This was to be Calonne’s show. It was he who presented a set of six detailed proposals in the king’s absence on February 23 and then shepherded these proposals through the assembly. No one thought he would encounter much resistance. Not only had each member been carefully vetted, but the proceedings had been structured to maximize royal control. The notables gathered en masse only for a handful of formal presentations, and they would have no opportunity to raise questions or voice opinions while in the large group. All deliberations would be conducted within the confines of seven “bureaus,” each containing about twenty members. Every notable was assigned to a bureau, and every bureau was led by a prince of the blood. It was surely not an accident that Lafayette was placed in the second bureau, where he would work directly under the watchful eye of the Comte d’Artois, one of Calonne’s closest and most powerful allies.
The government appeared to be so firmly in control of the Assembly of Notables that Lafayette and his colleagues were widely disparaged as little more than pawns, and all of Paris enjoyed a good laugh at their expense. Within weeks of the assembly’s convocation, authors of satirical verses and unflattering prints were outdoing each other with witty variations on the theme. In one caricature the members of the assembly were portrayed as a bevy of gullible fowl, lined up like hungry diners waiting to be called to their tables at “The Court’s Buffet,” supervised by chef Calonne. Perched behind a wooden podium, an officious monkey–cum–maître d’ informs the misguided flock, “I have gathered you here to learn with which sauce you want to be eaten.” On a sideboard seen at the left of the print, a roasted bird served up on a platter foreshadows the birds’ collective fate. So widespread was the ridicule that Jefferson opined to Abigail Adams that “the most remarkable effect of this convention as yet is the number of puns and bon mots it has generated. I think were they all collected it would make a more voluminous work than the Encyclopédie.” Jefferson’s observation was apt, but the conclusion he drew was mistaken; underestimating the staying power of the French, Jefferson predicted “that a good punster would disarm the whole nation were they ever so seriously disposed to revolt.”
“The Court’s Buffet.” A 1787 caricature of the Assembly of Notables. (illustration credit 11.2)
Neither the jesting nor the cynicism seemed to trouble Lafayette, who had joined the assembly in a spirit of goodwill. He entered its deliberations prepared to listen, learn, and negotiate, and for a few weeks at least, his trust seemed to be well placed. The politically savvy Calonne had placed a popular proposition—the formation of local assemblies—at the top of the notables’ agenda. His suggestion was that representative bodies, elected by and constituted of local landholders, be established throughout the nation at municipal, district, and provincial levels. Accorded no real legislative powers, these councils would serve as vehicles for expressing collective concerns and, in limited cases, for managing regional affairs. After less than a week of debate, twenty of the second bureau’s twenty-two members supported the idea, as did similar majorities in the other bureaus. Lafayette responded with exuberance, averring that local assemblies would offer “the greatest benefit that could come from the justice and the goodness of the King.”
This is not to say that Lafayette stood with the crown on every particular—he would have preferred provincial bodies that were stronger and more broadly representative than those the crown proposed, and he suggested a number of changes with such goals in mind. Joining with the majority of the second bureau, he argued that the provincial bodies needed greater powers if they were to have any chance of withstanding the “baneful authority” of the provinces’ government-appointed intendants. On the question of voter qualifications, Lafayette and four other members of his bureau advocated a lower standard than the government suggested: instead of requiring an annual income of 600 livres, Lafayette’s group called for a minimum income of 100 livres. Lafayette also objected to the notion that larger incomes should translate into more votes.
Of all the amendments Lafayette supported, the most surprising is also the most revealing: Lafayette believed that the provincial assemblies should grant the clergy and the nobility more authority than commoners. He and his like-minded colleagues would have permitted only members of the First and Second Estates to serve as president of any of the provincial bodies; commoners (the Third Estate) would be barred from the office. Furthermore, Lafayette wanted to see a cap that would limit the proportion of commoners—who constituted some 95 percent of the population—to no more than two-thirds of any provincial assembly. In contrast, the royal ministers planned to open membership and offices in the new provincial assemblies to all eligible voters regardless of their social standing.
To the modern eye, Lafayette’s position might seem counterintuitive—America’s staunchest French advocate came out in favor of political distinctions based on social class. But while the government seemed to be proposing an egalitarian system, Lafayette and many of his colleagues interpreted things differently. The majority of the second bureau saw the crown attempting to grab power by wresting control from the traditional leaders of each region. To be sure, the notables, who were drawn disproportionately from the ranks of the first two estates, were motivated in part by a desire to preserve their own power. But more than self-interest was at stake. Lafayette and many of his fellow notables believed that France’s system of estates served as a bulwark against despotism, ensuring the nation’s freedom by limiting the authority of the king.
This was also the logic expounded by the influential political theorist Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, whose 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws argued that “the most natural intermediate subordinate power is that of the nobility. It is in a sense the essence of monarchy, whose fundamental maxim is: no monarch, no nobility; no nobility, no monarch; but there is a despot.” Lafayette owned the complete works of Montesquieu and heard much talk of them from Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the archbishop of Toulouse, who served as a kind of mentor among the notables. During the assembly, Brienne summed up the vital position of the so-called landed estates—the nobility and clergy: they served at once as “the people’s defense and the monarchy’s support.” Privileging freedom over equality, Brienne insisted that “the distinctions among citizens are necessary for royal dignity, for the proper order of the state, and even for public liberty.”
The matter of provincial assemblies was settled relatively amicably, with the notables assenting to most of the government’s desires, but Calonne’s second proposal led to a veritable insurrection. The crown planned to tame the deficit by imposing a new land tax but offered none of the traditional exemptions. Such a tax would have fallen disproportionately on the First and Second Estates, who were not willing to give in without a fight.
At the heart of the notables’ objections was the fact that no one could calculate the size of the deficit with any certainty. On February 22, in a speech that managed to be simultaneously long, tedious, and unclear, Calonne had pegged the deficit at 80 million livres. Less than two weeks later, he acknowledged that the shortfall was 114 million livres. Confused and mistrusting, the bureaus attempted their own audits, yielding an even wider range of estimates, some of which dwarfed Calonne’s worst scenarios. By mid-March, the bureaus’ frustrations were starting to boil over. How, asked the notables, could they approve new taxes without knowing whether taxes would help to balance the budget?
The government’s dismal financial situation might have raised eyebrows under any circumstances but was especially disturbing at this particular moment because an impressive budget surplus had been reported just six years earlier. In February 1781, when France was expending large sums on the American Revolution, Jacques Necker, the Swiss Protestant banker who was then serving as director-general of finance, had issued a document purporting to offer the first full account of the nation’s finances ever presented to the people of France: the Compte rendu au roi. Designed to shore up a flagging credit mar
ket by boosting public confidence, Necker’s account trumpeted the underlying health of the French economy and the government’s new commitment to financial transparency. The Compte rendu was published in large quantity, translated into several languages, and became an unlikely best seller in France and abroad. Limiting his discussion exclusively to ordinary and ongoing expenses, while making no claims about the extraordinary costs of the war, Necker calculated that France’s annual income exceeded its expenses by some 10 million livres. In 1787, however, wartime expenses—including, to Lafayette’s embarrassment, unpaid interest still due on loans to the United Sates—were included in the calculations. Although they were comparing apples and oranges, the notables wondered how a surplus could possibly have turned into a deficit in such a short time.
Calonne’s reputation for loose ethics added fuel to the fire. In the few years that he held his post, he had been accused more than once of enriching himself at the nation’s expense. According to one especially colorful rumor, Calonne was said to have carried on a torrid affair with the fashionable painter Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, whose portrait of the comptroller general was exhibited to great fanfare at the Royal Academy’s Salon exhibition of 1785. At a time of economic strain, everything about Calonne’s appearance in the painting seemed to smack of excess: his sumptuous costume of black silk and white lace, his splendid desk laden with gilt mounts and accessories, and the red brocade drapery that matches the upholstery of his gilt wood armchair. Not only was Calonne said to have raided the nation’s coffers to pay an outlandish fee for this flattering portrait, but the tale of his affair with the artist grew increasingly delicious with each telling. The pilfered banknotes, it was whispered, were presented to Vigée-LeBrun in the form of exquisitely expensive wrapping paper, with each bill enveloping an individual piece of candy.
More elaborate and persistent still were the accusations of profligacy and impropriety leveled against the royal family. “Madame Deficit” was one of the kinder nicknames given to the queen, whose infamously extravagant wardrobe, penchant for high-stakes gambling, and purported affairs with men and women alike were constant fodder for rumors spread by myriad political enemies. Her spendthrift ways with other people’s money furnished a premise for the notorious “Diamond Necklace Affair”—a scandal that played out in the courts of law and public opinion in 1785 and 1786. A team of con artists duped the ambitious and wealthy Cardinal de Rohan into purchasing the eponymous jewels as a gift for the queen for the staggering sum of 1.5 million livres. Deploying, among other fanciful gambits, a nocturnal assignation with a woman dressed as Marie Antoinette, the swindlers led Rohan to believe that her royal highness coveted the necklace and would provide an influential post at court to anyone who gave her the magnificent gems. When the plot unraveled, the conspirators were dealt with readily—at least those who stayed in France long enough to get caught. But Rohan’s culpability was a bone of contention that kept all of Paris rapt. Was it reasonable, went the question before the Parlement de Paris (as the high court of Paris was known), for Rohan to have believed that the queen might act in such a manner? Or was the cardinal guilty of treason simply for having entertained such a low opinion of Marie Antoinette? Rohan’s acquittal on May 31, 1786, and the celebrations that greeted the verdict gave the royal family an unwelcome answer.
The widespread talk of spending gone wild put the notables in no mood to accept new taxes landing squarely on their own shoulders. The assembly aimed instead, as one member explained, “to make the king work at economies, as one makes the people work for revenues.” The royal household, the notables demanded, must open its books and agree to cut costs in accordance with the assembly’s decrees.
The notables also wondered about the limits of their own authority: having been appointed by the crown, rather than elected by the nation, did they, in fact, have the power to levy a permanent tax? On March 1, Jean-François-André Leblanc de Castillon, prosecutor of the parlement of Aix assigned to the second bureau, argued that they did not. As the Mémoires secrets reported, Castillon had insisted that “neither this Assembly … nor the Parlements, nor individual states, nor even the King: the Estates-General alone have this right.” Castillon stopped just short of calling for the convocation of the Estates-General, an elected body that had been summoned sporadically since the Middle Ages to help the nation through times of crisis. But the mere mention of the idea quickly became “a sensation.”
For his part, Lafayette caused a stir of a different variety: he surprised everyone by demurring on the subject of the new tax. Blindsided by the bitter tenor of the proceedings, he was desperate to do the right thing but had no clear idea of what it might be. As Lafayette confessed to his fellow members of the second bureau on March 3, “The object of the deliberation is so important that my youth requires me to enlighten myself through the discussion of administrators more able than myself.” He was, quite simply, unprepared to grapple with such profound matters of political philosophy.
So tepid did Lafayette appear to his compatriots that he managed to disappoint even the low expectations of the Mémoires secrets, which lambasted him and other veterans of the American Revolution on March 19. While acknowledging that the group had been “so useful to the nation during the last war,” the Mémoires lamented that they had “made a very poor showing in the Assembly of the Notables.” Accustomed to “the passive obedience of the military and the spirit of despotism that commands troops,” the veterans were said to have offered “no vigorous opinions.” Mincing no words, the Mémoires accused the military men of having demonstrated “the most blind and servile submission” on every matter. To Lafayette, who treasured his reputation as an independent thinker and a staunch defender of liberty, the criticism must have stung.
The preeminent Lafayette scholar Louis Gottschalk cited “a siege of illness” as the root of Lafayette’s “uncharacteristic restraint.” Certainly, illness might have been a contributing factor. Although Lafayette missed none of the proceedings, he suffered throughout the run of the assembly from a persistent chest cold that might have dissuaded a less eager man. Plagued by coughing, hoarseness, and exhaustion, Lafayette soldiered through with the aid of an assortment of remedies acquired from the Versailles shop of Jean Maury, the apothecary to the stables of the Comte d’Artois. Starting on February 22 and continuing through the month of May, Lafayette went on a veritable spending spree chez Maury. He made purchases nearly every day, running through bottle after bottle of syrup of erysimum, syrup of violet, syrup of mallow, and purified whey in an effort to ameliorate his symptoms and regain his strength. After mounting an all-out campaign to be included among the notables, he was not about to let a bit of congestion keep him from participating.
Finally, in early April, Lafayette began to assert himself. His apothecary bills testify that he was still not completely well, but his health was improving. And having taken time to assess the situation carefully, he began to feel more comfortable issuing bold demands for reform. Most simply, though, Calonne’s actions might well have pushed Lafayette past the limits of his tolerance. All of these factors combined to resurrect the fiery spirit that had won the heart of America.
Calonne was growing frustrated with his handpicked notables, who were turning out to be far more independent-minded than anyone had anticipated. At a plenary session held on Monday, March 12, Calonne adopted a new tactic. Rather than grapple with the substance of the assembly’s many and varied objections to his plans, he blithely declared the group’s oppositions to be immaterial. Taking a moment to thank the notables for their zealous and faithful service, Calonne reported that His Majesty had read the reports of each bureau and had observed “with satisfaction that in general your sentiments are in accord with his principles.” He added that “you have shown yourselves to be animated by the desire to contribute to and perfect” the implementation of the government’s plans and that “the objections that you have raised, and which relate principally to matters of form, do not contradi
ct the essential points of the goal that His Majesty proposed.” This was arrant nonsense.
By Friday—four days later—each of the seven bureaus had submitted its own refutation of Calonne’s ludicrous statement. Though phrased in tones ranging from polite rectification to righteous indignation, the seven separate réclamations all agreed on one point: the assembly’s differences with the crown’s proposals were substantive, Calonne’s declaration to the contrary notwithstanding. The second bureau’s rebuttal was among the mildest; the group asked simply that “an exact record” of their findings be inserted into the record to prevent any misconstruction.
Instead of backing down, Calonne raised the stakes. With the government and the notables at an impasse, the finance minister turned to a third party: the French people. At Calonne’s behest, his own speech, the full text of the government’s proposals, and an incendiary avertissement by an anonymous hand, published both independently and as an introduction to the proposals, were printed and distributed. The avertissement caused an instant commotion, not least because it was given out, free of charge, on Saturday, March 31, to parish priests, who were asked to read it from their pulpits the next day. By Monday, April 2, “nothing but the Avertissement” was being spoken of in Paris or Versailles, according to Brienne.
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