If the grievances of the middle classes were social rather than economic, the poorer people in the towns were more concerned about money. It is impossible to generalize about France as a whole: in the late 1780s Bordeaux was a thriving port which to Arthur Young seemed far more prosperous than Liverpool, whereas the silk industry in Lyons was passing through a period of severe depression with over half its looms at a standstill. Yet it does seem evident that French trade and industrial production were generally expanding, even though manufacturing processes were for the most part antiquated with very few factories using steam, and with mines so dependent upon manual labour that coal production was only one-twentieth that of England. But while wages were slowly rising they failed to keep pace with the more rapidly growing rate of the cost of living, and industrial unrest was becoming common. Most master craftsmen and their journeymen still remained on friendly terms: after all, they usually lived under the same roof, sharing the same interests, and, as Professor Hampson has put it, ‘when food prices rose the journeyman was more disposed to blame the baker, the farmer and the speculator in foodstocks than to demand higher wages’. All the same, master craftsmen were trying to perpetuate ‘their own privileged position at the expense of their journeymen and to confine recruitment to their own families. The journeymen’s attempts to organize themselves and to resort to strike action found the Government on the side of the masters and the municipal authorities – royal edicts prohibited the association of workmen for collective bargaining…The urban population was therefore a prey to deep internal divisions, with some of the wealthier merchants aspiring to become large-scale industrialists, the master craftsmen and journeymen united in resisting the pressure to reduce them to a mere proletariat’ but at the same time sometimes at loggerheads with each other.
The attempts of the King’s Finance Minister, Turgot, to tackle some of the country’s problems were neither reassuring to the people nor welcome at Court where his manner, too, caused offence. He was tactless, high-minded, impatient and touchy; he interfered officiously, so it was said, in departments other than his own. A thoughtless remark of his to the effect that if a woman were to have influence on the King’s decisions it was better that this woman should be Marie Antoinette rather than de Pompadour or Du Barry annoyed both the King, who had attempted to keep his wife out of politics, and the Queen who resented being compared with royal mistresses. Accordingly, in May 1776, having lost the confidence not only of the King and Queen and the Court but of the financiers, the Church and parlement, and being considered too much of a physiocrate by the interventionists, Turgot was dismissed.
The following year, the Swiss financier, Jacques Necker, the Director of the Royal Treasury, was appointed Director-General of Finance, a post which had to be specially created for him since, being a foreigner, he could not serve on the King’s Council of Ministers, all of whom, unlike himself, were French noblemen; and, being a Protestant, he could not be naturalized. It was the common opinion in Paris – an opinion fostered by his formidably clever and inextinguishably romantic wife who held sway over a literary salon in their smart house in the Rue de Cléry – that Necker was a financial genius. It was an opinion with which he himself would not have quarrelled. Silent, ponderous and ruminative, with half-closed eyes in a pallid, yellowish face, he seemed to be constantly lost in thought. If any man could bring order to France’s economy, it was maintained, surely it was he. After all, he had made a fortune for himself as a banker in Paris; and a self-made millionaire could scarcely be other than an improvement on the noble Finance Ministers of the past.
At first all appeared to go satisfactorily. The King and his new Minister got on well together, even though Necker’s silences when broken tended to be succeeded by economic speculations, prognostications and lectures of inordinate length. His cuts in Household expenditure at Versailles naturally aroused resentment at Court, where his vanity soon aroused as much antagonism as Turgot’s high-handedness and where he made a particular enemy of the Comte de Provence whose request for over a million livres, which he claimed was due from his father’s estate, was rejected. Yet it was generally agreed that these reductions of expenditure at Court were not only necessary but inevitable.
When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle, the traites, the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. Necker thought that he had the answer to this problem: arguing that the limits of taxable capacity had already been passed, he proposed to raise the money required by borrowing, on the dubious assumption that a swollen public debt would not place an insupportable burden on the country’s finances. He offered generous rates of interest and in order to attract investors published his Compte Rendu au Roi sur les finances de la Nation, a grossly optimistic and complacent document which transformed an actual deficit of 46,000,000 livres into a fictitious surplus of 10,000,000. Although the public at large, having no means of checking Necker’s figures, accepted his pamphlet with satisfaction and bought thirty thousand copies of it within a week, its fraudulence was immediately noticed by most of the King’s other Ministers. ‘It’s about as true as it is modest,’ Maurepas commented when asked what he thought of it. A few weeks later, after a confidential memorandum written by him for the King’s consideration and proposing a limitation of the parlement’s fiscal powers had been copied and distributed by his enemy, the Comte de Provence, Necker felt his position so undermined that he demanded admittance to the Council of Ministers. The King refused, and Necker resigned.
Necker was succeeded as Director-General of Finance by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a cheerful, amiable, red-haired man of forty-seven who had been an intendant of Flanders. A collector of pictures and the proud possessor of no less than ten Titians, Calonne had a far more pleasant and easy manner than either Turgot or Necker and was well liked at Court. He became an even more welcome figure there when, soon after entering office, he raised further loans which allowed him to be far less severe with taxes than it was feared he might have been. It was not long, however, before Calonne realized in what a perilous state the country’s finances were and that fundamental and wide-ranging reforms were essential to save them from utter collapse and to obviate the risk of the monarchy collapsing with them. He therefore drew up a detailed programme which included, together with many other less contentious measures of both economic and administrative reform, a new tax on land which was to be imposed without regard to the status of its owners and which would accordingly fall most heavily upon the privileged orders. This tax was to be a permanent one, not requiring registration for renewal by the parlements, and would enable the King’s Ministers to disregard the parlementaires’ remonstrances which had been the bane of their previous existence. The apprehensions of the nobility and the clergy that this new tax would prove not only financially burdensome but also the first step towards the extinction of their privileged positions were exacerbated by Calonne’s further proposal that its assessment should be supervised by newly created provincial assemblies where local landowners would have votes in proportion to the amount of land they owned rather than in accordance with their social rank.
Well aware of the opposition that his proposals aroused among both the privileged orders and the members of the parlements, who were now confirmed in their belief that a strong and favoured aristocracy was a necessar
y bulwark against royal absolutism, Calonne suggested that they should be submitted for approval to a special Assembly of Notables, a convention nominated by the King, of which Henri IV had been able to make successful use in the past.
This Assembly of 144 members, including mayors and magistrates as well as nobles and prelates, met in February 1787, and Calonne, revealing the existence of an immense annual deficit, opened the proceedings with challenging words: ‘Only in the abolition of abuses lies the means to answer our need. The abuses which we must wipe out for the public good are of the widest extent, enjoy the greatest protection, have the deepest roots and the most spreading branches.’ But already the opponents of Calonne’s policies were combining to render them unworkable. Both the Comte de Provence and the King’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, voiced their disapproval of him. So did Loménie de Brienne, the sickly, ingratiating and scarcely less than agnostic Archbishop of Toulouse, who hoped to succeed him. So did Étienne d’Aligre, one of the leading magistrates in the Paris parlement. So did the adherents of Necker who chose to believe their hero’s assertion that France had been solvent at the time of his enforced resignation. So did the influential Archbishop of Narbonne who declared, ‘M. de Calonne wishes to bleed France to death. He is merely asking us whether to make the incision on the feet, the arms or the jugular vein.’ So did Marie Antoinette, who strongly condemned Calonne’s publication of an avertissement which, distributed free all over France as an appeal to public opinion, was condemned by a member of her Household as ‘a terrible diatribe against the clergy and the nobility’. Obliged to listen to these voices raised in condemnation of his Minister, the King at first supported him, then wavered, and constantly asked for advice. ‘He asked advice of everybody,’ wrote Pierre Malouet, a well-informed government official, ‘and seemed to be saying to every person he approached, “What can I do? What should be done?”’ In the end Calonne was dismissed and exiled to his estates in Lorraine, whence, threatened with proceedings against him by the Paris parlement, he fled to England, the first of the émigrés.
Brienne replaced him; but when he presented to the Notables a shadowy version of the proposals he had formerly rejected out of hand, the Notables were in no mood to accept from the Archbishop even so mild a concoction of the medicines that they had refused to take from Calonne. Their Assembly was dissolved and they went home, having demonstrated the firm determination of most of their number to prevent the King’s Ministers tampering with their privileges.
The land tax and other measures which the Notables had rejected now had to be presented to the Paris parlement. And parlement, among whose members were several who had sat with the Notables, was equally determined not to let them pass, protesting that any new taxation required the assent of the Estates General, a consultative body of clergy, nobles and representatives of the Commons or Third Estate, which had not met since 1614 in the reign of Louis XIII. Confronted by the intransigence of parlement and worried by a crisis in foreign affairs, the King and Brienne, backed by Chrétien de Lamoignon, Keeper of the Seals, the one strong man in the Government, decided to use force. They dispatched troops to the Palais de Justice and had two of the leading and most intractable parlementaires, Jean Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil and Goislard de Montsabert, arrested. Three days later, on 8 May 1788, after the King had invoked his right to enforce various edicts to which they had objected, the Paris parlement and all the provincial parlements were deprived of their power of opposing the monarch’s will.
That summer violence erupted all over France. ‘In Dauphiny and other Provinces,’ reported the chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy in Paris, ‘no Taxes whatever can be collected, and accounts of some fresh act of Revolt and disobedience arrive every day from different parts of the Kingdom.’ Protesting that they were acting in defence of the parlements, nobles and magistrates came together to block the Government’s attempt to impose equality of taxation. There were riots in Brittany, Burgundy, Béarn and Provence. In Pau and Rennes violent demonstrations were provoked among the population by local parlementaires. In Dauphiné there were clashes between troops and the townspeople of Grenoble in which twenty soldiers were wounded and two demonstrators killed. In Paris there was fighting in the streets and an effigy of Brienne was burned before cheering crowds.
As the prospect of national bankruptcy grew more daunting, Brienne turned in desperation to the clergy, but they, in an extraordinary meeting of their Assembly, condemned the Government’s reforms and granted only a small proportion of the money for which they had been asked. Forced to accept defeat, Brienne announced on 5 July that the Estates General would be summoned to Versailles in May the following year; and a few weeks later he handed in his resignation. The King had now no alternative but to reappoint Necker, to recall the parlements and to agree to the replacement of de Lamoignon by the supposedly more moderate Charles de Barentin.
The general satisfaction aroused by the announcement that the Estates General were to be reconvened was, however, soon overcast by the further declaration by the Paris parlement that they should be composed as they had been in 1614, which was to say that the three orders whose representatives were to meet at Versailles, the clergy, the nobility and the Third Estate, or Commons, were to have an equal number of delegates. This meant that, if each order were to vote separately, the clergy and nobility could always combine in defence of their privileges to thwart the aspirations of the Third Estate. The popularity of parlement, which the middle class had formerly been inclined to view as a bulwark against despotic government, collapsed, as Professor Goodwin has observed, overnight. ‘Thus it was that, in the autumn and winter of 1788, the struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy was transformed into a social and political conflict between the privileged and unprivileged classes. As the issues broadened, the solidarity of the privileged orders weakened. A split appeared even in the ranks of the parlement of Paris between the conservative magistrates and those with liberal inclinations…The Third Estate also found champions of its claims among the lay and clerical aristocracy…Lastly, there was formed in these months, in opposition to the coalition of the conservative aristocracy, a combination of liberal theorists and politicians who assumed the style of the “patriotic” or “national” party.’ ‘The controversy has completely changed,’ wrote a contemporary witness, Jacques Mallet du Pan, the journalist. ‘King, despotism and constitution are now relatively minor questions. The war is between the Third Estate and the other two orders.’
Politics now became of all-consuming interest. Noisy discussions took place every night in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal where there passed from hand to hand a stream of freshly printed pamphlets, propounding the ideas of a new declaration of rights, new conceptions of national sovereignty, and France’s need of a constitution.
The business going forward in the pamphlets shops is incredible [Arthur Young was soon to write]. I went to the Palais Royal to see what new things were published, and to procure a catalogue of all. Every hour produces something new. Thirteen came out today, sixteen yesterday and ninety-two last week…This spirit of reading political tracts, they say, spreads into the provinces, so that all the presses of France are equally employed…Is it not wonderful that, while the press teems with the most levelling and even seditious principles that if put in execution would overturn the monarchy, nothing in reply appears, and not the least step is taken by the Court to restrain this extreme licentiousness of publication? It is easy to conceive the spirit that must be raised among the people. But the coffee-houses in the Palais Royal present yet more singular and astonishing spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening à gorge deployée to certain orators, who from the chairs or table harangue each his little audience. The eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the present government, cannot easily be imagined.
These orators and journalists harangued the customers in the Café de Foy, the Régence, the Caveau and the Procope. Meetings were held in the fashionable salons of Madame de Tessé and Madame de Genlis. In masonic lodges the theories and writings of the philosophes were disseminated. Political clubs, which had been suppressed by the Government, reopened and found scores of new members; and new clubs were founded and soon fully subscribed. In cities all over France, the common practice of the upper floors of buildings being occupied by bourgeois families and the lower by the common people made the dissemination of revolutionary ideas between classes all the more rapid and effective.
The Days of the French Revolution Page 3