forgotten it) the instrument of their oppression. The nineteenth century is Turgot's own, because it is the one during which his ideas have been applied, and where he has manifestly reigned over ideas and things. 'Vill it have been the only century during which Turgot's ideas have received so brilliant a satisfaction? \Vill the next century burn what we have worshipped? Dismal pro phets are not wanting to threaten us with that destiny. Those prophets of evil shall be belied by the events. Turgot has entered into his glory; he has entered into it for ever, and French political economy, of which he has been the true founder, does not yet feel disarmed. It is not on the point of striking its colours.

CllAPTER I. TURGOT'S FAMII#Y.-HIS CHILDIIOOD.-HIS F:nUCATION'.-TJlE SORllONNE. T URGOTJS family was one of the oldest in Nor mandy, and Cond<u:.cet tells us that, in the language of the Northern conquerors, his name means the giJd Thor. During the sixteenth century it had become divided into two branches---the Turgot des TouraiUes, and the Turgot de Saint-Clair. Their common ancestor, Louis Turgot, was moUre des nqllctes to Frnn)ois, Duke d'Alen -;on, and councillor at the presidiol (supreme court) of Caen. The eldest of his sons, Jean, was the first Turgot des TouraiHes; and the second, Antoine, was the first Turgot de Saint-Clair. One Turgot des Tourailles had to deal, as a soldier, in 16% I, with a certain l\Iontchretien, and this circumstance, singularly enough, brought into connection (or the first time the name of Turgot with that of the science upon which he has shed so much lustre.

~{ontchretien, son of a Falaise apothecary, a tragic author,and a soldierof fortune, had been commissioned.t nt the time of the rising at La Rochelle, by the Pro testant leaders, to summon together the Huguenots of 16 Tttrgot. Normandy. In a letter to Peiresc, dated Caen, October 14th, 162 I, M:alherbe thus describes the end of his expedition: H The event," says he, "which checkmated the Nor mandy rebels, has been the death of a man named hlontcbretien, who was the manager of all that business. About a week ago he came, at eight o'clock in the evening, accompanied by other fellows of the same quality, to an inn in a place called les Tourailles, twelve leagues off from here. Information was immediately given to the lord of the manor, of which the inn forms a part. He forthwith came with fifteen or twenty musketeers/' The band of rebels was dispersed, and the lord Qf Tourailleswho drove them away and killed their chief bore the name of Claude Turgot.

Now, that ~'Iontchretien, killed by a Turgot, had, besides his tragedies, written on industry and trade a work of remarkable sagacity; and that work bears the title, absolutely unknown then, of Trail;' rl'econo//lie P()lilique. It is the first time (1615) that a similar expression is used in our language to designate the science of politk..al economy, and the man who employed it before anyone else perished miserably by the hands of one who had the very name of the precursor of J. B. Say in France and Adam Smith in England.-the man, in shortJ. who shed so strong and so lasting a light on politiall economy, of which he is one or the founders.

Turgot's Ftl1Jli~y. The grandfather was Turgot the 'minister, descended from .Antoine Turgot de SaintuClair, but belonged to a younger branch. lIe had been ill/aulanl in the gillt.~ raJ/te of ~fetz and in that of Tours. His father, ~'lichel Etienne, was successively maUre des rei/llt/es,prh.l(jf dt"s marcnands (mayor) of Paris, member of the Aeatlbnle Ju itzscnptiollSd belles-ittlres,councillor of stat(~, and president of the grand ((}llSer1. Amongst his ancestors on his mother's side he counted Pierre Pithou, the celebrated jurist, of whom he was especially proud. lIe acquired a legiti~ mate celebrity as jJrl'1.lf)tdu martllal1ds. ' He undertook to improve the sanitary condition of the Paris swampswhich extended between the Houle"'ards and l\lontmartre, and ordered a large drain to be constructed, which bears his name. This drain still exists·~·partly, at least-under the Rue Saint~Lazare. 'Ve owe to l\lichel f~tienne Turgot one of the finest known plans (plans cQ'l.'alitrs; see Notes), and it bears his name; the fountain in the Rue de Grenelle was built, at his suggestion, by Bouchardon, whom he had trusted with the erection of it.

After having vacated his office, the prh..tQ/ dts mar" ellO/ldswas able to de\'ote to the administration of his property part of the leisure left to him by his duties ::lS councillor of state. His family estates were situated between Caen. Falaise~ Bayeux nnd the sea, in that part of Normandy represented now by the department of Calvados. These estates were raised to a marquisate in his honour, under the title of l\Iarquisate of Soumont.; after 18 Tzergot. the decease of the great minister, and with the view of bestowing further honour on his memory, the Turgots, Marquis de Soumont, were authorised to adopt the title of 1\farquis Turgot. The prh.llU des 11Iaychalldr did not reside at Sou mont, but at l.es Bons, Les BonsNTurgot, as Dupont de Nemours used to say, a small district not far distant from Soumont. Amongst the other plots of land, farms, and meadows which he possessed were those of Laulne and Brucourt, of which mty Turgot bore the name. At the Sorbonne he used to be styled the Abbe de Laulne; when he left it he took the name of Turgot de Brucourt.

The (ndteauofLantheuil, situated not farfrom LesBons, and which is, so to say, the cradle of the family, was then in possession of the elder branch, the Turgots de Saint~ Clair. It belonged later on to the ~larquis Turgot. The present ~larquis Turgot has gathered.together at Lan~ theuil all his family papers. He has been kind enough to show them to mc, and he has allowed me to consult them. 1 have had in my hands the first draft written by the great Turgot currente (alamo, and bearing some erasures, of the letter which he addressed to the king, August 26, 1774, for the purpose of placing under his, eyes, as he says, the engagement which he had made with himself to support him in his plans of economy. I thought I could hear the firm but feeling YOice of the great man, that voice so sweet when he was conversing with his friends, so stern when he was speaking to his adversaries. I have found in the same family records Turgot's rtl/llil)l. 19 numerous traces of the examination made by l\tales·· herbes ofTurgot's papers, after his death, for the purpose of selecting the notes, documents, and ~ISS. which were about to he given up to Dupont de Nemours. They were to be published by thnt gentleman's care, and to form the first edition of Turgot's works.

The prh.'ul du m(1r(nands died February 1st, 175I, leaving three sons tlnd one daughter. The eldest son entered the magistracy,tlnd was prhidelll (i lIloT/itT in the Paris parliament at the time of his death. The second, known as Ie Chtt'all~'f' TUTga/, was a sot/onl, an adminis~ trator, nnd a soldier; he was for a time gO~'ernor of Guyan.l. The third, lastly, is the minister. The da.ughter had married the Duke de Saint"Aignan. The third son, the reforming minister, was born in Paris, ~Iay Ioth t 1727. lie was studious) timid, and awkward. The bashfulness which characterised his youth never completely forsook him. ":My words arc somewhat confused,u he said one d~\y to Louis XVI, U but the fact is that I feel troubled.t' H I know thut you are limid,'t answeredthe king. He was educated at the College Louis~le~Grand; t.hen at the theological school of Saint~Sulpicc. As early as 1743, when sixteen )"ears old, he attended the lectures of the theological /acult;. In 1 746 he was obliged to obtai n a special permission, on account of his age, in order to be admittedto the examination.

That permission had been granted to him by the theo· logical/(1('III/(, "owingl)----such were the words·,---uto the 20 Tu'rgot. king's very powerful recommendation, but also in acknowledgment of the most important services rendered during the course of his administration by ~1. Turgot's very illustrious {ather to the city of Paris and to the ,rarious orders of the/act/lie itself." This special permission bears date October 1St, J 746. Six months later, on the 11th of ~larch, 1747, the prit/of des marc/lands wrote to his second son, the chevalier, then at :Malta, that his brother the abbe had maintained his B.A. thesis examination with brilliant success. " Your brother the abbe," snid he, U has maintained his thesis with every possible distinction; he has gone infinitely beyond my expectations, for he did not sho'v the slightest timidity, and received the applause of all persons present. The examination took place in the outer schools of the Sorbonne, the hall of which is im mense. It was perfectly furnished and lighted up; and, extensive as it is, it never ceased to be full of company during the five hours of the examination.

H My Lord the Archbishop of Tours presided. The assembly of the clergy, which is just now held in Paris, and over which he also presides, came likewise, as a body, to hear the thesis. l\fy Lord the Archbishop of Paris, on his part, came In fi(Jcchi. His cross-bearer, dressed in a surplice, carried the cross, sitting near the carriage-door; he walked before him in the han, and occupied a stool opposite him, holding that large and beautiful archiepiscopal cross, which is of silver gilt.

21 ,\rhen the archbishop had left the room the Papal nuncio came imd remained there more than one hour nnd a half. As he went out, he said to the abbe, to the doctors of Sorbonne who accompanied him, likewise to your brother and to ~1. de ercH, that he had often been present at theologk.al disputntions, but that he had never yet heard a thesis maintained like this one. U The Archbishop of Tours, on stepping down fronl hb pulpit, embraced the abbl, saying to him that he caned that maintaining a thesis in a splendid style. He went the next day to Versailles, and the king having asked him whether he was at the assembly of the clergy the day before, he answered in the negative. The king wanted to know why. He said that he was l)residing over a thesis. (\Vhose was it?' 'The Abbe Turgot.' The king thereupon asked whether the discussion was a good one; and the archbishop was kind enough to tell his majesty that he had never seen :l discussion carried on with so much superiority. He added, moreover, that there was not 3 greater and nrore deserving subject than the abb;. All this is most flattering for us, and ought to give you, too, much pleasure."

Two years later, April 7th, 1749, he composed the first of his works on political economy. It is a letter written from the theological school to his (ellow-pupil, the Abbe de Cice,.containing a refutation of the defence of Law'g system, published twenty years before by the Abbe Terrasson. Turgot did not regard metaHic currencyas a sign. U It 22 Tlt1~Ot. is," says he, "as an article of merchandise that money is, not the sign, but the common measure of other merchandise. " \Vhilst refuting the idea, so widely spread, that metallic currency is only a sign founded upon the royal stamp, Turgot did justice to those Utopists who then believed, as they did during the Revolution, and as many still believe at the present day, that the State can meet public expenditure by issuing bills which are not payable in cash, but arc transformed by virtue of a law into compulsory money. "The king," says he, "will enjoy merely a transitory advantage in the creation of bills, or rather in their multiplication; but that advantage will soon vanish away, because commodities will rise in price propor tionately to the number of bills."

Dupont de Nemours, publishing that letter, remarks: "If, forty years later, the majority of the citizens who formed the Constituent Assembly had possessed as much intelligence as he (Turgot) had already at so early an age, France might have been saved from the assigna/s." At the beginning of the year 1749 the young Abbe de Laulne was admitted as Master of Arts (courir sa licence),that is to say, he was allowed to take his last degrees. The house of Sorbonne was a society the members of which followed the studies and exercises of the theolo~ gical jamlles. These members formed an association composed of about one hundred clergymen, chiefly 23 bishops, vlcars"geneml, canons, (uris of Paris and ot the prindpal cities of the realm. The house was a large one; it still exists; it i~ the SQrbonne; it contained thirt}"..six sets o( rooms, together with a church, a fine library, a garden, and servants belonging to the com"

munity. The meals were taken together. As many of thee(~desiastics lived at their own houses or in province, a certain number of apartments were reserved for the ac.:commodation of ten or twelve students. It is one of these ten or twelve places which had been given to the son of the pdr.~ol du marella/Ids. The l\f.A. degree (licc1l(t) for which he was preparing consisted of a certain number of theses :,.--first, the letllali1 't, which qualified you to be a Bachelor: Turgot had already maintained it. Then there were the m,ilturt, the ....wrbomque, and the majture. Six months after his admission at the Sorbonne, that is to say, on December 31, 1749, he had been elected prior. This was a kind of hontage paid to distinguished young men, and to the sons of illustrious parents. Together with the title of prior, they enjoyed the right of presiding over the assemblies; and they were obliged (this was regarded as an honour likewise) to deliver Latin speeches on subjects chiefly connected with religion.

Turgot presided first as prior over the assemblyheld ~{ay 16, 1750, when the Abb~ Morellet was admitted on trial-~Iorellet, who was about to become his friend, and T1u;gOt. who was during his whole liCe his enthusiastic admirer. He then presided over the assembly of the 13th of August in the same year, when the same l\{orellet was definitely received a Fellow of the society. From 1743 to 1750 TurKot had never ceased to prosecute theological studies, and these studies, together with the exercises which were their necessary comple ment, had given to his mind a most wonderful maturity. U To go with some distinction," says r.iorellet, '-through the theological exercises, required some amount of talent, some skill in clearing the objection and answering it. Turgot often said to me, l~ughjng, (~iy dear Abbe, we who have gone through the licence are the only men qualified to reason accurately.'"

'Ve still possess the two speeches made by Turgot at the opening of the Sor!Joni'qlltSfor the )'ear 1750; the subject of the former is the blessings which the establish ment of Christianity has procured to mankind. It is a remarkable piece of composition, but still. resembles a rhetorician's exercise; one of those excellent Latin speeches which, a few years ago, used to be crowned in the same Sorbonne at the general competition between the Paris !ycces. 'Vriting to his brother, the chevalier (July 30, 175~) he says: cc I have had to write a Latin speech, which I delivered on the 3rd of July, and of which the success was most flattering for me. I have now about four speech/ets every week, with twelve arguments, waiting till I deliver a second one on the 27th of November. I am occupied with it now"

Turgot's Falllily. 25 "'riting to the same chevalier, on the 2 3rd of October 1150, his father said to him; H I told you some time ago the prodigious success of the discourse made by the abbt. last July; he is to deliver another one on the ;2 7th of next month.u The a/Jotssuccess was still greater on the 27th of November than it had been on the previous 3rd of July. His second speech, besides, is much more important than the fonner one; it treats of the successive progress of the human mind. It is a sketch of universal history, written with much talent, full of thoughts, wonderfully mature for a young man, characterised by very liberal ideas, and showing in every line an extremely keen sense of human perfectibility. A prop()sof the colonies of the ancients, we read in Turgot's essaythe followingsentence, which has often bee'n quoted, and which preceded, by twenty~five years,the Declaration of Independence of the United States: H Colonies arc like fruits, which remain connected with the tree only till they are ripe. As soon as they became sufficientto themselves, they did what Carthage did, what America will do one day."

lIe wasJ at that time., very busy with translations from the Latin, and he believed that the better to. imitate the ancients one might enlplo~lin.th.e. French languag,e some of the rules of Greek or Latin ,,"ersifkation. lIe would have wished to see in French poetry the a!ternate use of long and of short syllables, in order to produce on delicate and well trained¥ears an effect analogous to c Turgot. that of the melody as the ancients understood it. The investigation· of this new prosody was one of Turgot's most constant recreations; he returned to it whenever his occupation allowed him to do so, and he translated the whole of the fourth book of the .tEneid .in metrical French hexameters. 'Vben writing his poetry he assumed the fictitious name of the AbM de LaalZei and it is under this pseudonym that hp. "p.nt it to Voltaire, asking for his opinion. 'Ve may believe that Voltaire was in no hurry to read the attempt of an unknown a61J1. However, urged by fresh applications, he ended by making the followinganswer:_cc An old man, bowed downby illness, and who has become nearly entirely blind, h~ received the letter of the 28th April, dated from Paris, but he has not received that dated (rom Genoa. He is penetrated With esteem for M. I'Abbe de Laage, and thanks him for his remembrance; but the sad state in which he is hardly allows him to enter into literary discussions. All he can say is, that he is extremely satisfied with what he has read, and that it is the only prose translation in which he has found any enthusiasm.'J The pseudo Abbe de Laage was highly provoked that the great poet should have mistaken his verses for prose, and be wrote, with a bitterness which he did not seek to conceal, to his confidential friend Caillard, that cc the man either scorns to guess, or does not care to explain himself"; then, passing on to a question of political economy, he adds: Ie I am not more surprised at seeing that great poet talk lttrgot's Poetical TaIe11t. 27 nonsense(d;,ai'SQ1111e,)in political economy than in physics and in natural history. Reasoning has never been his strong point."

And yet Voltaire was not wrong. 'Vho could s<-..an the following lines, and find in the arrangement of the so~ called long and short syllables the melody which Turgot thought he had stamped them with?" Entin, lorsque I'Aurore a de ses feux blanchi l'horizon, Lorsque du jour naissant les c1artes ont chasse les ombres, Triste, abattue, eUe accourt a sa sreur, la reveille et dcposant Dans son sein la douleur qui l'accable, en adoudt l'amertume. " If Turgot did not succeed in French poetry, he had, at any rate, the good fortune of composing one Latin line which we all remember; it is the one which he wrote under Franklin's portrait: U Eripuit crelo fulmen, sceptrllmque tyrannis. u However, the young Abbe de l.aulne was not destined to remain long at the Sorbonne; he did not feel called to be a priest. IIis friends had wished to detain him; they said to him that both his name and his acquire ments would quickly push him on in the Church. They assured him that he would very soon become a bishop, and that he could then realise,in the management of a diocese. some of those beautiful dreams of administration which already occupied his mind.

C 2 Turgot. U :My dear friends," he answered to them, U take for your own use the advice you give me, since you can follow it. As for me, I find it impossible to wear on my face a mask all my life long." IIis father, very ill besides, and who was to die three months later, left him free to do what he thought proper. He gave up the Church for ever) and left the Sorbonne in December, 1750.

CHAPTER II. TURGOT LEAVES THE SORBONNE.-HE IS NAMED MAtTRE DES REQUtTES.-FREQUENTS THE COMPANY OF THE 'c PHILOSOPHES" AND TilE ECONOMlSTS.-\VRITES IN THE "ENCYCLO" PEDIE. tt T URGOT was twenty-three years old when he left the Sorbonne. His judgment \Vas formed and his method settled. He sought for natural laws, and in order to attain this object he applied himself to dis~ tinguish in phenomenn of every kind causes from effects, convinced, as he W3S, th3t all the errors committed by man are the result of the confusion which people are con~ stantly making between causes and effects. Thus he had arrh'ed, )'oung as he was, to unravel, with an accuracy altogether wonderful and a reall)' incredible quickness, the general reasons of aU the particular facts he had to appreciate. One might have said that, whilst he was )'et at the Sorbonne, he had already in his mind everything which came out of it afterwards; so that the only work which occupied the last thirty years of his life was simply to produce in the broad daylight what he had acquired 30 Tttrgot.

during the eighteen months he spent in that celebrated house. A consummate philosopher--considering nature and man from the highest standpoints-he had promised to himself, when he was barely twenty years old, that he would write the history of the human mind and of its progress. He had even made of that history, with the view of developing it in a book, a plan which we have still, and of which some of his ulterior works are only part expansions. He was thus, notwithstanding his extreme youth, already armed for life and its struggles; and his years of apprenticeship had made of himone of the men most capable of producing usefully one day fresh truths, in an age when prejudices seemed, however, to possess an irresistible strength. 'Vhen we study Turgot on the threshold of his active life, and when we think of the influence he exercised afterwards over the economic destinies of his country, we ask ourselves at once to whom he is like; in what mould he has been cast; to what intellectual family he' belongs; and, contrary to what generally takes place, we find no answer, for the simple reason that he proceeds, so to say, from no one. 'Ve see very well that he is a man of his own century; but he has known how to issue from it, to penetrate into our own times, by an energy which belongs to him, and without having had any other guide except his reason. The strength of his genius owes its development, not to the action of those who directed his studies, but to the conscientious and philosophical cateTUY.fot a1zd A da11t ~<;'1tith. 31 chising of his faculties by himself. He is the son of his meditations. He was hom a master; so much so, that those of whom he was considered the disciple have sur \'ived only, thanks to him; and they are a.dmitted by us only because he forces them, so to say, upon us as belonging to his company.

He has, however, with Adam Smith, a resemblance which manifests itself very carly. They were about the same age. Adam Smith was born in 1723. The one studied at Paris, the other at Edinburgh, and they pondered over their thoughts independently of each other, for they were not acquainted; and they (ormed their doctrines by reflection, each one for himself. They both prepared to play the great part which has made their names illustrious, and they did so by the same method, treading with equal steps the road on which they were destined to meet one day. After having completed their studies, both abandoned for philosophy the Church to which they were originally destined; both held the same views on the progress of the human mind; both sought the 13\V of that progress at the same time, and by the same method-·~in metaphysics, in moral philosophy, and in political economy. There fore, it is not astonishing that they s,hould have been alternately one another's inspirer and precursor.

Adam Smith, like Turgot, had thought of writing the history -of civilisation and progress, and, in order to accomplish that task, he had never ceased studying man, as Turgot did himself,in his conscience, his language, 32 Turgot. and his moral, social, economic life. They thus met later on the philosophical and metaphysical ground, but they met there consciously, a circumstance which had not marked their first meditations. They had been informed of their mutual existence; they k~ew one another, and we may sayJ without fear of makin~ a mistake, that from the day on which they became acquainted with one another they helped each other, and both profited by their own works and those of their masters. Turgot's philosophy is much indebted to the Scottish school, to IIutcheson, the master of Adam Smith, and to Adam Smith himself. But Adam Smith's political economy owes quite as much to France, to the economists of the jJhys;ocrateschool, and to Turgot.

Quesnay, Gournay, and Turgot, above all, exercised an evident and happy influence over the author of the 1Vea//1zof Nations. Turgot's small work, entitled Slir la forma/ion e/ 10 dis/tibution des rkhesses, is ten years anterior to the publication of Adam Smith's great treatise on political economy; and these ten years mark precisely the epoch during which Turgot and Adam Smith knew one another, and corresponded on economic subjects. Speaking of Turgot, Condorcet says, "He kept up an active correspondence with Adam Smith." Finally, we can say of both, that they have been more masters of the nineteenth century which followed their death than of the eighteenth during which they lived. In a speech on the bank of England, delivered before the House of Commons, I\lay 30, 1797, Pulteney was Turgot u l11aftrt' ties RCtjucles." 33 able to say of Adam Smith, that he would persuade the present generation and govern the next. The same opinion might have been passed on Turgot, for he has persuaded the enlightened minds of the day, without succeeding,however,in ruling over his age, whereas, by his ideas, after his death he has governed, and still go,·erns, French society.

On the 5th of January, 1752, Turgot was called to dis.. charge the duties of deputy solicitor~general ; on the 30th o( December of the same year he became councillor in the parliament ,; but it W:::iS merely a passage there, or, rather, he was soon connected with it only by the loose ties which still united the maUns des ret/lIlits to the parliament. Named maitre dts requeleson the 28th of ~tarch, 1753, he exercised exclusivelythe functions belonging to that post till'" 1761, upon which he W<1S sent to l.imoges as inttndallt / but during the whole time of his lnttmlallcl, from 1761 to 1774, he ne"<erthelessretained the title and prerogatives of the other 1IIaUresdes rtqllNts, taking part in their labours, if he thought proper, and sitting amongst them, whene,,·erhe happened to be in Paris. The matins dts requItesdischarged duties both adminisft trative and judicial. They submitted reports to the council in the presence of the committee of state, and sometimes even of the king. They were members of the parliament~ and could sit there, provided they were not more th~\n (our at a time. The four who arrived first took the places reserved for the body of which they formed a. part.

34 Turgot. They took a stand in the jurisdiction of the king's council for the affairs submitted to it, and, besides, they constituted a kind of spedal jurisdiction, that of the rt9uelts de fho/tl. It is the council which took up for reconsideration the case of CaIas, but it is the Cltam/Jredes reqzdtu de rhole', that is to say, the assembly of the maUres dtS ,.f.ljueles alone, which pronounced the sentence. Turgot was one of those who sat on that case. "He was one of the judges," says Dupont de Nemours, i' and on that occasion he spoke with a vehemence which was not his wont." His address, unfortunately, has not been pre" sen"ed. There is no report of the deliberation. Turgot had been received with open arms by the society of the jhilosophcs, the literati, and the econo· mists. His functions allowed him a great deal of leisure, and he spent the time at his disposal in cultivating his mind and conversing with his friends. It is at ~Madame Geotrrin's house that he made the acquaintance of D'Alembert.t ~lademoiselle de Lespinasse1 Condorcet; Helvetius, and many others. l\'ladame Helvetius was for him an older friend. She was l\fadame de Graffigny's niece, and he had often seen her at her aunt's before her marriage, and when he was still at the Sorbo nne.

~ladame de Graffigny, who had the habit of giving nicknames to everybody ....-we remember Panpan, that was his friend Devaux; AfarolJuin, his other friend Desmarcts; Ie Pelit SaitU, Saint-Lambert--:Madame de Graffigny, we say, never spoke to her niece, Mademoiselle I1trgol and "illinelte.·' 35 de LignevHle,without <:allingher A/inti/e. S.he..w01s..~~ery fond of l\linette; she was likewise very fond of the Joung Abbe de L:mlne} as Turgot was then called; and the t\Vo young people entertained a tender friendship (or one another. The good !\{orellet feels disturbed that this intimacy did not end by a marriage. The marriage, he \Vas convinced of it, would have made the happiness, in the first place, of the young people, and then, in the second, his own. Between the two beings whom he loved most, and who fully reciprocated his affection, he "ould have Jived delightfully, without the necessity of going from the one to the other. "I ha\'c often fdt astonished," says he, U that the familiarity did not lead to rcaI passion; but whatcver may have been the cause o( so great a resen"c, there had survived from this liaison a tender friendship between them!' Some persons have wished to make of ~Iorenet's regret on this mariagf. 1I1alltJUf. a kind of historical problem, and treasures or erudition have been spent in endea,"ours to solve it. ~{any writers Aavc busied themselves with it. If Turgot has kept the resen'e for which !\forellet seems to blame him, and if he has allowed the occasion o( so thoroughly suitable a marriage to slip :lv-'a)', the reason, some say, is that. he was already in holy orders.

Such is, at any rate, Delort's opinion, the author of an JIistojn ae /a tlelenllon ties plzi/osopltes d des gells tie It/Ins a10 1l0s1t71e. But this opinion has for its founda tion first a very questionable document,besides several others which are of a contradictorynature. It is ccrmin Tttrgot. that in several deeds of the Sorbonne Turgot is culled diacre Parisi'tll (a deacon of the diocese of Paris). It is equally certain that in other documents, quite as authentic, he is classed amongst the simple acolytes. In the former cuse he must huve been ordained; in the latter, he might have remained free. Other writers do not make so much fuss about all this; they find that he was too busy, and they have some difficulty in supposing that he could have divided his time between the serious occu pation which already filled his life, and the thousand cares of a household and a family of children. Finally, believing himself to be threatened with hereditary gout, and persuaded that no member of his family lived beyond fifty, Turgot might have dreaded (such is a third version) associating a wife and children to so precarious an ex istence as his own. At any rate, Turgot did not marr)' ; he left the beautiful ~Iinette at liberty to become ~Iadame Helvetius, and remained, up to the day of ·his death, her most devoted friend.

At Quesnay's house he saw :Mirabeau, cc the friend of mankind," Dupont de Nemours, Daudeau, and the Econo11listes. It is also at the house of the leader of the EC0110l1listesthat he met Adam Smith,about the year 1762, when the celebrated writer, not yet known by his works on political economy, came for the first time to France with the young Duke of Bucc1eugh. Morellet says in his memoirs: ce Turgot, who was fond of metaphysics, set a high value on the talent of Adam Smith. 'Ve saw him several times." Dupon t de Nemours also gives an TlIt;l{ot and his Friellds. 37 account of this meeting,:1nd speaks of Adam Smith, of Turgot, and of himself as having been ce fellow··disciples at Quesnay's." Together with Gournay, fin:111y, Turgot b~'came aCA quainted with both Trudaines; Alben, who was since intendantof the Boardof Tr:1de, and lieutenantAgeneral of police in Paris; he knew all these talented and courageous administrators, who maintained liberal doc trines against the councillors of st:lte and the ministers of the day, belonging nearl)" all, as tht~y did, to the school of Colbert.

He..wns.receivedat ~ladame du DelIh.nd~s. but. nevel. bec.'\meintimatewith her. He very soon forsook her to (ollow :Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, when she, with drawing from the house of her protectress, founded, in her turn, a society and a sa/oN. lIe had, besides, very little liking for the friend of the marchioness, the Duke de Choiseul, who was to become, later on, his most formidable adversary. lIe was already considered, not without reason, as hostile to the parliaments, although he numbered amongst them rel:ltives and personal friends to whom he always remained faithful. In 1754 he accepted to become member of a "royal chamber," that is to say, a kind of commissioninstituted after the exile of the members belonging to one of the courts of parliament,for the purpose of judging, in its stead, the cases wllich would naturally have come under its cognizance. This circumstance definitely set against him the parl1amentarinns and the Choiseulcoterie.

Tterg"ot. Then he was, as a matter of principle-and we have already noticed this point"",,,a gtJ11enlmcll/~11la'l; and his respect for authority kept him aloof from opposition of every kind. :Madame du Hausset relates in her memoirs that, dining one day with Quesnay in Paris, she met there "a )'oung maUre du requites, good-looking, <".aIled by the name of an estate which I do not recollect (the estate of nrucourt), hut who was son of Turgot, the prh.1(Jtdes mardraltds. There was a great deal of talk about administration, which did not much amuse me at first, then the love of the F'rench for their king was alluded to; whereupon ~{. Turgot said: ' That love is not blind j it is a deep sense, and a confused remembrance of great benefits received. The nations, and I shall say Europe and the whole of mankind, are indebted for liberty to a king of France (I (orget his name); he established the ((J1Il11Ilt1US,and gave civil existence to an innumerable multitude of men • . •• I requested M.

Quesnay to write down what young Turgot had said, and I showed it to ~.fadame (de Pompadour). She then spoke much in praise of that maUre ties requetes, a.nd having mentioned him to the king, he remarked, 'He comes from a good stock. J " \Ve must acknowledge that the t((Jnolllistes were often excessively inclined to seek the support of authority. In order to realise their ideas, some amongst them would have preferred an honest despot, with whom they could have obtained preponderance for their views, to a The I<i:fhls of the State. 39 government exercising more freedom, and submitted to influences upon each of which it would have been necessary to act separately. Turgot did not go so (ar, but he was not in favour of what was already called then cc the balance of power," or "the equilibrium of forces," and the other combinations devised for the purpose of checking the power of the chief of the State. His fear was lest the obstacles which some persons wanted to oppose to evil should become. hindrances to good.

He wished that the prince might exercise, in order to protect the freedom of individuals, what has been called in our own days, through a frequent abuse both o( the name and of the thing, the rights of the State. And yet he did not confound the rights of the State or of the prince with those which certain philosophers claimed as belongingto society. U Persons have accustomed them~ selves too much," said he, U under all governments, to sacrifice always the happiness of individuals to certain pretended rights of society. They forget that society is made for individuals." He considered all authority which extended beyond what is absolutely necessary, as a. tyranny, but he never had a very dear notion of what is now canedpolitiCalguarantees. He believedtoo readily that the consultative powers of certain local authorities, and the wide publicity given to their deliberations under the shape of fHEIIX (expression or statement of wishes), could hold the place of politkalfreedom, and sufficed to guarantee the rights of the citizens.

Through D'Alembert, Turgot joined the Entydopedie, 4° Tttrgot. and became personally acquainted with Voltaire. It is in 1760 that he went on a pilgrimage to "Ies Delices." "You shall soon," D'Alembert writes to Voltaire, "have another visit, of which I gave you notice; it is that of ~-1. Turgot, a young man full·of philosophy, of intellect, and of knowledge. He is a great friend of mine, and wishes to go and see you en bonne {ortulze. I say til b01tltcjortune, because, propter 11lelu11l/"da:orulIl,he must not boast too much of that visit, nor must you." After having received Turgot's visit, Voltaire answered to D'Alembert: "I am still quite full of M. Turgot; I was not aware that he had written the article' Existence.' I have seldom seen a man more amiable and better informed; and, what is seldom to be found in metaphy sicians, he has the most delicate and the soundest taste." Although Turgot had been entirely won over by Voltaire, his passion was not a blind one, and it suffered several eclipses: first, when Voltaire mistook (or prose the Abbe de Lange's metrical lines; later, also, when the Ferney patriarch published, under the title of l'Ho1nme aux tjuarante tcus,his witty pampplet against one exclusive taxation. On Voltaire's side there was more constancy; he felt Turgot's dismissal, in 1776, as a personal misfortune. " I see nothing but death before me/' he wrote to La Harpe, "since M. Turgot is no longer in office. I cannot understand how the king can have dismissed him. It is a thunderbolt which has struck both my brain and my heart."

Turgot 'lvyitcs ill the EllcyclojJtdie. 4 1 Two years afterwards, in 1778, when Voltaire came to Paris in triumph, he wished to see Turgot. "\Vc have witnessed, in 1778,usays Condorcet, U the enthusiasm mixed with tender and deep venerotion which the name and the sight of ~1. Turgot excited in that illustrious old man. \Ve have seen him, in the midst of the public acclamation, weighed down by the wreaths which the whole nation lavished upon him; we have seen him rush ,vith a tottering step to meet ~L Turgot, seize hold of his hands in spite of himself, kiss them, wet them with his tears, saying to him in a stifled voice, ' Allow me to kiss the hand which has signed the salvationof the people.'U Turgot wrote, in 1755,for the E'ICj'c/o!;ditfive articles which appeared the following year: Ety!1lo!ogie, Exis-: It'nfe, Expallsibtlilt., puiru d mardds, Fondatimls. He had intended writing several others, such as .:fundicite, Inspt'ctettrJ,HJpital, Immalenalite, but the publication of the work of the pllilosophesbeing no longer authorised, he thought it incompatible with his duties as a magis~ trate to remain one of its contributors.

The appearance of the article ec Existence" was a real literary and philosophic.'tlevent. The world of literati and that of the Encydol'h/isteshad been struck by the precision and the clearness of the style, the originality and depth of the ideas. A true ,witer, a philosopher had revealed himself. The Hke impression is even t<Kiay produced upon those who read, for the first time, that remarkable paper. Cousin admired it much, and I> Tttrgot. assigned to it n. special place in the philosophical out~ come of the eighteenth century. U As a metaphysician," he says, "Turgot belongs to the school of Locke, like all the men of his age, like Hutcheson and Smith, with whom he has so many points in common; but, like them, he has known how to keep free from all the vices of that school, thanks to the extent and penetration of his intellect, thanks, especially, to the elevation of his sentiments and of his character.

In a letter to Condorcet on the book de /'Esprit, he exposes the sad and absurd ethical system of Helvetius . .. . . . But the article C Existence' is the best specimen we have of his metaphysics."

CHAPTER III. QUES~AY AND GOURNAY.-TIIE PHYSIOCR.ATES. -TURGOT'S ECONOMIC nOCTRINE.-ESSAI SUR LA FORMATON ET LA DISTRIBUTIION DES RICHESSES.-ELOGE OF GOURNAY. T URGOT did not separate the economic laws from the other ethical ones, and he prosecuted simul· taneously the study of them with equal enthusiasm. According to him, men formed a natural society, and they could reach the degree of prosperity of which they are susceptible only in conditions of which they ('.annot free themselves. These conditions constitute laws which are not similar to positive laws, and which do not, like these, find their sanction in penalties either of a peeu· niary or of a bodily nature, but yet which it is impossible to violate without serious injury. If mankind tries to withdraw itself from the action of these laws, if it disobeys them, it throws an obstacle in the way of its own progress; nor does it realise the amount of comfort and of riches whichit might have procured to the indi.

viduals which co'mposeit, by respecting them. Such is the general idea which Turgot had of the relations existingbetweennatural1awand political economy. D2 44 T1ergot. Quesnay was at that time in the full blaze of his glory he had published his maxims, and his Tableauecono11llfue. His disciples constituted a kind of peculiar society, and treated the master as a sort of god. They assumed the name of Economistes,nnd formed a real sect. Now Turgot did not like the sectarian spirit. In one of his letters on the liberty of the commerce of cereals, we find this passage: "I am well aware that those who have for some time been speaking or writing against liberty in the commerce of cereals, pretend to consider that opinion as exclush"elybelonging to cert3in '....riters who have assumed the name of .E'cono1llisfes,and who may have prejudiced a portion of the public by a sectarian air which they ha\'e rather clumsily put on, and by a tone of enthusin.')m which always displeases those who do not share it."

Although professing for Quesnay the sincerest admira~ tion, Turgot preferred Gournay's intimacy to that of the author of the Tableau{cono1Jlique. Goumay, his second master, and the one, perhaps, whom he liked best, had, it is true, adopted Quesnay's ideas; but he laboured in what we might designate as another field of that domain which the}· had created together, and with which they had enriched the world. Dupont de Nemours takes much trouble to show the identity of views between these two remarkable men, and he has invented the name of "physiocratie" for the science upon which they were both engaged at the same time. For him Gournay was quite as much of a plzys;o trate as Quesnay.

QttCS1zay a1zd GOllYlzay. 45 Quesnay's leading idea was to raise agriculture to the greatest possible state of prosperity. lIe considered that all the other occupations in the world depended upon the cultivation of the ground, and jf he claimed freedom for industry and commerce, it was in order that freedom of commerce, b)' facilitating the working out and the trade of agricultural produce, should secure to agriculture the means of reaching a high development. U Poor peasants,n he said, H make a poor kingdom, and a poor kingdom makes a poor king." 'Vhilst acknowledgingthat agricultural interest should be the chief care of statesmen, Goarnay was especially anxious to throw light upon the economic questions arising from industry and commerce. He had remarked that competition was the most powerfulstimulus to work, and that everyone knows better than the government what is most favourable to his own interest. He had adopted as his maxim the expression: "Laiss(z jain, laissezpasser."

Goumay's own ideas, developed and applied by Turgot, have, become modern political economy, the political economy of Adam Smith and of Jean..Baptiste Say. Turgot's economic doctrines are condensed in two writingsof his. The one is an essay on Gournay, which he sent, in 1752, to ~Iarmontel, for the purpose of helping him to compose the (loge of their mutual friend. The second, entitled Essa;'sur ta forma/itm d la dislrz: buti{J!ldes richcsses,is a sketch of political economy given Tlergot. by Turgot to two young Chinamen, who, havingcome to France to prosecute their studies, were on the point of returning to the extreme East. The la5t~named essay forms a short work subdhided into one hundred paragraphs. The firstseven are meant to prove that the cultivation of the land is the only source of riches. This is Quesnay's own doctrine. All things which are of lise to men are produced by the soil.

All the preparations which industrymakesthem undergo, all the changesof placewhich commerce necessitates,are operations which add no new productions to those which have sprung from culth'ated land. Agricultural labour is the only one by which you may increase the wealth of a nation. The land immediately refunds to the culti· vator the "alue of his work, but what it giveshim is worth more than the painshe has taken. It is a physicalresult of the fertilityof the soil, which always exceeds the sum of labour by which this fertility has been obtained. The superfluousamount thus granted by nature as a pure gift to the cultivators,beyond the reward of their trouble, allows them to purchase the labourof the other members of society; and these, by selling their labour, mostly earn what is necessary to them for their food and for their daily life. The proprietor-cultivator, whose superflu ous income provides the others with work, is thus, accordingto Turgot, the only producer of wealth, wealth which, by its circulation,animates all the worksof society.

Society is thus divided into two classes, both equally laborious: the former gets out of the soil a wealth T1I1:t:Ot'sIi PorlJ1a/ioltdes richesses." 47 which is ever reproducing itself; whilst the latter, busy preparing the materi~ls thus produced, receives merd)' its means of subsistence in return for its labour. The fonner may be designated as the pr()dudng class, the latter may be named the sti}tndiary class. Mter this preamble, Turgot enumerates in the next paragraphs the various manners of giving value to the soil, and he endeavours to demonstrate by fresh argu ments what he has already stated in the first part of his essays, viz., that the soil alone can yield a net produce that is, something in addition to the expense of culture and to the interest derived from the capitals invested The other para{,rraphs,as far as the fifty-first, are devoted to the question of capitals, to those ofspecie, of commerce, and of the circulation of money. Before gold and silver had become the representative token of every kind of wealth, the exchanges, according to Turgot, took place in kind. Bushels of corn were then exchanged against pints of wine. The competition between those who had more or less need of this Of that article determined a current value for each one of them relatively to all the others. Every article may have thus become the equiva, lent of all the others, and may have served as a common measure merely to compare the value of all the other articles of merchandise with each other. The same quantity of com, worth eighteen pints of wine, was equally worth a sheep, or a piece of preparedleather,or a cer tain quantity of iron, and all these things had thus the same commercial value. But all pints of wine do not Tttrgot.

possess the same value; and if eighteen pints of Anjou wine arc worth one sheep, eighteen pints of Cape wine are worth a far greater number. In order, therefore, to avoid the mistakes arising from the fact that the same expression applied to objects of variable qualities, people found themselvescompelledto select as measureof the value of other merchandise, a merchandise always iden tical to itself, and which might be, besides, easily trans ported from place to place, and not liable to undergo any alteration. Gold and silver united aU these qualities in a superior degree, and, by the nature of things, they became the universal coinage. The last fifty paragraphs of Turgot's work treat of the formation of ec1.pitals,and of the various uses that can he made of them, whether by purchasing land, or by employing them in an agricultural scheme, an industrial enterprise, or a commercial operation, or, fimlIly, by iending them on interest to those persons who are in need of money_ 'Vhilst examining these five manners of investing capitals, Turgot makes us obsen-e, and he proves what he states, that ad"Yances(capitaux pr/:alables)are always necessary to those who want to make an enterprise, whatever may be its nature. Agricultural enterprises need these advances as much as all others. lienee the con sequence that cultivation, like industry, has its managers and its workmen. The managers supply the capital, and the workmen the manual labour. The mere work· men, tillers of the brround, like the mere industrial TlIY..f0t's .. For111ati'olt des richesst!s. 49 artisans, have no other property but their muscles, no other profit but their salary. If there is no capitalist, that is to say, if there are no capitals, there (".an bc nQ extensh'c culture, for it is only through extensive cultiva· tion that the soil can yield aU it is capable of },jelding.

Cultivation of the soil, and industries of every kind, depend accordingly on an accumulated mass of capitals, or of movable wealth,which return every year into the hands of those persons to whom they belong, in order to be made available and advanced during the following l'car, thus securing a continuance for the same in dustries. Returning, towards the end, to Q.ucsna}"s favourite theory, Turgot concludes that the produce of capitals should be exempted (rom all contribution to the public expense, because it is a produce taken from that of the soil. The income of the proprietors can alone be fCu garded as free, he(~use it constitutes an available w(~alth) and available wealth cxclusively may be applied to the expenses of the State. Such is Turgot's celebrated work. It contains, on the questions of capitals, specie, and competition, the most valuable and the newest truths for the epoch in which they were produced. Turgot could not but be, and was necessarily and continually, present to the mind of Adam Smith, when the author of the Theory of ,'rural .senli~ ments wrote, nine 'years later, his 1l1'taltle of J.Vatiolls.

But, jf the treatise we are noticing is full of truths, we are obliged, on the other hand,to acknowledge that it is 5° Ttergot. likewise fun of errors. It is steeped in Quesnay's thoughts on net produce, incessantly affirming that the soil must be considered as the only source of wealth. \Vhilst regretting the errors which have led Turgot astray, one cannot help doing homage to him as to the other p}~ystocrafes. \Ve must honour them, even on ac count of their errors; for, if they have committed them, it is only because they made a wrong application of laws which are everlastingly true-laws which Quesnay has had the honour of discovering. The wrong application Turgot made of them has given to these laws such celebrity that all thinkers have known them and accepted them as true. The pnyslocrates affirmed, to begin with, that the formation of wealth was subject to a natural law, and that in order to enable that law to produce all its effectc;, and mankind to get rich, men united in society, and constituting nations, should enjoy, in the first place, the liberty of producing, then the liberty of purchasing, seU ing, and conveying to various localities the produce of cultivation, industry, and commerce; finally, the liberty of accumulating capitals, making them circulate, lending them, employing them for the development of general wealth. That is the first and the highest of the truths for which we are indebted to them.

Another truth which they have taught the world is, that taxes are subject to a natural law of incidence. The State can oblige a class of citizens to pay taxes, but it cannot prevent those who have supplied the specie to The U Ph)'siocrates.U get it refunded to them by others, if the natural la\v of political economy allows or prescribes it. The pll)'SI()(TOIlS have triumphantly established that the t~n:payers arc in most roses nothing else but inter mediate parties, whose duty it is to pay the ta..xes on beha.lf of those who have finally to do so, thus making out of their own money to the real debtors of the State advances which arc recoverable in a longer or shorter delay, with more or less difficulty. From this obscn'ation they have concluded that men who only p()ssess their natural strength, and who support thcmselves merely by their bodily toil, should not be subjected to the kind of taxes which, by virtue of their nature, have a kind of reflex action.; fOf, if obliged to pay under these conditions, the poor would find themselves compelled to advance money to persons richer than themselves. lIenee this set~ond truth, not less evident than the first, that taxes should, as much as possible, be raised from the fortune and income of those \,,"ho, after a11, a re obliged to bear them.

But how many errors are mixed with these great truths which Quesnay discovered, and Turgot brought so clearly to light? Is it possible to believc, with Turgot and Quesnay, that the soil is the only souTceofwealth--<>C rtntzstcnt '1.£ltalth (ric/lcsses rUlaissantes), to employ the very expression which Turgot makes use of? \Ve know at present that all capitals indistinctly,whatever form they affect, whatevermay be the employment for whkh they arc destined and the use made of them, provided Turgot. the employment and the use are productive, have, just as the soil, the facuIty of producing incessantly new riches of which they are the origin. Adam SOlita and Jean~Baptiste Say have given of this fact proofs which bring the discussion to a close. The theory of taxation which recognises no other lawful resource to the budget of public expenditure but what rna)' be raised from the net produce of the nation, is it not also contrary to the truth? As if the State could provide (or its yearly expenses by means of fresh riches created every year.

If such. an opinion was true, a stationary people, that is to say, a nation the wealth of which would stop increasing, and living merely on a "ork supported by old accumulations of capitals, could have no right to claim from its members the means of defraying the public. expenses. And yet it is impossible to deny that, to whatever amount of wealth it has attained, or to whatever degree of poverty it has become reduced, a country is always obliged to provide, as a community, for certain branches of the public service, and to transform, come what may, some of its private expenditure into public supplies. The truth is that the taxes should be for everybody an increase of effort or a diminution of enjoyment, and that the yearly savings of the countl)·, if they help towards the expenditure, should not constitute the principal part, much less the onl}' one of the budget resources. A second mistake superadds itself to the Leller of David !{llllZt. 53 first. Not only does Turgot believe that the treasury ("...,\nnot be fcd except from the net produce of the nation, he further believes that in a nation there is no other net produce but that of landowners; whence he concludes that ('.4,pita1i~ts, manufacturers, and tradesmen should be exonerated from all taxation, their share in the public contributions being pnid by the landowners, they in turn getting refunded by selling dearer to them the articles which constitute the object of their trade or their industry. In a letter dated J 766, and preserved in the I~'\ntheui1 archives, David Hume, writing to Turgot, refutes with much earnestness that erroneous doctrine after stating it with the greatest clearness. Hume had devoted the first part of his letter to telling most fully to his friend the incidents of his quarrel with Jcan·Jacques Rousseau.

UBut I am heartilytired of this subject, as you very well conjecture.; and I shall here take my leave of it~ I hope for evet. Tho' >'ou must be tired too of my letter, I am tempted to say a word to the political question, which has been often agitated between us, viz., the method of laying on taxes, whether it is better to impose them on landed possessions, or on consumptions. You will own that, as the public revenue is employed for the defence of the whoJe community, it is more equitable to levy it from the whole; b.~t you say that this is impracticable. It will fall on the land at last, and it is betterto lay it on there directly. You suppose, then, that the labourers ahva}"s raise the price of their labour in proportion to 54 the ta.xes. But this is contrary to experience. La.bour is dearer in NeufchateJ and other parts of Switzerland, where there are no taxes, than in the neighbouring pro vinces of France, where there are a great many. There are almost no taxes on the English colonies: yet labour is three times dearer there than in any country of Europe.

There arc great taxes on consumptions in Holland, but the republic possesses no land on which they can fall. "The price of labour will always depend on the quantity of labour and the quantity of demand; not on the taxes. The tradesmen, who work in cloth that is exported, cannot raise the price of their labour; because in that case the cloth would become too dear to be sold in foreign markets; neither can the tradesmen, who work in cloth for home consumption, raise their prices, since there cannot be two prices for the same species of labour. This extends to all commodities of which there is any part exported, that is, to almost every commodity. Even were there some commodities of which no part is ex ported, the price of labour employed in them could not rise: for this high price would tempt so many hands into that species of industry as must immediately brin~ down the prices. It appears to me that, where a tax is laid on consumption, the immediate consequence is, that either the tradesmen consume less or work more.

No man is so industrious but he may add some hours more in the week to his labour: and scarce anyone is so poor but he can retrench somethingof his expense. 'Vhat happens where the corn rises in its price? Do Leiter of Dat.!id !fU1J1C. 55 not the poor both Jive worse and labour more? A tax has the same effect. I beg you al~o to consider, that, besides the proprietors of land and the labouring poor, there is, in every civilised community, a very large and a very opulent bod)', who employ their stocks in com merce, and who enjoy a great revenue from their giving labour to the poorer sort. I am persuaded, that in F'rance and England, the revenue of this kind is much greater than that which arises from land. For besides merchants, properly speaking, I comprehend in this class all shopkeepers and master tradesmen of evcf)' species. Now it is very just that these should pay for the support of the community, which can only be where taxes are laid on consumptions. There seems to me no pretence for saying that this order of men are necessi~ tatcd to throw their taxes on the proprietors of land, since their profits and income ('..an surely bear retrench ment. After so long a letter, you will surely excuse my concluding without any ceremony or compliment. Be only assured that no man puis a higher and juster value on your friendship than I do.

CC DAVID HUME." That is a very sound lesson on political economy given to Turgot twelve months before he published his Essa; sur la formatioll et la distributiondes richess(s,and nine years before Adam Smith's 1Yealtll of l'latit'1ls. Turgotreplied,and his answert which has been preserved by Hill Burton,. bears date March 25, 1767. He acknowledges that the law of supply and demand deter~ Ttergot. mines the price of labour. U You rightly observe," says he, U that the amount of salaries is determined not by that of the taxes, but only by the relation between supply and demand. That principle has never been called in ques tlon; it is the only principlewhich immediatelyfixes the price of all articles having a commercial value." And in order to explain the apparent contradiction with Quesnay's doctrine, he distinguishes two prices, "the current price fixed by the relation between supply and demand, and the fundamental one, which for an article of merchandise is what the workman has to pay (or that article." It is in this distinction that Turgot might have found an answer to his detractors when they accused him, as they do still, of condemning the workman to perpetual misery by subjecting him to the iron law of salary.

Turgot, like Quesnay, divided mankind into two classes: the producingand the stipendiary,the producbrg and the barren. The workman does not help towards forming a new produce, he can take no share in it, and his salary secures to him merely the strict necessaries of his life-his subsistence. U In every kind of labour,)' says Turgot in his Essai sur la jormalloRella distribution des ric!lesses,II it must happen, and it does happen, that the workman's salary is limited to what is necessaryto secure him his subsistence.)) Louis Blanc protests against this theory. Ie Turgot was unfortunate enough to adopt the principle which has in our own times been identified with the cowardly and Tttrgot's H FOYl1Zalioll des richesses." 57 cruel formula: (hat'll1'IN)I'" S(JI~ (/zQ(lIn dlt.z S()l~ and the principleonce admitted, supposing the consequencesarc fatal, what is to be done? :fhat fIIust hajJln. Of course it must hapi>en that the workman is reduced to what is strictly necessary, when the starting point is taken in individual right; but would it be the same in a regime of brotherly association ?"

Turgot placed the genn of his defence in his letter of March 25, 176,. The ironlaw, he would haveanswered, determines the fundamental value of labour, the law of supply and demand fixes the current price. H Although the fundamentalprice," says he, U is not the immediate prin~ cipleofthe currentvalue,there is,.nevertheless,a minimum, belowwhich it cannot descend; for if a merchant loseson his goods, he ceases to sell or to produce; if a workman cannot live on his labour, he becomes a mendicant, or leaves his nath'e country. That is not all: a workman must find a certain profit, to provide against accidents, to bring up his family •••The workman,as you say, does his best to work more al'1d to consume less, but that is only transitory. There certainly is no man who works as much as he could; but it is not natural, on the other hand, that men should work as much as. they could, for the same reason that a rope cannot be stretched to its full possibility of being so. In every machine there is a degree of relaxation necessary, without which it might run the risk of being broken at any moment . • • This species of superfluous amount from which we can, strictly speaking,retrench, is another necessary element in the E 58 Turg-ot.

ordinary maintenance of workmen and of their fami lies." Turgot looked upon the English as very little qualified to understand Quesnay. "Our economist philosophers," he wrote to IIume, July 23, 1766, "followers of Quesnay, will maintain vigorously their master's system. It is a system from which English writers are at present very far; nor can we hope to see them adopt it for a long time to come, so difficult is it to conciliate its principles with the ambition of monopolising the commerce of the universe." lIe was not converted by his friend's correspondence; his plan was settled (son sit~e etait jail); pnysioeratehe was, pltyszoe,-atehe remained. David Hume could not but mourn over this, for, if he was fond of Turgot, he was not fond of the economists. \Vitness this humorous letter which he wrote to the Abb6 ~[orelIet, :May 15th, 1769 : "I see that, in your prospectus, you take care not to disoblige your economists, by any declaration of your sentiments; in which I commend your prudence. But I hope that in your work you will thunder them, and crush them, and pound them, and reduce them to dust and ashes! they are, indeed, the set of men the most chimerical and the most arrogant that now exist, since the annihilation of the Sorbonne. I ask your pardon for saying so, as I know you belong to that venerable body.

I wonder what could engage our friend 1\1. Turgot to herd among them; I mean, among the economists; though I believe he was also a Sorbonnist.)) Tttrgot alzd QueSllay. 59 Turgot always remained faithful to Quesnay's doctrine; he always affirmed it with the deepest conviction. \Ve may even say th3t he made it his own personal doctrine by the vigour with which· he explained it. \Ve must not (orget, however, ~hat he did not belong to the strict sect <Ia fefite (glt'se), that no one acknowledged him as the sworn, offici~\l interpreter of the ~r:lster; against this assertion he would have protested quite as much as the others, nay, more; and he felt a strong repugnance to ascribe to Quesnay's maxims that dogmatic value which initiated people have always attached to the ideas of found ers of sects. Out~ide the limits of the school of economists, properly so called, he numbered friends and even masters.

lie professed for Gournay a respect equal to that which he had for Quesnay. lIe lived with him on terms of more familiar intimacy. If we would understand his doctrine we must not therefore be satisfied with seeking its meaning in the Essa; sur fa jonna/ion tt ta diUn'blltiondes ricMsses,. we must also trace its development in his con"·ersations with Gournny. 'Ve do not mean to say that in the course o{ the studies which he prosecuted in conjunction with Gournay, Turgot modified, on the subject of the sh:ue held by the land in the production of riches, the fundamental ideas \vhich he had derivedfrom Quesnay; nor did he, in his conversations with Gournay, acknowledge the errors into which he might previously have fallen. E 2 60 Tttrgot. The Essa; surla forma/foil e/ la dis/noli/iondes ridusus is posterior to Goumay's death; but the theory of the freedom of work, commerce, and industry, that theory which made up, strictly speaking, the whole of Gournay's system of political economy, has received from Turgot such lustre through the applications he drew from it, and the wonderful proofs he gave of the .happy results which might be produced by it, that people have for· gotten the errors of the net produce, and of the excessive preponderance of the soil over capitals of a movable nature The inquiry as to the net produce which should supply the substance of taxation and the /hlorie fonciere which sees in the soil the only source of wealth, ha\'e simplybecome hypotheses explaining the great law of the natural incidence of taxation, and bringing into light the admirable maxim which says that there is no rich State where the peopleare poor, whencethis other consequence, no less incont(.'Stable in its truth, that a State cannot become rich when it ruins the taxpayers. If we look upon certain economic prolegomena as hypotheses, we may say that Quesnay's theories have proved as useful to the progress of economic sciences as other theories, now abandoned, on the emission of light and the nature of electricity have proved to the progress of physical science. Turgot made use of them like the most eminent nlen of his time; but it is independently of these hypotheses, and by affirmingthe freedom of labour and of trade, it is by establishing the doctrine of the freedom GOltYI1a)'. 61 of labour on an indestructible basis, that he has been the forerunner of Adam Smith, perhaps his master, and that he deserves to be regarded as the real chief of the modern school of economists.

Gournay, whose real name was Vincent, was born at Saint-1.faloin 1712. \Vhen sel-enteen years of age his parents sent him to Cadiz to learn trade; he succeeded in the undertaking. In 1744 his business brought him back to France, and led to his becoming acquainted with ~raurepas, who found out his merit. Two years later his partner, Jametz de Villebarre, left him his (ortune, includ ing the Goumay estate, of which he then assumed the name. He had minutely studied both England and Holland, which he had visited, and he read with much eagerness the books which treated of the science of com merce. The treatises of Josias Child and John de 'VIlt's memoirs were the works (rom which he derived the first elements o( his economic knowledge. In 1748 he retired from business, and came to reside in Paris. ~1. de 1.faurepas induced him to look out for a post of 'n/em/ant du (01/lNllru. and made him obtain one in 17SI.

It is then that he became connected with the econmists. Dupont de Nemours. who lays great stress on the unity of the economic school, asserts that Gournay and Quesnayarrrived at the same results by different roads, that they met then, congratulated one another on that circumstance, and applauded each other when they saw with what exactness their principles, various, but equally true, led to absolutely similar consequences. He admits 62 Turgot. at the same time that the two aspects under which they considered "the principles of public administration" had formed two schools: the one is Quesnay's, the chief members of which were the l\larquis de l\1irabeau, Abeille, F'ourqueux, Bertin, Dupont de Nemours, the Abbe Roubaud, Le Trosne. ~lercierde 1a Riviere and the Abbe Baudeau formed, as Dupont de Nemours remarks, a distinct branch in t~at school. They thought that it would be easier to persuade a prince than a nation, and that freedom of commerce. and of labour, together with the true principles of public taxation, should be more quickly established by the authority of sovereigns than by the progress of reason. Although all economists did not share that way of thinking, many followed in the same direction, and we have seen that Turgot could be, not unreasonably, found fault with for not having assigned sufficient importance to the part played by political free dom in a nation.

The second school is that of Gournay; it included Ivlalesherbes, the Abbe l'florellet, Trudain~ de ~10ntigny, Cardinal de Boisgelin, the Abbe de Cice, and, in general, Turgot's private friends, together with Turgot himself. It is whilst Gournay was intendantiu comlllercethat he had with Turgot the most intimate relations. Condorcet alludes to the conferences Turgot held with him. " From these," says he, cc Turgot derived the greatest profit; he learnt from M. de Gournay to know minutely all the advantages of free trade, all the drawbacks of prohibi tions." Between 1753 and 1756 Goumay made in the GOIl1'IZQJ'. provinces a series of official journeys, with the view of ascertaining personallythe state of manufactures and of commerce. lIe visited in succession Burgundy, Lyon nais, Dauphine,Provence,Upperand Lower Languedoc; then, later on, )Ia.ine, Anjou,and Brittany, taking Turgot as his companion.

On his return from the 1756 journey he fell ill, languished (or a few years, and died, June 27, I 759. Atarmontel conceived the idea of writing his Ho.ge,· he mentioned it to Turgot, asking him for some notes. Shortly after, Goumay's friend sent to !\tlarmontel an essay containing a very faithful and dear statement of his doctrines. This es~'\y has been published by Dupont de Nemours under the title of Elugede GotJrnay. It completes the EIsai sur lajorl1lalifJll des rlcht/su, and makes up with it the doctrinal part of Turgot's work. Gourna)' did not think that·it wa..~ within the province of the government to fix the price of articles of con sumption, to proscribe one kind of industr)' for the purpose of encouraging another. He said that for a century aU well·informed persons in IIolland and in England looked upon the abuses which still prevailed in France as remains of barbarism, .as proofs of the weaknessand the ignoranceof those who had governed France till then, withouthaving found out the import ance of liberty, or, if they had found it out, without having known how to protect it against the spirit of monopoly.

Ttt1:~ot. The general liberty of selling and of buying seemed to him the only means of securing, on the one hand, to sellers a trade~price sufficiently high to encourage production ; .and, on the other, to the consumers the best articles possible, considering the purchasing prices. There were, he acknowledged, rogues amongst the merchants and dupes amongst purchasers, hut he maio* tained that it was for private individuals to look after themselves, and that it was absurd to provideall children with padded caps (omt,relets), under tbe plea that children are liable to fall, and to hurt themselves when they do fall. Turgot sums up in the three following propositions Gournay's doctrine, which he has nlade his 0'''71 : First: "Restore to every branch of industry that precious freedom ,,,,bicb they had lost through the pre judice of ages of ignorance, the ease with which govern~ ments condescended to private interests, and the desire of reaching a misunderstood perfection."

Secondly: "Facilitate labour to all the members of the State, so as to excite the greatest amount of competi tion in sales; the necessary result of this will be the greatest perfection in manufactures, and the most advan· tageous price for the purchaser." Thirdly: cc Give to the purchaser the greatest possible number of competitors, by throwing open to the trader all the outlets of his article of consumption: this is the only way of securing to labour its reward, and of perpetu· ating production, of which that reward is the sole object."

Such was Goumay's system, adopted and explained by Turgot-system, ns it has been called, resting upon the maxim that lC every man knows his own interests much better than another, to whom these interests are a matter of complete indifference." Those who attacked Gournay's opinions represented him as an enthusiast and nQlll11lt' a 5)'S/eme. "The name of lumtmc (1 sys(t.mc/,says Turgot, "has become a kind of weapon on the lips of all persons either prejudiced or interested in retaining certain abuses; and it is levelled against all those who propose changes in any order of ideas whatever."

CliAPTER IV. INTENDANCE Of' LIMOGES.-SURVEY OF THE DISTRICT.-LOANS ON INTEREST AND USURY. -LETTERS ON FREEDOM IN THE COMMERCE OF CEREALS. A FTER the death of Gournay, Turgot retained {or two more years the office of acting maUre dts requ2tes" but, thinking of becoming an intendant, and with the view of preparing for the post, he asked 1\-1. de la l\lichodiere's leave to accompany him on his inspections. France was divided into forty provinces and thirty five genera/iter. The provinces were military divisions under the command of a governor; the ginera/iteswere adminis trative circumscriptions directed by an ,flletldalz/. Their extent was not uniform, and their limits were not the same. There were almost always several governors for one inttndanl, and several Inlttldants for one governor, but their functions were independent of each other. The intendantswere financial agents, such as the directors of our taxes; but they decided on certain litigious cases concerned with taxes, as our c()nsel1s de prljecture,' and their attributions included, besides. as in the case of T1trgot at L it/toges.

our prefects, the police, public charities, the militia. Their power was the more considerable, because they were in constant relations with the Council of State, and that, preserving their title of maUre tiel re'1,II/el, they took their sitting with the other ",al/res ties requItes during the frequent stays they made in Paris. Turgot was appointed on the 8th of August, 1761, to the in/endana of Limoges. cc It is to LimOA'es that I am sent," he wrote to Voltaire, August 24th, 1761. U I should have far preferred Grenoble, which would have placed me within easy reach of the chapel of Confucius, thus enabling me to receive instruction from the hIgh. priest.tJ The Limoges i,,/endantecomprised five Iltdions: Brive, Tulle, Limoges, Bourganeuf, and Angouleme. The country was poor, and overwhelmed with taxation. ce I think I am right in asserting," says Turgot, IC that the taxation of the Limoges glnlralitl amounts to between 48 and So per cent. of the total produce, and the king gets out of the soil nearly as much as the landowners.)) For the space of thirteen·years Turgot devoted himself.

with an energy which\Vas never abated for a single instant, to the interests of his glnerall/e; but he could not please everybody. In 1774, when he left it to become a cabinet-minister, some persons affirmed that he had made himself adored. whilst others declared that he \Vas detested. Both parties were right, no doubt. The Limousinnobilitywere accustomedto make use of the ill/entlana for the purpose of obtaining favours, getting the land-tax and the poll-tax of their prQ/lgls rc duced, 68 Turgot. and reducin~ to the lowest possible amount their own capitation-duties. The)' never forgave Turgot for breaking with traditions which were so favourable to them. They readily called him, as they had done in the;: {'.ases of Goumay, a man aprojets e/ asysfe1Jle. cc Yes, :Madam, he is systematic," exclaimed the Abbe Baudeau, talking to a lady whom he does not name, but of whom he says that she was a witty court lJegueu!e, and one of the mothers of the Jesuitic Church; "yes, ~'ladam, he is systematic •... Do you think, then, that to govern a king dom like France, unconnected ideas and routine are needful ?" He had accordingly made many enemies throughout the small gentry of the district. But if the J..imousin nobility felt hostile towards him, it was not the same with the peasantry. liis departure was publicly announced from the pulpit by all the clITh of the province, who everywhere celebrated mass for his sake.

The labourers interrupted their work in order to be present, and repeated: "The king has done right in taking M. Turgot, but it is very sad for us not to have him any longer." 'Ve cannot write the history of his administration, nor give a complete analysis of what he called his Limousin works: that would be too extensive an undertaking, and it would lead us, besides, into details which are uninter esting just now; but, to make our readers understand Turgot's genius, we must bring out the loftiness of views with which he never ceased to treat the administrative questions on which he had to decide. There was not a TUy"l{ot S OcclIjJaticnls. 69 single ~.ase, however trifling in itself, which did not afford him the opportunity of affirming principles. The circu lars to his 3gents, his letters to the minister, his advices to the council, are so many treatises on economic theories and laws. Such are his AVIs Sill" fassittle el 10 rtpartilj(J1l tie ta tal1le (1762N1770), his Mt11loire sur les prl/s ainllrel e/ sur lusure (1769), his Let/res surta tioerl;' 1111 (()!!l!lurtt des grains (1770); and the most astonishing fact is, that all he writes seems extemporised. lIe does not require long studies to trace up effects to their (~,uses ; his first education, the habits of his mind, the uprightN ness of his judgment immediately show him the main substa.nce o( things, and he penetrates into it without either hesitation or confusion. \Ve do not mean to impl» that he was satisfied with a first glance, that he neglected details, and was not hardNworking; on the contrary, he toiled immensely, and the numerous attack() of gopt (rom which he suffered never turned him aside from what he had to do. His only rest was when he indu 1ged in his intimate letters-and he had many corre spondents. To Caillard he talked of poetry, communicat ing to him his translations from IIomcc or I)ope, and sending him, with the view of being despatched anony mously to ,Ferney, the metrical Hnes which Voltaire mistook for prose. lie argued on the pronunciatipn of the ancients, and could not pardon David Hume for believingthat the old Romans pronounced Latin after the English (ashion, sa)'ing e (or a, i (or i, and J'(}lI for 11.

\Vith Condorcet he exchanged views on philosophy, on 7° Ttergot. ethics, on science. His mmd \vas never more Cree than when it was most occupied. However, the mterest of the people subject to his admimstration was the unceasing object of his anxiety. One of hIs chief occupations during the early years OJ his intent/ante had been the revision of the taxation-lists. The land-tax \vas assessed in Limousm then accordmg to a tariff devised twenty years before by lvl. de Toumy. The late z"nfendant had wished to correct the abuses ansmg from arbitrary assessment, and with that view he had conceived the plan of recastmg all the old valuations of the produce of the estates, and also the settling of a basis of normal imposition founded upon a kind of survey. But the land-surveymg had been finished only in one part of the province, two-thirds of it, and the valuations had been stopped in most cases after a mere inspection oC the localities, a glance, so to say, or a bird's eye View, and by masses of culture.

Such glarmg inequalities had resulted Crom this arrangement, that the populations had found no relief, either in the giving up of the arbitrary taxation, or 10 the carrying out of so IOcomplete a survey. Turgot deemed it necessary to do the whole thing over again, and to undertake a general revision. It was a real survey he had in vie\v; he wanted to draw up in some measure a description of the province, estate by estate, a geometrical one, given in a plan, and which might be preserved and kept correct as changes took place in the consistency and nature of all the estates. But the establishment of a survey with measurements l.. f'ltat should the La1zd-tax be ? 7I and yaluations has always been and must always be a very longt ,"ery difficult, and very expensive work. "If I had known then," Turgot writes in 1762 to the comptroller~general, cc as distinctly as I know to--day, the o,>erwhelming amount of work necessary not only to per fect the operations for the future, but to draw the present system out of its confusion, I should perhaps never had had the courage to undertake it."

He did not, at any rate, save his trouble; he took the utmost care to enlighten the commissioners, the land· lords, and the peasants on all the questions raised by the revision. In order to edu<:'.atethe public, he C'.3,used the Limoges Agricultural Society to propose a prize on the theory of taxation; and, with the viewof opposing adminis trative prejudices, he constantly put forward in his letters and his advices to the council and to the comptroller· general, apropos of the smallest details, the most general questions, and the very discussion of the prin ciple of taxation. For Turgot the land·tax should be a fixed and real one. It should be fixed; « it is most important to djs~ tribute the tax which estates are to bear according to a fixed e,·aluation." It should be real, (C and be assessed only according to the inheritance which each taxpayer enjoys, and the income he derives from it." The taxa~ tion of persons s~ocks by itself,t) says he, cc because a person is nothing else but a heap of wants. . . ."

In his Plan de meflloire sur Its illlpositio1ls,Turgot examines the point of quo/iti(each one paying a portion of his revenue) with reference to the system of ,.tpar72 T1lrgot. titton, by virtue of which each person pays a portion of the sum required by the government. You may ask each one for a part of his income: that is the system of quo/itt. You may be satisfied with asking the nation, each province, each community a fixed sum to be divided afterwards amongst the landowners: that is the system of repartition. He finds great advantages in the system of quo/ilt. The State collecting a proportionate part of the revenue would be, according to him, the real owner of that part of the revenue. In sales and purchases an arrangement might be made on the same footing. The purchasers would end by no longer buying the share of the State. After some time nobody would pay any taxes. Th~ public revenue would increase in the same proportion as the riches of the nation, since it would form part of them. "The wealth o~ the king would be the measure of the wealth of the people, and the administration, always struck by the reaction of its faults, would derive instruction from an experience of every moment, from the mere calculation of the yield of the ' taxes."

In spite of so many advantages, the thing nevertheless seems to him impossible, because in the quo/itt system the government stands alone against all, everyone being interested in concealing the amount of his propertyJ and no one being interested in stating the truth. He further adds a consideration which has lost nothing of its forceJ becausethe generalmethod of working the land has much less changed in France since the last hundred The Lalld-la~:. 73 nnd twenty years than many people fancy. The consi.. deration is this: if in the countries where cultivation is managed on a large scale the price of the farming gives us the basis of the land-tax, it is not the same in mc/o)'agt countries where there arc no leases, and where, accordingly, that kind of control disappears; he adds that the whole of the land is not (armed out.; quite the reverse: "hardly one-third o( the kingdom is cultivated b)' fanners."

As (or trusting to the honesty of the persons who make their statements, it is not a practical manner of recovering the taxes; then he ends, by the following cO:1clusion,which is not a ver)" cheerful one, but which witnesses to a very deep knowledge of the human heart: "Fraud," says he, "would be very common, alii, tlure/ort, 'ItlQuld nul be dishonest." He accordingly recommends the plan of a fixed assessment. For him the land-tax should be a fixed charge, de~ termined by means of a fixed sUr\'ey, this resulting from a measurement of land and :.l classification of the various estates according to their quality. This system, which he makes so much of, is simplythe one which the National Assembly established in France. It still subsists at the present day. The advantages and drawbacks inherent to it are still those pointed out by Turgot, and the same questions are still discussed as at the epoch when it was endeavoured to perfect the fixed assessment ('t~a,ti'filJ'/) in the provinces where fixed assessment (,epartition) was in use, and to introduce it in those where the contrary system (viz., non-fixed assessment) prevailed.

74 TUY..t:ot. In '769 there took place at Angouleme one of those commercial crises which we rather erroneously designate to~ay as monetary crises; the cause of it was the im possibility in which certain speculators found themselves of supporting the excessive circulation of paper issued as accommodation-bills. Hence stoppages of pay ment, failures, and even bankruptcies; engagements fallingdue could not be renewed, discount had beeome impossible, commercial operations were suspended, no money was available for any business, and the soundest merchants had absolutely lost all credit. The tradesmen who sold stuffs for the consumption o( the town having applied, according to custom, to Lyons for their orders, answer had been sent to them that no transaction would be carried on with ~lessicurs d'Angouleme except on ready-money terms. Since those days crises of the same kind have often taken place. The over..circulation of paper always leads to an increase in the value of money; speculators are then obliged to liquidate, and both the guilty and the careless lenders who trusted them are included in the same ruin.

But the J 769 crisis at Angouleme had a special character which was destined to aggravate considerably its conse quences. The men who had circulated the accommodation·bills formed a band of scoundrels who had agreed to benefit by their very bankruptcy in charging the discounters with usury, and denouncingthem on that ground to the -senlclzal of Angouleme. "The disturbance of all com· The A11gou1R111C Criszs. 75 mercialoperations,"says Turgot) U alarmspreadamongst the merchants of a town, and the way in which their (or· tune is affected,constitutea. great evil. A greater evil stilI is the triumph of a set of rogues who, after taking advantage of the credulity of private individualsto obtain money on the security of fraudulent bills, have had the cunning guiltier still of seeking in badly understood laws the means not only of warding off the pursuits of their creditors) hut of exercising against these creditors the mo!rt cruel vengeance: ruining them) defaming them, and enriching themselves with the spoils." Turgot accordingly proposed to bring before the council the charges of usury submitted to the sClllelmlof Angoulemc, nnd to appoint for the purpose of judging these charges a commissi()nwhich should at the s..'lme time be required to draw up a declaration and to fix the jurisprudence on the subject of commercinl loans made on interest.

In agreement with these conclusions the council sum v moned the c.ase before it; the pursuits directed against the lenders were quashed, and it ,,-as expressly forbidden to institute any such in future; but no declaration took place; the law asked by Turgot was not made, and the legislation respectmg the rate of interest remained obscure as it was before, nnd abandoned to the arbitrary decision of the judges. In support of his demand for bringing the above ('.nse before the council, Turgot, always accustomedto treat from the most general point of view, on the occasion of specialcases,the businesssubmitted to him, handed over F2 Tttrgol. to the Council of State a memoir which is the most complete and most perfect work ever written on the subject of lending money on interest, and of usury, work which immediately placed the author amongst our best writers. The subject is divided into three parts :·····-First,the necessity of loans on interest for the requirements of trade and industry is demonstrated; the rate of interest variesJ in the first place, according to the abundance or scarcity of capitals; in the second, according to the cer tainty of the repayment or the risk attending it. Secondly, Turgot refutes the arguments of scholastic divines, lawyersJ and theologians. Thirdly, he inquires into the historical causes, which, by rendering usury odious, have spread about in the world an opinion unfavourable to .capitalists who lend their money, Lastly, in a conclusion very soundly argued, he asks that loans on interest should be deemed lawful; the rate of interest to be fuUy discussed hetween the lenders and the borrowers; the usurers who trade on the passions and inexperience of the young to be punished only by laws similar to those which are applied to cases of abuse of confidence and other forms of deceit.

According to him, there is no commercial locality where the greater part of enterprises do not result from borrowed money; and there is no capitalist who would consent to deprive himself of money which he could turn to use, if he did not find in it a corresponding advantage. If lent money did not bear any interest, it would not be Loa'lts a1zd Usu'YJ'. 77 lent. f and if the law forbade loans on interest, either it would be violated, or commerce WQuld come to a stand D still. But if loans on interest are necessary, and if a trade in money takes place, money must be looked upon as a kind of merchandise, the price of which depends upon an agreement between the contracting parties, and is submitted, like all other goods, to the law of supply and demand. \Vhat fault can there be found with the borrower who, making his lender run a risk, consents to pay over to him a high rate of interest; or with the lender who protects himself against risks by an increase in his price? No Jaw, whether civil or religious, obliges one person to procure to another gratuitous help; why then should a civil or a religious law prohibit anyone from procuring money at a price which the borrower consents to pay for his own advantage? The lawfulness of inter est is an immediate consequence of property, of the right which the proprietor exercises over what belongs to him.

The proprietor of a thing can either sell it or let it; the price of the sale or of the letting is ahvays fair when the will of both parties has been free, and when there ha.'i been no fraud on either side. These principles are universally acknowledged when anything else but money is concerned; why should they not be applied to money as well as to everything else? And if you say that it is want which obliges the borrower to accept the lender's terms, could it not he answeredthat it is wantalso which drives a man to the baker's? Has the baker less right to receive the price of the loaf which he sells, and can the Tttrgot. purchaser take the baker's loaf without having paid its value? Scholastic divines, in order to attack loans on interest, have started from an argument which some persons nscrihe to Aristotle; ~l.nd, under the plea that mone}' does not produce money, they have concluded that it is not lawful to get l110ney out of money by means of loans. The alleged sterility of money is nothing else but a glaring error resulting from a wretched misunder N standing. Those who maintain and spread it, forget that money is the necessary instrument of aU agricultural, industrial, and commercial enterprises; they forget that although some personf\ consider it as harren, it is amongst all the people of the world the equivalent not only of all the goods, of all the effects which might perhaps be regarded as barren, but of all landed estates which, nevertheless, yield a very real income.

The argument of the jurists, and of Pothier, ,unangst others, is different. H Equity," says he, "requires that in a contract which is not gratuitous, the values given on both sides should be equal; that each party should not give more than what it has received) nor receive more than what it has given. Now all that the lender requires in the loan, in addition to the principal loan itself, is a thing which he receives beyond what he has given, since, by receiving the principal loan exclusively, he recei"'esthe exact equivalentof what he has given." Pothier's argument is the one which Thomas Aquinas made use of. The jQllgilJle articles (articles which can l..,OQlIS and VSll-ry. 79 be weighed, measured, counted, and replaced in kind) whkh constitute the object of a loan have no USt~ distinguishable from the article itself; jf you sell that use at the price of interest required, you sel) a thing which does not exist. Turgot looks upon that argument a~ a tissue of errors 3nd of misunderstandings which can bt~ easily unravelled. In every convention having for its basis two n~dprocal conditions, there can be injustice only if there has been violence, fraud, bad faith, abuse of <:,onfidencc. Between two values exchanged, between two objects given and received, there can neyer be any~ thing like metaphysic.aJ equality or inequality. The equality of value depends upon the opinion of the contracting parties as to the degree of usefulness of the things exchanged for the satisfaction of their wants or their desires. But, after discussing the inequality, people add, as if this was an instanl~e of inequality, that in returning more than the capital to the person who has lent him money, the borrower gives more than he received, and they can this a (;ase of injustice. This reasoning supposes that the muney received tQeday and the money to be repaid a year hence are two things perfectly equal. Is there not, on the contrary, between these two things a palpable inequality and difference, and the well·known pro,·erb, U A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," does it not naively express that inequalityand that difference?

Finally, the last argument against the validity of loo.n5 on interest is taken from the Bible. \Ve read in 51.

80 Ttlrgot. Luke's gospel: U Mutuum date, nihil inde sperantes" (Lend, hopmg for nothing again); people of common sense would see in that passage merely a precept of charity, and it would be impossible to interpret the text otherwise if we replace it in the sentence from which it has been taken: cc Verum tamen, diligite inimicos vestros, benefacite, et mil/Ullin dale nih,1 ;"de sperantes, et erit merces vestra multa et eritis filii AltissimJ,quia ipse benignus est super ingratos et malos." (But love your enemies,and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your re,,·ard shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful, and to the evil.) For Turgot, any man who reads this text without any prejudice, must s~e in it a precept of charity. The true meaning of the passage is none other than if it had been said: As men, as Christians, you are all brethren. all friends. Deal with each other as brethren, as friends; help each other in your needs; let your purses be open to each other; and do not sell the assistance which you owe to one another.

The real origin of the opinion which condemns loans on interest and usury is to be found in the outcry of nations to whom usurers have always been hateful. It is pleasant to get money, it is hard to have to return it. In societies just starting, people do not borro\Vmuch for commercial purposes, they do so only for the necessities of hfe; money can be returned only jf fortunate circumstances occur, and the lender runs the risk that such circumstances may not take place.

Loans a1ld [!sury. 81 Accordingly, in these conditions the rate of interest (4'1nnot but be very high. At Rome it was excessh·e. The severity of the laws against debtors-,,~Jaws made by the rich··--rouscd the indignation oC the people against their creditors. In all the republics of antiquity the :lboHtion of debts has always been the wish of the multitude, and the watcheword of the ambitious men who wanted to curry the popular favour. 'Vhen Christianity appeared, it offered itself to· the people as the religion which stood up to protect the poor; preachers naturally ~dopted an opinion which had become the cherished one of the poor, and they confounded loans on interest with the severity of the prosecutions directed against insolvent debtors. Hence the tendency manifested by the doctors of the Church to consider loans on interest as unlawful. The causes, however, which had formerly made loans on interest hateful have ceased to act with the same force. Trade has multiplied ad itifittiltllllt and it em~ ploys immense capitals. Loans made by the poor to provide (or their living are anly an infinitesimal fraction of the whole amount o( such transactions. The persons to whom most loans are made arc the rich, industrious men, those, generally,who hope to derive profits from the money they borrow.

The name of usurers is now given exclusively to lenders of smallsums of money at an exorbitant interest for a week (prtltttrs ala pt/ilt slma;,u), to a few pawnbrokers who advance money on pledges to inferior bourgeoisand to dis tressed workmen; finally, to the contemptible wretches Turgot. whose business it is to supply at enormous interest to dissi~ pated young men of good family wherewith to carry on their licentious behaviour and their extravagant expenses. The prtlt.urs a la jJf/iit sf-maine enahle, after all, petty tradesmen to earn their livelihood; pawnbrokers lend money on pledges which the borrower has no need of, and the poor man thinks himself lucky to Hnd a momentary relief, without any other danger but that of losing his pledge. The common people feel grateful rather than indignant towards these smaJl usurers whQ assist them in time of need, although they sell that assistance very dear.

The only money ..lenders reany injurious to society arc those) therefore, who make a business by advancing money to young spendthrifts. But their real crime consists not in being usurers, but in facilitating and encouraging the extravagances of young men. They should be punished 011 that ground, and not Cor the rate of interest paid over to them. \Vhen we read in the ori~inal, from beginning to end, the memoir of which we have just given the summar)', we are struck by the power of the arguments employed, and we are forced to acknowledge that in writing it Turgot has really exhausted the subject. The di~cussi()n started by Turgot one hundred and twenty years ago, in the king's council, has very often been revived since; it is not yet finished, and it is perhaps not nearly being so. The champions of freedom in the matter of loans on interest have made many excellent speeches; but what Free C"irculatioll of Corll. 83 ever rna)' have been their merit, their eloquence, the readiness of their dt"veloprncnts, they have merely reproduced Turgot's arguments in the language of the day. There is only one arsenal in which perfect weapons can be found wherewith to fight the SUl~cessors of the $«::holastk divines and of Pothier. That arsenal is the memoir on money·,loans delivered to the king~s council in 1769, with the view of supporting the sum~ mary made t<) that council of the prosecutions on a charge of usury first brought before the s!:llkhill of Angoulcme.

Next to the dearth of capitals~ the history of which we have related. the gbzeralite of Limoges had to sutTer from another dearth, namely that of cereals, a much more formidable one than that of money, a redoutablc scourge at all times, hut still more so in countries where means of communication are mrt.~, as they were in France at that time, and when popular prejadices, encouraged by the most influential representatives of the administration and the magistracy, render the trade in corn extremely dangerous. The royal deduration of J 763 and the edict of J 764 had sanctioned "the fret.~ circulation of corn" within the kingdom; but that freedom was constantly threatened by the local parliaments and the munidp~l officers. Thus the Bordeaux parliament, by a decree dated January 17th, 1770, had ordered the landlords and farmers of Limousin and ()f Perigord to c1rry every week to the markets a quantity of corn sufficient for the supply of the said markets, prohibIting them, at the same lttrgot.

time, from selling corn either wholesale or in retail else A where than in these markets. The tcluvins (aldermen) of thc small town of Turenne had not respected the law any better. They had forN bidden the exportation of cereals from the mills of the town, ordering the landlords to leave Ie their corn on the spot, receiving in return the value in ready money at the market price".; finally, the Angouteme !leu/eltan! de polict had been bold enough to issue a decree ordering ~U persons having corn in their houses, either ware· housed or otherwise, to keep only what was strictly necessary (or their consumption and that of their families, directing them at the same time to forward the overplus to the market under a penalty of one thousand livres fine. This was adding to the local dearth, which was ver)· serious by reason of the failure of the harvest, a more general one resulting (rom the impossibilityofsupplement ..

ing by commcrcial means the deficit existing in the generality. \Varned of the danger, Turgot adopted the most energetic measures. He insisted before the council to obtain from them the quashing of the 130rdeaux decree. He ordered the Turenne municipality to cease their opposition to the export of cereals. He obtained a decree of the council prohibiting the lieutenant of police of Angouleme from carrying out his order. At the same time he caused to be distributed a large number of copies of the royal declaration of 1763, and of the edict of 1764 on the free circulation of corn, together with Le Trosne's work, entitled la Libert; till l011l11Urcc des grains) Free Circulation 0/ Corn. 85 lou/()ursIIli/t, ja11l1.1is llu;sjIJlt.;(or he used to sa)', "Orders even should be sown in prepared ground." Nor was he satisfied with these somewhat passive measures; he organised relieving offices, compelled' the landlords to supply their dependents with food, and opened docks for the construction of roads and highways.

The political difficulties, however, which the high price of corn could not fail to raise, not only at Limoges, but in many provinces, had seriously shaken the confidence of the Abbe Terray (supposing it was sincere: and this is doubtful) in the efficaciousness of the free circulation of corn which the ((Jlllnllellr gineral Bertin had allowed by the edict of 1764; the Abbe Terrny resolved accord ingly upon reC'.aHingthe edict. Before carrying out his plan, and although quite resolved upon doing so for all sorts of reasons, some of which were far (rom honourable, he communicated it to the inttlzdants,asking them their opinions. It is on this occasion that Turgot wrote his celebrated letters on the free circulation..of corn. He extemporised them during his journey of inspection, whilst he was making the deparltmenl (to uc;e the language of the day), or the dividinl{the charge of the land-tax between the e!(C lions, the slIlJdt/egations,and the (01Jt11lUlleS. It was winter, and cold in the mountain districts; the resting-places were few and badly appointed. It was whilst tr~l\··eHing under very painful conditions, especially for a man subject to gout and rheumatism, that he wrote them ~lIr"(lll( (alatllo.

Nothing is more astonishing than the ease with which 86 Turgot. our hz/tlziall/ could finish, unfavourabJy circumstanced as he was, a work which has become classical, and in which all the questions, stated with perfect dearness. are solved, on the side of freedom, by common-sense, with irrefutable logic. These famous letters, seven in number, are dated, the first from Limoges, October 30th, the second from Tune, November 8th, the third {rom Egleton, November loth, the fourth from Egleton, November 11th, and (rom Bort, November 13th, the fifth from Saint.Angel, November 15th, the sixth from Angoul~me, November 27th, the seventh, and last, {rom Limoges, December 7th, 1770. Three letters have, un fortunately, been lost; they were given to Louis XVI by Turgot him$elf in the original at the time of the guerre dts jarbzes, and they have not been recovered j the first drafts have disappeared, and nothing has remained of them but summaries and fragments j the others are complete.

The Abbe Terray, (on/ro/curgeneral, meeting Turgot at Compiegne, had expressed to him, a few months before, his doubts on the advantages of freedom in the circula~ tion of corn. H Three classes of persons," he said, (( are interested in the selection of a s}'stem on the police of cereals: the landowners, the cultivators, and the con sumers. I agree that the system of freedom is extremely favourable to the landowners. \Vith respect to cultivators, the advantage they find in it is merely transient, because at the end of the lease the landowners know full well how to appropriate it by raising the rent. Finally, the Frte (~£rtltltlt£OIl of Corll. 87 t~()n~umers evidentl)' suffer the grc:ltest prejudice from the lib(~rty which raises the prices to an extent thoroughly out of proportion with their ml~ans of subsistence, and increasing all their expenses." Hence the Abbe Tcrray's condusioll that whereas freedom was advantageous only to the smallest proportion of the citizens. and a matter of indifference to the cultivators, it affected in the most serious manner the infinitely greater number of his majesty's subjects.

This series of arguments Turgot undertook t.o refute in his letters. In the first place he regards it as an error to bdieve that freedom of commerce can result in raising the average price of corn.; the reverse is the truth. He has no difficulty in proving that if the cultivators and lo.ndownerscan freely dispose of their crops only if they are compelled to sell cheap, whilst they lose on the quan tity without being able to compensate for the s(,~'lrdty of production by the mising o( the prices, they are naturally led to prefer other cultures to that which exposes them to so many persecutions. A system of interference in commercial transactions must infallibly lend to diminish the in1portance of the crops, which necessarily produces a rise in the average price of corn. Under the rt~'me of police regulations the prices are more variable; under the regitntof freedom they are less so. "Regulations and prohibitions," says Turgot, cc do not produce one more grainof corn. but the)'preventthe corn, over·abun· dant in one localit}', (rom being carried to places where it is most scarce."

88 Ttel''got. Turgot examines then what he calls the three branches of the Abbe Terray's opinions. lIe states, in the first place, that he agrees with him so far that the landlords are interested in freedom, but not at an for the motive, as the CQlztnUeur general believes, that freedom leads to a rise in the prices, since it is the contrary which is true. One of the consequences of the wdnt of freedom is that in good years cultivators dare not warehouse the overplus of their crops for fear of being prosecuted as hoarders in a season of scarcity. So it happens that when plenty occurs the corn is wasted; it is thrown away to the cattle; hence a diminution in the production, and consequently a decrease in the net pro duce and in the annual value of the land. In one of the three letters which have not been re covered, because they were lost with the papers of Louis XVI, Turgot had made a comparative and detailed state ment of the expense entailed by production, and of the average value of the selie, (twelve bushels in English value) of corn, in France, in the good, fair, and bad years, and he had calculated that where freedom of commerce does not exist, the impossibility of compensating one by another the "expenses and the prices in times of plenty and in times of scarcity represented a diminution of 50,000,000 livres for landowners merely, to say nothing of the losses endured by workmen and consumers.

In his sixth letter Turgot passes on to what he calls the second branch of the Abbe Terray's argument, that is to say, the cultivators' point of view. The (ont,Jltll1' The Uilftta}'cr lJ ,,'»'stelJ1. 89 gbltra/ looked upon the interest of the cultivator as being untou'ched, because in the case where the farmers would have found an advantage, their landlords would have reaped that advantage at the expiration or the leases. But the Abbe Terray forgot that cultivation on a large scale, that of farmers, occupied then, as it does now, only part of the territory of Franc:e. Four~sevenths of the country were worked by mt!oytrs, whose cultivation, resources, and income were very middling. These cul tivators held no leases; they received half the produce. Under such circumstances the interest of the cultivator could not differ from that of the landowner, and freedom of commerce, which,according to the Abbe Terray's idea, ought to help the one, must be Jike\visebeneficial to the other. Turgot hoped that the improvement in their situation would allow the wretched 11ItlQyersof his da)' to shake off their misery gradually, to get together by degrees a small stock of cattle, and to become farmers, that is to say, to pay to their landlords it fixed rent.

This transformation would have had, according to him, the consequence of placing on the same level the cultivation of the provinces the most behindhand with that of the richest parts of Normandy, Picardy, and IIe de France. '(And supposing," sal's he, "that the system of freedom had no advantage except that of putting on the same footing the culture of these provinces and that of the districtsnow cultivatedon a largescale: supposing the cultivation and the income of these ,vere not likewise to be very much increased, could you be blind to the 90 Tlt1'g'Ot. advantage which such a revolution alone would introduce into the State. the immense increase in the revenue and in articles of subsistence. could you not see what cultiva·· tion in general gains by a system of freedom ?" Turgot devoted his last letter to the discussing of the interests of consumers, which, according to Terray, were injured by the suppression of the restrictions imposed under the regimt of the old police; he reproduced and developed in that letter all the arguments he had already put forth to prove that freedom, by increasing the total mass of production. must tend to diminish the prices of the general market for the benefit of the consumers.

\Ve need not go a second time over these arguments, but· his discussion of the monopoly of trade in corn exercised by the State is curious. \Vhat Terray wanted to favour by suppressing the edict of 1764 was really the optrations des bits du 1"0;. to use the parlance of the times, and. when bringing light to bear upon the question of monopoly. Turgot touched the vital point. lie could not conceive a company exercising the most terrible monopoly-monopoly on purchase against the labourer. monopoly on sale against the consumer. Supposing even that all its members were angels, the company could not possibly succeed in equalising the prices; it would be incapable of providing for the subsistence of aU, and people would always say that it only consisted of rogues. Ie If a series of losses/' says he, cc is occasioned by a series of bad crops, and more certainly still by maladministration, by the faults, negligences, and swindTerray's r11J1tSt'. o.f Power. 91 ling of every kind inseparable from the management of an undertaking too extensive and directed by too many persons, what will become of the supply it has pledged itself to make? The directors will be hung, but that will not give bread to the poor."

The Abbe Terray, however, would listen to nothing; he contented himself with sounding the praise of the letters he had received, and offering them as patterns to the other b,lelldtl1lls,. and h~ cancelled, by the edict of December 23, 1770, the principal dispositions of the edict of 1764. All persons wishing to trade in Corn had to enter in the police-register their names, sur~ names, qualities, places of abode, warehouses, and deeds relating to their business, and they were obliged under the severest penalties toseH nothing except at the market-town. U In twenty villages," says Voltaire, H the lords, clergy men, labourers, and artisans were compelled either to go themselves or to send at a great expense to that capital (the market-town); anyone selling at home, to his neighbour, a seHer of corn was condemned to a fine of 500 Bvres, and the corn, the waggon, and the horses were seized for the benefit of those who came to exercise that plunder accompanied by a troop of soldiers (at··u utle pando/ieye). Every lord giving in his village corn or oats to one of his vassals exposed himself to be punished as a criminal."

In order that so gross an abuse of power should come to an end, Turgot must be raised to the position of a cabinet minister. G 2 CHAPTER V. TURGOT A CABINET MINISTER.-}.REE TRADE IN COR~.-THE GUERRE DES t<"ARINES. REINSTATEMENT OF THE PARLIAMENTS. O N ascending the throne, Louis XVI had sum moned the old Comte de l\laurepas in order to make of him his prime minister. By this measure he had put an end to the triumvirate of d'Aiguillon, Maupeou, and Terray, but he had dismissed d'Aiguillon alone, and retained the two others temporarily. However, if Terray still retained his title as (ontrtJlettrgbteral, we may say that his successor was already found; that was Turgot. The Abbe de Very and the Duchess d'Enville had decided that choice. Very was an old fellow-pupil of Turg',)t, and had never ceased being "ith him on terms of the closest intimacy. Later on, at Bourges, where he had spent a few years as grand 'l.litaire.he had made the acquaintance of the Count and Countess de l\.faurepas,exiled from the court by Louis XV, and he had often spoken to them of his (riend. The countess admired Turgot's character, and had been won over by his ideas. Accordingly, when her husband had been made prime minister, she Turgot Cabinet Ali11z"ster. 93 strongly urged upon him to offer a scat in the c-..abinet to a man whose genius and honest)' had inspired her with profound esteem.

The Duchess d'Enville belonged heart and soul to the philosophers and the economists, whom she received in her beautiful ehd/tall of La Roche*Guyon. She was an impassioned advocate of frec trade in corn, and was spared neither by the satires, nor by the songs, nor even by the c.aricntures with which the courtiers and the gentlemen of the parliament continually over whelmed the new reformers. She belonged to the La Rochefoucauld family, with which Count de l\laurepas was very proud of being connected. She recommended Turgot to him most strongly at the very time when the Countess de ~taurepas and Very were recommending him likewise. Thus it is that Turgot became minister, not c.alled, perhaps, by public opinion, as it has been said, because public opinion did not exist then, or was only just beginning to appear; but he was designated by his admirers and friends to an all-powerful prime minister.

This event caused great joy in the camp of the economists and the Em:ydojJtdis/es/ but a rather serious disappointment afterwards manifested itself when they learnt that, if Turgot was indeed minister, it was to the navy, and not to the finances, that he had been appointed. &« This selection meets with general approval." :Mercy writes to :Maria Theresa, U not because Turgot is supposed 94 to possess great talent for naval matters, but everyone knows that he is thoroughly honest." Marie Antoinette was not dissatisfied, and said to her mother that "Turgot enjoys the reputation of a very honest man." The na\'y, besides, was only a temporary appointment. One month later, August 24th, 1774, Turgot was named {01tlt'lj/ttlY gblt.Yal. 'Vhilst thanking the king, Turgot was very much mo,,·ed. Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse relates that he said to him: U It is not to the king that I give myself up, but to the honest man," and that the king answered, taking him by both hands, "You will not have been mistaken."

The Abbe de Very gives of that scene a similar description. Turgot was with him at Compiegne, where the whole court had assembled, when ~laurepas came to inform him of his appointment to the £'()lltrole genero/. He went immediately to the king, and, on his return, this is how he related to Very the conversation he had just had with Louis XVI: "Sire," said he, ")'ou must allow me to put down in writing my general views, and if 1 may so say, my conditions on the manner in whichyou should assist me in this administration of the finances; for, I own to you, it makes me tremble on account of the superficial acquaintance I have with it." "Yes! yes!" the king is reported to have said, U just as you please; but I give you my word of honour beforehand," and he took hold of both his hands whilst he went on speaking, "to share all your views, and always support you in the courageoussteps you will have to take."

111rgot's Progral1l1UC. 95 On the next day Turgot delivered to the king his famous programme. "I limit myself just now, Sire, to remind lOU of these three cxpresstons; NQ bankruptcy, no increase in the taxes, no loans. No bankruptcy, either avowed or conceak'd by compulsol}' redut':tion. No increase in the taxes: the rcason of this lit-os in the situa.tion of your people, and still more in the heart of your Maji."Sty. No loa.ns, because every loan always diminishes the available income ,; it nec::essitates, besides, at the end of some time, either bankruptcy or an increase in the taxes." 'ro carry out this progranmlc he only proposed one means, the reducing of the expenditure, and the bringing of its amount below that of the receipts. He knows per~ fectIy well that aU those who have expenses to carryon in the variQus branches of the public service will ever maintain that all thos~ expenses are indispensable, and he feels no doubt that they \,,"ill support their statement by excellent arguments; but he knows also that all their statements ·shouJd yiekJ to the absolute neces~ sity of economy. He represents strongly to the king that the people can be relieved only through the reform of abuses, which is difficult, bC<.":ause there are always many people interested in keeping up abuses, "for there is no abuse which does not maintain some person or other. . . . U " I shall have to fight/' said he, "against your ~Iajesty's naturalkindness and generosity, and against that of the personsdearest to you. c •• Your ~lajcsty will be pleased to remember that I abandon Turgot.

myself less to the king, than to you individually, to the bonest man, to the man just and good." Turgot evidently dreaded the influence of the queen. I ha\·e read the very draft of the programme. After having written the words, "against your ~fajesty's generosity," "furgot had already added the words, U and of the ••.n when he stopped and covered the "and of the 't by U and against that of the persons, et~..n On the very next day Turgot set to work. Named COlltnUeur lrhzeral, August 24th, 1774, he was to be dis missed ~fay 18th, Ii 76, at the end of twenty months and eighteen days. Out of these twenty m.onths he enjoyed go<>d health during thirteen, and suffered from gout during the seven others; but mnessdid not influence his w'Ork, and we can affirm that during the whole time that he exercised his duties as contruleur gfJzeral he never ceased for one single instant the frank and honest execution of what we can designate his programmt!) to use a modern expression, that i!: to say, the re-establish· ment of the finances, the struggle against the abuses, the destruction of privileges, freedom of work, commerce, and industry) which had been crushed by regulations and monopolies,endeavouringthus to realisewithout violence, fifteen years before the Revolution or' 1789, all the reforms conquered later on in the civil and economic order, at the cost of so many efforts and sufferings.

He was implacable for persons who stood up for abuses in order to live upon them, whenever he thought these persons intelligent enough to appreciate their own The FanJlers-GclltraiFrighle1led. 97 acts; but he \\"as indulgent for the ignorant, vigorously stnmping out at the snme time the disordersinto which their ignorance might hurry them. He hnd n due regnrd, besides, (or vested rights. and he always took care to pay equitably the amount of the offices which he decided upon suppressing. His accession to the (Oil/role gb,t,nl had (rightened the farmers-genernl. Ie People S&"ly that the financiers are frightened to death," the Abbe Haudeau wrotei U they are wrong; ~I. Turgot is not giddy enough to upset immediately the lease of the Carnung of the taxes, or the other financial arrangements." During the discussion which he had in 1776 with ~lirom~ni1 on the suppression of the (ortleel (statute.

labour) he penned some notes in answer to the observa· tions of the keeper of the seals. In those notes a passage occurred well worth the attention of those who used to consider, or who still consider TurKot as the chief oC a band of fanatics. "I know quite as well as anybody else that we should not always do the best thing possible, and that, if \~ cannot give up the idea of correcting by degrees the defects of an old constitution, we must proceed only slowly, in proportion as public opinion and the course of events render the alterations possible." \Vith the view of convincing public opinion, and destroying prejudices \vhich he considered as founded upon ignorance,he had conceived the plan of a board which would have fonned an administration analogous to our Ministry of Public Instruction.

l1trgot. " I think," said he to the king, « that I cannot propose to your ~fajesty anything more advantageous for your people. and more likely to maintain peace and good order, better qualified to give activity to all useful works, to make your authorit)< cherished, and to attach more and more t.) yourself the hearts of your subjects, than to have them all thoroughly instructed in the obligations they have towards society, and towards your power which protects society: the duties which these obligations lay upon them, the interest they have in fulfilling these duties for the public good and for their own. This moral and social training requires books expressly written by competition, and a schoolmaster in every parish who shall teach them to the children, togetber with writing, ciphering, and land-measurement . • • . The civic education given throughout the whole extent of the kingdom under the direction of the educational board, together with the common-sense books it would order to be written, and from which it would compel every professor to teach, would contribute still more Lo train a well-informed and virtuous people/' 'Vhilst preoccupied with the thought of destroying prejudices for the future, and moulding, as he was wont to saYt a new nation, Turgol attended quite as eagerly to the prescnt, and sought the promptest and most efficacious means of healing the inveterate wound of financial disorder, rendered worse still by the Abbe Terray's dishonest administration.

He had been scarcely installed in the office of (on/roletiT 1erray's Intrigues. 99 gIn frat than he commissioned those of his assistants in whom he had the greatest confidence to collect the ele~ ments of what we should now can the budget of income and of expenditure. u He ordered,l1 says Dupont de Nemours, "the draw... ing up of methodical and minute tahles which should contain the most complete details on every branch of the income and the expenditure." This statement has been pre&t:f\'ed. \Ve have also a statement of the same kind made hy his predecessor a few days before. The Abbe Terray, whom Louis XVI had retained for a few months in the ministry, had hoped that he might remain there perm:t nently. by setting his system of policy in tune with the new reign, and by transforming his principles, since new principles seemed fashionable. In the memoir and the statementto which we alluded, he cast upon d'Aiguillon and de Boynes, respectively~Iinisters of 'Var and of the Navy, the responsibility of the deficit, and laid a great stress on the efforts he had made to reduce the expendi.

ture b}' every possible means. \Veber states that in the conversationshe had with his friend, the abbe said that "he had succeeded by dint of injustices,bankruptcies, :md spoliations in filling the deficit, all but five millions. He had left 57,000.000 in the treasury,besides 14,000,000 in reserve for unforeseen requirements. The antidpa. tions were reduced to two months. He had provided for the usual expenses, war preparations, the circumstance 100 Tttrgot. of three weddings, nnd other extraordinar)? outlays which were to remain secret." Turgot's adversaries have contrasted the situation of the treasury at the two epochs of Terray's downfall and of Turgot'~; and they ha"'e pretended that Turgot exw hausted the:: reserve left by his predecessor. Linguet used to say of Terray that he was a Suny, because he had amassed an amount of 56,000,000. Turgot, according to hiro, could be compared only to Sully's successors, who had squandered away the millions heaped up in the Bastille. \Ve shaH follow neither the discus~ sion of Terrny's supporters nor the arguments of Turgofs champions,for both would be equally idle; posterity has pronounced its verdict; it has selected between the un· scrupulous minister of Louis XV and the honest minister of Louis XVI.

t. One of Turgot's first measures had been to dismiss the maUre des "t~lI;les, Brochet de Saint-Prest, director ofthe corn agency. "I am delighted," wrote l\Iademoisellede L'Espinasse, "that :M. Turgot has already dismissed the man of the corn business." \Ve must remember that in 1770, that is to say, four years previously, Terray had suppressed the liberal clauses of the declaration of 1763, and the edict of 1764 on the trade in corn, and that he had once again brought that trade under the se~·erity of the old police regulations. B}' the return to the former usages he had flatteredthe The A bbl Galialli. leI prejudices of the people and the parliaments, and satis fied the publicists, who contended that the national subsistence could not be abandoned to what they called the unfettered cupidity of commercial people. He had found, besides, a valuable support {or the upholding of his politkaJ ,'jews in the book of a man of considerable wit, an intimate friend of lil/eralellrsand Ent;J'c/ojtdistts, whose ideas on questions of economy, not very liberal, contrasted singularly with the opinions of most of his friends.

The Abbe GaHani, for it is to him that we allude, had composed a series of dialogues on free trade in corn, and in these dialogues, full of sharpness, of ",it, and of examples borrowed (rom the history of all nations, he had affirmed that so far as commerce in cereals is concerned, policy could be only one arising from cir cumstances ; it must be different according to the variou'i countries, and in the same country it could not be the same in the interior and on the sea-coast. The Abbe Terray did nQt disdain the help brought to him by the Abbe Gatiani, but he cared very little about his arguments. It was really neither the cries of the peoI»e, nor the wishes expressed by the parliaments, nor Galiani's theories, which were to decide him to cancel the edict of 1764-He yielded to none of the arguments of those who reasoned in conConnity with his own view~, just as he neglected the advicesscnt to him by Turgot (rom l.imousin, in the seven admirable letters which \\'t~ have analysed above.

102 lurgot. The aim he pursued was none else but the establish ment of a monopoly in the corn trade--monopoly handed over to his underlings, his associates, and perhaps, as it has often been stated, the associates of King Louis XV. According to the arrangement which has been designated by the too startling expression of Ie pacle de fami1le, the great point was to realise at any ratc the monopoly of ~peculation on the article of con sumption of prominent necessity par excellence,the bread of the people. ~luch has been written on the pacle de famine / it is an incident, the importance of which has been much exaggerated by popular report; but it remains beyond doubt that dealings in corn which have been the result of it were accompained by thefts, criminal dilapidations, and disgraceful speculations which we are right in denouncing and condemning, although no historian has ever been able to draw up an' exact list of them, or to give the enumeration of the persons who made their fortune by them, or derived from them some profit.

A lawyer, a man of business, named Leprevost de Beaumont, had been informed of the agreement made for the establishing of a society by a retired Paris baker, Malisset, inventor of an improved system for the grinding of corn, and a certain number of capitalists. The object of that society was the execution of a treaty entered upon with the government for cc the care, the providing, and the preservation of the kings cereals."

The "Pacte de FaIl1i11e." 1°3 This was in 1765, and the agreement which must now be executed anticipated a permanent 5uppl)". The corn or the flour produced by it was to he constantly main tained in a good state of preservation, and with that. view the society (or the farming of the cereals was authorised to sell the old purchases and replace them by new ones, according to the fluctuation of the markc:~t. a circumstance which excused, sanctioned, and en· eouraged speculation. l.epre\'ost de Beaumont saw in that agreement a compact made with the vic\v of starving the people··..·../t peult tit famint: he wanted to denounce it, but, overtaken before he could give to the Rouen parliament a copy of it which he had prepared. he was arrested and sent to the Bastille, from which he came out only on the 14th of July, 1789. The Revolution it was which set him free. "It is not," said he, "from suspicions,reports, conjectures, or false statements that I denounce this horrible machination; it is from the terms of its compact." And when Laverdy, the contra/ell' gb,t,al who had signed that deed in 1765, appeared on Brumaire 3rd, year II of the Republic, before the Revolutionary tribunal, I..cprevost c.ame to support, spontaneously,Fouquier-Tinville's accusation. All those, however, who had fonned part of that society, who had concurred towards that s().Called paclt' dt famine, and whom Leprevost de Beaumont had reproached {or having gained,as he said, "tens of millions, by hundreds at a time," had successively died, either ruined or in a state of insolvency; and ~fali$set himself, the agent1°4 Tttrgot.

general of the company, still alive in 1791, vegetated without any resources, and as if out of his mind. Leprevost de Beaumont's accusations were evidently exaggerated. It is possible that the corn company gave shares of interests on its profits to influential personages, to the king's favourites both male and female, perhaps to the king himself; proof has been found that such was the case for the shares in the profits of the general farming of the taxes. It is not less dear that l~ertain of the society's agents speculated on their own account, and that a few clerks gave themselves lip to dilapidations and thefts, of which the produce was squandered by them, and helped them to keel> up an impudent opulence,little justified by their patrimonial fortune. But never has anyone been able to find the track of the tens of thou y sands of millions, which, if we believe Leprevost de Beaumont, were drawn by :Malisset's accomplices from the people, so wretchedly poor, of the last years of Louis XV.

In consequence of Leprevost de Beaumont's revela tions) whether from fear lest they should be made public, or from other reasons of public or prh-ate interests, the )falisset·agreement was quashed by the Abbe Terra)' himself. A new combination, that of the regie ill/tress/e, bad been invented as its substitute. That regie was to pursue the same aim as the previous farming, that is to say. it was to provide for the distribution of corn, so that the provinces the best supplied should give their over.. plus to the less favoured ones. cc A commission had been formed,tl so say the memoirs on Terray, It to inquire into the cc:>rn business. It had under its n.uthor it}' two directors or agents-gen.eral for the purcrmses and tr..msmi~sjon~ (Sorin de Bonne and Doumerc); so that ~\H ahuses, in this branch of the public s~rvice, ought to have beenimmt:diately suppressed. But the(;ounciJlors of St.'lte complained that they were not eonsuhed, that nothing was conuntmkat(~d to them, amI, indt~ed,. the Abbe Terray had always brought to them the work half.

done; this conduct had become still more suspected, because Brochet de Saint~Prest, his sworn ally, a thorough beggar when he entered the council, displayed since he formed part of it an extraordinary amount of opulence and luxury; hence the supposition that .Ml\L Terray and Brochet, far from checking the monopoly, favoured it and carried it on by their underlings, who, too, were extremely rich." One month ,\fter Hrochet de Saint-Prest's dismissal, September 18th, 1774, two fishermenfound in the SeineJ in the neighbourhood of Suresnc, under a big stone, a bundle of papers referring to the administration of corn. Albert, the economist,the commercialilllelldan!, the friend ofTurgot, and who had been appointed in IJrochet's stead, received the bundle discovered by the fishermen. He immediately c.lused the government seals to be placed on the papers of Sorin and Doumerc, ordering the two men to be locked up in the Bastille. Crushing proofs were found against Brochet and his wife, who had borrowed heavy sums from the exchequer of the admin· 11 106 istration~ but the books of the administrators seemed regularly kept. Traces, indeed, were found of some mi5~ appropriations at which the ('tm,IY(Ut'IIY g/:Ub"ll/.--,,--wemean Terray,,,,,,·hadno doubt winked, hut nothing result(~d from the inquest which could justify a criminal pursuit.

Albert set the two administrators at liberty, dedaring that it was merely th(: casc()f settling of accounts to be brought before the ordinary and duly qualified tribunals. As for the irregular profits rC~llised in private speculations. they could not but escape all investigations: it was im possible to procure a statement of them. After so many scandals, so many rumours and reports, there was only one resolutionto adopt: return to freedom in the eorn trade, and break up all these companies, all these ad~ ministrntions, whieh, H if th~~y had consisted C\'(:n of angds/' as Turgot said in Ii70, CQuld not escape the suspicion and the anger of tht~ people. The (.(.mlro" leuy iff/leral, a(~cordingly, resolved upon suppressing the legislation extcmpol'ised by Termy in 1770, and he did welL He returned to the freedom, still very limired, of the declaration ofr 763 and of the edict of 1764, the initiative of which had been formerly taken by the f."tJlllnlkIlY ghll~ral Bertin, Turgofs colleague in the 1774 cabin~t.

The decree on the freedom, of the corn trade was si~ned in the Council of Finan(x~s, September 13th, 1776 ; but it was published only on the 20th of the same month. As early as September 7th, Daudeau announced in his jonrnal that U the declaration of J\lay 25th , 1763, B"'tiict Oil the C~rlt Trade. 1°7 on the liberty of home; trade is about to be rc-estabHshcd hy an edict of the counc::il blotting out all the Abbe Termy~s scribbling t '; but on the 18th he was still ignorant that the decision had been taken, and he said; U There are some fine cootradktQry rumours on the forthcoming edict of the council which relates to the corn trade. Some say that it is a continuation of the old principles, Oft at the utmost, the replacing of one (~ompany by another. The provision dealers (appnJ1.!is' J;mmeurs), Sorin and Doumerc, boast of going on with their swindling." The truth is that, during the week after Turgot's proposition, there had been a discussion at the council· board. Bertin, who during his tenufe of office as a:mlrukur gbllral had caused the liberal declaration of 1763 and the 1764 edict to be produced, was now .!\finic;ter of' Agriculture; and, whilst sharing Turgot's opinions, he was afraid of coming too strongly into collision with popular prejudices. lIe was convinced that in the corn question there was only one measure sanctioned by experience, viz., "pro&tTess by sknv and slH::cessh'esteps.f1 In September, 17i4, probably between the 13th and the 20th, after the first communication of thl~ scheme of edict to the Council of 14'inances,and before it had been made public, he wrote to TurgQt: "The d(X~umcnts you have forwarded to me, whilst they revive all my hopes for th(~ general good, and for that of my spt~dal oflke, have renewed all my regrets as to the past . . . • I exhort you to give to your progress all the Pi :z 108 Ttt1;g-ot.

slowness of prudence. I would even go so far as to invite you, if it was as possible for you as it is to me to do so, and if you had not long ago made a profession of your principles, to conceal your views and your opinions from the child whom you have to govern and to restore to health. You cannot help performing here the part of a dentist." Bertin was not the only person who recommended him prudence. Others came who wished to turn him aside from the object he had in view. They were no doubt less devoted to him individually; that was perhaps the reason why Turgot repelled them with a certain degree of haughtiness. Necker, who had just been crowned by the Academie Franc;aise for his Hoge of Colbert, asked of him an audience, with the view of explaining to him his ideas on the corn question. This is how ~lorellet, in his memoirs, relates this incident: "M:. Turgot answered rather dryly to the author, in a personal interview, that he might print whatever he liked; he, Turgot, dreaded nothing; the public would judge; he refused to see the work; he stated all this with that contemptuous manner which he put on too frequently when he refuted ideas contrary to his own; and what I state now I do not express from hearsay, for I sa\v it with my own eyes, and heard it with my own cars, for I was then at 1\1. Turgot's. Nt Necker came there, bringing with him his 1\-15.; I heard the answer made to his proposition; and I saw him retire with the appearance of a man who was offended, and yet not discouraged."

L011/r()l.lCrsy 'lvi/It l\-'ecJ,"C1-. 109 Just like the minister of whom :Madame dt' Doumers used to say: U His is a coldness which freezes you. n Neckersent his ~IS. to the press, and published it at the time of the disturbances; he caused a copy to be delh-ered to Turgot, who acknowledged it by the following laconic and cutting reply bearing d~\te April 23, 1775: "I ha.ve received, sir, the (~opy of your work which you have caused to be left at my door; I thank you for )"our attention. If I had had to write on the subject, and had thought proper to defend the opinion which you maintain, I would have waited for a more quiet moment, when the question might have intere.sted only people in a stat(~ to judge it dispassionately. But on this point, as on many others .• each one has his way of thinking. I am, sir, very truly yours, et<:., etc." Necker's answer was soon despat(~hed. He modestly founds his justification on the vcr)' date of the impn'malur, date which was anterior, not only to the disturbances, but even to all rise in the price of corn.

U Then," says he, "there' was not the slightest dearness anywhere. If the rise which has since come about in several places, had seemed to you, sir, Of to the keeper of the seals, a motive for delaying the publication of the book, and if you had informed me of your opinion. I would have respectfully complied with your wishes ... It is sufficiently annoying for me to differ from your way of thinking on some points of political economy; I would wish you to have no other subject of complaint against mc. I would rC:llly yalue your opinion on this subject."

J 10 Necker's book obtained an immense success. A large number of editions of it were su(~cessively published. Turgot's adversaries, the parliamentaries, the adminis trators belonging to Colbert's school, praised it to the skies. The champions of the protectionist system have made of 1t, and can still make of it at the present day, their manual; nor do they fail to do so, deriving from the work on the legislation and the trade in corn arguments t he value of which increases by reason of the honesty of him who has supplied them with these arguments. There exists another school, however, connected with the doctrines of certain adversaries of Turgot, which professes for Necker's· book quite as passion:lte an admiration: it is the socialist school of the organisation of labour. U Then Necker took up his pen," Louis Illanc writes in his" History of the French Revolution," "and out of a subject which Galiani believed he had exhausted he produced a powerful book, a book where from end to end reigned a grave eloquence, a subdued emotion, and certain pages of which might have been owned equally by a statesman and by a poet. Seeking in the question of corn merely an opportunity of attacking, for the benefit of the people, the system of individualism, and going back to the principles con stitutive of society, Necker submitted them to an inquiry equally elevated and audacious."

In the edition which he ha..c; given of the Legislatj()n sur Ie c()mmercedes grains, l\{. de Molinari passes upon it a judgment very opposite, judgment which may be Edict 011 C."OY1l Published. 1 I I thought severe, but which Hheral~ cannot denounce us such. He discovers in the book "grcut order and method, n cerbin warmth Q( st)rlc, hut a complete absence of prindples~ and a childish ignorance of facts. The author proceeds by hypotheses, and these hy potheses are gcn(~ra]]y wrong. :M. Ne<.~ker>s book has contributed more than any other to lead opinion astray on the important question of articles of subsistence." The edict of Tuesday, September 13th, 1774, brought onct.~ more before the council at its sitting of the following Tuesday, September 20th, was published at last. It crcated profound jO}' amongst all the minister's friends. \Vhat had struck them from the vcry first, and what, we may say, commanded the approval of all men of ~n elevated turn of mind, was the care taken by Turgot to explain, in a lengthened preamble, the reasons of the change introduced by the new decree to the then existing legislation. To discuss before the public was a novelty .at the time; Turgot thus invented the system, generally practised since in free governments, of introducing legislative enactments (projds de lois) by what we now desiE:,YJluteas (XP{)Sfs 4tS 1IJotifs.

Mademoiselle de I/Espinasse writes to 1'1. de Guibert: "\Vithin a few days will be published an edict on the trade in corn; it will be justified by a preliminary state ment ("UJ/it.~); this expression is a new one." Condorcet S3yS, on his side: "He set the useful (~xmllplc of giving to the public a detailed and reasoned account of the principles according to which the laws were drawn up."

112 Turgot. La Harpe writes: "Ht: is the first amongst us who trans fonned the acts of the s<lvercign into a work of argument and of persuasion." Nor does Voltaire spare his praise for the novelty in tht.~ form: "Never yet had edicts been seen in which the ~overcign condescended to instruct his subjects, r(:.ason with them, enlighten thtm as to their interests, persuade them before commanding them; the substance of all1'lOst all the orders emanating from the throne was contained in the words, (for such is our good will and pleasure 1 (car ttl est )wtre bon p/ajsir)." The preamble of the.:.' decree of Sl~ptember J 3th is really a di,;cussion of principles, in which Turgot en~ deavours to pron:., and succeeds in doing 50, that free trade in corn secures the subsistence of nations more completely and under better conditions than police rcgulations. It is in some sort a fresh cxpianation of the doctrines so well defended it. few years before in the seven letters on cereals addressed to the Abbe Terray, and of which we have given the substance.

" The more commerce i:-; free, brisk, extended," says that admirable statement, U the more promptly, efficaciollsly~ and abundantly is the lwople provided for. The prkes are proportionately more uniform; they vary proportionately less frorn the avt~rage and usual pri<..~<.~ a<xording to which salaries arc necessarily fixed. Victualling made by the care of the government cannot have the same success. The attention of the State, divided between too many objects, cannot be as aetive as that of merchants who are EllthusiaslJl he Extites. I 13 cxclusi\.·c:~ly occupied with their trade. It knows later and less correctly both needs and resources. The agents em~ ployed by the government, having no interest in economy, buy at a dearer market, convey the provisions at a greater cost, and preserve them with smaller precautions. A large amount of corn is lost and damaged. Through want of skill, or even through dishonesty, these agents \"Z)ay increase to exc..:essthe cost attending their operations.

They may indulge in criminal intrigues unknown to the government. Even when they are most innocent, they cnnnot nvoid being suspcc;ted of fraud, and the suspicion always reflects upon the administration which employs them, and which becomes hateful to the people through the "cry care it takes in supplying them with foou." UNo rninister/' says ~Ictrats correspondence, "without excepting Sully, Colbert, d'Argenson, has ever made our mas ters utter a nobler and kinder langt1<1ge/' Baudeau writes in his journal: u It (the edict) is received with great applause by the public. Good Turgot's enemies are some"'hat silly at the turn which this edict has taken, and at the \\'isdom of the principles which he t~xplains in the dear<~st mannt~r." Voltaire writes to D'Ak:mbert: "I have just rend 1\1. Turgoes masterpiece. It St~ems as if new heavens and a new earth had made their appearance." Unfortumltely, cir<~umstances became more and more difficult. 'The harvest had been middling in 1774, and seemed as if it would be almost nun in 1775. llachumnont said, in his iJ/tJllcircssurds: H The tOlllrcUeurghlt~ral, per~ 114 Tttrgot.

sisting in his s}'stem of free trade in corn, is not affected by the rise in price, \\'hich takes place everywhere. He assures us that it will not exceed the pitch it had attained at the time o{ the monopoly; the calamity, he adds, will only be temporary, and the speculators, punished {or their cupidity, will lose {or ever the desire of hoarding their provisions of corn." On the 18th of April, 1715, a troop of peasants in~ vaded Dijon, plundering private houses, destroying mills, and searching all the places where an amount of com was supposed to exist. The governor was threatened with death, being accused of having said: "~ly friends, the grass is beginning to grow, go and browse." The bishop went into the streets, harangued the peasants, and finally prevailed upon them to leave the town. People have tried to discover, at the time of that riot, and even since, what was the cause of a movement so sudden and so speedily suppressed. 'Vas it a mere popular outbreak, such as is sometimes seen when whole populations suffer? It is quite certain that those who took part in the Dijon riots had not read Turgot's expos!

dfS moti/s, and understood nothing of his serious and lofty discussion on the principles of free trade. The riot was therefore provoked neither by the perusal of the edict, nor by that of the preliminary remarks. It is related that Turgot, communicating this preamble to one of his friends, said to him, laughing: "It will be found diffuse and flat; this is my motive: I wished to make it so clear that every village magistrate might make the peasants The [Ji.jOll Riots. 115 understand it. It is :1 subject on which publicopinion' ('~n exercise great influence." }lopular opinion could certainly do much in an evil direction; but village judgf.~s hnd not )'ct been able to prepare it for good, by giving to the peasants the lessons mentioned by Turgot; they were far from having dissipated prejudices which last some~· times for several centuries when all enlightened men have succeeded in throwing them off.

It is always easy to explain a popular rising by a plot, just as it is easy to explain the phenomena of nature, when they produce themselves, by the spedal interference of a superior and occult power. 'Vf~ judge thus in most cases from extreme shortsightedness, and we should not be too easily satisfied with explanations of that kind. I-Iowever, events occurred at Dijon, as tht~y did later on at Pontoise, \Tersailles, and Paris, which it is diflkult to account for, if we do not suppose the action of a directing club, and of chiefs more or less disguised, whose aim it was to excite popular wrath and to promote the attacks of the rioters. II The first point. of my sermon," Voltaire writes to Condorcet, " is the abominable popular superstition which rises against free trade in corn, and free trade of any kind. You see the horrors which have just been perpetrated at Dijon. God grant that the fetishes may not have excited underhand this small copy of Saint llartholomew)sDay".; and in another letter, writtenone month later to ~fadame de Saint.Julien: "If you had been at Dijon, you lVould have stopped the criminal 116 Tllrgot.

riot excited in an underhand manner by ~1. Turgot's enemies." Turgot replierl to the Dijon disturbances, not by making a concession to the champions of police regula tions, but by giving new pledges to free trade, which was more in accordance with his views, at Dijon itself, and likewise at Beaune, Saint-Jean de Losne, and at Mont bard. He tried to meet high prices with a diminution in the taxes. In a decree of the council, dated April 22nd, 1775, that is to say, four days after the insurrection, and at the very moment when he was informed of it at Paris, he said: "The king, occupied by the means of preventing the corn necessary for the sustenance of his people from rising above the equitable and natural value it ought to have, consistent with the inconstancy of the seasons and the state of the harvest, has established, by his decree of September 13th, 1774, and by his letters patent of November 2nd last, freedom in trade, which alone can by its activity supply corn to the di~tricts where need might be felt, and stop by competition all ex(;essive rise in prices. . . . Consequently, the levying of all duties on corn and flour, at the entrance of towns as well as in markets, either under the title of municipal dues (octrois),or under the domination of minage,aunage, hal/age, or any others, is suspended in the towns of Dijon, Saint-Jean de Losne, and ~Iontbard."

The rise in the price of corn persisted, nevertheless, and all those whose private interests had suffered from the destruction of monopoly did not cease accusing the "La GUt!rre des rariJles." I 17 «mlr~/tll" gbltrill of witnessing with indifference the sufferings of the people. And yet Turgot was very far from entertaining that indifference; and, as formerly during the period of his lnltlldanu at Limoges, he endeavoured to relieve, by the establishment of charitable workshops,those who were unable to providefor their wants. He ("..aused to be distributed among the Paris ,lUreS a memoir on the means of procuring by additional work resources for the population of the metropolis, in case a fresh rise should take place in the prices of provisions; he addressed to aU the provincial ill/till/allis directions for the creation and administration of charitable work· shops in the rural districts. These two documents are respecth'ely dated !\Iay I st and 2nd, 1775. The ver>' day when they were published, the gllerre des jar;,zes hroke out.

II. Bands had gathered together in the country. They appeared first at Pontoise, not far {rom the estates of the Prince de Conti, plundering, burning the houses, begging for bread, and destroying the corn, exciting the people t(> seize upon the corn~barges, as at l\lery~sur-Oise, and to divide between themseh·es the contents of those barges; to penetrate into the towns with the view of upsetting the markets. The ChevalierTurgot. brother of the minister, relating afterwardsto Soulaviethe e\·ents of l\{ay, 1775, said to him that "the plunderers seemed to have gold and I 18 silver nbout them; their movements were directed as an insurrectional operation) and according to the best principles of military art, no doubt under the command of an experienced general..>$ On the 2nd of .May, 1775, the mob went to Versailles) they penetrated as far as the palace, filled the cO:lrtyard, c1umouring for bread. Turgot was then in Paris, ,,,,·here he had gone to hold a conference with the lieutenant of police and l\farshal Biron. The king appeared at the balcony, wished to speak, but was not listened to¥ The rumour spread that he had yielded to the urgent advice of his entourage, and that he had promised to impose a duty of two SOllS (onc penny) on bread. The correspondence of the king with Turgot, preserved amongst the Lantheuil records by :Marquis Turgot, con tradicts this opinion most decidedly. On the 2nd of .May, 1775, Louis XVI wrote indeed two letters to Turgot.; the fonner is dated J I o'clock in the morning; the latter, two (/clock in the afternoon. Here is the text of both : "~Iay 2, 1775, I I o'clock in the morning.

H I have just received your letter, sir, by ~1. de Beauveau. Versailles is attacked, and by the same people who went to Saint-Germain. I shall settle with .l\larshal de :i\Iuy and ~t d'Atrry as to what is to be done; you :may rel)· on my firmness. I have just despatched the guards to the market-pla<:e; I am very satisfied with the pre<:autions you have taken (or Paris, l~cl'ers of LOllis X VI. I 19 whcrt:,~ I most fcared lest disQrders should break out; you rn~y tdl:\1. ll~~rticr that I approve his conduct.; you will dQ wt:11 h) put umkr .Ur(~5t the pt.~rsons you mention; but t.~spcciaHy, when you havc SCt~urcd them, let there be no hurry, but pk~nty of questions. I have just given orders for what is tQ be done h~~re, and for the markets and mi11s of the neighbourhood. Ii LOUIS." Three hOUlS afterwards, a fresh leU(:,:r: "Two o'clock, Tuesday, ~Iay 2nd. '"' I have just seen :\1. Bcrtit'r, sir; I howe bt~en very satisfiedwith the arrangements taken by him with respect to the Oise and the Lower Seine; he gave me an account of what took place at Gonessc, and of the encourage ments he had given to the labourers and <:orndealcrs not to interrupt the trade. I have sent orders to the Comp~\ny of Noaillcsat Beauvais to arrange with him in case of need. He has just started for :Mantes, whert~ he will find ~lt lIeubn the light cavalry and the gendannes, who are diret:tcd to arrang<.~ with him; he will, besides, find infantry in both towns. The musketeers are under orders to hold themseh'cs in readiness at Paris, a.ccording to the ne(~d you may have of them j the Black, who are all quartered at the Faubourg Saint~Ant()ine, can send detachments in the direction of the :\Iarne.; and the GrtJ', in the Faubourg Saint~Germain, can ()r\yard some towards th(~ Lowt:r Seine. 1\1. "Intendant has told me that he entertains no fcars for the Upper Seine and the :Marne, which do not supply any Hour; nevertheless 120 Ttergot.

we shall despatch troops there. The colonel-.general shall go to .Montereau and to :\IeIun, ~uld Lorraine t() Meaux. Here we are perfectly easy. The riot was beginning to assume serious proportions; the forces sent put a stop to it, and the rioters kept quiet before them . .1\1. de neauveau, who went there, asked them some questions; some answered that they came from Sartrou· ville and from Carrieres Saint~Denis;. the others said that they came from more than twenty villages; the greater part said that they had no bread, and that they had come to have some; they showed some very b,ld barley loaves for which they had paid two sous (one penny); that w.as the only brt'ud they could procure. The greatest blunder committed was that the market had not been open; as soon as it was so, everything went on very well. The people bought and sold as if nothing had happened. They went off afterwards, and detach ments of the body~guards followed them to know the direction they took. I do not believe the Joss has been considerable. I have caused soldiers to be stationed on the road to Chartres, and on those leading to the mills of the Orsay and Chevreuse valleys; precautions are like· wise taken for the Neauphle and Rambouillet markets.

I trust that aU the communications will he free, and that trade will go on reguhuly. I have recommended to ~I. l'Intendant to find out, jf he can, those who paid; I look upon them as our best capture. H I shall not go out to·day ; not that I fear in the least, but I wanl everything to quiet down.

Di'slllrbal1tesill Paris. I 2 J u ~I. de Deau\'eau interrupts me to inform me of a foolish step which has been taken, namely, allow the rioters to take bread at two sous. He pretends that there is no middle course between permitting them to take it thus, and compelling them under threats of the bayonet to buy it at the present prices. This market is over, but when the next occurs t the greatest precautions must be taken to prevent the rioters (rom coming to lay down their conditions. Let me know what had best be done. for the state of things is most perplexing. 'Turgot returned to Versailles in the COurse of the evening; he immediately cancelled the order of ~.J. de lleauveau, and prohibited the requiring of the mct(;hnnts and bakers that they should sell corn or bread under market price. The next day, ~fay 3rd, the rioters entered I)aris, and began plundering; U in some of the streets one might have fancied one's self in a town taken by storm/' The police showed no energy, and allowed the men to have it their own way; it is even stated that they obliged several bakers to open their shops) and that the mutineers were at liberty to carry off bread without paying for it.

Turgot, who was incessantly going from Versailles to Paris, and from Paris to Versailles, requested the council to meet during the night of the 3rd to the 4th of )lay. 1775. He spoke most energeticallyagainst Lenoir, the lieutenant of police, who had done nothing to stop the 1 122 Turgot. riots, he obtained his dismissal, and caused immediately his friend Albert to be appointed in his place. The commander of the police (gud), both infantry and cavalry, was likewise dismissed, and l\Iarshal Biron organised resistance as in the case of a real war. Two armies ,,·ere raised at once; the one {or Paris, under the orders of Biron; the other for the parts outside the metropolis, under the direction of one of his lieutenants. On the 4th, the rioters tried to recommence the plunder; but the attitude of the troops frightened them. They withdrew, and the Parisians, venturing out to find the riot, as they said, no longer discovered it.

During the da}" the parliament had assembled c:md caused an edict to be posted up forbidding the assembly of groups of idlers, but'adding that the king should be asked to lower the price of bread. Turgot forthwith stopped the distribution of that edict, and directed the parliament's manifesto, posted up in divCl"S places, to be covered by a proclamation forbidding, in the king's name, gatherings, under penalty of death. At the same time he caused an edict to be published assigning to the Tournelle the duty of trying the rioters. The Parliament met a second time to draw up a reply. They asserted that the last-·named edict was an infringement of the rights of "superior police" (hattlt pullet), which had always been onc of the prerogatives of the parliament. They issued a new decree, claiming the right of conduct· ing the case, and praying once more the king to lower the price of the bread. Turgot at once ordered the Bed of Justicc.

parliament to meet at Versailles, (or the purpose of receiving the king's commands in a bed of justice. The sitting was held on the morning of the 5th. As Turgot was not present, the king informed him by a note, dated 6 ddock p.m., that everything had passed off <luietly, and that the councillors cc had toned down much Qf their impertinence." "1 nearly lost my memory at the first speech," said the king, "but I made up for it as I could, without getting disconcerted." In this bed of justice the decree of the previous day was annulled, and the trying of the rioters was given to the jrh.'(Usit la marfchll tJ.Utt. The commissionprh~(Uale, immediately called together, sent to the gallows two poor wretches, who ascended the gallows sa)'ing that they were dying for the peQple; a few fights took place in the country districts, and twenty· three peasants---so it is said--were killed in an engage ment which occurred on the Versailles highroad.

At the same time, and to reassure the dealers in corn, Turgot reimbursed to them the amount of the goods they had lost. The (Cl11l1ntl1lCS were obliged to pay the damages caused by the rioters. A friend of the 1\larquis de :Mimbeau, named Butre, wrote to Turgot, asking him to be exonerated from the tax to which his property had been assessed in consequence of the riots. Turgot thus :mswered him: "As for the compensation you ha\'e to pay for reparation of the damages suffered by the corn, I acknowledge that it is disagreeable for you, as it is for many others who certainly have taken no part in the I 2 124 TU1'gOt. rtoting; but you must feel that if the general distribution of these kinds of compensation is an evil for the innocent persons upon whom it falls, it is nevertheless indispem)~ able in order to establish the confidence of traders against popular outbreaks, and to interest the whole of the country in preventing and opposing them."

This was a great victory for Turgot. The king had supported him with firmness. "You are quite right in saying," thus Louis XVI wrote on 1\lay 6th, "that all this will cost a great deal of money and necessitate great re¥ trenchments; but whether a little more or a little less~ we must have passed through this crisis, and as, some~ times, e\'j) leads to good, people will have seen from this affair that I am not so weak as was supposed, and that I shall know how to carry on what I have resolved to do; this will render easier the operations we may have to perform; the fact is that I am more embarrassed with one man than with fifty." Turgot, then, enjoyed at that time the king's fuJI con~ fidence; he had triumphed not only over the riot, but also over the opposition of the parliament. the esprit de I~rondc of the Parisians, the affected indifference of his colleagues. The Parisians had pretended that they had hunted about (or the riot, and had not found it. 'Vhen an was over, they made songs about it; the women wore caps ala rn'ulle, and the name of guerrt des jan'Izes was given for fun to this popular movement. Everyone believed in a plot. In his instructions and decrees, Turgot makes the king expressly say so. CI The Turgols Pottier. 12 5 destruction, ft he writes, "was committed by men foreign to the parishes which they came to plunder ..•. It seems as though the purpose of this plot \Vas to <,:reate a real famine in the provinces around Paris, and in Paris itself, in order to drive the people to the last excesses through want and despair." (Instructions sent by his .~lajesty's orders to all the curt.r of his kingdom, I\fay9th, 1775.) \Vriting to the king of Sweden on the 15t.h of July following, Louis XVI said: "The bad harvest, and the evil disposition of cert:lin persons whose schemes were concerted, have led some rogues to plunder certain rnarkets." l\laria Theres~'l, answering to ~tarie Antoin·· cue, remarked: "1 believe, as you do, that there is something under an this." ~[any persons were accused of having taken a part in this plot. Some said it was Sartine ; Turgot believed that Conti was the instigator. "I would not dare to affirm that this rumour was without founda~ lion," l\larmontd 'writes in his memoirs.

The hope of the instigatorsof the riot was, however, very much deceived, for never did Turgot enjoy greater power with the king than during the days ''.thieh f()lIowed the repression of the disturbances. The support given to him by ~falesherbes in his rtmtmtral1CUof l\lay 21St, 1775t and the accession of that great and good man to the ministry, confirmed his triumph. The queen herself, who was the secret stay of the Choiseul party, seemed disarmed,for a space of time, alas! too short.

126 71lrgol. III. But we must retrace our steps. In order not to interrupt the narrative of the corn~business from the re-establishment of free trade, September 13, 1774, to the gucrre desjarinc'fJ,May 2-·6, 1775, we have left aside for further discussion the greatest event connected with the beginning of the reign, we mean the reinstatement of the parliaments. The l\:[aupeou CQUp d'etat, as it was then called, had created a profound sensation when it took place in 177I, and at the accession of Louis XVI that sensation was still lasting with the same intensity as on the first day. The suppression of the parliaments, and the cruel violences exercised against their members, had raised an opposition of feeling which kept up and further increased the formidable opposition of interest excited in the magistracy by the radical change which l\-1aupeou had prepared. The new sovereign was strongly urged to return to the old organisation of justice. ~Iaupeou, besides, had not been able to stccr clear of a rock on which revolutions most frequently make shipwreck in which the question of persons have a leading share. The substitutions, hurriedly made, left much to be desired; the new judges had less merit than the old ones. These sham-judges (juges p()Stt"CMS), as they were called, enjoyed, not unreasonably, no consideration. A kind of public opinion seemed therefore to force upon the government, l?ccall l!f Ihc Partifl/Ilenl. 12 7 even independently of the society amidst which the parties concerned moved, the dismissal of the new judges and the rc<:".aH of the former ones. J...et us not make a mistake, hem'ever, The destruction of the old par1i~\,· ments, and the establishment of a magistracy whose sole business would have been to administer justice without troubling itself with either government or politics~ were the preliminary conditions of the civjJ~ economic, and political reforms which might have prevented the violt~nces of the close of the century, and aHowed the French Revolution to accomplish its work by making gradually the principles of modern government succeed to those of the ancien r:~111t. In an article on Louis XV I and Turgot (Ccrrtspmulanl, AU&rtlst 1868), 1\:1. de Larey considers the recall, of the parliaments as the first step taken in the direction of a political system which, according to him, could find its issue only in danger.

Turgot was opposed to the recall, and, so far, was in agreement with all his cone~gues, except ~faurepas. " It is stated, U says the ~Ietra correspondence. t "that the king has been obliged to take upon himself the whole responsibility of the business, and even to use his authority for this purpose of bringing it about; the members of the council took the opposite view." 13ut 1tlaurepas was clever, more so than Turgot, and he ended by isolating him. Condorcet wrote to Turgot to beg of him to persevere in his resistance, and most of his arguments were no 128 Turgot. doubt in perfect agreement with those which Turgot gave to himself. "P(~oplc sar," Condorcet writes (October or November 1174), "that the old parliament is about to return uncon ditionally, that is to say, with its insolence, its pretensions, and its prejudices. From this arrangement it results that all reforms in the laws are impossible, because our laws are excellent for the judges and detestable for the persons tried. The more cruel, secret, and oppressive criminal jurisprudence is, the more powerful are the parliaments. As these gentlemen ignore or despise public opinion, their only anxiet)', it is said, will always be to enjoy the favour of the population; they will defend all the tyrannies of the prohibitive system, stand in the way of all freedom, and excite seditions against any minister who would endeavour to establish a liberal policy. As these gentlemen hold the views maintained by the fools of the fourteenth century, as they are ridicu lously ignorant of all that is not to be found in the OIim register, as they despise an light, all philosophy, and are puffed up with an amount of pride equal to their ignorance, they will be the enemies of all light, they will persecute it, and will tf}' to drive us back to that state of barbarism which in their remonstrances they call the simplicity of good old times . . . .

"Adieu, sir; I cannot tolerate that you should be a minister, and yet that good should be unattainable." Turgot, no doubt, took care not to show Condorcet's letter to the members of the council ,; and if he opposed The Pariian/cIII. 12 9 th(~ reinstatement of the parliaments, it was, of course, hy nddudng the interests of the royal authority. A pupil of the ph)'siocf'oles,ht7 was necessarily touched by their doctrines, those even which might have s(~emed to him excessive. lIe further believed, with the utmost sinccritYt that the king had the power of altering the ancient institutions ()f the country whenever the good of the public made it a duty for him to do so) and he did not admit that the intervention of the parliament was necessary to impart to the royal decisions a compulsory legislative character. Some pers(ms have e\'en ascribed to him the following maxim, so often repeated since hy ·t~e Jacobin school, that is to say, by the men who have always been most opposed to his economic doctrines: "Allow me five )'e.us of despotism t and Fr~nce shall be frce,"

'Ve must acknowledge that Turgot had not all his freedom of action to oppose, in the council nnd in the presence of the king, the propositionmade by :Maurepas to recall the parliaments. He had helped in the dis~ missal of Terray and ~raupeou, and it was Terray himself whose place he had fined, after having had to put up with him as a colleague, we know with-impatience, for the space of three months. It was at n meeting of the council, while he sat in his capacity as l\linister of the Navy, on the anniversary of Saint Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1774, that the exileof Terrnyand of1\faupeou had been decided, He was,accordingly, responsibte,as weB as his colle:lgues, for what was called a Saint Barlhu/a13° Ttt':f ot. lIle1f/s massa(re ()Imini's/ers,and he certainly would not have contradicted Count d'Aranda, who, hearing the phrase, had added: " Yes, but it is not the massacre of the Innocents." ~laupeou's exile had for its natural con sequence the reinstatement of the parliaments. Turgot was obliged to put up with it, because the proposition of }laurepas was the natural const.~quence of a political system to which he had associated himself with dis~· tinction. On November 29, 1774, Louis XVI, in a bed of justice, reinstated 10 their functions the members of the parliament of Paris who had been deprived of them on January 24th, 1771; but he took, or thought he took, in a series of edicts registered at that same bed of justke, precautions against the administrative or political en croachments of the judicial courts. The parliament met, several days later, to protest against the diminution of its authority, and soon matters resumed their old course, despite the edicts which accompanied the reinstalment of the judges. The parli3ment looked upon itself as charged quite as much by the past, jf not more, to defend what it called the old constitution of the realm against the reforms which it was the design of some persons to introduce into it.

The day when parliament recovered its power has been a fa~'\l one for France. It was on]y too easy to perceive that the parliament would fatally become the instrument of Turgot's downfall, and that by persisting in maintaining the order of things to which the name of ancien regime has been given, it would render a peaceful re\'olution more and more difficult.

CfIAPTER VI. THE »REPARATION OF TIlE H GRANDS EDITSo" -THE "}~DITS" OF I ii6.---TUE BED OF' JUSTICE. I NTERR UPTED by the gutrre dts jar;nu, but still bent upon rooting up prejudices, privileges, and abuses; encouraged, besides, by the victory he had just gained, by the trust which the king had shown in him, and by the accession of his friend, the wise :Malesherbes, to the ministry, Turgot renewed, with all the activity of which he was capable, the study of his great plans, already in a \Oery forward state of progress. He did so without ostentation, but without mystery, and those who were to suffer from them could prepare leisurely to defend their interests, thos~ of their families and of their friends. In the forefront of his adversaries Turgot was to meet the parliament and then the clergy, the court, the Choiseul coterie, the Parisian uOllrgtOIS;f., threatened in the six trades-guilds which composed it, and, finally, in the cabinet itself, first the keeper of the seals, Hue de ttliromenil,and, lastly, the prime minister himself, :Maurepas.

The clergy looked upon him, not unreasonably, as a 132 Tttrgot. p/1t1osoL'''Jhe. They remembered that passage of the Con· cilia/cur where Turgot said, apropus of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: "Religion was dishonoured for the purpose of flattering Louis XIV"; they also remembered that other opinion, strongly expressed, that "the king should no more be th(~ head of the Church than the head of the Church be king."l H SuprellUlC}T, as the English understand it, and the temporal power of the Papacy, sueh are the two extreme points of abuses." Nor had the clergy forgiven him the efforts he had made to obtain the modification of the oath taken by the king on his corOllntion. Turgot had asked I ~ouis XVI to strike out of the o:\th the passage where he swore to H exter· minate completely from his dominions all the heretks condemned nominati\'elyby the Church." To this Louis XVI would probably have consented; he had been touched by the obsen·ntions which his contriUeltrgeneral had submitted to him; but, beset by ~Iaurepas, who did not wish to quarrel with the bishops, he had defended himself feebly, had yielded nt last, and had pronounced the old form, contenting himself with stammering it out in a few unintelHgible words.

A striking proof subsists of the effect which Turgot had produced upon the king whilst submitting to him his observations 1/h)ci 'l}()((. nnd by writing, whilst follow· ing him to Reims, for the purpose of speaking to him, up to the last moment, of the dedtln1tion of intolerance forced upon him. This proof consists in an autograph note of the king, dated Reims, June loth, 1775, addressed I!."cclesiasticlllOath. 133 to Turgot, and preserved amongst the Lantheuil papers: " I did not send for you, sir, to give you an answer to }'our letter of yesterday, because I preferred leaving with }'OU a written statement as a proof of the opinion I entertain of Y(JU on this "occasion. I think that the step you have taken is that of a most honourable man) one most deeply attached to me. I thank )'OU very sincerely for it, and I shall always be very much obliged to you for speaking to me with the same straightforwardness. I can N not, however, in the present circumstances, follow your advice; I have much weighed it since; I have conferred about it with several persons, and I think that there is less inconvenience in making no alterations; at the sam~ time, I feel none the Jess obHged for }'our ad\'ke, and you may del-.end upon its remaining secret, as I tru5l this letter will be.,---L()tHS."

Turgot took no trouble to conceal the step he had taken, and, besides, he did not consider himself as defeated. After the coronation, after the king had pro· nounced more or less distinctly the famous sentence, he addressed to him a long letter, in which he gave him on the subject of tolerance the most admirable ad\'ice and teaching. "Can religion order, can it permit crimes? To order a crime is tantamount to commit it; he who commands a murder is looked upon as a murderer. Now, the prince who orders his subject to proCess a fonn of"religionwhich the subject does not believe, or to give up the one he believes, orders a crime. The subject who obeys him is guilty of a lie; he betrays his own 134 conscience; he does a thing which he believes God for bids him to do:" Turgot, besides, does not helieve the king is bound by formulre C( drawn up in times too unenlightened. All is not lost, and )'our }lajesty cannot be obliged to carry out what would he an unjust measure."

The pietist party (parll dh!(}t), whose leader, then, was the Comte de Provence, expressed themselves with the greatest violence on the cOllfrtUtur general. He who was to be I..ouis XVIII even stooped low enough to write with his own hand a pamphlet against the minister; but this pamphlet, entitled Ie SOI1,gt de .ilf. tie ...'ffaurcpas, produced only very little effect; it converted no one, and was read only by those whose opinions were already formed. The pietists endeavoured to disturb the king's conscience by telling him that ~1. Turgot did not attend mass. ":M. Turgot does not attend mass ?~' I.ouis XVI asked 1\'1. de 1\laurepas. "I don't know, Sire/, answered ~laurepas; ce ~{. -Terray attended it daily." The queen did not like her expenditure to be controlled. Bailly relates that Turgot had obtained from the k;ng the promise that nQ bills payable at sight (ordonlla1ues au (omplant) should be given during a.

certain time. A few days afterwards, a bill for 500,000 livres was presented at the treasury in the name of a person belongin.r to the court. It was the queen, they said. Turgot went to ask· for the orders of the king. "I have been taken unawares," said the king. U Sire, (-:Oul:1 de Gllillcs. 135 ""hat am I to do?" U Don't p:l)"." The minister <obeyed, ~fnrie Antoinetteenergetically supported her fa\'ourites. It was in connection with a cuse referring to a friend of the Duke de Choiseul, namely, the Count de Guines, then ambassador in England, that she gave :Maurepas to understand the interest he had in not incurring her displeasure. The secretary of that diplomatist claimed from his chief large sums which he had been obliged to pay, or which he still owed for Exchange speculations. He pretended to have acted as the alias of his .ambassador, ?'ho, said he, speculated at the Stoc~k Exchange on the diplomatic secrets with whicn he was .acquainted. In order to support his defence, the Count de Guines asked the authorisation to produce before the law~courts some of his despatches to the king, and the council had refused to gmnt it. Very angry at this decision, the queen had obtained from the king the permission which the council, unanimously, had not thought it advisable to grant. l\Iaurepas, it is said, was stupefied at the influence exercised in that circumstance by the queen over the mind of the king; he took then the resolution of leaving Turgot to himsel(, giving up all participation in his reforms, and throwing him overboard, if necessary to preserve his o\m place.

Although warned of the intrigues going on around him, Turgot followed up his plan with the greatest .activity, and on the 5th of January, 1776, he laid before the council the six decrees which are his best title to 1urgot. glory j he obtained the assent of the king, after the most thorough discussion, and obliged the parliament to register them in a bed of justice, notwithstanding an opposition of an extremely violent chara<:ter. These decrees finally led to his downfall; he perished in the midst of his triumph. The six decrees presented by Turgot to the king on January 5th, 1776, were of unequal importance. The first had for its object the suppression of ({)t1'ces,. the second, the suppression of the police exercised in Paris over cereals; the third, the suppression of the offices concerning the wharves, markets, and ports in Paris; the fourth, the suppression of the mal/rises and jurandes; the fifth, the suppression of the l)oissy caissei the sixth and last, the modification of the duty on tallow.

'Ve shall deal exclusively here with the decrees relating to (UnleeS and jurandes. Several years before, Turgot had tried for the first time to free the peasants from the burden of (()rt 1ees,· it was at Limoges, where he held the office of in/enda1lt. He had recognised that the burden was very heavy for the persons subjected to it, and that the amount of labour it procured to the administration of public works was not very productive. He had accordingly tried to substitute for it a money-contribution. :Finding it impossible to modify the law, he had placed that contri bution on the same basis as the (OnlCe itself, and had made of it a kind of supplement to the capitation-tax by way of subscription. It was a money-redemption paid Decrees OIl the Con"ee.. 137 by the persons liable to the (on'et, somewhat analogous to what takes place now. Redemption,as everyoneknows, is optional at present; all the taxpayers do not avail them~ selves of it, and the moneyNsupplies on the one side, and the supplies in kind on the other, \':uy from department to department. But there is a fact worth noticing: the departments where the redemption occurs in the strongest proportion are those which (ormed the old Limoges genera/ill. It is a traditic)n which dates (rom Turgot's times.

In the general preface common to his six decrees Turgot rc¥stated the conversions in money made in his glnl:rali'/e,and, following his example, in several others. He said that he might have proceeded by way of an order, if he had thought of merely suppressing the ("On..,fl, or if, substituting for it a money~tax. he had laid that contribution exclusively upon those liable to tallage. But his object is a different one, and he affirms imme~ diately, and in the very first line of the preamble, that wha.t he wishes to realise is a complete revolution in the very assessmentof the taxes. His aim is, indeed~ to put down privileges~ and to render amenable to taxation the members of the nobility and of the clergy in the same conditions as all the other citizens. The decree <)n the (OT'/)/($ has been the most violently attncked of the six~ for the simple reason that it con tained so formal and so direct an attack against the privileged classes, and was a first step in the direc~ K Turgot.

tion of equality of all proprietors with reference to the taxes. "The weight of the burden," says he, "only falls, and can only faU on the poorest class of our subjects, those whose only property is their manual labour and their industry, on cultivators and farmers. Landowners and almost all the privileged classes are either exempt from it or contribute to it in an infinitesimal degree; and yet it is to landowners that roads are beneficial, by the value which multiplied communications give to the produce of their lands.... It is therefore the class of L'lndowners which derives the profit from the making of the roads; and they should advance the mone)', since they derive the interest from it. How can it be fair to oblige those people to contribute who have nothing that they can call their own; to make them give their time and their labour unremunerated, to take from them the only resource they have against misery and hunger, comp~lling them to work (or the benefit of citizens richer than them selves? •.. Through the account which we have C',aused to be drawn up of the roads to be constructed and kept up in the various provinces, we believe we may venture to assure our subjects that in no year shall the expense for that purpose exceed the sum of ten millions for the whole of the pays d'(/ecl;o1t. The object of this c.ontribution being an outlay useful to all landowners, we will that all land owners, whether privileged or not, should help towards it, a.s is the custom in all local charges."

The preamble and the statement of the decree on the "lfironlc1lil 01t the (ortlle. 139 suppression of (onJtCS hnd been thoroughly 5tudit~d, and at great length, previous to their being submitted to the king, and they were nftenvards examined, and minutel}' examined, by the keeper of the seals, lIue de ~{iromenil. In his history of the downfall of the am~it1l ,..;'gi11lt, Cherest tens us that the king asked, besides, the opinion of another member of the council, who, he thinks, was }Ialesherbes. The memoir ascribed by Cherest to ~Ialesherbes is preserved in the State l)aper Office. l\liromenil has drawn up his observations in following, paragraph by paragraph and clause by clause, the preamble and the statement of the decree. lie begins by declaring his impartiality; he does justice to the intentions of the author of the project, and expresses his de~ign not to oppose a real contradiction, but to discuss as it deserves so important a matter. lIe then recapitu lates the works of Orry and Trudaine, who thought that the (Orl)!.t might be amended, but should not be suppressed ; he tries to prove that all classes profit by the good condition of the highways.; cc landowners,~l he says, "are not the only persons who derive henefit from roads kept in good order; travellers, waggoners,even peasants who go on foot. equally reap the advantage."

To this Turgot answers: "\Vith respect to the peasants who go on (oot, the keeper of the seals will allow me to believe that the pleasure of walking on a well¥pebbled road does not compensate them for the trouble they have had in making it without remuneration." \Ve wish we could quote (rom end to end, so instruc K '2 Tltrgot. tive it is, the discussion carried on, pen in hand, by these two distinguished men. 1vliromcnil shows a great deal of dexterity, and produces under the most various, and often under novel forms, arguments, the substance of which is rather old. It seems as if he does not wish to carry these arguments to extremities, and he appears to believe that nlOdifications, easily accomplished, would suffice to reconcile the most opposite minds. Turgot does not allow himself to be shaken or disconcerted by any argument: he has always an answer ready. Since we cannot reproduce here all l\-Iiromenil's objections, and Turgot's answers on the subject of the compensationutax destined to form the fund for the maintenance of the highroads, we must at any rate give the principal ones.

ce I shall not repeat here," says l\firomenil, "what I have already said in my observations on the preamble to the project, with reference to the inconvenience that can be found, generally speaking, in the assessment of a land-tax substituted for the c()n·,eeof manual labour and of horses; but I shall state that the complete destruction of all these privileges is perhaps dangerous. I do not allude to those attached to certain offices, which I readily look upon as abuses, purchases for money, rather than as veritable privileges; but I cannot help sayin~ that the privileges of the nobility should be respected in :France, and that it is, 1 think, in the king's interest to maintain them.)) Turgot answers: "The keeper of the seals seems Tllrgols A1tS1lJcrs. here to adopt the principle that, by virtue of the consti· tution of the State, the nobHityshould be (ree from aU taxes. He seems even to think that it is dangerous to go against such 3 prejudice. If this prejudice is a universal one, I must be very much mistaken on the way of thinking of all the well·inlormed men I have seen in the course of my life; for I do not remember any society where such an idea would have been considered other· wise than as an antiquated pretension given up by all enlightened men even in the nobility. . . . The govern· ment expenses having for their object the interest of all, all should contribute to them, and the greater the advantages one derives from society, the more honoured one should feel to share in its burdens. From this point of \<iew the many privileges of the nobility cnn hardly seem fair.U In another passa.ge Turgot adds the followingreflections: U A further reason finishesrendering this privilege more unfair, more onerous, and at the same time less worthy of respect. It is this: through the ease with which we can purchase a patent of nobility there is no rich man who ('.annot at once become a nobleman; so that the nobility includes the whole body of the rich, and the cause of the rich is no longer that of the distinguished families against the TO/II';er. but that of the rich against the poor. The motives one might have had for respecting that privilege if it had been restrictedto the families of the old defendersof the State. cannot certainly be looked upon with the same eye when it has become shared by the brood of Tlt'J'got.

excise~farmers (/raila/lls) who have plundered the country. Besides, what a govemment that would be which would lay all the public burdens upon the poor and exempt the rich from them I" The memoir ascribed by Cherest to l\{alesherbes contains analogous observations expressed in nearly identical terms. Turgot reasonably maintained that the doctrine he upheld was the one always maintained by the statesmen who had tried to re-establish order in the finances, beginning with Desmarets, Orry, and ~Iachault, down to himself. "All the ministers of the finances," said he, "without exception, have thought and acted in that direction; all have endeavoured to consolidate the tax of the twentieth, all have tried to restrict the privilegeof the capitation-tax." The author of the memoir shares this opinion; he thus begins: " Every nobleman, I admit, is not rich, but every rich man is noble. . •• The tax which, in the eyes of reason and of justice, should be in proportion to the fortune, has become on the contrary a tax from which one is exonerated by virtue of one's for tune"; he ends in the following words: "From all I have said, I conclude that the objection raised by the parliament on behalf of the privileges of the nobility is not grounded; it would be very dangerous if the king allowed this system to obtain some favour, because it tends to destroy all the good that has been done during the last hundred years, and all that can still be ac complished in the way of taxation. Finally, although I am not more a friend of despotism than I have ever been, I shall always say to the king, I shall say to the parliament, I shall say aloud, if necessary,in the presence of the whole nation, that the present case is one whkh the king should decide by his absolute will; and here is my reason: if the question is properly understood, it is a suit between the rich and the poor. No\v, of whom does the parliament consist? Ofpersonswho areal1 rich, compared with the people, and who are all noble, since their offices imply nobility. \Vh() are the persons con stituting the court, so powerful in its outcry? The high personages of the State, the majority of whom possess domains which shall pay the tax, but not the ,()Tt,te. 'Vhat does the Paris public consist of? A great many nobles or rich people enjoying the privileges of nobility (they are the loudest in their protests), and a multitude submitted to other impositions, but paying neither tallage nor (on'le. Consequently, neither the remonstrances of the parliament, nor the cheers of the Parisians, nor even the complaints of the courtiers should exercise any prejudice in this affair. . . . Let the states general or provisional be summoned in France, it is my heartfelt wish, and that of aU good Frenchmen.

Let these assemblies be so constituted that the people may make themselves heard, and not have for sole representltives bailiffs, seneschals, office--bearerswhose interests are totally different from those of the real people, and who are always depending-,upon a grandee or a minister; then I shall think it just that to such an assemblythe assessment of the taxes should be left; but 144 Turgot. so long as the people are not represented in the parlia ments, the king, after hearing them, should judge by himself, and judge in favour of the people, because they are the poorest of an.» Turgot yielded to 1\1iromenil only on the question of the clergy, but even then he retains his opinion. " The privilege of the clergy is liable to the same discussion as that of the nobility; I do not believe it to be better grounded. However, as by suppressing the tithes and the incidental sources of income (caslIeI), the Church property does not make up a very important item, I do not mind putting off to another time the examining of principles and dismissing here the question, so far as the clergy is concerned, although the proposal about it is a.

very just one." And, alluding to ~laurepas's opposition, he adds: "and perhaps the opinions of the king and of the minister are not settled enough to justify us in having to enter upon two quarrels at the same time/' ~nr()menil pretended that thl~re were in France three great orders--the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate; each of these orders had its rights, its privileges, its prejudices, perhaps, and it was necessary to retain them, such as they were. "The keeper of the seals:' Turgot answers, et talks of the privilegesof the Third Estate. Now, we know that the nobility and the clergy have privileges; we know also that in the Third Estate some towns and some private guilds have privileges also. But the Third Estate, taken as a body, are far from enjoying privileges ,; what they possess is the very reverse, since Turgot alld AfirOllttlzil. 145 the burdens which persons exempted from them would have borne always £'dl upon those who do not enjoy the exemption."

~L de ~liromenit read the answers which 'Turgot had written on the margin of his observations, and then returned to him the whole bundle of papers with the following letter: H ~1. de ~liromenil sends a thousand compliments to ~f. Turgot, and forwards to him the projet(/'tdif with his observations. He likewise returns the papers concerning the fees payable for the use of the mills (balla/ilh), acknowledging at the same time that he is not mu<.~h impressed by :M. 'rurgot's answers to his objections." The king was more impressed by these answers than the keeper of the seals had been, and he allowed the decrees to which he had given his approval to be placed before the parliament on the 9th of February, 1776. 'rhe persons opposed to these decrees had spent in orga nising their resistance all the time which elapsed between the presentation of the decrees to the king and February 9th. 'I"urgot's friends, who were aware ?f this, and felt :mxious, wanted to have done. "The wen~intentioned in the parliament,'t Trudaine wrote, "who are but few, wish that firmness should be displayed, and therefore we must make haste. The longer the delay, the more time our opponents will have to prepare."

The parliament registered the decree on the suppres~ sion of the Poissy (0;1$(, and named commissioners to examine the others. On the 17th of February the Turgot. proturtur generaland the commissioners declared them selves unfavourable to the decree on the suppression of the (On1les,' votes were taken, and it was decided that "remonstrances should be made to the king, entreating him to withdraw the aforesaid decree as inadmissible both in substance and in its clauses. A bed of justice was inevitable; impossible to doubt that things must come to that extremity. However, as Malesherbes hesitated to use it, nearly one month was lost, during which the cabals assumed a character of extreme violence. Trudaine kept on urging promptness of action. " The public excitement," he wrote, "bears upon everything; we see a thousand cabals, active, violent, audacious, attacking the existence of the ministers. They are seen to be quiet, slow, often undecided, and people suppose them to be undecided, anxious, frightened. No one knows even whether they are united amongst themselves.

In this position every delay is fraught with danger .•• Since the assembling of the parliament securities are fallingat the Stock Exchange. This state of things will go on till the king has decided." The king, on his side, did not seem moved. ~rarie Antoinette, writing to ~Iaria Theresa, said: "The king has made decrees which will lead perhaps to fresh quarrels with the parliament; let us hope that these quarrels will not go as far as under the last reign, and that the king will maintain his authority.» But J\,Ialesherbes, Turgot's friend and collaborator, Oppositiol/' 1o liergol. 147 asked that modifications should be introduced in the statement of the decree on the (Ortl"ct , in order to prevent certain administrative abuses; if the assent ot the parliament could not have been obtained, he would have wished an application to be made. to the emIr des Aides. Trudaine maintained that these half~measures would be regarded as proofs of weakness. Turgot naturally shared Trudaine's opinion. The king was on Turgot's side; they consequently resolved on holding a bed of justice.

But, in the meanwhile, the pamphlet warfare ,,-as going on with ever~increasing activity. Every day a fresh request, a fresh memoir, fresh songs, epigrams, jokes. " :M. de Malesherbes fait tout; M. de Sartine doute de tout; M. Turgot brouille tout; M. de SaintvGermain renverse tout; M. de Maurepas rit de tout." Turgoes friends were annoyed by all these attacks: that was wrong j they got angry: that was worse. The council satisfied them by punishing the authors of the memoirs and pamphlets, and their works were suppressed by a decree of February 22, 1776. The parliament saw a challenge in this act of severity; and, on the 23rd of the same month, by way of answer ing Turgot's friends, they prosecuted a work directed against the privileged classes, creating much sensation, and entitled Its Inconvenien(sdtS tlroi'lsflotlaux. The Tttrgot. author, Boncerf, was a clerk under Turgot; he owned the book, and was summoned to appear in person before t he court. The work seems very moderate to those who read it now. The author enunlerates very calmly the inconveniences attending upon feudal rights, and merely proposes that the redemption of them should be allowed or made obligatory. The present vassals might be per mitted to redeem their estates; their heirs alone would be compelled to do so. The parliament considered the discussion of that system in the light of a crime, and condemned the brochure as "injurious to the laws and customs of France; to the sacred inalienable rights of the crown, and to the right of property in the case of private individuals; its aim was to shake the whole con stitution of the monarchy, by exciting an the vassals against their lords and against the king himself, as it denounced to them all the feudal and domanial rights as so many usurpations, vexations, and violences equally odious and ridiculous."

'rurgot immediately ordered Boncerf to come to him at Versailles, with the view of shielding him against the parliament, and he required that all prosecution should cease at once. On learning this act of vigour, Voltaire could not restrain his joy, and wrote to Audibert, on the 28th of February, 1776: "You know perhaps that the parliament having caused the public hangman to burn at the foot of the principal staircase an excellent book written in favour of the people by M. de Boncerf, ?vI. Turgot's chief clerk, and having further ordered the (Jpellit1c.( of Ilas/ililies. 149 author to appear in person before the court, his ~fajesty has written commanding the parliament to sup~ presstheirsentencc, and prohibiting them from denouncing books. Denunciations, the king says, are in the provim~e of the solicitor-general exclusively, and even he cannot denounce any publication without previously taking the orders of his ~fajesty. These are judgments worthy of Titus and of .Marcus Aurelius; but the gentlemen of the p:trliament are not senators of Rome. As for )1. Turgot, he seems quite like an old Roman."

AU these skirmishes had preceded the opening of the great hostilities. A merciless war was about to be waged at last; it was unfortunately to end by the defeat of the champions of equality, and by the triumph of the league of the privileged CAstes. It is on the 2nd of ~·tarch, 1776, that the parliament had decided upon the wording of its remonstrances. They had sent a deputation to Versailles to carry them to the king, asking him to fix a day and an hour when they might be officially presented to him. On the 7th of :\Iarch a second deputation had come to take the orders of the king. Louis XVI received the deputation, and answered: U I have examined the remonstrances of my parliament; the)' contain nothing which has not been anticipated and made the subject of serious considera~ tion." If the parliamenthas not registeredthe decree on the suppression of the (tJnJ(tS, it is because that suppression is a violation of justice: so the remonstrance says. U The first rule of justice consists in preserving to everyone what belongs to him: this is a fundamental rule of natural law» international law, and civil government; this rule does not consist merely in maintaining the rights of property, but in preserving those which belong to the individual, and which originate with the prero· gatives attached to birth and social condition. • . ."

" The right of (On,fee belonged to the 'Franks over their dependants. . . • 'Vhen these serfs obtained their free dom, by becoming free citizens but ro/uriers,they likewise became subject to the conlee. If you compel the nobles to pay a tax for the redemption of the COrlfee, contrary to the maxim 'nul n'es/ (()ri..,cable 5':1 flul tall/able,' )?OU pronounce them Hable to tallage (faillables) just as if they were no noblemen." The refusal to listen to the remonstrances really an nounced a bed of justice; but, before giving an account of it, we must examine the decree on the suppression of the jurandes and maU,ises (workmen's guilds and cor porations), which was carried to the same bed of justice as the decree on the abolition of the (on,ltt. The suppressions of the }urande.sand moUrises,and the establishment of unfettered labour, constitute Turgot's greatest reform, that in which his individual action has been most visible, and which has finally triumphed with the Revolution through the mere power of liberal ideas.

The suppression of privileges and the introduction of civil equality may be and have been the result of another passion than that of freedom; this is proved by the ",4holf/ieJ1t oj Jttra1ides. 15 1 whole of our history since 1789' The protectil'e systenl and the organisation of labour are not incompatible with what people c.an moderng()1/trnmtnIJ,that is to say, the governments which have succeeded to the antinl ,egtllle, Accordingly it is to Turgot, much more than to the Revolution, that we owe freedom of labour.; and it is to freedom of labour inaugurated h}p Turgot that the f"rance of the nineteenth century, after the final triumph of the great minister's ideas, owes the wonderful manifestation of industrial power which our generation has been able to witness. The preamble of the decree on the abolition of }urandes is a masterpiece which we must examine, and the principal parts of which we must make known by extracts.

The right of labour is a natural one; it has been inter fered with by institutions, old, it is true, but which could not be legitimised either by time, or by opinions, or by the acts of the authority which seem to have invested them with a species of consideration. In nearly nIl the towns the exercise of the different arts and trades was concentrated within the hands of a small number of masters, forming guilds, and who alone had the privilege, to the exc::lusionof all the other citizens, of making or selling the objects of the special trade of which they had the exclusive privilege. Those persons who wished to take up an art or a trade as a profession, could suceeed only byobtaining the rank of master (maUnie); norcould they be received mastersexcept after a series of long, toilTurgot. some, and superfluous tests, and at the cost of multiplied exactions, which made him who underwent these tests lose part of the capital which he would have needed to establish himself in life, to get up a trade, or open a workshop.

Those who could not meet these expenses were obliged to have only a precarious existence under the authority of these masters, to languish in poverty, or to carry to foreign parts an industry with which they might have benefited their own country. The citizens of all classes were deprived of the right of selecting those they would have wished to employ, nor did they possess the advantages they would have found in competition for low prices and perfection in workman· ship. The simplest \vork could often be performed only by applying to workmen of different guilds, and one had to put up with the slowness, the dishonesty, the exactions favoured by the pretensions of these guilds, and the caprices of their arbitrar)"and selfish regime. " These abuses have crept in by degrees. Originally they resulted from private interest acting against the public one. It is after a long interval of time that the authority, now taken by surprise, now deceived by a semblance of usefulness, gave to these abuses a kind of sanction. The origin of the evil is in the very power allowed to the workmen of the same trade to assemble in one guild."

The preamble shows that the trades' corporations were born at the same time as the C()111111Ilnes. 'Vhen the /1 OltS(~S c0111zectedwitlt the l'faUrises. 153 to\vns bc,:.tan to throw off the feudal yoke, and to form (Om1ll111lf.S, the facility of classifying the citizens accQrding to their professions introduced this custom, which was till then unknown. U The various professions then became, in a fashion, so many separatc communities of which the general community was made up. The ecclesiastical brotherhoods, by further fastenin~ the bonds which united together persons belonging to the same profession, furnished them with more frequent oppor tunities of assembling together, and occupying themselves, in these meetings, with the common interests belonging to that special society, interests which they prosecuted with steady activity, to the prejudice of those which concerned the general society. The communities, once formed, drew up statutes, for which they got the authorisation of the police, under various pretexts of public benefit."

The preamble then goes on to enumerate the clauses of most of the statutes belonging to the various communities, tyrannical as they a.re, and contrary to the public good. The principal object of these communities was to limit as much as possible the number of the masters, and render the acquisition of the masterships almost impossible for any but the children of the masters. U The spirit of monopoly which has directed the drawing up of the statute has been pushed to the last extremity. Therearesomewhichexcludefrom apprentice ships. and. consequently, from masterships, the young men who marry before they have obtained the position of L 154 T1trgot. masters. \Vomen are excluded (rom the professions the most natural to them, as embroider)', which they may not do on their own account. "'Ve shall not (ollow an)' further the enumeration of the dispositions, fantastic, tyrannical, contrary to humanity and morality. with which those obscure codes are full, drawn up by avarice, adopted unexamined in obscure times, and which, had they been known, would have been the object of public indignation."

The decree comprises 24 articles. Article 1 declares that all persons, even foreigners, are (ree to exercise any trade, profession of arts, or industry they like, and even to exercise several together. All guilds and corporations of trades and artizans are suppressed, as also the maUn"sesandjurandes. Articles 2 and 3 direct all traders and artizans to make a preliminary declaration before the lieutenant~ general of police, in order that a register of entries may be kept. Articles 4 and 5 exempt from the previous clauses the barbers, hairdressers, bath~keepers (efuvi'sfes), because their masterships had been officially created, and the moueys paid for th~m had been entered amongst the incidental income of the king. • • • The goldsmiths, chemists, printers, and booksellers were likewise ex~ empted, as being under special police regulations. Articles 6·9 stipulate the conditions under which the entries of the artizans should be made· on the registers, and the precautions to be taken (or the sale of drugs.

l?efor111S: their C"haratlel". 155 Article 10 establishes syndics in the various districts or the towns throughout the kingdom. especially in l)aris; these syndics shall watch over the traders and workmen of their respective districts; without any distinction of trade or profession. they shall send in reports to the head of the police, receive and transmit his orders. Articles 1 I and 12 give the summary proceedings from which the lieutenant~general of police shall judge the disputes arising {rom bad and defective labour. The gardu1urh (members of the jury of a guild or corporation) .are expressly prohibited by Article 13 to continue the exercise of their functions. Article 14 is the one which has most frequently been attacked since the Revolution. It forbids all masters, companions, workmen, and apprentices of the guilds and c.orporations to form amongst themse1\'es any association or assembly under any pretence whatever.

The following articles settle questions of jurisdiction, of procedure, and prescribe the forms to be observed in the liquidationof the various communities, especiaUythose of the city of Paris, the net result orwhich, after all debts paid, was to be equally divided between the masters~ Such is the celebrated decree which introduced in France {or the first time the freedom of work. The detrnctors of the reform were numerous then; there are still some at the present day; we shall reproduce their objections, for the parliament appropriated them, whilst giving an account of the bed of justice. J.. : Turgot. That assembly, in which Turgot's famous decrees were registered, took place at Versailles, l\{arch 12th, t 776. The speakers were the king, the keeper of the seals, Hue de ~Iiromeni1, the senior president, d'Aligre, and Scguier,the crown advocate. " Gentlemen," said the king, "I have assembled you to make my will known to you; my keeper of the seals shall state it."

ltiromenil then spoke. He briefly explained what the decrees were, justifying them, even the one on the sup.. pression of the (OrfleCS, which he had so perseveringly opposed in the council. His speech is, in a certain sense, a very brief analysis of the general prenmble, and of the preambles special to each decree. The duties of his office obliged him to defend what he had so strongly attacked. The senior president, speaking on behalf of the par.. liament, after the keeper of the seals, expressed him self in a pompous style, and as if struck by terror. H Sire, on this day when your ~Iajesty displays your power only through the conviction that you are manifest inq your kindness, the pomp with which your l\{ajesty is surrounded, the absolute exercise you are making of your authority, impress all your subjects with profound dread, and are for us the omen of a terrible constraint ••.• 'Vhy should deep sadness offer itself to-day to the august looks of your :Majesty? If you condescend to survey your people, you see the people in a state of consterna tion; if you look at the metropolis, you find it ...Sp~c(h of d'A/igre. 157 al:umed ..••This decree (the one on the conlttl), by the introduction of a ne" kind of perpetual and arbitrary taxationon Jand, inflicts serious prejudice on the pros..

pects both of the poor and of the rich, and constitutes a fresh bIo" on the natural freedom of the nobility and the dergy, whose distinctions and rights are bound up with the constitution of the monarchy. n Going on, next, to the decree on the suppression of the 1'1l'OlllJ($, he dedares that ce such a decree breaks at once a)) the ties of order established for the professions of merchants and artizans. It lea\'es without rule and without order turbulent and licentious young men, who, s('.arcelykept within proper bounds by the public police, by the discipline preserved in the various communities, and by the domestic authority exercised by' the masters over their companions, are capable of rushing into excesses of every kind. The keeper of the seals caused the decree on the (OrVeeS to be read next, and he said to ce the people of the king" that they were at liberty to speak. Seguier then pronounced a discourse, in which he developed all the arguments developed by ?\liromenil in his private obsen'ations, concluding by proposing that, in times of peace, soldiers should be employed in the maintenance of the roads.

After this address, to which no answer was made, the keeper of the seals took the orders of the king, previous to collecting the votes, for form's sake beginning with the princes of the blood, then, having first walked up to the kin~, and walked down again to reach his place, he pronounced the (ollowing words, seated, and with his hat on : "The king, holding his bed of justice, has ordered and does order that the decree just read shan be registered at the greiJe (registrar's office) of his parliament." The same ceremony took place for the other decrees, namely, the one on the police measures regulating the sale of corn in Paris, and the one for the suppression of offices in the market.places. The decree on the abolition ofjllralldes only came fourth. In order to state the reasons which the parliament had for resisting that decree, Seguier made a speech much longer than the previous ones.

From his point of view, the corporations might be looked upon as so many small republics exclusivelyen grossed by the general interest of all the members which compose them; and, if it is true that the general interest is formed by the combination of the interests of all the members in particular, it seemed to him that every member, ""hilst labouring for his own private benefit, worked necessarily even, unknown to himself, for the real benefit of the whole corporation. If you loosen the springs which set in motion this multitude of different communities, if you destroy the urandes, if you abolish the regulations, in one word, jf you disunite the members of all the communities, you suppress the resources of every kind which trade itself should desire for its preser vation.

,s"Cgttier's Re1Jlarks. 159 The king's advocnte then drew the picture of the isolated workman free to indulge in all the excesses of an imagination often unruly, eager for gain, and preparing secret means for duping both his fellow-citizens and foreigners. "It is these bonds (those of the r;gillle pro ceeding py regulations), these restrictions, these prohibi~ tions, which make the· glory, the safety, the immensity of French commerce." Seguier readilyacknowledged that there were defects in the constitution of the comnlunities; "but there are no institutions into which some defects have not crept; and there is an immense difference between getting rid of abuses, and destroying the corporations where these abuses may be found.') The number of communities seemed to him too great. U'Vhat is the use, for instance," said he, "that flower-girls should form a community sub· ject to regulations? what is the need of statutes to seH flowers and make bouquets of them?" There are unions which he found opportune, such as that of the tailors with the old~clothes men, the eating-house keepers with the sellers of roast poultry (r6Ii'sseurs),the bakers and the pastry~cooks. He likewise admitted that women might rise to the mastership in order to be dress makers, embroiderers, hairdressers. "But we must retain what has been sanctioned by Henry IV, Louis XIV, SullYt and Colbert. Never was prince more be loved than Henry IV', and Colbert) who changed the face of :Franceand revived trade, caused an order to be issued to the effect that all persons carrying on traffic or 160 Turgot.

commerce in the city of Paris should be for the future constituted as communities ofjurantles and mai/ri'ses." After Seguier's harangue, the decree was registered. The decree moderating the duty on tallow, read the last, gave occasion to a few remarks only, and the long sitting, which had been protracted over five hours, concluded with the usual form and ceremony. It is worthy of notice that Articles 13 and 14 of the decree on the jurandes, which, later on, created such discussions amongst the economic and liberal school, suggested no observations at the time when the decree was published, and gave rise to no contestation either on the part of the trades-guilds in the memoirs \vhich they caused to be drawn up and distributed, or on the parl of the parliament in its remonstrances, or, finally, on that of the crown advocate in his harangues at the bed of justice. The articles we allude to are those which prohibited all associations or assemblies of workmen or masters belonging to the same business.

It is in our time alone that persons have seen in these articles the translation into a leRis]ative enactment of the famous maxim for which Adam Smith has been so much blamed, and which has been sometimes excused on the ground that it was nothing but a whim. It was, however, the sincere expression of fear lest the law should not protect with sufficient efficaciousness the freedom of the consumer. Ada.m Smith wrote that persons belonging to the ./1ssocialiolls Forbiddell. 161 same trade seldom meet, even for a pleasure-party or for motives of distra«::tion, but the conversation ends by some plot against the pUblic, or some machination to raise prices. Dy forbidding artizans to associate and meet together, Turgot, we must own, placed an impediment in the exercise of a right which the liberal school has always daimed in modern timl~s. But, on the day when he suppressed the lIlaUrist'S and the juramfts, he had not a ", and this silOuld be borne in mind"···..either the thought or the pretension of legislating on the right of speaking and of association. He wished simply to bring back the corporations to the common Jaw of the day; and the common law, then, in ~"ran<:e, implied neither the right of association nor that of meeting.

The endeavour to reconcile the right for private individuals to form associations, and the right for the State to protect itself against what has been caned a stall fi,lz"thin lIlt Stall, is an altogether new problem. Turgot had not to preoccupy himself in 1776 about a question which was not born, and, beSIdes,if, anticipating the future, he had tried to solve it, would he be very guilty for not having succeeded? It is a problem which, for the last hundred rears, has been in France the most constant preoccupation of statesmen belonging to all parties. 'Ve, have had governments founded upon the principleof authority,and others founded upon the principle of liberty. The latter have not, on this point, given more satisfaction than the former to liberal views; Tttrgot. and the laws on the freedom of association do not yet exist. The rights of associations and those of the State are still opposed to each other. The discussion is even now pending, and no one has }'et succeeded in discovering the formula which shall guarantee them respectively with()ut either enslaving the citizens or disarming the State.

CllAPTER VII. INCREASING DIFf'ICULTIES.-RETREAT OF MALE SHERllES.-SECRET LETTERs.-nISMISSAL OF TURGOT.-HIS RETREAT.-HIS DEATH. W HAT impression did the king receive from that dn.y? It is difficult to know. Turgot, had he wearied him by requiring of him that new and so c()n~ siderable effort? It is certain, at any rate, that the influences of all Turgofs adversaries made themselves felt from that time with an increasing strength which soon became irresistible. The queen had succeeded in getting compJetdy the upper hand over the king, and she soon gave a last proof of that fact ajropos of the same Count de Guines on whose behalf she had already induced the king to in,· terfere, despite the unanimous opinion of the council The end was drawing near. At the time when the American affairs were begin ft ning to preoccupy them, ~f. de Vergennes and Turgot ha~ strongly urged the king to grant them authority to recall Count de Guines from London. They con sidered him rightly as unqualified to deal with delirote affairs. The king had yielded to their reasons, and Turgot.

had even written to Count de Vergennes, informing him that he gave him all power to change the ambas sador. The queen, extremely irritated by this resolution, had ascribed to Turgot, still more than to Vergennes, the disgrace of her favourite. She could not indeed cause the Count de Guines to be reinstated into the embassy which had jnst been taken awayfrom him, but she obtained for him the title of Duke, together with a con gratulatory letter written by the king himself. "I render justice to your conduct," wrote Louis XVI to him, "and I grant to you the honours of the Louvre, together with the permission of assuming the title of Duke. You are at liberty to show this letter." Count de ~iercy writes to :Maria Theresa: "In the matter of Count de Guines, the king finds that he has evidently been contradicting him self by autograph letters written to Count de Vergennes and Count de Guines·-lettcrs entirely opposed to each other; he further compromises himself and all his ministers in the eyes of the public, who know perfectly well that this is brought about by the will of the queen, and through a kind of violence exercised by her over the king. The cOIl/roltu,. ghleral, i~formed of the hatred which the queen bears towards him, has decided on retiring, chiefly on that account; the queen's plan was to insist upon the king's dismissing Turgot, and even sending him to the Bastille on the very day when Co~nt de Guines should be declared duke, and only the strongest and most urgent remonstrances could stop the consequences of the queen's anger; that anger has no COUllt de Gttilles.

othcr moth'c than the steps which Turgot felt bound to take for the recall of Count de Guines." Since the bed of justice, Turgot's enemies were jubilant j they knew that the king was tired, and e,"eryone felt cerbin of the downfall of the ~onlrolttlr general. The mot which Trudaine had uttered the day before the decrees had been sent to the parliament was becoming a reality. II Be sure," he had written to Turgot, U that there is not one councillor in the parliament who does not consider the fon"arding of the decrees as the end of your ministry. If this misfortune should happen, I believe that the king's authority would be ruined for the whole of his reign." The Choiseul party no longer concealed their jO)·. " TIlt Turgot is in a state of dissolution," said ~fadame du Deffant in a letter to the Duchess de Choiseul; and when she heard the news about " lite Turgot," she wrote: "'''hat events, what surprises, and, I may add, what jo}', nnd what pleasure; the triumph of ~1. de Guines is, I own, what has pleased me most." The Duchess de Choiseul answered: U I have, like you, been overwhelmed with joy at the triumph of :M. de Guignes; I think that the disgrace of the two ministers, which has accompanied it, makes him look like the Roman generals enjoying the honours of triumph, and dragging their slaves in their train." On the 1St of June, 1776, Galiani wrote to ~Iadame d'Epinay: "By the arrivalof the ambassador's brother·in-Iaw, I had learnt the change of the ministry, and I had learnt nothing more than what I knew when 166 Turgot.

?\1. Turgot was appointed ((111/rollttr gtnel"al. Pray read over again the letter I wrote to you then." The prophecy contained in the letter alluded to by him had really been a most singular one, and reflected the greatest credit on his perspicacity. IIere is the passage to which he refers, and it can be read in the letter he addressed from Naples to :Madame d'Epinay, September 17, 1774: "At last 1\:1. Turgot is (on/rolttt,. ghtt.~ral. lIe will remain in office for too short a time to be able to carry out his systems; the administration of the finances will be too like his brother's Cayenne. lIe will punish a few rogues, he will be out of temper, he will get angrr; he will wish to do good, but will meet everywhere with thorns, difficulties, rogues. Credit will diminish, he will be detested, people will say that he is not fit for the work; enthusiasm will cool down, he wilt retire or be dismissed, and once more people will dis~ cover the error of having appointed to an office like his, in a monarchy like yours, a man who is both virtuous and a staunch philosopher." Subaltern intrigues are mentioned, those, amongst others, of the ?\farquis de Pezay, who had contrived to attract the notice of the king, and had given him notes on the budget of receipts and expenditure, such as Turgot had prepared it. It is said that these, notes had been drawn up for 1\1. de Pezay by Necker himself, and that they stated matters with a great deal of cleverness in a way most unfavourable to the (on/ro/tllf'.. genlral. To use the Abbe Galiani's ex..

pression, some persons said that "he was not good for Turgo/ wrttes to tlte Kitlg. 167 the work." There was also an episode of forged letters intercepted by the (( Black Cabinet." Dupont de Nemours relates it in detail. An these secondary manoouvres may have had some effect in embittering the mind of the king; but the oppositionof the queen) the resignationof ~lalesherbesJ which occurred then, and the singularly severe and somewhat haughty letters which Turgot wrote to the king with the view of thwarting the influence of ~laurepasJ And asking that ~-lale5herbes should be replaced by a friend of reforms-·aU these circunlstances sufficiently explain the final crisis. In an absolute monarchy, such as was that of Louis XVI, as well as under a parliamentary government, like niodern ones, ministerial crises are always produced by questions of confidence. Turgot had lost the confidence of the king, and no ministerialcombination could restore it to him. The question was no longer to admit this or that person in the combination so as to have his support in the struggle with the prl'vileged classes. The king had made up his mind, and that was aU. Just as a parliamentary minister can do nothing to maintain his position when the majority have resolved upon with~ drawing their confidencefrom him, so Turgot could do nothing because the king would have him no more; better if he had sent in his resignation at the same time ~ ~{alesherbes. Instead of retiring,Turgot, with whom the king had (or some time avoided to hold any conver~ sation, wrote to Louis XVI foursecret letters in the shape J68 Tttrgot.

of memoirs, and two of them have, fortunately, reached us. The Ahb~ Soulavie had mentioned them in his diffuse and confused history; he had affirmed that in one Turgot had said to the king "a terrible, a frightful truth; he had pointed out to that young king, naturally full of fears and of timidity, that the destiny of feeble princes is that of Charles I or Charles IX." If we may believe Soulavie, he saw these 'letters amongst the papers of Louis XVI; the one where Charles I is mentioned had been placed by the king in an envelope, sealed with the smallest royal seal, of the size of a len/tine, with this inscription in his own handwriting: U Letters of Turgot." Soulavie's assertion had never been considered very serious by the historians of Turgot, when 1\-1. de Larcy discovered in 1868 the entire original of it in Very's memoirs. The document is so curious, and it throws so much light upon the last days of Turgot's ministry, that we shall give further on a certain number of passages from it. A still more recent discovery has, besides, removed all the doubts which might have been enter tained as to the existence of the letters in question, and the authenticity of that which ~I. de Larcy has published.

M. Ie :Marquis Turgot has found in the Lantheuil archives a sheet of paper serving originally as wrapper to a bundle of papers of which not one remains; but on that wrapper ~Ialesherbes had written with his own hand the following observations: "This bundle contains four letters written by ~{. Turgot to the king at the time when the selection of my successor was being considered.

~1. Turgot wrote to the king with the zeal whkh should actuate the minister the most devoted to the service of the crown, and with the confidence one has in one's trustiest friend. U He tells him in the dearest manner what he thought of those who were at the head of t.he administration, and of the persons best qualified to fill the vacant office; and even when he mentions his friends, he does not think he should conceal from the king the defects he knows they have. I' The most austere virtue pervades these fOUf letters; hut, on the one hand, and in the interest of those of whom he speaks, it would be extremely anno}'ing if any· one knew what he told the king in this (~onfidential statement j and nothing is certainly more contrary to l\I. Turgot's intentions than to le~l\re, in writing, notes of what he thought right to say to the king alone. "I, who speak of this, have no personal interest in the matter, for he praises me uoreservedl)"; not but that he certainly knew that I had defects, for I have many; but, as I was about to resign, the interest of the king's service did not require that they should be re"'ealed to him, and they have not been so. But there are certain persons named on. whose behalf I claim the most absolute silence, althouKh they have not commissioned me to do so, beCa\lSe they do not know what is said of them; and those for whom I do most interfere have an equal interest in demanding of the family the suppression of these documents. Indeed, ~1. Turgot can feel no M T1lrgot.

regret at such a suppression, because they are not memoirs in which ~1. Turgot explains to the king his principles as an administrator, memoirs which would be most worthy of being preserved. He has only said there on the necessity of maintaining authority what everyone has ,\Iread}~ said, and on the application of these principles, which is the subject of his long memoir, he only described the character of persons, which does n~t deserve preservation. U I trust that the letters themselves, written to the king, shall be buried in the deepest oblivion. If the contrary should happen, it will be the fault neither of M. 'furgot nor of his family; but they should not have to reproach themselves for contributing to this by the preservation of the rough drafts. I even exhort M~. Ie l\larquis Turgot to give up the idea of reading them himself; I repeat to him that he makes no sacrifice by doing so; I, who read them seven or eight days after they had been entrusted to me, I wish now I had never read them; so much do I fear lest, if the secrets of the n1inister to the king should be one day revealed, the accusation of that revelation should faU upon me. I add, that this secret being that of the king as much as that of the ministry, it is a mark of respect due to the king to burn the letters, if possible in the presence of some one qualified to certify the fact to him."

The documents contained in that wrapper were evidently the rough drafts of the letters seen by Soulavie in 1793, and are now lost. The drafts enTttrgols Letters. closed in the bundle, of which the wrapper alone has been preserved in the Lrmthtuil archives) \yere no doubt burned, as 1\faJeshtrbes wished. The copy of one of the four letters was probably sent to Very by Turgot himself, who wanted to sho\V to him in what terms he had insisted on his being sele<;ted in the place of 1\lalesherbes, and on his being named minister of the royal household. Another letter has been copied by Soulavie, and inserted by him in his Mbnoirts Izisloritjll($ as an annexed document amongst the pieces juslijiralh.'u. It refers to the petition of a certain Chanvallon, who, suing for the revision of a lawsuit, was endeavouring to com promise the president (Turgot's brother) and Turgot himself. It was a machination of Sartine, and Turgot denounced it to the king.

" Last year, ~1. de Sartine informed me of all the steps taken; asked, so to say, my consent, which I took c.are not to refuse; insisted, in spit: of myself, on my hearing the special report which ~L Chardon made to him, at hiS own house, of the whole affair; and now, eveI},thing is mysteriously conducted and is made public only in opposition to ~I. de Sartine. It is no longer I who am warned beforehand. And yet everyone knows that I am not capable of asking a denial or justice against any~ body; but it is :M. de Choiseul who gets the information before his departure for Chanteloup. \Vhence this difference? It is easily explnined: last year, the accession of 1\1. de l'falesherbes to the ministry, the kindnesses with !of 2 11t1:::01. which your :\fajesty honoured me, left no hope to those who wished for my downfall; they wanted either to win me over, or, at least, to seem as if the)' desired my friend ship. This year, the resignation of ~-f. de :Malesherbes, the combination, more decided, of all parties against me, my complete isolation, the tolerably well-known dislike of :M. de I\firomenil, and his influence over :M. de ~laurepas, everything persuades me that 1 am holding on merely by a thread. That thread must be broken, and then we must contrive secretly a fresh plot which shall bring back on the stage an old and wen-forgotten affair, hence the publication of defamatory memoirs, first in a ~lS. form, then printed; so is my time wasted in defending either my brother or myself, and this announces, at any rate, that I have lost my credit: that is, Sire, why the conduct of I\L de Sartine in 1776 is so different {rom what it was in 1775."

The other letter, the one of which the Abbe de Very had the copy, bears likewise the date April 30, J 776. Its character is so singular, it throws so much new light on Turgot's personal relations with the king, that it deserves serious meditation. U Sire, I will not conceal from your ~'1ajesty the deep pain I felt at heart in consequence of your cruel silence towards me, last Sunday, after -what I had told you with so full a detail in my previous letters about my position, about your own, about the danger which threatens both your authority and the glory of your reign, about the im· possibility of my serving you unless you come to my Tuygot's Leffel's. 173 assistance. Your l\lajesty hns not condescendt~d to give me an answer. . . . I have set at defiance the hatred of an those to whom some abuses are profitable. So long as I entertained the hope that your ~Iajesty valued me, so long as I hoped to do good, nothing has been spared on my part. Your ?\lajesty sees the impossibility in which I am to resist those who injure me, both by the evil they inflict upon me, and by the good they prevent me from doing, thwarting, as the)' do, all my operations, and your ?\Iajesty, nevertheless, gives me neither assist ance nor consolation.

"Your ~Iajesty said to me that you wanted Inore time for retlexion, and that you lacked experience. You do lack experience, Sire. I am aware that at the age of two.. and-twenty, and in ),our position, you have not the resources which the habit of living with one's equals gives to private individuals when they wish to judg(~ men. But will your experience be greater in a week? in a month? And must you wait till that slow experience has arrived, in order to adopt a resolution? "I have described to you all the evils caused by the weakness of the latc king, I have unfolded before you the progress of the intrigues which had, by degrees, made his authority contemptible. I venture to entreat you to read that letter over again; then ask yourself whether you wish to run the ri~k of the same dangers, I shall even say greaterdangersstill. "At the age of forty Louis XV enjoyed the whole amount of his authority. The public mind was not 174 Turgot.

excited then ,; no corporation hnd as yet tried its strength. You are twenty~two, Sire, and the parliaments are already more animated, more audadQus, more united to court~ cabals, than they were in 1770, after twenty years of enterprises and of success. ~Iinds are a thousand times more animated on all sorts of questions, and your cabinet is almost as divided and weaker than that of your predecessor, Think, Sire, that, according to the course of nature, you have fifty more years to reign, and think of the progress ,,,,,hieha disaffection C'ln make after having reached in twenty years the state we see. Oh ! Sire, do not wait till such experience has been your lot, and know how to profit by that of others. "Sire, I owe to ~I. de ~{aurepas the situation which your s"Injestyhas entrusted to me; this I shall never {orget; never shall I fail in whn.t I am bound to testify of him; but I am a thousand times under ~re~lter obligations to the State and to )'our l\fajesty. I could not, without being guiltyof a crime, sacrificethe interests of either. It costs me horribly to tell you that ~r. de ,Maurepas is really guilty if he proposes to you 1\1.

Amelot (to replace ~lalesherbes)J or, at any rate, that his ,..eakness would be as fatal to you as a premedit:lted crime .•.. (( At any rate, it is so evident to me that I cannot re main alone and isolated, as lam now, that even if my duty did not oblige me to tell you the whole tnlth, I could not have any interest in concealing it from you. If I displease you by so doing, I beg of your ~tajesty to ten l1t1:f°t'sLeliers. liS me so, or to fa\'our me with a It.~tter to that (~fr~ct. I do not wish to sh~lke your eonfiden<:e in ~l. de ~laurepas: hc;~ deserves it in many ways by his cxpet'ienc(~, his knowl(;~dg(~, his great acquaintance with buslnes<), his wonderful memory, his amiability, his sincere attachment to what is gOQd n.nd to your own pen30n. H But, Sire, you must surely he aware how weak-· minded ~1. de 'Maurepas is, and how ht~ is overruled by the opinions of those who sec him. Everyone knows th~\t !\ladame de l\laun~pa5, infinite1}' less witty than her husb~lnd, has much more eh~1.Tacter, and inspires him with aU her wishes. Public opinion likewise produces upon him an impression which is extraordinary in a sensible man, who, with his intdhgencl~, should have views of his own. I have seen him changc his opinion ten times. on the OC<::~lsjon of the bed of justice, according us he looked either at the keeper of the seals or ~t ~t Alhertt Heutt.~mmt of police, or at mysdf. It is thanks to that unfQrtunate uncertainty, of which the parliament was faithfully informed, that the rcsistance of the ass{;~mbly was so prolonged. If the Abbe de V(~ry had not contributcd to strengthen his friend, I should not be ~stonished to hear that he would have given up cl'ery"

thing, and advised your l\lajesty to give way to the par·· liament. That weakness it is which makes him adopt so e..'\sily the clamours of the courtiers against lUl'\ and which deprivesme of almostaU power in my ofllce. •...no not forget, Sire, that it is we~lkness which placed the head of Charles I on the block; it is weakTz.ergot. ness which rendered Charles IX cruel; it is weakness which organised the Ligllt under Henry IV; which made of Louis XIII,as it now makes of the king of Portugal, crowned slaves; it is weakness which caused all the misfortunes of the late reign. "People believe you are weak, Sire, and occasions have been when I feared lest you should have that defect; and yet, in other circumstances still more deli cate, I have seen you display real courage. "You have said it yourself, Sire, experience is wanting in you; you need a guide, and that guide should possess both mind and strength. M:. de Maurepas has the former of these qualities, and he cannot have the latter unless he himself is backed up. He does not feel so, he even dreads it ; I see as much by the selection he has in view, and by the little amount of effort he has made to determine you in fa"our of the Abbe de Very. I see that he dreads precisely that which would give him strength. lIe does not feel that after having isolated me, after having made your :Majesty dislike me, and compelled me to leave )'ou, the storm now directed against me will fall upon him, and that he will end by giving way, ~'\rrying along with him your authority, or, perhaps, after having ruined it .... Such, Sire, is your present position: a cabinet weak and disunited; aU the minds in a state of ferment; the parliaments leagued With all the cabals, emboldened by a patent weakness (your l\lajesty has seen in a letter which I have confided to you, the very 1tali,Jt expression of their thoughts), Turgot's Leiters. 177 an income below the expenditure, the greatest resistance to indispensable economy, no harmony, no stability in plans, no secre(~y in the resolutions of your councils; and it is in the midst of such circumst."mces that a man is proposed to your~lo.jesty, destitute of aU talent, and whose only merit is his subserviency'-lo whom? not to the one amongst your ministers who shows some strength in his office, but to the keeper of the seals, who by his insinuations further increases hlS disposition to weakness.

It is in these circumstances that your ~Iaj~sty cannot be struck by the dangers which I h:u!e pointed out to you with so much evidence. "Really, Sire, I fail to understand you; people may h::we said to you that I was hot~he.1dcd and chimerical; yet it seems to me that an I am telling you is not like the ravings of a madman. It seems even to me that the operations I have made, despite the clamours, the oppo .. sidon they have met with, have had the success I fore~ told; and if I nm no madman, if the dangers I have shown to you have any reality about them, )'our :\Iajest)' c~nnot, without failing in your own sense of duty, rush into them by condescension for 1\1. de ~lnurepas. U I beg of )'OU to reflect once again before you make up }'our mind to an appointment which will be bad in itself, and fntal by its consequences, Finally. if I am so unfortunate that this letter should bring upon me your ~lajcstyts disple~sllre, I entreat you to inform me that such is the casco An}'how, I rely upon your keepingtht~ matter secret."

Ttty/[ot. The king did not answer this letter, an)' more than the previous ones whieh Turgot had written to him on that day or at an earlier date. He had to choose between :Maurepas and Turgot, and his selection was made beforehand. He could not be influenced by the last effort which Turgot made in writing to him with so much bluntness. Far from that! He must even have seen there an effort to gain the mastery over his will, and to govern by placing him, the king, so to say, out of the government. 011 the 31st of April, the <In}' when he caused this fourth and final letter to be delivered to l.ouis XVI, no doubt hy ~t. d'Angivilliers~ Turgot wroteto Very, without alluding yet to the last effort he had just attempted, and bt~gg(~d of him to come to Paris for the purpose of influencing the mind of his old friend :\faurcpas, and inducing him to choose the successor of )Ialesherbes amongst the champions of reform. Ten days after~ wards, on the loth of ~Iay, he wrote to him that all was pvcr. and that the successor of .l\1alesherbes was really Amelot.

He, however, still hoped to have the time to draw up a plan for the reform of the kingJs household. " The plan will certainly not be adopted, and I shall ask to be set free. H The next day, ~lay II, 1776, a fresh letter: "The }Iarquis de NoailIes is ambassador in England, :M. de Ja Vaugu)'on in Iionand, 1\1. de Guines has the patent of Duke, and is therefore as white as snow."

Tl0:g0t'S lJislIlissal. 179 Finally, on the 12th of T\Ia}~, his (~(}l1cague Bt~rtjn delivered to him, on the part of the king, the order to give up his functions. 1\Iaurcpas wfote to him: it If I had been at liberty, sir, to follow my firj:)t impulse, I would have called ,upon you. Superior orders han~ pre't"ented me from doing so. I beg you to be persuaded of tne share I take in your situation.'l Turgot, answering him, began by the following words: "I receh,'c, sir, the letter you have honoured me "..-ith.; I do not doubt the sh:lre you have taken in the event of the d;,\y~ and I f(~d every proper gratitude on the subject.'" TWQ days after, ~r:l)' 14th, he wrott": to Very: "\' our old fri(~nd has caused me to be dismissed without waiting for me to ask (or my retr<::at.Y' On the 18th of l\lay, after having ()btained leave from the king, Turgot wrote to him a letter, which Dupont de Nemours has published" and which forms a worthy parallel to that by which he accepted, two years before, the office of amlriJ!tur ghlera/. lIe alludes in it to the four secret letters of which ,ve have spoken. (( The step which I have ttlken, and which s(~ems to have displeased }'OU, must have proved to you that no motive could aaach me to my offke! for it was impossible that I should not be aware of the risk I was running, and I should not hav(,~ exposed myself to it h~\d I preferred my for tune to my dut).. You have also seen in my letters how impossibleit was for me to be of any useful service in that place, and consequently to retain it, if you left me there isolated and without any help."

180 Turgot. \Vhen he speaks U oethe step which he has taken,'· some persons have thought that Turgot was alluding to his interference in the business of the Count de Guines; but there can now be no doubt on the subject. The step which has displeased is the correspondence. The four letters had deeply offended the king. Immediately after his disgrace, Turgot retired to the dla/eall of the Duchess d'EnvilJe at r~'1. Roche-Guyon; then he returned to Paris. He spent the five remaining years of his life in the study of sciences and the cultiva tion of literature. The universal reproach addressed to him of having lost his influence by the want of pliancy in his character,*· in one word, U by his awkwardness," affected him much; he spoke of it in the long letter which he wrote to Dr, Price, M:arch :und, 1778. ce lowe you a double shan~ of gratitude/, says he, " first, for your work ... ; 2nd, for the politeness you have shown in suppressing the imputation of tlwkward.

fUSS mixed by you with the good you said of me in your • "M y dear and illustrious philosopher, I have been com missioned to send you the enclosed copy of M, Turgotls famous decrees. You know them, and, consequentl)·, you esteem him. You have heard of his downfall, and you will pity us; for although he did not sufficiently know either society or business, although in maintaining his \'iews he had a stubbornness and a coldness little calculated to make them adopted, although he deemed it a great deal too easy to upset all estabHshed things, and to go against all received prejudices, so long as one is right, yet no one has regretted him." (Letter of Suard to H urne, May 28, 1776.) 4.il,prtCl:,tioltof 1il1i:,tfs Character. t 81 ;:uJditional observations. I might have desen-'ed the imputation, ifyou had not had in your mind's eye any other awkwardness except that of not having known how to unravel the intrigues set at work against me by people much morc clever in that Hne of conduct than I am, than I shall ever be, and than I wish to be. But it struck me that you ascribed to me the awkwardness of having ruddy gc:me against the general opinion of my nation, and in that respect I think that you had done justice neither to me nor to my nation, where there is much more enlightenment than is generally thought amongst you, and where it is perhaps easier than in your own country to bring bac.k the people to reasonable ideas."

The opinion expressed by Doctor Price was held then as a kind ofaxiom. Up to his death, and even afterwards, Turgot has been looked upon as having made shipwreck bec.ause he could not master himself, and because, on accounf of the asperities of his character, he could not win the kindness of those whose support he needed to get one Althoughthis judgment has been almost unanimously subscribed by Turgot's contemporaries, it ought to be revised by the generations born of the RC\'olulion, because the coadjutors and friends, as well as the adversaries and enemies of the great minister, have mixed up his personal and individual cause with that of his doctrines .; nor ha\o°c they noticed that the defects of character ascribed to him, and which have broughtabout his downfall,have been, fifteen years later, one of the principal reasons of the final triumph of his ideas.

182 Tttrgot. It is known now, in consequence of g(J'lJenzmellfs ()! Opinl()n having been practised for many years, that the upsetting of a cabinet on a question of principle leads often to this: a party is formed which adopts the programme of that cabinet, and the new party is strong enough to realise su hsequently, when circumstances have become more favourable, the reforms which had been endangered by the very downfall of the minister. Democracy, which has made the Revolution, certainly needed not to remem ber Turgot when it destroyed privileges, and placed its equalising level on :French society; but we must acknowledge that it has been influenced in the highest degree by the remembrance of Turgot in all economic a~d financial questions, especially on the day when it consecrated the principle of unfettered work-principle which was contrary to the aspirations of some ofitsleaders,who thought that it could be neglected consistently with the passion for equality.

After leaving public life Turgot devoted himself almost entirely, first, to the Atademie des inscriptions et belles*letlres,over which he presided as vice-director in 1777, and then to the literary studies which had charmed him in his youth. He had many friends, and he was fond of seein~ them, although they were "the thieves of his time," as he said, after Bacon. He eagerly procured all the scientific works which were published throughout Europe. He studied the higher branches of geometry with the Abbe Bossut, chemistry with Lavoisier, astronomy Tur..i[ols ()ccujJatiolls. 183 with Rochon. Condorcet kept him a/l (Quratll of aU that was going on at the A(ad;mit~ des scitlues. "'hen Franklin came to Paris. at the end of J 716, he saw him frequently.; he talked with him about the con~ stitution of the various Amcricnn States. lIe even wrote on purpose fbr him a memoir on the taxesaffecting :lrtic1es of consumption. lIe also sent one day to Sartine, anonymously, a note on Capt.lin Cook's third voyage of discovery, proposing that his ship should be assimilated to those of neutral powers. U Captnin Cook," said he, .. is probablyon his way back to Europe.

The purposeof his voyage being merely the progressC?f human knowledge, nnd thereforeinteresting all nations, it is worthy of the king's magnanimity that its success should not be allowed to stand compromised by the for· tunes of war." Sartine caused thIS note to be approved by the king, but neither the king nor Sartine ever kne\~ that the ~enerous idea with which they associated them~ selves c~me from the disgraced minister. During the first period of his retreat Turgot suffered very impatiently that the beautiful reforms he had under taken should be reconsidered. Hearing that there was a talk about suppressing his edicts on the abolition of juramJes and (()n'tes, he wished to write to 1\h.urepas. He even began a letter, but never finished it. Could he hope that they would listen once more to him who had been dismissedfrom powerin ordernot to be continuaUy wearied by his pleadings on behalf of rcfonlls? The unfinished letter has been found amongst his papers; it is at Lantheuil.

T1/1:~Ot. "In spite of all that I had heard, sir, since my removal (rom the ministry, relating to the plan ascribed to you, of advising the king to reconsider the suppression of the ~()rt.!ftS ~lnd jllralldts, I never could persuade myN self that you were bent on realising it. I cannot under~ stand your having had ever the idea of doing so; but it is impossible to doubt now that you have already c()n suIted the parliament as to the new decrees intended to cancel those which were passed in the last bed of justice. It will certainly seem strange to you that I should venture to writ~ to you on this occasion. It is (not) from me that you expect advice, and I cannot presume that my opinion may make you alter your views; the very reflexions I have to submit to you are so simple, so palpably evident, that it seems morally impossible that they should not have suggested themselves to you; but the more natural and palpable they are, the more in agreement with the line of thought I always knew you to have, the more also I am obliged to believe that some extraordinary motive has closed your eyes to their evidence. I wish then to recall yourself to what you have a thousand times said and thought, to what you owe to the public, to the king, to your own reputation; I want to oppose your conscience to passion, which, allow me to say so, conceals from you even your own intereCit.

Forgive me this frankness, sir; my intention is not to offend you by unpalatable truths; but you know me weB enough to understand that I cannot see without the deepest sorrow a great good destroyed to which I had Death oj Tttrgot. I8S had the happiness of contributing, a good supported by the will of the king against the obstacles put in its way, a good which I was bound to suppose solidly established. I (eel this interest, o( course j I dare also to feel con cerned (or the honour of the king, which may be com promised by so sudden a change-the king who ought to be dear to me, both as a citizen, and as having shared his confidence and his kindness." There the letter ended, and it has never been fimshed. Turgot had the grief of seeing the suppression of his decrees. If he had hved ten years more he would have had the joy of seeing them once and (or ever reinstated in the code or our laws; but his health was precarious, and his attacks of gout frequently recurred. He had only a few more months to live. Poetry occupied his last days. He had finished his translation of the 4th iEneid In metricalverses. He translated in rhymed verses some Odes of Horace. Dupont de Nemours tells us that Turgot dictated to him, during his last illness, the trans lation of the ode .tEguQm mtlJlt1l/o.

CC Un marne torrent nous entratne ; Un marne gouffre nous attend Nos noms jett!s confus~rnent S'agitent dans rume incertaine. T6t ou tard Ie sort les am~ne Et designe ~ chacun son tour, Pour passer l'onde souterraine Dont Ie voyage est sans retour." Turgot died in Paris, Alarch 18, 1781, with the firln N 186 Ttergot. ness of soul of a man of whom ~o[alesherbes could say that he had the heart of J..,'Hopital nnd the mind of Bacon. He was buried at first in the church of the Incurables, Rue de Sevres, so says ~L de Neymarck; but his coffin was transferred afterwards to the cemetery of Bons, in Normandy. A tradition preserved in the family tells 'us that in 1793, at the time when all the available lead was required by the government, his coffin was removed from the tomb, and opened in order to extract the metal. Several of the persons entrusted with that operation had known Turgot. They were frightened at seeing him in a perfect state of preservation,and at lookingat his features, which appeared as if he was }'ct alive to reproach them for disturbing his repose. At that view they ran away, leaving the work unfinished. The municipal ofticers had the coffin hastily put into a grave, but the spot was not marked. AU that we know at the present day is that Turgot's remains are buried to an unknown corner of that little country churchyard.

Clli\PTER VIII. "ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL H.EA~::TI()N AFTER TtiI~GOT'S DEATH.",,·_·FIl"AL TRIUMPH IN 1789. --FRESH REACTIOXS UNDER THE EMPIRE, THE Rl';STORATION, THE REPUBLIC OF FgBRUARY AND THE REPUBLIC OF 1871, IN THt': NA~fE, FIRST, OF THE ORGANISATION OF LABOUR, AND, S"t.~CONnLY, IN THl\T OF FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION.---RADICAL SOCIALIST SCHOOL. ·-EC():N()~IIC CATHOLIC SCHOOL. T URGOT could not have succeeded except for the authority of the king, and the concessions which :1 minister more tractable than he was might, for the sake of cQndliatk:lll,have tm'tde to the court and the par~ liament, would have produced no useful effect for the ultimate success of his enterprise. The ancien rt~g;mf., after the slo\V transformations it. had undergone, consist(~d in the eighteenth century of a despotism tempered b}t the privileges which cc.~rtain corporations enjoyed, such as the nobility, the clergy, the magistracy, the army, the trades' guilds, etc. The destructionof these privilt~ges, and the substitution of a general guartlntee gh'en to the "'holt" n~.ti()n instead of N 2 188 Tttrgot.

the special guaruntees secured by these privileges to a certain number of individuals, such was the object aimed at by Turgot. U The cause of the evil," says he to the king in his memoir on municipalities, "comes from the (act that your people have no constitution. You might govern, as God does, by general laws." A revolution alone-that is to say, the destruction of the existing system-could bring about that progress, and such a revolution could be accomplished without violence only if the two powers, the two active powers of the system, or one of them, the king and the privileged classes, had consented to undertake it. Turgot could not depend upon the privileged classes, which were, at that time, very far from anticipating a night of August 4th, and which, believing themselves very strong, had no wish to lay down their arms. His only chance, therefore, was to persuade the king to assume the lead of the mO'iement, and obtain from him that he would occupy that position with firmness. But if Louis XVI has sometimes felt what he could dare in that range of ideas, he has never been strong enough to pass from sentiment to action.

Could Turgot have overcome the king's hesitations if he had spared the influential persons of the court and the parliament, and if he had not successively quarrelled with everybody? To state the question thus is to show the contradiction it implies. liis object was to change a system resting precisely upon those very per sons whom ~omesay he should have conciliated.

Necker as a .StateS1Ilall. 198 To conciliate them would have been, in some sense, doing them homage and respecting their authorit)?, as jf it h:ld been a rcgulnr one, whereas his purpose, on the contrary, was to destroy them so far a~ they "'erc organs of the government, and prevent them from exer· cising, as corporate bodies, any influence whatever on the administration of the realm. People soon perceived, after Turgot's downfall, the reason which, instinctively or not, directed the resistance of the privileged classes to his reforms. The reaction did not confine itself to the cancelling of the decrees which had just been registered by the bed of justice; it aimed at the same time at a general political result, namely the strengthening of the s)"stem, and deducing from it the most extreme consequences. After having served the reaction, Necker was carried away by it, as Calonne was to be subsequently. The constitution of the State, patiently restored by the parliament and the nobility,assumed a form more and more tangible. The French monarchy degenerated into an oligarchy of privileged individuals, masters of the crown, and powerful enough to prevent the king, if even he had wished to do so, from performing his part of protecting his people :lgainst the encroachments of the aristocracy.

Nothing is more distressing and, at the same time, more extraordinary than the reaction which took place after Necker'sfirst ministry. The spiritof privilege had never shown itself more exacting than in 1781. Com .. moners (ro/lIritrs) till that epoch might appear on the Ttergot. lists of otlicers, and a good number of them under Louis XIV, Louis XV, and even during the first }'ears of the reign of Louis XVI, held a conspicuous place in the staff of the French army. The order of 1781 on the-army commission is more strjng(.~nt than all the previous ones. 'Vhoever for the future wished to obtain one either in the infantry or the cavalry had to prove that he possessed fOUf degrees of nohilit},. "Instead of yielding gently to the action of time," wrote Sieyes in his famous pamphlet of 1788, "the aris tocracy stiffens itself against it. They will lose mLUght of their privileges; nay, more, they increase them. Quite recently they have, without any further ado, granted for ever to the nobility the offices of presidents and councillors." Joly de Fleury, Necker's successor, carried to ItS extreme limits the narrowness of the reac tionary spirit. In a note appended to his translation of Marcus Aurelius he is astonished that the most useful of laws should still remain to be done. cc ~len should have been commanded, under the sc\'erest penalties, to keep within just limits their natural curiosity, and forbidden to speak and write on topics which are beyond their intelligence. J1 Those who heard Turgot, who were his friends and coadjutors, who shared his disgrace for having served him during his ministry, could read in 1784 and 1788, three and five years only after his death, a decree of the Paris parliament prohibiting the mowing of corn with a scythe (this concerns agriculture), whilst (this is for industry) the Character 0/ Lalo1tlle. 191 length of the pocket~handkerchie{s manufactured in the kingdom was to be pre(~i$eIy equal to their breadth. Reac ..

tion in the army, in industry, in the mugist~~l.ey, reudion even in the appliC'.3tionof feudal rights of the landlords; the government was hurrying towards the prt.~dpice with the most terrible rapidity. And )'et the reaction could not provide for everything, it could not increase the privileges and fiU the treasury.; ruin the Third Estate in oppressing it, and yet take from it wherewith to (oster the development of all abuses; throw open to favourites the pension~fund, and, at the same time. bring down the expenditure below the income. Amiable and clever as he was, Calonne could not draw the kingdom from the abyss where it was sinkmg. That well··informed man, agreeable, full of res~urces and of questionable morality, finally made up his mind to take up Necker~s financial reforms and Turgot's econori'lic ones. His plan was that, undoubtedly, of the two ministers who had tried to restore order in the disorder of the old system; for us this is a title of recommendation, and we should feel most grateful to him. "'Vhy !" said the king, whilst listening to him. Ie it is some downright Necker that you bring me." Louis XVI might have added that it was also some Turgot.

Calonne's territorial sub,,'ention, which a(feded aU landlords and all estates without exception or privilege, was nothing else but the land..tax which Turgot was meditating at the time of his disgrace, and which was to be the object of his next reform. It was also a plan of T1l"got. l\'1atesherbes, if it is true that ~'13.1esherbes is the author of the memoir preserved in the State Paper Office, where, speaking of the necessity of compelling all the privileged persons to contribute to the taxes, it is said: ce This truth, so evident, has been felt by an administrators. It would have been felt by the whole nation, if the nation had been allowed to know it, and to discuss its own interests. t) Calonne exhibited the naked truth to the nation, and, by summoning the notables, he prepared" the appeal to the whole nation for the purpose of discussing its own int(~rests." But if Ca10nne possessed the ideas of Turgot and the skill of ~Iaurcpas, if he combined at the same time the virtues which save and the vices which please, if he was a courtier without being any the less an econo mist, a philosopher, a statesman, why did he not succeed where Turgot had failed? And if it can be said of him that he was the faithful portrait of the Turgot, which this great minister is found fault with for not having been; if he had what was deficient in his predecessor according to the opinion of those who blame in Turgot his inflexible temper and his too contemptuous arrogance, why has he not deserved to receive from posterity all the praises be stowed upon Turgot pills those which have been denied him? The reason is easily found: it is that the Revo lution could not be avoided by compromises with the privileged classes, whether these compromises came from Calonne or from Turgot. History is there to prove this.

Turgot would have lost by being a Calonne, and Calonne has gained nothing by having aimed at being a Turgot.

Rejor11ultiQ1lof the JlIra1tdcs. 193 In the night of August 4th the National Assembly voted the reformation of thejurolldts. Turgot's apothc()sis was beginning. His trusty friend, Dupont de Nemours, heca.rnc the lnspirer Qf the financcycommittec, and drew up the address to the French n:ttion on direct taxes. It is certainly Turgot's views which are the basis of the finarH.::ialsystem of the Revolution, such as Dupont de Nemours has gi"'cn the programme of it, and such as it results from the deliberations of the National Assembly; the tax should be real, consequently it should bear only upon perceptible riches, and leave no opening for any arbitrary act in the rCCOVt~ry of it. Artk·Jc 7 of the law of 1791 enforces 'Turg{.)t's own decree on the jUYfl1ults, and reproduces a,lmost all its wording. "Beginning with the 1St of April next, every citizen shall be at libcrty to excrcise an}' profession, art, or industry he pleases, after hin'ing t~\kcn out a patent, and conditionally on his compl}·jng with 0111 the rules which mn)' be established.

J1 Finally, artide I of the decree of June 14~17, 1791, definitively condt.~mns the old system of industry. U Tl)(~ destruction of an kinds of guilds of citizcns cXt~rdsing the same tmd(;~ and profes sion being one of the fundamental laws of the French constitution, it is forbiddt.~n to re··establish them in fact, under any pretence :md form ,\·hat<~ver.H ()nt.~ could pcr~ ccivc already,howe\'cr, the genn ofthe disagreement which was soon to break out between th(~ rt~formcrs; some, devoted to liberty, granted it to their adversaries, just as they secured. it to themselves; the ()thers inclined to 194 defend the rights of the State so far as to oppress in dividuals: the liberals and the Jacobins. "\Ve were about to see," says Louis Blanc, "other re\'olutionists, give a new definition of liberty, such as the revolu tionists of '89 understood it. lVe shall hear them say: 'Liberty consists not in the right, but in the poz(lergranted to man of exercising and developing his faculties under the empire of justice and the safeguard of the law.''' In his journal, rAmi dlt l>euple, !\larat stood up for the trades' guilds. " Nothing better, ofcoursc," he wrote on the 16th of ~farch, J 791, "than to free the citizens from the bonds which stand in the way of the development of talents, and keep the wretched in a state of poverty.

But I am not sure whether this fulllibertYt this exemption of all apprenticcship, of all novitiate, to exercise this or that trade, this or that profession, is good from the political point of view. . • . The first effect of these foolish decrees is to impoverish the Ste"\te by destroying manufactures and commerce; the second is to ruin the consumer by everlasting expenditure. . • . In every State which has not glory for its principle of action, if you take the desire of a man to establish his reputation from that of making his fortune, there is nn end of good faith. Every profession, every traffic must soon degenerate into cheating. As the only question then is to dispose of oneJs works and one's articles of commerce, it is enough to make them look attractive, and to sell them at a low price, without caring for solid and well-finished labour • • • . . And as they have then neither merit nor solidity, 11tr..iJol discussed ~y Lonis ii/aile. 195 they must necessarilydegenerate into rubbish, and de~ termine the consumer in easy circumstances to provide himselfabroad."

Louis Blanc places himself at ~nother standpoint.; he sees in Turgotts w(>rk, taken up by the constitutllts of 1789, the triumph o( individualism over fraternity: "'Ve must speak plainly (Ilis/()ry of the French. Retll}!lIfi()ft): Turgot proclaimed in splendid langua~e the right o( labour. This will be in the future one of his titles of honour. But do not m~lke a mistake: Turgot never went so far as to acknowledge the right to labour. lIe consented that the poor should be (ree to develop their faculties, but he did not admit that society should be obliged to supply them with the means of so doing. lIe meant that the obstacles should be suppressed which ~uise {rom the action of the authority, but he did not compel the State to act as the guardian of the poor, the weak, the ignorant .... 'Vhat was the use of repenting to the pro/claire: 'You have the right to work,' \,,.hen he could answer: 'llow do you wish me to avail myself of that right?t The school of so..callcd fraternity found fault with Turgot for having thought, first, that to destroy the obstacles, and, next, to grant liberty, was the whole duty of government, and, next, that isolation was the only guarantee against monopoly.~1 One circumstance, however, prevented the Revolu tionists from returning to corporations,and led them to retain Turgot's work in opposition to Murat and to man} others; it was this: they saw clearly that corporations 196 Turgot.

contained in themselves a principle of exclusion nnd of oppression, and that by corporative association they could establish a kind of family, and it was an exclusive family which did not admit amongst its members all those who needed work.. Napoleon was not to have any of those scruples; accordingly, under the Consulate there was an offensive reaction, still more strongly characterised, towards cor~ porations. A great number of memoirs were presented to the council of state in favour of the re-establishment of trades' guilds. Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'AngeIy con stituted himself the patron of the jurandes. Under the Restoration, the chmnpions of the revival of corporations plucked up courage. In 1817, a barrister, named Levacher-Duplessis, who pretended to act on behalf of "thirty-four commercial and industrial pro fessions," presented to the king a request on the necessity of re~estahlishing merchants' guilds and the communities of arts and trades. This request stated anew the arguments of the 1776 parliament, and spoke of Turgot according to the fashion of the advocate general Seguier, and ill a style otherwise rather strange.

Turgot U was born with an inflexible and absolute character; his opinions, which had assumed the hue of that character, had degenerated into a sectarian spirit." The corporations destroyed by him had been recon· stituted after his disgrace; their abuses, it was said, had disappeared, and they had rendered the greatest services to trade and to industry. It is those corporations, wisely 11t1'got auti the Restoratioll. 197 regulated. that Lcvacher and the Paris merchants wanted to see re-·established. "Obstacles must be put in the way of that mCr\,antilc mania which fills the career or industry with a ('rowd of adventurers who dishonour it.H The Paris Chamber of Commerce, to which this request was submittedt examined it, and, adhering to the opinion it had often expressed, maintained its first deliheration,,, ii time and reflexion having, in that respect, strengthened the opinion of the chamber/' In 182 I there was a fresh petition, a fresh deliberation of the Chamber of Commerce, a fresh affirmation of the unchangeable convktions of its members.

"The chamber, deliberating on this communication .... and considering, besides, that the immense progress of French industry since the time when it became free from the monopoly of masterships (maUnsu) is a sufficient (~lutjon against the danger of the innovation which some wouldintrodu<.:einto the pre~ent legislation .... protests, as its predeCeSS()TS have done, and with the same unanimity, against the petitions addressed to both Chambers (Houses of Parliament)." In February, 1848, the corporations rose into f:wour. Those who proclaimed the right to work, and whose doctrines were summarised in the formulre of the organisa tion of labour, seemed for a moment to have the power in their own hands; but they frightened the nation, and their ideas perishedduring the days of June. Thus Turgot's doctrines had passed, unimpaired, through the most dangerous epochs f()r libeml views of 198 11/.'J:~Ot.

political economy: the Convention) the Empire) the Restoration, the Revolution of February. Napoleon would have made a police-agency of the (~orporations, reconstituted and placed under his iron hand; he had a proje! de/til' drawn up acc.ording to that idea, but was obliged to give it up. The Restoration had inspired courage into those who deplored the downfall of the old French institutions, and }'et it did nothing to return to the old organisation of industry. AU attempts had successively failed before the general indifference, before the suspicions engendered by the pretensions of the spirit of monopoly which satisfied one interest whilst it threatened all the others; tinally, there was the dread of . a popular and re\'olutionary tyranny. If modern France has escaped from the reaction against the enfranchisement of work. it is owing to the memorable struggle which Turgot carried on in 1776.

The blow struck by him had been a deadly one for the corporations. The re-establishment of them after his disgrace had been incomplete, inasmuch as the old communities were not restored, and fresh associations, merely, were either sanctiotled or proscribed. The esprit it corps had been broken in them; it failed to revive under Necker. during the Revolution, the Empire, and the Restoration. If equality between the citizens) the admissibility to aU offices., the abolition of all distinctions must be con sidered as the necessary consequence of the French Revolution in the conditions of its outburst; and if these l"lte S)'slcIJI. of Protection Ex/c1ltled. 199 dermx-:ratic conquests make up, in some sort, what h;.ts been (~lHed the modern rtgimt, it is perhaps not the same case with a system of interference in labour, in industry) and in commerce, ''''hieh would proceed by genertlllaws, without attaching to exdusivt~ corponl.tions a protection which otherwise ..night have seemed to reinstate a privilege of the Qlldtfl r~g'imt'. By extending .and ~.\pplying that prot€~cti()n to open corporations, it might perhaps have been pQssible to make it i'l(:(:.eptablc to those innumer~hle ag(mts of the Revolution whose onl}' passion h..1S alw..\ys been equality, and for whom liberty meant in most cases the right of refusing it to thei.r ".:uiversa Ties.

\Ve may believe that it \Vas n()t by virtue of a principle, but by a sentiment ex{~]usive]y their o\vn, springing (rom thdr education, and which tlH.'~Y could perfe(~t1y well not transmit to their suceessors, that the st:ltesmcn of the Revolutionary em hr~ve preserved our country from the reactions attempted against the liberty of labour established by Turgot in 1776. Tht;;y were really under the personal influence ofTurgQt, who had died tnore than ten )-ears befQre. Turgot it was who made them act, and who was as the invisible dIrector of their economic conscience.

CI-IAPTER IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS.-DIF}<"'ICULTY OF RECON.. CILING THE PRINCIPI4E 0.1" j<"'REE LABOUR 'VITH THAT OF Tll}O~ :FREEDOl\1 OF ASSOCIA.. TION.-TURGOT'S LETTER TO DOCTOR PRICE. T fIERE are two schools at the present day which ask for the re-establishment of corporations through the unrestricted and unreserved application of the freedom of association; the one is the socialist radical school, the other is the Roman Catholic economic school. These two schools call for the interference of the State in questions relating to labour, extending its attributions beyond the limits which economists consider as natural; but the socialist radical school is inclinedto recommend close corporations, whereas the Roman Catholic school is in favour of open ones. Both look upon Turgot as their great enemy. lIe it is who must be hurled down. Some reproach him for having abolished workmen's privileges; the others find fault with him for not having respected their -liberty_ The French Catholic economic school proceeds from the German Christian socialism which ,vas born in Prussia after 1848, and pretended to have found the 201 solution of the social problem in the union of the Church, mnnifesting itself by a thousand (orms of bencfkencc, with the State, permeating the inner life of the nation through the tuxes and the org:misa.tion of numerous local boards. The German Christian socialism struggled with equal ardour against the liberal et~onomic system of Adam Smithand J. D. Say.and againstthe politicalliberal school which {rom Ie:nglandspreadthroughout the whole of Europe the system of parliamentary and representa ti\"e government.

Severnl branches have spurng up from the parent stem. Prince Bismarck pretends to connect State socialism with it. lIe said one day at the Reichstag: U It is not socialism we are making; it is, if you like, Christianity saIlS phrases,. we wish to give to the people, not hollow phrases, but something substantia-I." The Austrian Catholics caught the inspiration. In 1875, the popular meetingof Lower Austria declared in a solemn resolution that H the social question could be solved only by the legislative autonomy of the corpora tions in their own affairs, and under the protection (If a Christian government:' Prince Lichtenstein, speaking in the name of the party. asked and obtained the recon stitution of corporations, compulsory {or industry of a smaller kind. The law affecting sman industries was voted in 1883; but the formation of district~corporations for the establishmentof more important industries has been reserved 3S the object of another law.

The Fren<.~h Catholics have entered into the same o 202 l1ergot. direction as the Austrian ones, and the long residence of the CQunt de Chambord in Austria has contributed to their evolution. At the same time we must acknowledge that they have made considerable progress, if we compare them to the Austrian Catholics. The corporations which they want to sec instituted would be free, open, exclusive of monopoly, and constituted hy a very broad application of the principle of association. According to them, 'furgot's great crime does not lie in his having suppressed old ~\ssodations in which had evidently crept many intolerable abuses, but in his h~tving prevented the formation of fresh associations which might have been organised without allowing anything to the spirit of monopoly, and solely to protect those persons who belonged to them . .Familial industry, they say, has perished with the trades-guilds. U Great industry," which has taken its place, has obtained the mastery of the nineteenth century, dragging along with it a train of misery: p<1llpcrism, strikes, the struggle between class and class, the disorganisation of the family, and the rest. tfhe whole evil, they add, has arisen not (rom the abolition of abusive and degenerate corporations, but from the oppression of a Jacobin law copied on the 14th Article of Turgot's edict: "'Ve likewise forbid all masters, com panions, workmen, and apprentices belonging to the afore..

named bodies and communities," so it was said in the fourteenth article, "to form any association or assembly amongst themselves under any pretext whatever."

Fa1Jlilial Industr)!. 2°3 'Vhen people say of /amilial industry that it has per.. ished because free labour has isolated the workman, and bC('.3U5C it has allowed the patrons to enlarge their factories, to absorb aU the work in inlmcnse work~h()ps, nnd all the trade in colossal depositories; when they speak of these extensions as if they were the cause of all the misfortunes of our times, they are guilty of a twofold exaggeration; first of all, they give a "ery inaccurate picture of the eighteenth Ct~ntury and of its jamili'al industry, placing them in too favourable alight j secondly, they ascribe, to begin with, to freedom of work effects which it has not produced, and then, to the prescnt time vices which arc not peculiar to it. The eighteenth century is represented as if it had known neither misery, nor class¥struggles, nor difficulties amongst workmen, nor strikes; as if the morality of workmen's families was much superior to that of the workmen of our da}'s; as if the workmen were always brethren, and the apprentices always like sons in their relations with the virtuous masters who employed them, and who were not yet tormented by that eagerness for gain which is supposed to be the characteristic of our modern commerc:ial men.

The truth is that the condition of the labouring classes under the QllI:ien regime was neither happier nor more virtuous than it is just now, Those who have studied the historyof workmen know perfectlywell that since a century the progress of their comforts has been immense, and if that of their morality has been slower, it is far 2°4 Tttrgot. from having proved nun. The workmen of the nine teenth c(~ntury are in a much greater state of prosperity, and in a state of morality considerably higher, and from that point of view they have no reason to envy the workmen of days gone by. It is free labour, some say, which has disorganised familial labour, and created industry on a large scale. That it is a mistake. It is true that industry has endeavoured to follow the progress of wants, and that liberty has enabled it to do so. In order to reach that end, it has been obliged to study the conditions of cheapness, and submit to these conditions. But if familial industry has disappeared, it is not on account of freedom of labour, but through the impossibility of producing at a cheap rate. Can anyone desire the reconstitution of familial industry at the cost of a factitious rise in the price of all the things most necessary to existence, coupled with the natural and progressi"oe increase in the burdens resulting from a more intenseway of living? If we did not shrink from such a consequence, is it to be supposed that we could succeed in obtaining?

we must evidently give up the thought of doing so. Success, here, is impossible. All the discussions on o,,-er-production, on the obligations incum bent upon manufacturers to work on a large s(',ale in order to diminish on every article the weight of general expenses-all these discussions belong to a different order from economic problems. Their real object is the increase of our wants, the taste for lllopi'a1t Views 0/ Political EC01Z01IlY. 205 luxury, the progress of civilisation, the destinies of man ft kind. Those who regret the expansion of industry on a large scale, regret that mankind should have increasing wants. They would stop it in this direction, and they condemn the means employed by industry to satisfy the increase of our wants. But is it not idle to try and recast the human race into a new mould? Is it not Utopian to think that manA kind can be denied the satisfactions they require, because these satisfactions are deemed useless or dangerous for morality? Such discussions have no practical value; they do not prevent humanityCrom moving on, obe}'ing laws which cannot be abolished in a chamber of depu ties. The modern schools are weak, when they ('..all free labour to account, when they think they can find in the suppression of freedom a remedy for the labour problem of our day. They run at every moment the risk of falling into the Utopias of the organisation of work, and they will find it difficult to reconcileto them the public mind under a s)'stem of discussion and of political liberty. But what is the liberty in question here? ~Iust we not take prer.autionsagainst the possible crushing of individuals by associations which would be free to do what they pleased? Turgot did not consider as an enlightened friend of liberty the man who gave the name of liberty to the right of fordng everything upon others, if only the majority gave its consent. This is what he wrote to Doctor Price in the letter he addressed to him on the 22nd of 1\larch in 1778: 206 Turgot.

"How is it that you are nearly the first among your men of letters who has given correct notions of liberty, and who has proved the falseness of the idea stated over and over again by all republican writers, namely, that 'liberty consists in being subject to the laws alone,' as if a man oppressed by an unjust law was free? This would not be true, even on the supposition that all the laws are the work of the assembled nation; for, after all, the individual has also his rights, which cannot be taken from him except by violence, and by unlawful use of the general stren~h. Although you have taken account of this truth, and explained yourself on the subject, yet it might be worth while your developing it at greater length, considering the small amount of attention bestowed upon it even by the most zealous cha.mpions of liberty." It seems that we could not end what had to be said on Turgot more worthily than by repeating these noble and courageous words.

NC)TES. INTRODUCTION. (l'. t J, I. 5.) .Iur<lmles. mallriscs. The }urmtde was an office given by election to a member of a guild or corpora~ tion, \\-·hose business it was to act as chairman at the meetings, dcf(md the interests of the guild, receive the apprentices, etC'.-Ifl at/risu .. when a wl'lrkm:m had served his time as apprentice, and produced a specimen of his talent or skill (clJ~1 tf'a:II1Jre), he W:lS admitted to the 'J/I1ttriS~, which implied great authority and extensive privileges. (Page J I, 1. 18.) Talons rouges, name given to the courtiers in .....rance, during the seventeenth and eightee nth (~fmturies, on account of the shoes with red heels, whkh the noblemen alone had a right to wear at Versailles. "La sc~ne de Paris, qui est plus rempJic de petits-maitrt~s Fran ~ais tt tt:/mlsr()l~f{cs {-lue de heros antiqu(~s."~· Voll.a.irl. (Po I I, 1. 19.) Bowuls canol's. Lawyers used to be thus desigmlted in Francetrin consequence of the square caps the>' wore.

CHAPTER I. (P. 17, 1. 8.) ~G"tlnd cOllseil,established under the reign of Philip the Fair, discharged political, administrative, and judkial functions ; was reorganised in 1497. (P. 1i, 1. 16.) Pla!ls cwvaliers. Plans giving the view of the houses bordering the streets, and of the monuments which the streets contain. (1'. J9, 1. 9.) P,.lsidt.llt (} mortier. These magistrtltes pre sided over the chief court (g-rand dzambre) of the parlia ments, and were thus called from the caps they wore, CHAPTER V. (Po 97, 1. 13.) Corllth. The con.tles (sen/tce de forps) were due by the serf or retainer, first to the king, secondly to his feudal lord. The. making and keeping of the roads and highways, the conveyance and carriage of goods, etl~.t con~ stituted the chief corllles. As they had to be dischar~ed without any remuneration, they entailed serious loss of time upon the persons ordered for the purpose.

(P. 116,1. 24-) J'fbulge, hallal{~, millage. .1finOKe was a duty recoverable by the lord of the manor on the com which 208 Tttrgot. was measured out in his estates; the mtne equalled half a selier, or 78 litres, 73.-}fallage, duty levied on the goods exhibited for sale in the fairs and markets (hal/es).-···Auna.ge, duty payable for the right of affixing a stamp or trademark on goods and other articles of merchandise. (P. 119, 1. 17.) C011ljJag1liede Noaillts. The king's body. guard consisted of four companies, each of which did duty for a quarter; they were known by the names of their respective commanding officers. (P. J 19, I. 22.) Afolts9ttelaires. In the French household troops there were two companies of mounted musketeers, called respectively blai:k and grey, from the colour of their horses. The black musketeers were first created in 1660; the grey, in 1622. (P. 120, I. 2.) C%ne/·glnera/, regiment of cavalry coroN manded by the colonel·general ; bore that name since the reign of Louis XIII.

(P. 123, 1. 12.) Prt"lJots de la marlchaztsle. The marl dtausle was a body of mounted soldiers doing in the provinces the duty now devolving upon the gendar11lerit~ dlpar/fmcntale. The prh.!(Uswere their officers, and formed what was called the commissionprevo/a/e. CHAPTER VI. (P. 136, I. 3.) Bed of justice. The name li/ dt jlls/icewas given to certain extraordinary meetings of the Paris parlia ment, held for the discussion of important cases, and pre sided over by the king in person. All the great officers of the State were bound to attend, as also the chiefmembers of the court. The king's throne was covered with a canopy, hence the designation lit de jllstiee, and the whole form of the sitting was most strictly adhered to, in accordance with a minute programme settled beforehand. (P. 136, l. 14.) The POi.fSy "caisse.n This was a kind of bank established at Poissy, near Paris, for the purpose of settling the obligations, compensations, sales, purchases, and other money matters between the Paris butchers and the cattle-breeders of Normandy.

(P. 138, 1. 35.) Pays d'llection, name given to certain provinces in France, where a tribunal existed whose business it was to assist the officers of the crown in the fixing and collecting of the taxes. The pays d'/Ials, enjoying the privi lege of having provincial assemblies, voted their own taxes, and settled the assessment of the amount required.

I N' IJ EX . ..~U{'Hp!~:it~hi: :;::~1~)~~ ~~~ g:r~rr~t~r:i~;lr~:;~~~mt af the i\~rH~\ment ~)~ ANGOIJL~Mlt Cansu>,the, H. (~ BUlIVUt1 (Clurk!. Ju~te de): %7~~"H193; Mar'Sh.ll of [-'r.ulee ; m~mber af Ih~~ A~aJI1It;z F:ra"t;aiu, a11 IhclltTUl:III net SAI.\..··lGNV (Lauj~;. B~'n~gl)1! 1'·r;,.n~ois). ! ti4~'11S9' Inteudatl~ {,f PiUh.u?, Illl:R1'Il'f (1'I.:art Ui>!lOltd Je.an B3.ptisle). t719·11~w; {,~.,.trll.~H"'C'bth..al d..... Fi1l4ncu: A r.umd ofTulI'gut. t~~l 10" U.lltn~Jlf.~~~~~t~te de (1:mr.aut, Count, Ih~~:1) Duke de), ~100-tlgS ; ~ Marsha! BLANC (Jeall Jt)~'P~ Lo~~i1;). 1314.,811; c~Jebt.ated p')ntic~~~ c!:Qt!{)mbt; and tJ.tX:H~~~'$Sl:::·~:p~i~;·.5~}a:;~~ ~:~~~iu~~~;, SJ~mi~sed. tOO, $O~" CALOMMI$ (CbSi.t1u Atu~ndte d,~). 11H·a&n: C(>'t'n.~i~'ti". gbJi."",~1 (%78J : hili c:b'\T.ldet a") ;a lifl.a.noeier.191, 19~. CH(USliWl,. P.<\Rn', ahe, U5. IJQ, t6$. 166. ())N'm)I(<:J!.l' (A ). M, (;a,ritat. l\hN~ui"~ de), l1-U"194 ;1{':'ut':l'1i "f hi>\< to Tur~!.lt. L~S U,It'ON'tDIS: .r.:1£)lOlHt.~ (Pierre S~mud). potitk~dl eCOl'\Om' ..l, 17.31'H'h~; H), f:,l.

~u, 34. 3~J ..... (h'bl "'ANtU,"". INv\;',>Tte\" :203, <l<,'>3.' g:~t~~~~~bt'; ~~~~1~~;'~:~~?~s:';1~l~l~;u..~~~:,~~~:~~~t ;&nd pubtki!<s. (;'.~t.:$(~AV {Vincenl d~}, 11~,)·t7.~9~ ()I'lt! of Ttirg~~t's m;ut~rs..... 4§. ~;,)~ hl~ bio,graphv, and his $YJOl~llt, 61-65. g~~::'~G(.~J~~~~'1~t:i~·I~:~~:~~~~~~:~:::"l:h~~· Ii'J:~11j~: ~;~l;~~~~; amb.a.os$.a.dl.)tin £ngi~n~§. 13$; §(:call~~d, and milde a dukt:. 164, 16$. Ht1M~ {Da"id), 11tl·tn6; hill teller" to Tutgt)t, ~~~'5S: 10 MOI'cll~t. ;8., ~~9. L,._ ,f"IlO'n a~'¥ /;U·J·nt.·$, 1 _, I xIS. t::NR;~:·~~~~~~~1i;~.~4·p·EN\tal...t.1l (Dudie,$.se de), a we,u admire I' or Turgot LE1'R{{~'~;S~"'Dlt U$.Ala.U)!*·'f (J. 1'. G.). a bamioter. d<eMtHu:es. the P."u:ie·d£. /iu""t.-, IO~~·1l14. LIS:NOlIk (JUri CbaJ'1e~ Pkrl'>':'). tn:.r·llkt6; Heutell:lnt.-getlf:s·Al of p91iCf:: di$· I'tl,s,,,,edbr Turg(~t. l".l*. U·l;'$I~~~; ~t·~ ~:~~~~!;la:5:~~9L;i~:~&~\~fJ~~~j::';>'~;:;r ll"i,al, 9'~; M"f(A:((,l:~:a~~, tH~'l79.3 ; ¢debr~t('d r~V()IUli{>ni.~t; lnll views 011 freedom !\IAkMOS'TIlt. Vein f'r;an~oi~). JP~H7W: writes lu.lI(1g~ olGouma)', lh.

l\!At,lRtl:,.AsQean fo'~ltn~: Philipil>eaux.C,)ItI't¢d~}. ~1QH12, ; Prime ~iifihter. 9~, JUI4'!U'!Y Svsn~ ... the, g,}. l\hNI.TTIt (ltbd<mo1seU,de UgniviH(, th~n Mada.me Hdvldus), 9,3$, MI'il:OP>HhHL (Armand-1'hom.:a.'Io,th'e de). 11"~l"J796; Ke~~r o( the ~eah;. 91~ and Tur~ol, t39'146; his. Spe~dl :n Ehe Oed uf Ju\ticc, t56. . t~~~~t;~R;f.~~~t(~~~:i~J:~}:k~i:i:t':J':S~;)~);'~;~~~$!~~~:~~:~: ~ ~~..%(,. MOItKL1.t!.1' (Andre, Ahbe}. t?21'ISl~') ~ Qne c,f Tutg<ot'* chief f".:{~H(h.. :~,H. p 210 Turgat. .'n' (J..oui!\.Nit:ol:'itVit:tor d~ FlUx, ('.(Juni de). 11tJ-t11S: l\brsh~l of 'r;.~n&.':e. Mil,iSler cf\Va,. itS. NHKfti Q",n~ue'$o). 113:N~(',4; edebulttd as a Mauder; hi~ c()t'respondc:"~ 'With I.'\!l~(;t, !(,fl. Ie<;!: hi. lx>dc, no. prals.¢d by Louis Blanc, HO, 169. f'AflU.o\l\\lW'l'$. 1·~C'\U <)(t!l~,.1~1·",~"')' f'H'I'SII.:<.:}(II"l't'$, the ; tht:~r (lCctrnles-. SO, 51. ['i)1'UIP.~ (R.lh·fl j('l>~:~)h). sf,»-:t11?: hil> OPf.~$ition t<) loans On interest, 18. 1t· PInel!( (l<kh~rd), llIl3'179t; a'eddnllted dis\!lt:l'lti.ng mini.~toer ; his <::om!\p<'llld~ (;fI<',e Witt. Tlltg¢t, :r80. ,~h.

Qt~t'!;'''iAY {1<'rOlntt\IS). It.:9~·1?1-'l: lind Turgot, H'46: his fiys-tern, St. ~AJ<'H"'~ (G~l,l(iel (k), S1~9:'tOOt; Mil'lit;ter ofthe Navy. 171,lp. SMI"l'H iAdau\). 17~3't790; ~n,d TurgQl. jl·:n. ~octAI...t~M. Ckl'hti.an, ~l. 'f1~l<NM~M):-' (Jea.H, Abhe), 16,~,'l1S\); a ,.,\\d'1~r an<i ~ u\)vell'Sot.~n. -rf!flNilY (Mark )~:';el,)z)' !'t~'lng. CrmlnJ/e'1iYcbufr41; his schemes-and "IJu$e \'lof p<)w~r; 9'>; hiS lntn;1:'\t:~, 9:?,'lOt. TIn?"Ml"ol!~, t)ft AkN1'lGtiY (C1Mrl!en}\tiiliben), '1 n'l17i: and 1·urgot. tH·I.'. 'flHit:N''f dt:s Tl1ur<:iUb (Jt.an>. tS, .... ' TVf(1Arl" de 8ainf.,Cbir (,\ntQill")' 1;:" '~n~\;<)'r (Mlflb.t ~M'!lt"t:). P~·h#d.($ 11ttlrdlQtUb, S'·l~. l'd:~\t ...~v~~ "1 tiJ.:!:"OT(Annf.'.RIWt~Yt· J.~('qlJ(:ll), O. 17~? (May w) ~ l.ludlel\;'it S~mt.Sul1"'IC~, If. "0; h'l> th{:!il~, ~~; fir~\ ""mk Qn ~whtical ~(;QnQm)', ~J~ b,:;,.~O;t6.tmiQfll!$. !li. ~<'5 • f~Qcl.t}:. ~~, ~7; tl~aH$ lh.~, Smlll',nn-e, ~~; lwd Adam Smith. .~(; \!eputy ~HHcit(,r~(nn;lt ,n ~ II/nUn du ;'(:'~fdlu. 33 ~ ;and Minette, \1oitai:~~ :~:':~I~Il~'r~~s ~~~lih~dE;':)t·i'~d~~~,~~~~;I~dQ~;;~~;;~S~I;~ b~:~ I\a)', >44, ..6; lil!\ tW(' th;d w(irkit, 045'·47 t 1l1fmdanf M LiJlHl~~S. 6,; hi..

vic::w~ .<:>\l l:):liollioll.7~; m~rnt)ir Nl l;);m$and u",ur)', ,6,S,: '.m the frt'e cir. el.llndon of eorn. 8Z·?lB ; nalYl~d Cd'lt,.!~!~"r,f'lnblZl, 93; Jnu~r"i~w Willi the kmg, ~4·q6; h!s p\Qgr.81mne ,~s: .'dld, on th~ $ale of corn, SU·U3 ; and the c(lrQh~~i(ln .::nth, 13~1.;l3; and l~e six (kf.'r¢e~. q{).'14~ ; ~lppo$i'i')ll tu, $~1'1<;"'; hl$ ..,e(:T~l t1:U~1"l\ to 1.0Ull. XVI, lOa'f'S: <llsfflliisal of, 379; lil'''Clip;'~d rluril1Rhl~ retreAt, lh; dc-s"h Q(••8.;; le~(.d')n a~aiJ'llit. f9~'199'ftl<(;()'r (l.Qhlll)" ~rle·<:}.to, of the family, flfaJtt't' .tlS t'MUUt$ and C<>uflcillor. 15· Vft"" (Abb~.d,~),a,~t<:(>.t ~dend of T\lrgot. 9a. 93, l1f, 172,"7:" 176'''19· VOl.'}," 11oIJ!. (Fr:H.l~l,,)t1i ~h.rle Aroud de), 169.. ·.718: .and "J urgol, 4Q, "'. 146• W\)l'<'I<:I}«'·l'J, ..JI$,U, f,t~dc "fthe, \JlJdel',h.tJndm rlgimf.. '106.

CHRONOLOGICAL INDEX. ~""·)i(:I.~O~~~M $. " 1:.1 , " Birth ~)f G»\!rtl<1.Y< &1 l $ • 'i~rl';l}' b. '!', 'Mj:~~..rirtb.•r ~.tg~ (A~••~.be~ r~~~~~~\~~~~[~~ • 'T}ie 0\1(. d)OdiaI1~, rq~eilt, ,{. ~ Tt:n-:s.y,C~·mlldHf.lr <It the P ..f. 'l lkun~nt. $ 148 . {G'~t~~~~i!(~~:~;~i~ll;ti~h~~Uhi~ l~'-t9 (f~n<' .F.11tef"ithe. !'¢r~.~rmt:, ~ir!ot wtsr~ f R~;:;~~~i~~:>~~~~bi~~h$:;f.~;;~t:'!o'~:)l~~ ~m flmu'i~¢$(rdlJl.attl)n(!f L:A~\' ~!iY$h~m.ll att*:' \ fhtff~)~'$ "Hi~t~l;l,~ Ilau.ltt:Ut:" (Dec.) I1'i~r ~)f S~"ft1o()Unl!'. ,.; :~~~:~~'. ". Vdl~W't:'''' "ROt'l"le . Man;haI5;u(~ II. .fG!;~~r:' ~!i;~~le;;~~n;~~ i)r~h;I E.ncy(:kl(l~~d:t:. D Ai: lIl!'$'., S¢<lll d.. liS(l lhn.' Deputy S,)tlcitor.~.netat l7~.~ ••~blut: d~5 Requ~tes" • . The P~r}iamoenl e~H~< f 1.;4 .fI.eUte'S Seur b tolerance (;ivtle:' $7.U-t7-'i9 Studit:§ admi:ci!Stnltiol'3under Gournay. t·"};'al'll;}V wmpM~." Thf! Du(: lJet (Al)g1S-s.t gth) "Intel:uJaut<':d Litnog~,t. de Choik. \ll. Msnhtt:r 01' War "nd of "\m~i~ Atrair.s.

176~~y';m U A\'h ~ur l";~!\;liette et l;l r~p.:u1itil)D dt! l.at<\me.~ t161 . .{E~~:~~~l;~ft~~~ t~ foretc· 1 766 " Rtflulanl $\U' fa f<lrmatioud la. di,tri. . tH~t.icnde:lil"khf!'i~"." TUl"cct'uix de· r.ft~1. «:&II\<:Ie4, !'J~~) " \t,~~~~~~ §ur ,tel ~r~t~ .:.. in:l'r~t.et l&n~} T~naJ f' Co.tr41~r l~ft'.aL $ 7']0 .f ~~!Qr 1. U~f\~ du <:ommerce de212 11{.i (July) Mini~ler of the Navy • •• (August) f' C{)ntr~leur general. .. Quesn....yd. Louis XV J. I BeaUtn~bai5' H Le Barbitr de • SCville"p~rfotm~d. tn6 Memberof the ••Acadelllie de.,;. Im;crip. f Necker a.ppointed Director· tions ct Bl)!lI>t$·!-:tlres" . . • 1 General or the ....inances. t. (May) Retires. {rom publk liftl. Sue.. 4.~ded by Clug'tly. A.i~h (~brch) Death of Turgot SNecker publisbes hilt .. Compte • ~ Relldu." Maurepas d, BIBLIOLIFE Old Books Deserve a New Life www.bibliolife.com Did you know that you can get most of our titles in our trademark EasyScripfI'M print format? EasyScriptTM provides readers with a larger than average typeface, for a reading experience that's easier on the eyes.

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About this edition

This EPUB was produced automatically from the PDF named below. The text is the publisher's; the layout was reflowed for screen reading, so page breaks, line breaks and hyphenation differ from the original.

Title: Great French Writers: Turgot

Author: Leon Say

First published: 1888

Publisher: George Routledge and Sons, London

Source file: Great French Writers Turgot.pdf

Source page: https://freecapitalists.org/books/great-french-writers-turgot/

Converted: 2026-08-09 by The Liberty Archive (freecapitalists.org), converter v6

Table of Contents

- Translator's Preface
- Turgot's Works
- Introduction

- CHAPTER I - Turgot's Family - His Childhood - His Education - His Sorbonne

- CHAPTER II - Turgot Leaves the Sorbonne
- CHAPTER III - Quesnay and Gournay
- CHAPTER IV - Intendance of Limoges
- CHAPTER V - Turgot a Cabinet Minister

- CHAPTER VI - The Preparation of the "Grands Edits"

- CHAPTER VII - Increasing Difficulties

- CHAPTER VIII - Economic and Political Reaction after Turgot's Death

- CHAPTER IX - Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Index
- Chronological Index
- About this edition