The Oxford History of the French Revolution
Page 11
It had not been unforeseeable. Aware of the burden of debt bequeathed by previous wars, Turgot had warned the king on assuming office as Comptroller-General in 1774 that economies were essential to the restoration of financial health. Otherwise ‘the first gunshot will drive the State to bankruptcy’.2 A month before his fall from power in May 1776 Turgot denounced Vergennes’s proposal to intervene in America on the grounds that the cost would permanently destroy all hope of financial reform without necessarily helping to weaken Great Britain at all. On both counts time proved him right. In 1776, however, Turgot’s fellow ministers had lost faith in both his policies and his judgement; and in any case within six months a successor had been found who seemed confident of squaring the circle. In October 1776 Necker was appointed Director of the Treasury. Necker was not plucked from obscurity. He had carefully established himself as a man of influence and ability who offered alternatives to Turgot’s austere policies, and his appointment aroused high expectations. He was determined not to increase taxes. He believed that ordinary income and expenditure could be brought into balance by economies and reorganization of budgetary structures to eliminate profiteering by financiers. Order in the finances would engender confidence; and confidence would enable the king to borrow money to meet extraordinary expenditure. The most extraordinary of all expenditure was that incurred by war.
Necker financed French involvement in the American war almost entirely by loans. No new direct taxation was imposed while he was in power. Interest incurred on the loans was charged to ordinary expenditure, and Necker claimed to have found the extra money for this from economies and ‘ameliorations’. Under this system he raised 520 million livres in loans between 1777 and his resignation in May 1781. Most of them were fully subscribed with remarkable speed, and the parlement of Paris only raised difficulties over registering the first. Generous terms and high interest rates accounted for some of this success, but Necker believed its true foundation was public confidence in his management. In February 1781, beset by a whispering campaign organized by ministerial rivals and discontented financiers, he sought to sustain that confidence with an unprecedented gesture. With the consent of the king he published the first ever public balance sheet of the French monarchy’s finances, the Compte rendu au roi. It showed ordinary revenues to be exceeding expenditure by over 10 million livres, after three years of war and no increases in taxation. The public, which bought thousands of copies, was convinced. Nobody asked about extraordinary accounts, where the real cost of the war was recorded. For the next seven years people would say, whenever ministers complained of financial difficulties, that affairs had been under control in Necker’s time. This conviction would carry him back to power in 1788. But in 1781 the Compte rendu prepared his downfall. Buoyed up by the public adulation it brought him, he sought to force the king to admit him to the innermost council, from which he was excluded by his religion. The king, advised by Maurepas and Vergennes, refused, and Necker resigned.
The Compte rendu had so identified Necker’s personal credit with that of the State that the blow to confidence was substantial. His successor Joly de Fleury felt obliged at last to increase taxation, with predictable objections from several of the parlements. These were overridden without much difficulty, however, and the new revenues enabled the Crown to offer interest on further loans. Between May 1781 and the end of 1782, accordingly, almost 252 millions more were raised. All told the American war cost France something over 1,066 million livres; and the expense did not end with the conclusion of peace in 1783. The third vingtième tax, introduced in July 1782, was to run until three years after the war ended; and Calonne, who became Comptroller-General in November 1783, found himself obliged to go on borrowing.
Calonne was intendant of Flanders, his native province, returning there in 1778 after a thirteen-year absence. On his rise through the administrative hierarchy he had acquired the reputation of a slippery time-server with naked ambitions. But his connections at Court were excellent, and he was trusted by Vergennes, now the dominant minister of state. Calonne’s appointment was popular at Versailles, and he certainly made no efforts to impose economies on the Court, as Turgot and Necker had. Indeed, he believed that lavish spending on ‘useful splendour’ was good for credit. It appeared to work: between 1783 and 1787 Calonne was able to borrow over 653 millions. But by 1785 doubts were surfacing about how long this could go on. In that year Necker published his Administration des Finances, at once a vindication of his own record and an implicit condemnation of Calonne’s. The parlement of Paris, which had not demurred at registering new loans since 1777, objected so vehemently to that of December 1785 that its members had to be called in a body to Versailles and told explicitly by the king that he had the fullest confidence in his Comptroller-General. Even so the loan, despite generous terms, was subscribed only sluggishly, and throughout the spring of 1786 there were persistent rumours in Paris that Calonne was about to be dismissed. The queen and her favourites were certainly throwing all their influence behind his ministerial rivals; but with Vergennes on his side he was safe. ‘There appears at present no disposition whatever to economy in the finances of this kingdom’, noted the sharp-eyed British chargé d’affaires with some disgust on 24 August 17863
… Purchases of great value continue to be made and works of immense expense to be carried on in different Royal establishments. M. de Calonne by his unbounded liberality and complaisance to people of high rank and distinction, supports himself still in his most important situation, but the easing the burdens of the people and the interest of the Nation seem to be as perfectly disregarded as they ever were by the most corrupt of his predecessors.
He did not know that four days beforehand Calonne had proposed to Louis XVI the most radical and comprehensive plan of reform in the monarchy’s history.
Calonne claimed that he had been working on his Plan for the Improvement of the Finances for two years before he presented it to the king. It certainly took Louis XVI several months to understand it and authorize its implementation. At the outset Calonne had to convince the monarch that it was necessary at all. In 1786, the Comptroller-General explained, there would be a deficit of 112 millions, almost a quarter of expected income. Yet at the end of the year the third vingtième would expire, and for the next ten there would be a heavy annual burden of debt redemption on short-term loans raised since the beginning of the American war. Almost half the annual revenue was absorbed by debt-service. Well over half the next year’s revenue had been spent in advance in short-term loans (anticipations) raised from financiers on the security of expected tax-yields—a normal enough practice, but not on this colossal scale.
It is impossible [Calonne concluded] to tax further, ruinous to be always borrowing, and not enough to confine ourselves to economical reforms … with matters as they are, ordinary ways being unable to lead us to our goal, the only effective remedy, the only course left to take, the only means of managing finally to put the finances truly in order, must consist in revivifying the entire state by recasting all that is vicious in its constitution.4
That would involve a three-part programme. First came a series of sweeping fiscal and administrative reforms designed to ‘establish a more uniform order’. They centred around the proposal to abolish the existing three vingtièmes and their various surcharges, along with all the exemptions, compoundings, and special provisions enjoyed by privileged groups and corporations. This complex structure would be replaced by a ‘territorial subvention’, a permanent direct tax levied in kind on all landowners, with no exemptions, at the moment of harvest. The new tax would be assessed and administered by the taxpayers themselves in provincial representative assemblies working in cooperation with the intendants. Calonne estimated that this new tax would bring in 35 millions more than the vingtièmes; and it would be augmented yet further by a whole range of other innovations such as an extended stamp tax and better administration of the royal domain.
Even more impressive yields
could be expected if the taxpayers could be made more prosperous; and Calonne planned to achieve this by the second part of his programme, aimed at economic stimulation. Advised by Dupont de Nemours, the former associate of Turgot, Calonne took up several of the Physiocratic policies that had lapsed when the latter fell in 1776. He proposed to abandon controls on the grain trade, abolish internal customs barriers, and commute the corvée into a tax where this had not already happened. Vergennes, meanwhile, in September 1786, concluded a free-trade treaty with Great Britain which was expected to benefit French agriculture. But neither these measures nor the fiscal reforms could be expected to show instant results. Time would have to be bought, and the immediate crisis averted, by further borrowing. The third part of Calonne’s plan was designed to create the confidence to sustain new loans. Before sending his measures to the parlements for registration, Calonne proposed to have them endorsed by a show of national consensus, which would disarm any criticism in advance and persuade lenders that the country was behind the minister in his determination to restore financial health. The obvious forum for seeking such support, much discussed since the political crisis of 1771, was the Estates-General. Calonne considered the idea, only to reject such an unwieldy body as too unpredictable. Remonstrances from the parlements were bad enough: obstruction from people who saw themselves as the nation’s elected representatives might be far worse. Besides, precedents also existed for another kind of representative body, an Assembly of Notables, whose members were all royal nominees and could therefore be handpicked. They would of course be ‘People of weight, worthy of the public’s confidence and such that their approbation would powerfully influence general opinion’.5 But the honour of being chosen alone ought to make them docile. With a public show of backing from the leading men of the kingdom for his plans, Calonne did not doubt that the loans to make them possible would be forthcoming.
Louis XVI finally authorized this plan on 29 December 1786. An Assembly of Notables was ordered to convene at Versailles on 29 January 1787 to consider the king’s views on ‘the relief of his peoples, the ordering of his finances and the reform of various abuses’. No other details were given and speculation ran riot. In the event the Assembly did not convene until 22 February as first Calonne and then Vergennes fell ill. Vergennes, the only minister who supported Calonne whole-heartedly, died on 13 February. During all these delays the 144 chosen nominees had plenty of time to get to know each other, and the 64 provincials among them were able to sense the mood of the capital. Fewer than five of the Notables were non-nobles; 18 were clerics, 7 were princes of the blood, each assigned to preside over a working party (bureau). Most of the 36 dukes, peers, and other great lords were generals, provincial governors, and others with experience of authority; but they included ambitious celebrities like Lafayette, the self-proclaimed hero of the American war. There were also 12 senior administrators, 38 sovereign court magistrates, 12 representatives of the pays d’états, and 25 civic dignitaries. And as soon as they met, and heard what the Comptroller-General proposed, it became apparent that the Notables would not be the meek and ductile collaborators Calonne had expected. Inexperienced as he was in managing political assemblies, he totally miscalculated the forces he had let loose, and how to handle them.
In a controversial political career Calonne had made many enemies, and they were well represented in the Assembly. Members of the parlements had been hostile to him ever since the 1760s, when he had been closely involved in authoritarian moves against them. The first president of the parlement of Paris, a Notable like most of his provincial counterparts, was a personal enemy. Leading prelates had been alienated by attempts since 1783 to bully the clergy into increasing its contributions to the royal finances; yet in choosing the clerical contingent Calonne was content to act on the advice of Loménie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, skilled from years of manipulating clerical assemblies and the estates of Languedoc in the politics of intrigue, and known to harbour his own ministerial ambitions. Only Vergennes among Calonne’s ministerial colleagues had been fully aware of his plans, and the rest felt no commitment to supporting him. Some hoped to use the Assembly to destroy him; others were known disciples of Necker. And the Swiss wonder-worker himself, though not a member of the Notables, was a central figure in their deliberations from the very start. He had many admirers in the Assembly; and when Calonne, in his opening speech, declared that the royal finances were running a substantial deficit, everyone immediately thought of the Compte rendu. If Necker could achieve a surplus after three years of war and no new taxation, why now was there a deficit after three years of peace and a third vingtième? Calonne’s lavish spending and heavy borrowing were notorious. There was a perfectly reasonable suspicion that if there was a crisis—and at this stage the minister offered no figures to prove that there was—then he was responsible.
Yet if Calonne’s proposals had come from anybody else there is little doubt that the Notables would have welcomed them more warmly. They were, after all, ‘More or less the result of all that good minds have been thinking for several years’, as Talleyrand put it.6 And in the event the vast majority of them were accepted with very little complaint. Criticism was largely confined to the territorial subvention, the provincial assemblies, and a proposal to force the clergy to redeem its corporate debt. Even then the Notables declared themselves unequivocally in favour of the basic principles of equality of taxation and representation of the taxpayers in its assessment and apportionment. But, landowners as all the Notables were, they questioned whether a perpetual, variable tax falling entirely on people like themselves was fair, and whether the proposal to levy it in kind was practicable. And, members as they all were of the first two orders of the realm, they thought nobles and clergy should be guaranteed a proportion of the seats in the provincial assemblies, and that the work of these bodies, if they were to be truly representative, should not be subject to the veto of the intendants. The bishops, finally, saw the proposal for redemption of the clerical debt as a prolongation of the minister’s earlier attacks on the Church. They knew that if their debt, incurred on the government’s behalf, was liquidated, they would lose the best guarantee of the clergy’s time-honoured right of self-taxation. They declared themselves incapable of assenting to any changes touching the Church without the authorization of the Assembly of the Clergy. Magistrates, likewise, announced that they could not predetermine the attitude of the sovereign courts they sat in. Most of the Notables, indeed, felt uncertain about who they spoke for. ‘We were not the representatives of the Nation’, Lafayette later wrote to George Washington,7 ‘but … we declared that altho’ we had no right to impede, it was our right not to advise unless we thought the measures were proper, and that we could not think of new taxes unless we knew the returns of expenditure and the plans of economy.’ This proved the real sticking-point during the first week of the Assembly. At first Calonne contended that since the king had seen the full accounts they should accept his good faith. The Notables countered that in that case there was no point in soliciting their support. Eventually, on 2 March, Calonne reluctantly revealed his estimates, and in doing so explicitly condemned the Compte rendu of 1781 as false and misleading. The Neckerites were outraged, while those who did not know whom to believe demanded to see even more detailed accounts in order to make up their own minds. On 3 March came the first overt claim that the Notables had no power to approve new taxation. That right, declared Leblanc de Castillon, procurator-general of the parlement of Aix, belonged only to the Estates-General.
All these proceedings had formally taken place in secret. The public was agog to have news of the Assembly, rumours abounded, and a good deal of more or less accurate information leaked out. It fuelled a flurry of pamphleteering, most of it hostile to the minister. In addition to despotism, profligacy, and incompetence, it was now revealed by the most notorious pen-for-hire of the day, the dissolute Count de Mirabeau, that Calonne was also guilty of shady stock-exchange dealings. This atmos
phere encouraged the Notables in their demand for full accounts, and in detailed criticism of Calonne’s plan. They were all the more scandalized, therefore, when on 12 March he blandly observed at a plenary session that the king was glad to note their broad approval. Despite vehement protests, Calonne proceeded to publish this speech, which proved the first sign of a fundamental change of tactics. Having failed to browbeat the Notables in private, he now attempted to take advantage of the intense public interest to subject them to outside pressure. On 18 March he sponsored a pamphlet calling for the full proceedings of the Assembly to be made public. On 31 March, with the ground thus prepared, he published the full original texts of his proposals. They were accompanied by an introduction (Avertissement), which was also separately printed and circulated free to parish clergy with the request that they read it from the pulpit. It was clearly designed to arouse public suspicion about the motives of Calonne’s critics. The Notables’ doubts, it implied, were mere pretexts:
We will be paying more! … No doubt; but who? Only those who were not paying enough; they will pay what they owe according to a just proportion, and nobody will be overburdened.
Privileges will be sacrificed! … Yes: justice demands it, need requires it. Would it be better to put further burdens on the unprivileged, the people?
There will be a great outcry! … That was to be expected. Can general good be done without bruising a few individual interests? Can there be reform without some complaints?8
But this bold attempt to foment social antagonisms against the minister’s leading critics fell flat. The Notables sent further indignant protests to the king, and the public proved completely unresponsive to Calonne’s appeal. It was received as a desperate last throw by a discredited political gambler. And so it proved to be. Even the king was now dismayed by the lack of progress in the Assembly, and his minister’s seeming inability to convince anyone of his honesty and good intentions. Courtiers, ministerial rivals, and men of ambition moved in for the kill. Louis XVI, committed to the reforms, resisted to the last; and on the morning of 8 April he dismissed Miromesnil, head of the judiciary and his longest-serving minister, ostensibly for failing to support Calonne. But later that day the Comptroller-General himself was dismissed. The king had clearly concluded that only new men could hope to push any reforms at all through; and the general celebration which greeted the news of Calonne’s fall certainly seemed to promise an improvement in the political atmosphere.