The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  But finding a replacement did not prove easy. Miromesnil was succeeded by Lamoignon, a member of the Notables, long known as one of the more able presidents of the parlement of Paris, and an advocate of judicial reforms. The appointment was popular, but the central problem confronting the State was financial, and capable men willing to take over the fallen minister’s programme were not so readily found. Necker was still the public’s favourite, but the king disliked him. On the very weekend of Calonne’s dismissal he had flouted express royal instructions not to publish a vindication of the Compte rendu against the minister’s attacks. He was exiled from Paris for his effrontery. The other obvious candidate was Brienne, who from the start had hoped to use the Notables as a stepping-stone to power. The king disliked him, too, but after entrusting the finances for three weeks to a bureaucratic nonentity who proved quite unable to handle the Notables, he yielded. Informed that royal stock was steadily falling and that without some gesture to restore confidence credit might soon run out, the king, on 1 May, appointed Brienne Chief of the Royal Council of Finances. Credit revived instantly. Nobody seemed more likely to be able to engineer a successful outcome to an experiment that had already gone seriously wrong than one of the Notables’ own most capable, intelligent, and flexible members.

  Brienne himself was also confident of success. He thought that if the territorial subvention could be modified to a tax in cash yielding a prearranged amount over a set and limited number of years, and if the clergy and nobility could be guaranteed seats in the provincial assemblies, the Notables would be satisfied. He presented these modifications to leading members of the Assembly on 9 May. But during the ministerial upheavals of the preceding month the Notables had done little but scrutinize the accounts, and the more they saw the more confused they had become. Before agreeing even to a modified version of the Calonne plan, they now insisted that the true condition of the finances must be established beyond dispute. The best way of achieving this, more and more of them were coming to believe, was through a permanent commission of auditors. Brienne had no objections to the idea, but the king, who fatally believed that he understood finance, thought it an unacceptable infringement of his prerogative. He vetoed it. His decision brought all constructive activity in the Assembly to an end. They had no authority, the Notables now declared, to consent to or authorize new taxes. ‘It seems to me’, declared Lafayette in the bureau where he sat on 21 May,9 ‘that this is the moment for us to beseech His Majesty to fix, immediately, in order to render account to him of all measures and settle their happy outcome forever, the convocation of a truly national assembly.’ ‘What, Sir,’ burst out the Count d’Artois, the king’s brother, ‘are you calling for the Estates-General?’ ‘Yes, my lord,’ replied the young glory-hunter, ‘and even better than that.’

  This now became the universal cry; and Brienne quickly recognized that no further progress with the Notables was likely. They had to be brought to an end before irreparable damage was done; and on 25 May they were. In an uncontested closing speech Brienne announced that he intended to press on with the modified territorial subvention, the provincial assemblies, and various other measures in the plan originally formulated by Calonne. Having so ringingly declared that they represented nobody, the Notables had no alternative to accepting their dismissal on these terms. ‘At least,’ the mayor of Montauban explained,10 ‘you cannot say we have voted for any taxes.’ Nevertheless the Assembly was a turning-point. It marked the beginning of a political crisis that was only to be resolved by revolution. Convoked to deal with hitherto unacknowledged financial problems, its three-month sitting revealed in rare detail to the country and to the world how serious they were. The effect was to throw public doubt on the capacity of absolute monarchy to manage the nation’s affairs, and to encourage subsequent resistance to any measures the Crown might propose. Brienne saw this clearly enough.

  If the Assembly of Notables [he had predicted to the king (who agreed) on 16 April] separates without having assured a balance between receipts and expenses, and it becomes necessary, after its separation, to have recourse to taxes, it is to be feared that great resistance will be encountered. This assembly was called because it was judged that its opinion would overcome all foreseeable obstacles. Lack of that opinion would produce much the same effect as outright opposition.11

  But opposition there had been, and it had culminated in loud calls for the institution which Calonne had ruled out in his original strategy as too dangerous—the Estates-General. This stance was bequeathed to future opponents of the government’s plans, and it was extremely popular. The unprecedented political spectacle of the Assembly of Notables had involved public opinion in politics to an extent not seen since 1771 and this time the interest aroused did not die away. Calonne himself had helped to sustain it by his ill-judged attempt to bring pressure on the Notables with the Avertissement. His fall from power discredited him entirely and vindicated the Notables in public esteem. The parlements, which were now required to register the modified remnants of his plan, knew that the public expected a resolute show of opposition.

  Brienne’s ministry (in August he was awarded the title of Principal Minister, unused since 1726) also felt obliged to press ahead with a programme of reforms. After all, the difficulties which had led Calonne to formulate his original plan—the lapse of the third vingtième and heavy debt redemptions falling due—were still there. And although the archbishop’s arrival in power revived credit sufficiently to float a successful new loan in early May, it could only be a stopgap. Besides, the international situation had suddenly darkened over the spring. The Dutch Republic had been teetering on the brink of civil war for four years as self-styled ‘patriots’ sought to curtail the constitutional role of the Stadtholder William V of Orange. Vergennes’s policy had been to support the patriots, but the British and the Prussians were now encouraging a princely counter-offensive. To lend the patriots further support might require military intervention, with all its attendant costs. Some resolution of the budgetary crisis was therefore a matter of increasing urgency.

  The ministry began to send its measures for registration in the parlements at the end of June. Some of them encountered little resistance. Free trade in grain, the commutation of the corvée into a tax, and even the edict setting up provincial assemblies passed in Paris without trouble. Only the parlement of Bordeaux, which had been on record since 1779 as an advocate of strong provincial estates for the province of Guyenne, voiced more than formal reservations about the vagueness of the powers these assemblies were to exercise. It refused to register this or anything else until they were clarified. But the focus of public attention was the parlement of Paris where, thanks to its status as the Court of Peers, no fewer than twenty-one former Notables were entitled to sit and opine. Everybody knew that the real battle would be joined over the taxation edicts which were the kernel of the government’s programme. First to arrive, on 2 July, was the extension of stamp duty, and on this the parlement clearly established its general position. It refused to register until the government justified the tax-increase by producing accounts. The king replied that there were enough former Notables in the court to know how matters stood; in any case the parlement had no right to vet the royal finances. He ordered immediate registration. Instead of that, however, the parlement decided to send further remonstrances in which it declared itself incapable of sanctioning a perpetual tax. That right belonged solely, it declared, to the Estates-General. Rather than take issue with this argument, the government now sent the territorial subvention for registration. It, too, was rejected after a long discussion, not unanimously but by a clear majority, on 30 July. Again the Estates-General were called for, and there was no doubting the popularity of the magistrates’ stand. Great crowds assembled whenever the parlement met, the salons of high society were almost unanimous in urging the magistrates to keep up their opposition, and all over the capital political clubs and discussion groups were mushrooming, reading together and sometim
es sponsoring an ever-swelling flow of pamphlets and broadsheets, now appearing at a rate of more than one a day. When the government decided, on 6 August, to force registration of the new taxes in a lit de justice, the ceremony was held at Versailles, away from the rebellious atmosphere of the capital. On this occasion a whole programme of administrative economies was announced, in the hope of softening the blow of a forced registration; and the atmosphere was so calm that Louis XVI snored audibly through much of the proceedings. But back in Paris the next day the biggest crowd anyone could remember thronged the palace of justice as the parlement debated its response. It declared the forced registration null and illegal. Three days later it voted to proceed against Calonne for criminal mismanagement of public funds; and on the thirteenth it condemned the forcibly registered laws once more to thunderous applause. Ministers were now growing alarmed. Even those who had doubted the wisdom of so rapid a recourse to a lit de justice recognized that the Crown must quickly recapture the initiative and calm the effervescence in the capital. So they all supported the next step, a time-honoured one in conflicts with the sovereign courts. On 15 August the parlement was exiled to Troyes.

  Defiant though the leaders of the parlement felt, none of them thought of resisting the royal orders. History suggested that such exiles were never permanent, and were usually ended by some compromise or even surrender on the Crown’s part. Older and more hesitant magistrates willingly complied in the hope that a calmer atmosphere would now descend. But initially there were tumultuous protests in Paris, led by law clerks thrown out of work by the transfer of legal activity out of the city. Forced registration of the tax-edicts in other Parisian sovereign courts, carried out by the king’s brothers, produced catcalls, jostling, and clashes with the princes’ escort of guards. In the days following there was open defiance of the city police, and talk of a mass march to Versailles. ‘The abuse bestowed on the King and Queen and the Archbishop of Toulouse’, noted an English observer,12 ‘is incredible.’ But the government continued to act with newfound vigour. All clubs were now closed. Booksellers were ordered to clamp down on unauthorized publications. Troops cleared the palace of justice and began to patrol the streets day and night. Meanwhile proceedings against Calonne were quashed (although by now he had fled to England), and to show that the new firm policy applied outside the capital too, the parlement of Bordeaux was also exiled to Libourne, a small town some distance from its normal seat. By the first week in September, the government appeared to be back in control, although the Paris parlement had ordered its subordinate courts not to register or publish the tax-edicts, and protests were now pouring in from provincial parlements about the whole drift of royal policy. What the government could not control was the situation in the Dutch Republic. There, a confrontation between the Hohenzollern princess of Orange and the patriots at the end of June had led to a Prussian ultimatum. On 13 September Prussian troops crossed the frontier, with the open connivance of Great Britain, and by the beginning of October they were masters of the entire Republic. French intervention to support the patriots was generally expected. ‘The political conversation of every company I have seen’, observed Arthur Young on 16 September,13 ‘is much more on the affairs of Holland than on those of France.’ But on 28 September the French foreign secretary Montmorin admitted that there was no possibility of intervention. The financial crisis had meant that throughout the summer no proper preparations had been made. The contrast with the resolute days of Vergennes was glaring, another blow to the government’s prestige. A lasting resolution of the country’s internal problems offered the only serious prospect of restoring it.

  Lamoignon, who dreamed of a comprehensive reform of the French law, was beginning to talk about action on the scale of Maupeou to break the parlements’ powers of resistance once and for all. Brienne preferred negotiation with the exiles of Troyes, sensing that many of the magistrates had been pushed by the electric atmosphere of the capital beyond what they knew were the limits of wisdom. Besides, by mid-September he had elaborated a new plan. Ever since the Notables the Crown’s leading critics had been calling for full accounts and drastic economies as prerequisites of new taxation. He now proposed to offer both, in the context of a five-year programme designed to restore financial health by 1792. Neither the stamp tax nor the territorial subvention, he now announced, were necessary to the success of this plan, provided the two existing vingtièmes could be prolonged and levied on a more equitable basis. He therefore offered to terminate the parlement’s exile and withdraw the two new taxes in return for registration of the prolongation of the old. A majority of magistrates was persuaded to agree. On 20 September, accordingly, the exile was revoked, and the parlement entered at once upon its normal autumn vacation. It was understood that, on reassembling in November, it would be presented with a new loan edict intended to keep the government afloat during its five-year retrenchment.

  Public reaction to this compromise was a mixture of scepticism and disgust. Although the parlement had declared once again, in agreeing to prolong the vingtièmes, that only the Estates-General could sanction new taxation, it appeared by the very act of registration to have abandoned that principle. The provincial parlements, who had rallied round their exiled colleagues, felt betrayed—especially that of Bordeaux, which remained in exile. The law clerks of Paris spent three days and nights celebrating the end of the exile with fireworks and bonfires where Calonne was burned in effigy. But pamphleteers were less flattering, and hostility to the government continued unabated.

  The feeling of everybody [Arthur Young recorded in Paris on 13 October] seems to be that the Archbishop will not be able to do anything towards exonerating the State from the burden of its present situation; some think that he has not the inclination; others that he has not the courage; others that he has not the ability. By some he is thought to be attentive only to his own interest; and by others that the finances are too much deranged to be within the power of any system to recover, short of the States-General of the kingdom; and that it is impossible for such an assembly to meet without a revolution in the government ensuing.14

  Brienne’s own optimism, however, continued incorrigible. Even the idea of the Estates-General no longer alarmed him. Indeed, he now resolved to incorporate it in his five-year plan. By 1792, he thought, with the hand of government immeasurably strengthened by the plan’s success, the Estates might be safely assembled to celebrate recovery. And to promise this now, before the plan even went into operation, would surely induce the parlement not to obstruct the loans essential to its working.

  Nevertheless the archbishop left nothing to chance. Before presenting the loans for registration he took good care to ascertain that a broad spectrum of opinion in the parlement would view them favourably. And in order to invest the parlement’s registration with added authority, he decided that it should take place in the king’s presence, at an unprecedented Royal Session. It would not be a lit de justice, since all present would be allowed to opine freely. Approval given in these circumstances would carry the sort of weight once hoped for from the Assembly of Notables. The session took place on 19 November, with the peers present in force. It began with the introduction of an edict, long known to be in gestation, according civil rights to French Protestants. The aim was to foster an atmosphere of good will. Protestant refugees from Orange reprisals in Holland now pouring into northern France made its promulgation at this moment particularly appropriate. But the real business of the session was a proposal to borrow no less than 420 millions between 1788 and 1792, falling annually from 120 millions in the first year to 60 in the last. These funds would be used to pay off short-term debts due for redemption over that period, and bring down the level of anticipations. Stringent economies were also promised over the same period, including rationalization of the royal household, the armed forces, and the financial bureaucracy. Brienne gave notice that he was resuming the policy of Terray, Turgot, and Necker, abandoned by Calonne, of eliminating the role of priva
te financiers in budgetary administration, and centralizing operations in a single, bureaucratically organized royal treasury. For 8¼ hours members of the parlement delivered their opinions. Even the acknowledged leader of the younger extremists among the magistrates, Duval d’Eprémesnil, supported the loans, although he called for the Estates-General to be convened in 1789. Others preferred 1788. And even though some spoke against the loans, there seemed to be a clear majority in favour. But it was never put to the test. At the end of the proceedings the king reiterated the promise of the Estates by 1792, and ordered registration of the loans as if this were a lit de justice. To general astonishment the Duke d’Orléans, head of the junior branch of the royal family and heir to a long tradition of obstructionism, suddenly rose and protested that this was not legal. At one of the most finely balanced moments in his country’s history, the king of France was caught completely off guard. ‘I don’t care … ’, he stammered, ‘it’s up to you … yes … it’s legal because I wish it.’