The Marquis

by Laura Auricchio

  The avertissement was an exercise in demagoguery, pure and simple. In an audacious move, the crown was trying to turn the people against the nobility and the clergy. After summarizing the key proposals and extolling their many virtues, the text built to a harangue against the government’s critics, reaching a crescendo with a series of rhetorical questions and answers that must have given that week’s Mass a lively tone:

  What could be the pretexts for concern?

  We will pay more! … Undoubtedly: but who? Only those who do not pay enough.…

  Privileges will be sacrificed! … Yes: justice desires it, necessity demands it. Would it be better to overcharge those without privilege, the people? There will be loud objections! … It’s to be expected. Is it possible to advance the common good without damaging some private interests? Can reform be accomplished without complaint?

  The fact that the First and Second Estates were under siege was not lost on the notables. Gathered in the Versailles apartments of the Comte d’Artois on Monday, April 2, the members of the second bureau seethed. Brienne denounced the avertissement. The Duc de Guines declared that it “misled the people” and served as a “dangerous tocsin.” The Duc d’Harcourt maintained that “the government had never addressed the people in this manner.” And when Lafayette boldly asserted that “even in Boston this appeal would be regarded as seditious,” he was reproving Calonne for rabble-rousing. In Lafayette’s view, enraging the public not only risked undermining the nobility and the clergy but jeopardized the very stability of France. Marie Antoinette, too, “highly disapproved” of the avertissement, thinking that Calonne was playing a dangerous game. The king, however, predictably failed to understand what the uproar was all about.

  His reserves of goodwill depleted, Lafayette went on the offensive. Seizing on rumors that Calonne had manipulated the sale of government lands for personal gain, Lafayette (quite possibly coached by Brienne) rapidly became his bureau’s sharpest and most outspoken agitator against the finance minister. Calonne’s dabbling in land speculation had already been the subject of a scathing pamphlet that had come to the attention of the second bureau; now Lafayette joined the disparaging chorus by insisting that “we must attack the monster of land speculation, not feed it.” On Tuesday, April 3, Lafayette presented the Comte d’Artois with a signed memo to be passed along to the king requesting a “rigorous examination” of recent real estate transactions. “Why,” asked his memo, had “finance ministers proposed to the King purchases or exchanges that, having no benefit for the King, served only to benefit certain individuals?” Fighting fire with fire, Lafayette donned the mantle of public interest that Calonne had briefly tried on. The squandered funds, he alleged, had been raised through taxes, and taxes could be justified only in the interest of the nation. The millions of livres that had been “abandoned to depredation and greed,” he wrote, “are the fruit of the sweat, the tears and possibly the blood of the people.”

  Lafayette’s memo soon supplanted Calonne’s avertissement in the public eye. In an entry dated April 30, 1787, the Mémoires secrets reported that the denunciation “has been spoken about for a long time and … attracted a certain amount of publicity.” It had, in fact, generated more than noise. On April 8—five days after Lafayette submitted the memo—Calonne was dismissed. And on May 1, Brienne was appointed to take Calonne’s place.

  The Assembly of Notables marked an important turning point in Lafayette’s life. For the first time, he established himself in his native land as a champion of the downtrodden and a defender of human rights, much as he had already done abroad. Writing to Washington, Lafayette acknowledged that the venture was bound to make him a few enemies. “The King and family and the great men about Court,” he noted, “do not forgive me for the liberties I have taken, and the success it had among the other classes of the people.”

  Triumphing over Calonne seemed to energize Lafayette, who found his footing in the month of May by suggesting a host of reforms. In the name of justice, Lafayette wanted to improve conditions in the nation’s prisons, introduce greater leniency in the criminal code, and increase rations for His Majesty’s soldiers. Thinking, perhaps, of his American friends, he also sought to restore civil rights to French Protestants. For much of the seventeenth century, the Edict of Nantes, issued by Henri IV—a convert to Catholicism—had guaranteed members of Reformed churches religious freedom and legal equality. But Louis XIV had revoked the edict in 1685, forcing hundreds of thousands of Protestants into exile and exposing those who remained to discrimination and persecution. During the second half of the eighteenth century, pleas for toleration grew steadily louder, as one philosophe after another adopted religious freedom as a key principle of Enlightenment thought and coalitions of intellectuals, clergymen, and public leaders sought common ground on the matter.

  Lafayette had been involved with the struggle for Protestant rights ever since his return from the American war, but prior to the assembly he had worked only through back channels, collaborating with Calvinist leaders, influential salonnières, and sympathetic statesmen in an attempt to persuade the king to soften sanctions. These efforts had come to nothing. But, as Lafayette wrote to Washington in January 1787, he was hopeful that the Assembly of Notables might at last provide some relief on this count. Indeed, Lafayette found a sympathetic audience in the second bureau, where only two members objected. Inspired by Lafayette’s words, the group approved a memo to the king on May 24. “A portion of our fellow countrymen,” it read, “who do not have the good fortune to profess the Catholic faith, find themselves stricken by a kind of civil death.” On behalf of these oppressed individuals, and “in the general interest of the populace, of national industry, and of all moral and political principles,” the bureau asked the monarch to demonstrate “a beneficent” tolerance toward the non-Catholics, who, counting among his people, deserved his protection. No immediate action was taken. But by November, with pressure mounting from both domestic and international fronts, the king issued the Edict of Tolerance, restoring to Calvinists a limited range of civil rights.

  The proposal of which Lafayette was proudest was one on which he had initially demurred: the calling of the Estates-General. In March, when Leblanc de Castillon had insisted that the Estates-General was the only body that could legitimately impose new taxes on the French people, Lafayette had remained silent. But on May 21, Lafayette predicted that five years hence, the state of the nation’s finances would be so altered that a new legislative gathering would be required and asked that the gathering take the form of “a truly national assembly.” Artois sought clarification: was Lafayette suggesting a meeting of the Estates-General? Yes, Lafayette confirmed. That was “precisely the object” of his request. Leaving no room for ambiguity, Lafayette asked Artois to “please inscribe his name as putting forth the opinion that the Estates-General of the realm be convened.”

  On May 25, after three months of deliberation, the Assembly of Notables adjourned. In terms of tangible change, the group accomplished little. Its most important achievement was the establishment of provincial assemblies, and soon Lafayette would be off to participate in the assembly of the Auvergne. The notables had also made headway toward free trade and, by abolishing internal tariffs and modifying the widely despised gabelle, or salt tax (which hit the poorest hardest), moved toward a more equitable tax structure. There was some cost cutting as well. Lafayette boasted in a May 5 letter to Washington that they had “got the King to make reductions and improvements to the amount of forty millions of livres a year.” Still, by refusing to impose new taxes or authorize new loans, they had all but necessitated that other bodies should undertake additional actions.

  The assembly’s intangible achievements, however, were of monumental importance. Proving the prognosticators wrong, the notables had not been eaten for dinner. Instead, they’d fired the chef. Lafayette told Washington that the assembly had been a success, writing that “the walls of Versailles had never heard so many good things;
and our meeting, particularly in the alarming situation of affairs, when the Kingdom was driving away, like Phaeton’s car, will have proved very beneficial.” When the Assembly of Notables gathered for its final session in May, the meeting hall looked much as it had at the convocation in February, but looks can deceive: everything had changed.

  The months that followed witnessed an epic power struggle between the crown and the highest court of France, with the king repeatedly trying, and repeatedly failing, to persuade the Parlement de Paris to register officially the acts that had emerged from the Assembly of Notables. It was a necessary step; all new laws had to be registered before they could take effect. But as Thomas Jefferson observed, finance minister Brienne, Lafayette’s erstwhile mentor, was “slow” to present his edicts to Parlement, “which gave time for the feelings excited by the proceedings of the Notables to cool off, new claims to be advanced, and a pressure to arise for a fixed constitution, not subject to changes at the will of the King.” Perhaps, thought the members of Parlement, they should hold out for more.

  A game of one-upmanship ensued. Finding Parlement unwilling to act on most of the motions at hand, the king resorted to a tradition as ancient as it was risky: he called a “lit de justice”—literally, a “bed of justice,” an extraordinary meeting at which the monarch simply declared the controversial legislation to be registered without further ado. On August 6, 1787, the members of Parlement were summoned to Versailles, where they were forced to look on as the king and his ministers announced the registration of the unwelcome edicts. But Louis managed to undermine his authority even as he exerted it. The historian Simon Schama put it perfectly in Citizens, his sweeping narrative of the French Revolution, in which he observed that the king evidently “took the presence of the ceremonial ‘bed’ too literally by falling asleep early in the proceedings.” So soundly did the monarch slumber that his snores could be heard throughout the chamber. This performance did nothing to shore up royal power. The very next day, Parlement declared the king’s actions null and void on the grounds that new taxes could not be imposed in such a manner. The crown responded by exiling the parlementaires to Troyes. And so it went throughout 1787 and into 1788, in a cycle of objections, punishments, and rapprochements that generated much heat but little progress.

  Lafayette was appalled. He later related his sentiments to Washington in a 1788 letter: “Government have employed the force of arms against unarmed magistrates, and expelled them. And the people? you will say. The people, my dear General, have been so dull, that it has made me sick, and physicians have been obliged to cool my inflamed blood.” Having lost faith in his mentor Brienne, Lafayette wrote to Washington saying that he had decided to cease visiting Brienne’s house: “The more I have been connected with him and the Keeper of the Seals [roughly the minister of justice], the greater indignation I have professed against their infernal plan.”

  Lafayette’s outrage was widely shared, most notably by the Duc d’Orléans, the liberally inclined cousin of Louis XVI—the same man who, when he bore the title of the Duc de Chartres, had been Lafayette’s rival for the affections of lady-in-waiting Aglaé d’Hunolstein in the 1770s. Orléans let his displeasure be known in dramatic fashion on a day the government hoped would end the conflict between the crown and the Parlement de Paris. On September 20, 1787, after agreeing to a budget compromise to extend existing levies, Parlement was recalled from exile, and on November 19, the magistrates sat in the presence of Louis XVI at a royal session where they were asked to keep the nation afloat by authorizing new loans. After eight hours of discussion, Parlement appeared to be on the verge of approving the borrowing when the king usurped their power and declared the edicts registered. Orléans objected on the spot, announcing to the king and the assembled magistrates that the registration was utterly illegal.

  The king banished Orléans from Paris the next day, but his stunning proclamation became the talk of the capital, thanks to a team of writers and printers based at the Palais-Royal—the Paris seat of the Orléans family located across the street from the Louvre. The Duc d’Orléans had inherited the property along with his title in 1785 and had promptly converted its interior courtyard into a bustling commercial emporium whose proceeds helped pay down his extravagant gambling debts. With boutiques, bookstores, and cafés installed throughout the arcade ringing the courtyard (and prostitution flourishing in the garden’s shadowy alleys) the Palais-Royal had quickly become a magnet for the wealthy and the dissolute. By 1787, it was also a hotbed of political ferment, a place where agitation against the king and his ministers was continually stoked by Orléans and those in his employ.

  The so-called French Prerevolution demonstrated that public opinion could serve as an effective defense against the crown. It would not be long before Lafayette and Orléans—once and future rivals—would use that fickle force as an offensive weapon against each other.

  CHAPTER 12

  RIGHTS OF MAN

  Lafayette found himself in a contemplative mood on January 1, 1788, with his customary optimism tainted by anxiety. He spent the “first moments” of the New Year at home on the Rue de Bourbon, writing an affectionate message to his “beloved General.” It was the longest letter he had sent to Washington in months; now that the Assembly of Notables had drawn to a close and the provincial assembly of the Auvergne had completed its work, he had a bit of time to reflect.

  As he had since 1777, Lafayette wrote freely to Washington, almost as though he were addressing his better self—a man who knew him intimately and treasured him despite his foibles. On this day, Lafayette’s thoughts ranged across a typically broad array of affairs. He shared news of conflicts that threatened to engulf Europe in war and his work on French-American trade as well as an appreciative assessment of Thomas Jefferson, with whom he was “more and more pleased.” He wrote with particular pride of the recent meeting of the Auvergne assembly, where he “had the happiness to please the people, and the misfortune to displease the Government to a very high degree.” In response to the crown’s plea “for an increase of revenue,” he explained, “our Province was among the few who gave nothing, and she expressed herself in a manner which has been taken very much amiss.” Yet something new had entered into Lafayette’s thinking. As a boy, he had yearned to capture the Beast of the Gévaudan without stopping to wonder what, exactly, he would do with the creature if he ever trapped it. Now Lafayette pondered the consequences of his actions. Once tyranny had been vanquished, he wondered, what would take its place?

  It was a burning question on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1787, fifty-five men had worked through four steamy Philadelphia months to hammer out provisional answers, and a copy of the resulting document, the Constitution of the United States of America, had since made its way to Lafayette. “It is needless for me to tell you,” wrote Lafayette to Washington, “that I have read the new proposed Constitution with an unspeakable eagerness and attention. I have admired it, and find in it a bold, large, and solid frame for the Confederation.” Still, Lafayette had concerns. Sensitized by the Assembly of Notables to the dangers of governmental overreaching, he was troubled by the constitutional convention’s decision to forgo a bill of rights. Such a document, Lafayette believed, was needed in order to guarantee “that the people will remain in possession of their natural rights and of a perfect equality among the citizens.” He was also wary of “the great powers and possible continuance of the President” permitted by the Constitution’s vision of the executive branch. Dictatorship, he feared, might be the result. Certain that Washington was the only man capable of leading the nation past these obstacles, Lafayette implored him: “In the name of America, of mankind at large, and your own fame, I beseech you, my dear General, not to deny your acceptance of the office of President.… You alone can settle that political machine.” Lafayette had unbounded faith in Washington’s leadership, which, he felt certain, would set the United States firmly on the right path.

  If only France would follow Ame
rica’s lead. “For my part,” wrote Lafayette of his homeland, “I am heartily wishing for a Constitution and bill of rights, and wish it may be effected with as much tranquility and mutual satisfaction as it is possible.” As Washington knew full well, the constitution that his acolyte envisioned for France bore scant resemblance to the document that was making its way through ratification conventions in every state of the American union. Lafayette and his intimates thought instead of a charter that would reimagine the French monarchy as a version of the English system, with even Jefferson suggesting that they look to England for inspiration. Shortly after the Assembly of Notables convened, Jefferson had sent his best wishes to Lafayette, along with advice that, by “keeping the good model of your neighboring country before your eyes, you may get on, step by step, towards a good constitution.” Jefferson acknowledged that a government based on the English “model may not be perfect,” but he believed “it would unite more suffrages than any new one which could be proposed.”

  From a distance of more than two centuries, it may seem unfathomable that a founding father of the United States would encourage France to emulate England, but in 1788, the position espoused by Jefferson was widely shared. Inspired by Montesquieu, many political theorists saw constitutional monarchy as the form of government most likely to ensure liberty in an Old World nation. “Liberty,” Montesquieu argued, is not synonymous with unfettered freedom. Rather, in a chapter devoted to the English constitution, Montesquieu wrote that “political liberty … is that tranquility of mind that derives from the opinion each person has of his safety.” Montesquieu believed that the key to guaranteeing such peace of mind lay in a separation of powers that permitted each branch of government to check the unbridled expansion of the other branches; England, with its legislative Parliament and executive monarchy, had achieved just that. In 1771, the Genevan Jean Louis de Lolme had fleshed out these ideas in his Constitution of England; or, An Account of the English Government, a book that found a home in the libraries of Jefferson, Lafayette, and thousands of like-minded thinkers across Europe and the Americas.