CHAPTER V - Turgot a Cabinet Minister

The Duchess d'Enville belonged heart and soul to the philosophers and the economists, whom she received in her beautiful ehd/tall of La Roche*Guyon. She was an impassioned advocate of frec trade in corn, and was spared neither by the satires, nor by the songs, nor even by the c.aricntures with which the courtiers and the gentlemen of the parliament continually over whelmed the new reformers. She belonged to the La Rochefoucauld family, with which Count de l\laurepas was very proud of being connected. She recommended Turgot to him most strongly at the very time when the Countess de ~taurepas and Very were recommending him likewise. Thus it is that Turgot became minister, not c.alled, perhaps, by public opinion, as it has been said, because public opinion did not exist then, or was only just beginning to appear; but he was designated by his admirers and friends to an all-powerful prime minister.

This event caused great joy in the camp of the economists and the Em:ydojJtdis/es/ but a rather serious disappointment afterwards manifested itself when they learnt that, if Turgot was indeed minister, it was to the navy, and not to the finances, that he had been appointed. &« This selection meets with general approval." :Mercy writes to :Maria Theresa, U not because Turgot is supposed 94 to possess great talent for naval matters, but everyone knows that he is thoroughly honest." Marie Antoinette was not dissatisfied, and said to her mother that "Turgot enjoys the reputation of a very honest man." The na\'y, besides, was only a temporary appointment. One month later, August 24th, 1774, Turgot was named {01tlt'lj/ttlY gblt.Yal. 'Vhilst thanking the king, Turgot was very much mo,,·ed. Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse relates that he said to him: U It is not to the king that I give myself up, but to the honest man," and that the king answered, taking him by both hands, "You will not have been mistaken."

The Abbe de Very gives of that scene a similar description. Turgot was with him at Compiegne, where the whole court had assembled, when ~laurepas came to inform him of his appointment to the £'()lltrole genero/. He went immediately to the king, and, on his return, this is how he related to Very the conversation he had just had with Louis XVI: "Sire," said he, ")'ou must allow me to put down in writing my general views, and if 1 may so say, my conditions on the manner in whichyou should assist me in this administration of the finances; for, I own to you, it makes me tremble on account of the superficial acquaintance I have with it." "Yes! yes!" the king is reported to have said, U just as you please; but I give you my word of honour beforehand," and he took hold of both his hands whilst he went on speaking, "to share all your views, and always support you in the courageoussteps you will have to take."

111rgot's Progral1l1UC. 95 On the next day Turgot delivered to the king his famous programme. "I limit myself just now, Sire, to remind lOU of these three cxpresstons; NQ bankruptcy, no increase in the taxes, no loans. No bankruptcy, either avowed or conceak'd by compulsol}' redut':tion. No increase in the taxes: the rcason of this lit-os in the situa.tion of your people, and still more in the heart of your Maji."Sty. No loa.ns, because every loan always diminishes the available income ,; it nec::essitates, besides, at the end of some time, either bankruptcy or an increase in the taxes." 'ro carry out this progranmlc he only proposed one means, the reducing of the expenditure, and the bringing of its amount below that of the receipts. He knows per~ fectIy well that aU those who have expenses to carryon in the variQus branches of the public service will ever maintain that all thos~ expenses are indispensable, and he feels no doubt that they \,,"ill support their statement by excellent arguments; but he knows also that all their statements ·shouJd yiekJ to the absolute neces~ sity of economy. He represents strongly to the king that the people can be relieved only through the reform of abuses, which is difficult, bC<.":ause there are always many people interested in keeping up abuses, "for there is no abuse which does not maintain some person or other. . . . U " I shall have to fight/' said he, "against your ~Iajesty's naturalkindness and generosity, and against that of the personsdearest to you. c •• Your ~lajcsty will be pleased to remember that I abandon Turgot.

myself less to the king, than to you individually, to the bonest man, to the man just and good." Turgot evidently dreaded the influence of the queen. I ha\·e read the very draft of the programme. After having written the words, "against your ~fajesty's generosity," "furgot had already added the words, U and of the ••.n when he stopped and covered the "and of the 't by U and against that of the persons, et~..n On the very next day Turgot set to work. Named COlltnUeur lrhzeral, August 24th, 1774, he was to be dis missed ~fay 18th, Ii 76, at the end of twenty months and eighteen days. Out of these twenty m.onths he enjoyed go<>d health during thirteen, and suffered from gout during the seven others; but mnessdid not influence his w'Ork, and we can affirm that during the whole time that he exercised his duties as contruleur gfJzeral he never ceased for one single instant the frank and honest execution of what we can designate his programmt!) to use a modern expression, that i!: to say, the re-establish· ment of the finances, the struggle against the abuses, the destruction of privileges, freedom of work, commerce, and industry) which had been crushed by regulations and monopolies,endeavouringthus to realisewithout violence, fifteen years before the Revolution or' 1789, all the reforms conquered later on in the civil and economic order, at the cost of so many efforts and sufferings.

He was implacable for persons who stood up for abuses in order to live upon them, whenever he thought these persons intelligent enough to appreciate their own The FanJlers-GclltraiFrighle1led. 97 acts; but he \\"as indulgent for the ignorant, vigorously stnmping out at the snme time the disordersinto which their ignorance might hurry them. He hnd n due regnrd, besides, (or vested rights. and he always took care to pay equitably the amount of the offices which he decided upon suppressing. His accession to the (Oil/role gb,t,nl had (rightened the farmers-genernl. Ie People S&"ly that the financiers are frightened to death," the Abbe Haudeau wrotei U they are wrong; ~I. Turgot is not giddy enough to upset immediately the lease of the Carnung of the taxes, or the other financial arrangements." During the discussion which he had in 1776 with ~lirom~ni1 on the suppression of the (ortleel (statute.

labour) he penned some notes in answer to the observa· tions of the keeper of the seals. In those notes a passage occurred well worth the attention of those who used to consider, or who still consider TurKot as the chief oC a band of fanatics. "I know quite as well as anybody else that we should not always do the best thing possible, and that, if \~ cannot give up the idea of correcting by degrees the defects of an old constitution, we must proceed only slowly, in proportion as public opinion and the course of events render the alterations possible." \Vith the view of convincing public opinion, and destroying prejudices \vhich he considered as founded upon ignorance,he had conceived the plan of a board which would have fonned an administration analogous to our Ministry of Public Instruction.

l1trgot. " I think," said he to the king, « that I cannot propose to your ~fajesty anything more advantageous for your people. and more likely to maintain peace and good order, better qualified to give activity to all useful works, to make your authorit)< cherished, and to attach more and more t.) yourself the hearts of your subjects, than to have them all thoroughly instructed in the obligations they have towards society, and towards your power which protects society: the duties which these obligations lay upon them, the interest they have in fulfilling these duties for the public good and for their own. This moral and social training requires books expressly written by competition, and a schoolmaster in every parish who shall teach them to the children, togetber with writing, ciphering, and land-measurement . • • . The civic education given throughout the whole extent of the kingdom under the direction of the educational board, together with the common-sense books it would order to be written, and from which it would compel every professor to teach, would contribute still more Lo train a well-informed and virtuous people/' 'Vhilst preoccupied with the thought of destroying prejudices for the future, and moulding, as he was wont to saYt a new nation, Turgol attended quite as eagerly to the prescnt, and sought the promptest and most efficacious means of healing the inveterate wound of financial disorder, rendered worse still by the Abbe Terray's dishonest administration.

He had been scarcely installed in the office of (on/roletiT 1erray's Intrigues. 99 gIn frat than he commissioned those of his assistants in whom he had the greatest confidence to collect the ele~ ments of what we should now can the budget of income and of expenditure. u He ordered,l1 says Dupont de Nemours, "the draw... ing up of methodical and minute tahles which should contain the most complete details on every branch of the income and the expenditure." This statement has been pre&t:f\'ed. \Ve have also a statement of the same kind made hy his predecessor a few days before. The Abbe Terray, whom Louis XVI had retained for a few months in the ministry, had hoped that he might remain there perm:t nently. by setting his system of policy in tune with the new reign, and by transforming his principles, since new principles seemed fashionable. In the memoir and the statementto which we alluded, he cast upon d'Aiguillon and de Boynes, respectively~Iinisters of 'Var and of the Navy, the responsibility of the deficit, and laid a great stress on the efforts he had made to reduce the expendi.

ture b}' every possible means. \Veber states that in the conversationshe had with his friend, the abbe said that "he had succeeded by dint of injustices,bankruptcies, :md spoliations in filling the deficit, all but five millions. He had left 57,000.000 in the treasury,besides 14,000,000 in reserve for unforeseen requirements. The antidpa. tions were reduced to two months. He had provided for the usual expenses, war preparations, the circumstance 100 Tttrgot. of three weddings, nnd other extraordinar)? outlays which were to remain secret." Turgot's adversaries have contrasted the situation of the treasury at the two epochs of Terray's downfall and of Turgot'~; and they ha"'e pretended that Turgot exw hausted the:: reserve left by his predecessor. Linguet used to say of Terray that he was a Suny, because he had amassed an amount of 56,000,000. Turgot, according to hiro, could be compared only to Sully's successors, who had squandered away the millions heaped up in the Bastille. \Ve shaH follow neither the discus~ sion of Terrny's supporters nor the arguments of Turgofs champions,for both would be equally idle; posterity has pronounced its verdict; it has selected between the un· scrupulous minister of Louis XV and the honest minister of Louis XVI.

t. One of Turgot's first measures had been to dismiss the maUre des "t~lI;les, Brochet de Saint-Prest, director ofthe corn agency. "I am delighted," wrote l\Iademoisellede L'Espinasse, "that :M. Turgot has already dismissed the man of the corn business." \Ve must remember that in 1770, that is to say, four years previously, Terray had suppressed the liberal clauses of the declaration of 1763, and the edict of 1764 on the trade in corn, and that he had once again brought that trade under the se~·erity of the old police regulations. B}' the return to the former usages he had flatteredthe The A bbl Galialli. leI prejudices of the people and the parliaments, and satis fied the publicists, who contended that the national subsistence could not be abandoned to what they called the unfettered cupidity of commercial people. He had found, besides, a valuable support {or the upholding of his politkaJ ,'jews in the book of a man of considerable wit, an intimate friend of lil/eralellrsand Ent;J'c/ojtdistts, whose ideas on questions of economy, not very liberal, contrasted singularly with the opinions of most of his friends.

The Abbe GaHani, for it is to him that we allude, had composed a series of dialogues on free trade in corn, and in these dialogues, full of sharpness, of ",it, and of examples borrowed (rom the history of all nations, he had affirmed that so far as commerce in cereals is concerned, policy could be only one arising from cir cumstances ; it must be different according to the variou'i countries, and in the same country it could not be the same in the interior and on the sea-coast. The Abbe Terray did nQt disdain the help brought to him by the Abbe Gatiani, but he cared very little about his arguments. It was really neither the cries of the peoI»e, nor the wishes expressed by the parliaments, nor Galiani's theories, which were to decide him to cancel the edict of 1764-He yielded to none of the arguments of those who reasoned in conConnity with his own view~, just as he neglected the advicesscnt to him by Turgot (rom l.imousin, in the seven admirable letters which \\'t~ have analysed above.

102 lurgot. The aim he pursued was none else but the establish ment of a monopoly in the corn trade--monopoly handed over to his underlings, his associates, and perhaps, as it has often been stated, the associates of King Louis XV. According to the arrangement which has been designated by the too startling expression of Ie pacle de fami1le, the great point was to realise at any ratc the monopoly of ~peculation on the article of con sumption of prominent necessity par excellence,the bread of the people. ~luch has been written on the pacle de famine / it is an incident, the importance of which has been much exaggerated by popular report; but it remains beyond doubt that dealings in corn which have been the result of it were accompained by thefts, criminal dilapidations, and disgraceful speculations which we are right in denouncing and condemning, although no historian has ever been able to draw up an' exact list of them, or to give the enumeration of the persons who made their fortune by them, or derived from them some profit.

A lawyer, a man of business, named Leprevost de Beaumont, had been informed of the agreement made for the establishing of a society by a retired Paris baker, Malisset, inventor of an improved system for the grinding of corn, and a certain number of capitalists. The object of that society was the execution of a treaty entered upon with the government for cc the care, the providing, and the preservation of the kings cereals."

The "Pacte de FaIl1i11e." 1°3 This was in 1765, and the agreement which must now be executed anticipated a permanent 5uppl)". The corn or the flour produced by it was to he constantly main tained in a good state of preservation, and with that. view the society (or the farming of the cereals was authorised to sell the old purchases and replace them by new ones, according to the fluctuation of the markc:~t. a circumstance which excused, sanctioned, and en· eouraged speculation. l.epre\'ost de Beaumont saw in that agreement a compact made with the vic\v of starving the people··..·../t peult tit famint: he wanted to denounce it, but, overtaken before he could give to the Rouen parliament a copy of it which he had prepared. he was arrested and sent to the Bastille, from which he came out only on the 14th of July, 1789. The Revolution it was which set him free. "It is not," said he, "from suspicions,reports, conjectures, or false statements that I denounce this horrible machination; it is from the terms of its compact." And when Laverdy, the contra/ell' gb,t,al who had signed that deed in 1765, appeared on Brumaire 3rd, year II of the Republic, before the Revolutionary tribunal, I..cprevost c.ame to support, spontaneously,Fouquier-Tinville's accusation. All those, however, who had fonned part of that society, who had concurred towards that s().Called paclt' dt famine, and whom Leprevost de Beaumont had reproached {or having gained,as he said, "tens of millions, by hundreds at a time," had successively died, either ruined or in a state of insolvency; and ~fali$set himself, the agent1°4 Tttrgot.

general of the company, still alive in 1791, vegetated without any resources, and as if out of his mind. Leprevost de Beaumont's accusations were evidently exaggerated. It is possible that the corn company gave shares of interests on its profits to influential personages, to the king's favourites both male and female, perhaps to the king himself; proof has been found that such was the case for the shares in the profits of the general farming of the taxes. It is not less dear that l~ertain of the society's agents speculated on their own account, and that a few clerks gave themselves lip to dilapidations and thefts, of which the produce was squandered by them, and helped them to keel> up an impudent opulence,little justified by their patrimonial fortune. But never has anyone been able to find the track of the tens of thou y sands of millions, which, if we believe Leprevost de Beaumont, were drawn by :Malisset's accomplices from the people, so wretchedly poor, of the last years of Louis XV.

In consequence of Leprevost de Beaumont's revela tions) whether from fear lest they should be made public, or from other reasons of public or prh-ate interests, the )falisset·agreement was quashed by the Abbe Terra)' himself. A new combination, that of the regie ill/tress/e, bad been invented as its substitute. That regie was to pursue the same aim as the previous farming, that is to say. it was to provide for the distribution of corn, so that the provinces the best supplied should give their over.. plus to the less favoured ones. cc A commission had been formed,tl so say the memoirs on Terray, It to inquire into the cc:>rn business. It had under its n.uthor it}' two directors or agents-gen.eral for the purcrmses and tr..msmi~sjon~ (Sorin de Bonne and Doumerc); so that ~\H ahuses, in this branch of the public s~rvice, ought to have beenimmt:diately suppressed. But the(;ounciJlors of St.'lte complained that they were not eonsuhed, that nothing was conuntmkat(~d to them, amI, indt~ed,. the Abbe Terray had always brought to them the work half.