‘Some master hand, of very superior talents, and inflexible courage … at the helm to guide events, instead of being driven by them.’
Arthur Young (1741–1820), British agriculturalist and writer, describing what France needed in the 1780s if it was to avert Revolution
ON THE FACE of it, Louis XVI’s next Finance Minister was a safe pair of hands, a 58-year-old former intendant called Louis Gabriel Taboureau des Réaux. Publicly, he received the message: ‘Leave things as they are … until we can make some reasonable improvements.’
It might have sounded as though the radical reforms were over, but in fact Réaux was just a figurehead for the de facto Finance Minister, who could not be given the title because he was a Protestant – despite Louis XVI’s law on religious freedom, only Catholics were allowed to serve in the King’s Council.
This was Jacques Necker, a Swiss financier who had shown such skill at money-management that he was made partner of a Parisian bank before he was 30 and retired, a multi-millionaire, at the age of 40 – all this after starting his career as a humble bank clerk.
Behind the reassuring smokescreen of the mature Réaux, Louis XVI hoped that Necker could inject some dynamism into France’s finances, and appointed him Director General of the Royal Treasury.
Necker set out to show that he was just as radical a reformer as Turgot, but a man who was not going to put all his trust in the free market. He wrote an essay for Louis XVI, the Note to the King on the Establishment of Provincial Administrations, setting out his aims, all of which sounded perfectly laudable.
He promised Louis that he would ‘use only slow, gentle and wise means’, and that he would ‘offer multiple guarantees of the happiness of the people, without disturbing public order’. If his measures were accepted, Necker said, ‘we would no longer see the people weighed down beneath taxes and legal fees …’ – a direct jibe at the parliaments – ‘… we would free the inhabitants of the countryside painlessly from the yoke beneath which they are living’.
Necker recognized that taxes were necessary: ‘It is the power to tax that constitutes the essence of sovereignty.’ But, he warned, the people who collect these taxes and have the power to spend them must be well chosen: ‘In whichever hands the monarch places this trust, only those of his subjects who use it well will remind the people that a good king is watching over them.’
Necker concluded his essay by reminding Louis XVI that times were changing. In the past, kings had been remembered for winning wars or for their ‘magnificence’. But ‘today, concentrating on the people’s happiness, and establishing the laws that can guarantee it, seem to offer the only new, and the most noble, ambition.’ Necker told Louis that ‘the eyes of the nation are on Your Majesty, and they seem to see a harmony between its needs and its sovereign’s character.’
Whether Louis XVI actually read this dense, 25-page document is debatable. After a day’s hunting, he might well have fallen asleep during the central chapter where Necker outlined all the practical details of his reforms. But a canny operator like Necker probably read out the key, flattering sections, and Maurepas, the Chief Minister, would have reassured Louis that the Swiss banker had his head and heart in the right place.
Necker’s plan was daring. At a stroke, he proposed to replace a whole tranche of job-for-life, commission-raking tax collectors with administrators who were on a fixed salary. He also wanted to strip the noble parliaments of their powers, appointing the ‘provincial assemblies’ proposed in his essay on reforming administrations. The parliamentarians were so furious at this that they instantly started a resistance campaign, and managed to stop all but two of the assemblies taking over in the provinces.
But Necker was like a wheel of Gruyère cheese bouncing down a Swiss mountainside – on a roll. With Louis XVI’s blessing, he worked on immediate, short-term savings while planning a complete overhaul of France’s finances. And if he had been able to push through all his reforms, the Revolution might never have happened.
It is fascinating to read Necker’s progress report, published in 1781. Simply entitled Compte rendu au Roi – a report to the King – it is a lucid, easily readable 100-page essay on the state of France’s financial health after four years of Necker’s reforms.
The bottom line is promising for a country that had been on the verge of bankruptcy – a profit of ten million. But ten million was a dangerously low amount to be in the black. That was less than a third of the amount spent on the royal households in a year. It certainly wasn’t enough to protect France against a famine or an epidemic. But, as we shall see, Necker gave some very precise excuses for not producing a much better result. And he offered radical suggestions to cure the chronic French tendency to overspend – most of them just as democratic as anything proposed after the Revolution.
The report opens with Necker reminding Louis XVI how wise he was to commission the audit. In Britain, he says, ‘every year the [financial] situation is presented to parliament and then published. In France, we have constantly made a mystery of our accounts.’ Necker is in favour of ‘shedding a light upon the financial situation’ (that ultra-modern word lumière again). He recommends passing a law obliging the Minister of Finance to publish the state’s accounts at any time the King wishes. This, he says, is how Britain manages to negotiate cheap loans for itself. Lenders will only offer low interest rates if they trust the borrower.
Necker then hits Louis with the first punch: when Necker took over the accounts, ‘everything was a model of pointless and complicated spending. A multitude of officers were acting as suppliers, cooks and dinner guests.’ This kitchen metaphor was a none-too-subtle hint that job-for-life aristocrats were still exploiting the system to cheat Louis and the country as a whole. And Necker followed it up with a clear threat to the complacent hangers-on at Versailles and all over France. Praising Louis for ‘Your Majesty’s particular taste for order’, he says that the required savings can be achieved ‘by ending a lot of privileges and useless occupations’.
For example, Necker pinpoints the massive 28 million livres dished out in pensions awarded to favoured aristocrats. He notes that Louis himself was surprised to learn that the sum was so enormous – thereby defending the King against frequent charges that the pensions were being given to his cronies.fn1
Necker goes further, suggesting several revolutionary ways of helping the poor, ‘this class of your subjects towards which the benevolent hand of Your Majesty must constantly stretch out’. Necker intends, he says, to lessen the sufferings of the poor beneath ‘the imperious yoke of property and wealth’.
Necker wants to alleviate their tax bill, first of all by reforming the taille, the tax paid by non-aristocratic landowners, mostly peasant farmers trying to eke out a living. This, Necker points out, is the only tax that has risen steadily, and the only one ‘that can be increased in secret, often without the sovereign knowing’. Capping the taille would therefore help a large section of the low-earning French population.
What’s more, Necker says, income from the taille often doesn’t reach the King’s purse. Aristocratic tax collectors are creaming it off. From now on, Necker proposes a fixed tax based strictly on the size of a landowner’s property, with the possibility to challenge any unwarranted increases in the rate.
Necker repeats his call to end the corvée, the workdays served mainly by the rural poor, and praises Louis for releasing his own bonded labourers – other landowners must do the same, Necker says, and put an end to the exploitation of feudal serfs by aristocratic landowners.
He also turned his attention to the sensitive issue of grain shortages. Grain, Necker says, is ‘the only product for which changing prices influence the people’s ability to subsist, and public tranquillity’. According to him, the only way to protect the people from famine and the regime from riots is to ban exports of grain during times of shortage.
Necker naturally tries to reassure Louis that democratization of the tax system won’t bankrupt France, and suggests that the country holds its salvation in its own hands. Already, he says, innovative, well-made French products attract visitors who spend 30 million livres per year, but the manufacturing sector needs to be encouraged and expanded,fn2 which is exactly what Louis was doing by creating an ‘annual award for the invention most useful to trade and industry’. Necker likes the idea of this award because, he says, ‘any type of glory is the best motivation for the French’.
It all sounds formidable – Louis XVI, modern monarch, benevolent mentor of France’s most democratic Finance Minister, tackling the country’s problems head on, with an audit that is ten times more transparent than most modern governments would dare to be. It is hardly surprising that the Compte rendu au Roi was a huge hit, and sold 100,000 copies, earning a tidy sum for the public purse. It is difficult to imagine a modern politician’s budget speech topping the book charts.
But openness can come at a price, and Necker’s report was peppered with embarrassing revelations about excessive spending by Louis XVI and his family. It was as though one of Marie-Antoinette’s necklaces had broken during one of her husband’s speeches promising budget costs, scattering diamonds at the feet of the scandal-hungry pamphlet-writers.
Necker’s essay revealed to a hungry public that the running cost of the King’s household and those of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI’s three sisters had come to 25.7 million livres for the previous year. And this did not include the 8.04 million lavished on his three brothers. To ordinary French people, these were unimaginably high sums, the equivalent of billions today – just to keep the royal family in curtains, servants, food, drink and horses. Not forgetting the unforgivable 28 million in pensions to royal cronies.
These revelations were all the more damaging to Louis XVI’s reputation because Necker’s simplified list of outgoings was concentrated into two crystal-clear pages. Anyone vaguely literate could compare this extravagant royal spending with, say, the mere five million allotted to roads and bridges in the whole of France.
This seems to explain Necker’s almost apologetic note to Louis at the end of his report: ‘I don’t know if people will think that I have followed the right route, but I have sought it.’
Sorry, Your Majesty, Necker seems to be saying, but you did ask…
As well as embarrassing the royal family, Necker terrified the privileged classes, and certainly made a lot of them poorer. And he didn’t stop at financial reform. He began hijacking other ministers’ responsibilities if he thought they weren’t being radical enough. In the early 1780s, France’s poorest citizens could be grateful to Necker for alleviating their sufferings, exactly as he had promised.
In 1780, Louis XVI visited the Hôtel-Dieu, the hospital in central Paris, leaving in tears after seeing three or four patients to a bed, with the dying nudged on to the floor as soon as they were too weak to resist. He commissioned Necker to reform French hospitals, and the Swiss minister immediately sprang into action.
In order to set up the Hôpital Necker,fn3 he had to haggle fiercely with the Bishop of Paris, who was insisting that the building he wanted belonged to the Church and should be used to house nuns. Necker responded by forcing the bishop to grant him a lease at a reduced price. No noble-born clergyman was going to stand in the way of humanitarian reforms.
The new hospital’s manifesto, Rules and Customs of this House, smacks very much of Necker’s writing style, though it may well have been written by his wife. It begins:
Imperceptibly, time introduces and establishes abuses in the best institutions. Even hospitals have not been immune to this general law, and these monuments to humanity have sometimes become monuments to indifference and even barbarity. Is it not necessary, or at least useful, to work on reform and to seek to establish more order and economy in these charitable institutions?
The express aim of this new hospital was to serve as a model:
We have tried by order of His Majesty to test a small hospital of 120 patients, one to a bed, cared for in the greatest cleanliness, and with all the necessary attention to ensure their cure; they will be housed in well-ventilated rooms, free of noise, and cared for by sisters of charity, as well as a doctor and surgeon who will live on the premises and devote themselves entirely to this job. They [the patients] will be given the healthiest food and the most carefully selected drugs.
Necker also convinced Louis XVI that French prisons needed urgent modernizing. This idea was inspired by an Englishman, John Howard, who had published a report, The State of the Prisons, in 1777. Again, a sign that Necker and Louis XVI were men of the times.
Necker visited some of Paris’s worst jails, and noted that not only were conditions dirty and cruel (unless you were rich enough to pay off the warders), but the most violent criminals were locked up with harmless debtors and even actors who had disappointed their noble audience and provoked a lettre de cachet (the royal decree whereby an aristocrat could have any commoner imprisoned on a whim).
In August 1780, Necker published a Declaration on the Establishment of New Prisons. In it, he informed the people that Louis XVI wanted to ‘give a helping hand to those who owe their misfortune to their transgressions’, and that ‘we have been moved for a long time by the state of the prisons in our kingdom’.fn4 Prisons, Necker said, needed to be cleaner, better managed and less crowded, and it was necessary to ‘destroy the underground dungeons, so that men who have been unjustly accused or suspected, and then found not guilty by the courts, should not suffer a rigorous punishment just by being held in these dark, unhealthy places’.
As promised in his declaration, Necker got Louis to buy and demolish a sixteenth-century building in central Paris, and build two model prisons in its place: the Grande Force for men, and the more ladylike-sounding Petite Force for women. By 1782, they were ready, and inmates were transferred from crowded, insalubrious cells elsewhere in Paris into a prison that had an infirmary, dormitories with real beds, fireplaces and an exercise yard, as well as a chapel where the inmates were obliged to pray for forgiveness.
John Howard visited the Force prisons in 1783 and was impressed. He wrote: ‘The King’s Declaration for this alteration, dated the 30th of August 1780, contains some of the most humane and enlightened sentiments respecting the conduct of prisons.’ Howard also praised the new system of commissaires, noblemen who were appointed to oversee each prison, saying that: ‘These officers are very humane towards the distressed. They can oblige creditors to accept one third part of debts.’ This at a time when London’s Newgate Prison was full of languishing eternal debtors.fn5
What impressed Howard most, though, was the cleanliness. The French prison courtyards were washed down once or twice a day, killing the noxious odours that he had smelt in English prisons: ‘I sometimes thought these courts were the cleanest places in Paris.’
Of course, Louis XVI’s prisons weren’t all transformed into models of modern leniency at a stroke. Plenty of putrid dungeons with cruel, corrupt warders survived. Galley slaves awaiting transfer to the sea ports were still chained up in the château de la Tournelle, on the banks of the Seine – where the luxury restaurant the Tour d’Argent (Silver Tower) now stands. And some punishments were as barbaric as ever: women who killed their husbands might be burned alive. Men killing their wives would be broken on the wheel (the system whereby the victim was roped to a wheel, then spun round as an executioner smashed his limbs with an iron bar, before leaving him to die). Commoners could be broken on the wheel just for robbery or arson, while noble murderers might be beheaded, or, if very lucky, declared insane and spared.
However, throughout Louis XVI’s reign, the use of the death penalty was being reduced – at Douai in the north of France, between 1721 and 1730, out of 260 defendants accused of a capital crime, 39 were condemned to death (about 15 per cent); in the same town between 1781 and 1790, only 26 out of 500 were executed – 5 per cent. By contrast, after 1792, revolutionary France would be plunged into an era of mass executions and lynchings.
Necker also put an end to torture in prisons. Until 1780 the euphemistically named ‘question préparatoire’ was still being used to make sure that people accused of capital crimes confessed that they were really guilty. Methods of torture included the wooden horse (a prisoner would sit on the sharp edge of a V-shaped table with their legs weighted down), osselets (bones jammed between the prisoner’s fingers), estrapade (for which the prisoner had his or her hands tied behind their back and was then winched up by the rope until the shoulders dislocated), and – a Parisian speciality – brodequins or boots, in which the victim’s legs were crushed between wooden splints. Thanks to Necker, Louis XVI put a stop to confessions obtained in this way.
Reading Necker and Louis XVI’s intentions, and John Howard’s dispassionate report, it seems that in the 1780s, France’s penal system was heading in the right direction. It is slightly ironic that the coming Revolution would take as its most powerful symbol the supposedly inhumane conditions in a royal prison – the Bastille. John Howard tried to visit the Bastille in 1783:
I … knocked hard at the outer gate, and immediately went forward through the guard to the drawbridge before the entrance of the castle. But while I was contemplating this gloomy mansion, an officer came out much surprised; and I was forced to retreat … and thus regained that freedom which for one locked up within those walls is almost impossible to obtain.
But then, as we shall see, there were only seven prisoners locked up there in July 1789, and the Bastille was stormed for its supply of gunpowder rather than to alleviate the sufferings of its inmates – all of whom were reimprisoned after the Revolution, anyway.
All in all, Jacques Necker sounds like the kind of political figure that modern French voters can only dream about – a democratic reformer with his heart in the right place, an efficient administrator who is not scared of shaking up the establishment, and a politician who actually delivers on his promises. Too good to be true, surely.
Well, yes.
The problem with Necker’s Compte rendu au Roi was that it was written in self-defence and to increase public trust in France’s economic prospects. As such, it had two main flaws. First, some of the income he listed had not actually been received yet. And most importantly, he conveniently ‘forgot’ to include 200 million livres of debt.
But this, he would have explained, wasn’t his fault: most of the debt had been run up because of circumstances outside his control. He had hinted at these in the first line of his outgoings for 1780: ‘Extraordinary war spending … 65,200,000.’
The circumstances in question were that, in early 1778, at a time when Louis XVI was meant to be cutting expenditure, he had embarked on a war. He had been seduced, in purely platonic terms, by the roving American politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin, who had come to Paris in 1776 to drum up support for his country’s independence.
To Louis XVI’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Charles Gravier de Vergennes, the arguments in favour of helping Franklin and his revolutionary friends were obvious: getting Britain – France’s favourite enemy – entangled in a long, difficult war was sure to weaken its economy. Furthermore, if the British were busy fighting to stay in North America, they might stop trying to annex French sugar islands in the Caribbean. And siding with a major new independent ally would open up a whole new continent to French trade.
Vergennes was also keen to regain some of the territory in Canada that had been lost to Britain in the disastrous (to France, anyway) French and Indian War of 1754–63. He was virulently anti-British, and saw the American bid for independence as divine intervention: ‘Providence has chosen this as the time for the humiliation of England.’
As a fan of the sciences, Louis XVI knew that Franklin was famous for attracting lightning, so he didn’t want to provoke the British, and initially insisted that any French help should be kept secret. He therefore recruited Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (the watchmaker, author and fixer who had schemed for Louis XV)fn6 to run guns to America in exchange for tobacco. Beaumarchais set up a company with a Spanish name to disguise its French origins – Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie – and shipped 30,000 muskets and 2,000 barrels of gunpowder, as well as cannons, uniforms and other equipment across the Atlantic.
This did not cost France a penny, because it was trade rather than aid, but by 1778, Britain had got wind of France’s involvement – partly thanks to the young Marquis de La Fayette, a military adventurer out to avenge his father who had been cut down by a cannonball during the Seven Years War. Not a modest man by nature, La Fayette made a huge public show of going to join the good fight.
So in 1778, with Necker desperately trying to save money, Louis XVI began to commit hardware, men and cash to the American war. Seven French warships were sent, along with 6,000 troops headed by a trusted general, Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau – whose first battle during the American campaign was to stop his men trying to seduce Puritan women.
And overall, the expedition was a military success for France, which won glory for itself by sealing victory at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, when the French fleet cut off British reinforcements and forced the garrison to surrender.
With the British distracted, France attacked Malta and Gibraltar, grabbed the islands of Minorca and St Kitts, and regained trading posts in India. The French even felt emboldened to threaten an invasion of Britain, with 60,000 troops massing in Brittany and French ships sailing threateningly up the Channel – though they never actually got close to England, because they had been loaded with barrels of dirty drinking water, and the sailors started dropping dead.
Of course, all this military action came at a price. Necker had to find the running costs for a fleet of warships and thousands of men stationed in the Americas for more than two years, as well as funding for the aborted invasion of England. On top of this, Louis XVI donated 12 million livres in cash to the American cause, and granted another 12 million in loans.
In his Compte rendu au Roi, Necker was explicit about his struggle ‘to find the resources necessary in the middle of a war to defend the state, and the power of the sovereign’, without ‘neglecting the happiness of the people’.
His solution was to borrow. He raised over 380 million livres by offering subscription bonds to the French public – a regular income for life in exchange for a cash loan to the government. However, this was made more difficult than necessary. France’s previous secrecy about its accounts meant that Necker was forced to offer high interest rates in order to gain people’s trust. The scheme also backfired because investors began selling off the contracts to the parents of young children, in the children’s names, so that these young subscribers would have an income for the whole of their (hopefully long) life.
French critics of the idea of state borrowing are brutal in their demolition of Necker’s economics. In the 1970s, even the supposedly neutral Larousse encyclopedia contained an entry for ‘Necker (Jacques)’ which stated bluntly that ‘borrowing precipitated financial disaster’, and quoted an eighteenth-century economist called Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan, who had declared that Necker had ‘neither goal, doctrine or system’ – without mentioning that Meilhan was one of Necker’s bitterest enemies, having coveted the job of Minister of Finance for himself.
Borrowing was a highly risky strategy, but Necker achieved one miracle – he financed a war without raising taxes. And if the country had defaulted on his loans, it was the bourgeois and aristocratic speculators who would have lost out. In a way, it really was taking from the rich to protect the poor.
Ordinary French people therefore adored Necker, but his social policies and his attempts to end privilege made him dangerous enemies. In May 1781, an anonymous pamphlet appeared, the Lettre de M. le marquis de Caraccioli à M. d’Alembert. It was a common format, supposedly a letter from a naive foreigner expressing astonishment at the goings-on in France. This one rubbished Necker’s policies. It lambasted him as ‘a banker suddenly elevated to functions that he knows nothing about, a foreigner preferred to every subject of the King to occupy a place of trust alongside him; a Protestant given the most important ministry in a kingdom where Protestants are excluded from the lowest office’. Necker’s appointment was, the writer said ‘une grande bizarrerie’.
The pamphlet accused Necker of being disrespectful to Louis XVI, and its author expressed his surprise at ‘the dogmatic, cutting tone he uses to address the King of France’ in the Compte rendu au Roi. The author even hints at treason, accusing Necker of threatening to announce his resignation purely to plunge the country’s finances into crisis and make himself look indispensable.
The only accurate parts of the pamphlet are the accusations that Necker was ‘crushing a whole class of citizens’ and ‘attacking property rights’, and that in his paper proposing provincial assemblies, ‘parliaments are violently attacked’ and ‘the clergy and the nobility mistreated’. Necker really was trying to topple the privileged elite.
As a result, the knives of the establishment were out for Necker, wielded in secret by Louis XVI’s brothers who had been criticized in the Compte rendu au Roi, and much more openly by the noble parliamentarians.
In response, Necker seems to have decided to brandish his own sword, offering to fall on it if necessary. In mid-May of 1781, he made one final request to Louis XVI to force through the law taking political power away from the parliaments. But Louis had been stung by the public outcry at his excessive spending on the royal households, and no doubt swayed by the furious complaints of his family. We can gauge the tone of conversations in the royal household from the former attendant, Félix d’Hézecques (a nobleman), whose normally genial tone turns much more toxic when he looks back at Necker in his memoirs: ‘This Genevan, lifted from his obscure tasks at the bank, concealed, beneath a simple exterior, an immense pride, an overriding stubbornness and an astonishing vanity inspired by constant flattery from the economists.’ Louis XVI’s brothers’ comments would probably have been far less printable.
So at the key moment in his and France’s history, Louis XVI showed his true character and weakened. He refused to back Necker.
The Swiss banker promptly resigned, hid himself away in the country north of Paris and wrote a three-volume book, De l’administration des finances de la France, explaining what he had done, and suggesting how to make the country richer, fairer and (on average) happier.
His ideas must have hit a chord, because it sold a massive 80,000 copies in France, underlining the sad fact that Louis XVI had just axed the man who might have saved him from the guillotine a few years later.
In Necker’s place, Louis XVI appointed a man who was in some ways the Swiss banker’s opposite. Jean-François Joly de Fleury was in his early sixties and an old-school politician who was said to be vehemently opposed to the modern trend for philosophy. He was generally perceived as a conservative who might be able to mollify the distrustful parliamentarians’ opposition to reform. As such, Fleury declared that he was going to scrap Necker’s plans to install provincial assemblies, and that he supported the system of selling privileged jobs for life. However, when he tried to cut government spending, Fleury met with such ferocious opposition from ministers that he resigned after just under two years in office.
Undeterred, Louis XVI opted for radical change yet again, appointing a 32-year-old former intendant des finances (regional financial officer) called Henri Lefèvre d’Ormesson. When Henri objected that he was too immature for the job, Louis XVI is said to have answered ‘I’m younger than you, and I occupy an altogether more important position.’ The King was still only 29.
Sadly, though, Louis was showing his own inexperience, because d’Ormesson was a short-lived disaster. All he achieved in his seven months in office was to raise a few million in lotteries (Louis XIV’s antiquated method of harvesting cash from the nation) and cause panic in France’s financial markets by trying to borrow money in secret. He was fired, and later re-emerged during the Revolution as Mayor of Paris – a post he quit after a week because he was terrified of the mob. A man, in short, who made even Louis XVI look decisive.
The next in line to try and save France’s economy was a dashing, witty aristocrat called Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a friend of Marie-Antoinette’s confidante, Gabrielle de Polignac.
Calonne had been an intendant in Metz, was the son of a parliamentarian, and was married to a woman whose family included several tax collectors and a supplier of food to the army. On the surface, he was a wholehearted member of the royal-job-for-life, bribe-taking, privilege-protecting aristocracy – the diametric opposite of Necker. It was also widely assumed that Calonne had written the anti-Necker Lettre de M. le marquis de Caraccioli à M. d’Alembert.
On being nominated in November 1783, Calonne gave a speech to his treasury officials saying that he had ‘an improvement plan which, founded on the very structure of the monarchy, embraces all its parts, without undermining any’. It sounded very much like a coded message to the landowning, tax-grabbing classes that they were safe in his hands.
Calonne proceeded to restore powers to the private tax collectors whom Necker had tried to replace. He paid off 37 million livres of debts owed by Louis XVI’s brothers Charles and Louis Stanislas. He even rubber-stamped the scandalous policy of giving pensions to royal cronies, after Necker had abolished them. And it was while Calonne was in office that Marie-Antoinette got embroiled in the infamous ‘necklace affair’ that brought royal extravagance to the forefront of public opinion (see Chapter 7).
If Louis XVI was determined to provoke a revolution, this looked like the perfect way to do it.
Or so one might have thought. But in fact, there was much more to Calonne than his friends and family at court supposed. As a young man, he had helped Louis XV to write the speech he gave to the Paris parliament, warning them not to stand in the way of the democratization of the legal system. Calonne had mainly opposed Necker because he suspected him of dishonesty and self-publicity. And now, Calonne was only trying to keep the trouble-making establishment happy while he implemented his own radical plan to salvage France’s economy. Louis XVI’s choice of minister was much more astute than it seemed.
Using Necker’s idea that a country had to look rich if it was going to attract funding, Calonne embarked on an almost socialist programme of public spending. He built roads and canals, renovated the city centres of Marseille, Lyon and Bordeaux, and developed the ports of Le Havre, Dunkirk, La Rochelle, and especially Cherbourg, where a vast (and strategically vital) harbour wall was begun. It was so impressive that in 1786 it inspired Louis XVI’s only tripfn7 to his provinces, to admire the building site.
Calonne defended himself against charges of over-spending with a biblical metaphor that everyone in France would have understood: ‘It is not the case that one must sow to reap?’ (His italics.)
Unfortunately, though, he also reaped a fair bit of unrest in Paris. One of his great public works was a 3-metre-tall, 24-kilometre-long stone wall to be built around the capital. This was not conceived to give tourists a better view into the medieval streets of the city, or to protect Parisians from uncouth provincials coming in for the nightlife. Called the ‘Mur des Fermiers généraux’ (which could be loosely translated as ‘Tax-collectors’ wall’), it was to provide 50 checkpoints where taxes could be levied on products arriving in the city.
To give an idea of the scope of the wall, it followed approximately the same route as the present-day loop of Métro lines 2 and 6. And even though it provided two years of work to an army of labourers, many Parisians saw it as a symbol of oppression, especially because the taxing stations were grandiose mini-châteaux that inspired Louis-Sébastien Mercier, one of the Lumières writers, to say that ‘the lairs of the tax collectors have been turned into colonnaded palaces.’
The writer and agitator Beaumarchais also chipped in with a punning line that has since become famous: ‘Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant.’
The alliteration is untranslatable, but what it means is that the wall walling Paris makes Paris wail. It did even more than that, because on 12 and 13 July 1789, mobs would attack the wall and destroy several of the toll stations, getting in some practice before they turned on the Bastille.
Despite this political faux pas in Paris, for a while things in France felt decidedly rosy under Calonne’s management. Manual labour was plentiful; there were good grain harvests in 1783, 1784, 1785 and 1787, and an excellent year for wine in 1785; and taxes had not been raised. All this and the aristos were happy, too.
However, some of Louis XVI’s advisors felt that the rosiness was fragile. His Minister of the Navy, a friend of Necker’s called Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix de Castries, wrote a paper for the King about the ‘public mood’, saying that ‘irregularity shocks the people.’ Some people were saying that the whole country except the permanently disgruntled Parisians was loyal to the throne, but Castries warned that ‘one spark could ignite the nation and consume it in flames.’
The problem with Calonne’s attempt to end France’s financial ‘irregularity’ was that his public works programme did not generate much income, and he had borrowed heavily to finance it – around 600 million, even more than Necker.
Also, contrary to expectations, Britain had quickly recovered from its war with America. It was now beginning to pump out cheap, mass-produced goods and selling them all over the world – including to America, which seemed to have forgotten its debt to France, and had begun trading with its former landlord. Calonne struck a deal with the British to sell them French food, wine and luxury products, but exports were outweighed by the sudden influx of cheap British industrial goods. Confidence in the French economy slumped, and loans and investments dried up.
In April 1787, Necker weighed into the economic debate by writing an open letter objecting to Calonne’s assertion that he had covered up a deficit. The two embarked on a public bout of polite-but-vicious mud-slinging, until finally Necker wrote to Louis XVI complaining of Calonne’s ‘spectacular injustice’, and defending every one of his policies in endless pages of detail that Louis almost certainly never read. Instead the King issued a lettre de cachet ordering Necker to leave Paris, and not to come within 20 leagues of the city without his permission (and that included approaching Versailles, too).
In his own defence, Calonne published his Reply from Monsieur de Calonne to Monsieur Necker, Containing the Accounts of the Financial Situation for 1774, 1776, 1781, 1783 & 1787. This was, as its title suggests, an almost absurdly detailed, 500-odd page explanation of how he had ended up with a deficit of 126 million livres, blaming most of it on debts from the American War, and more particularly on Necker’s borrowing to cover them – all 439,759,464 livres of it, itemized down to the last livre, with a cruel footnote to the effect that ‘we have only included in this account genuine, known loans. We did not enter … secret extensions that we have not been able to calculate.’
Admirable though all this transparency was, it was also an obsessive exercise in ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’, and was exactly the sort of document that sent Louis XVI dashing out of a cabinet meeting to find his hunting breeches. Worse still, even if its main aim was to destroy Necker, whose revelations about spending had done such harm to the royal family’s reputation, Calonne’s accounts were just as embarrassing for Louis XVI.
In the section on the ‘Maison du Roi’, Calonne declared spending for the previous year of 21,869,000 livres on the King’s household. This was down on the 25.7 million per year under Necker, but it didn’t include the cost of Marie-Antoinette’s household – 4.25 million. And spending on the rest of the royal family had gone up since Necker, from 8.04 million to 9.8 million livres.
Worse still for Louis, unlike Necker (who had only itemized 89,000 livres spent on the royal library, a relatively noble spend), Calonne listed embarrassing individual items like ‘Silverware and menus 2,000,000’, ‘Furniture 1,900,000’, ‘King’s wardrobe 77,000’ (less than a pair of Marie-Antoinette’s earrings, but still a lot of money) and, predictably, ‘Hunting 1,031,000’ – the approximate equivalent of ten million loaves of bread, frittered away just on galloping around the royal forests in pursuit of wildlife.
Louis XVI’s increased weakness in the face of his wife’s frivolities and his brothers’ indifference to public opinion was there in black and white for everyone to see.
We know from other sources, too, that Louis had been letting Versailles get out of control. Palace accounts revealed that spending on wine increased from 6,567 livres in 1785 to 60,899 livres in 1789. This wasn’t caused by Louis drowning his sorrows after listening to accountants, because he didn’t drink very much at all. Félix d’Hézecques, the former page, wrote that: ‘He only drank undiluted wine with his dessert. Often it was a large glass of Malaga with a slice of toasted bread. But the quantity was in proportion to the food he ate.’ In wine, as in everything except hunting, Louis XVI was boringly restrained. Much of the increased spending was notched up by Marie-Antoinette’s party crowd, and because the palace still overpaid suppliers who in turn gave bribes to the royal buyers – everyone working in and around the palace was creaming off an increasing percentage of the vast spending. It was as if they knew it was all about to end.
Calonne promised his readers that Louis was conscious of the need to economize, and assured them of ‘the love of the King for his subjects, and the keen desire, that has never left his heart, to lighten by every means possible the load upon them’. But the figures seemed to disagree. Spending on the royals and their entourage came to 6 per cent of the national budget, compared to only 2 per cent on education and aid for the poor.
Calonne ended his Reply to Monsieur Necker with a call to convene an ‘Assemblée des notables’ – in theory a meeting of the country’s wisest, most influential and best-informed men (women were still a long way from being considered notable). This assembly, Calonne said, should be appointed and headed by Louis XVI himself, and would oversee ‘reform plans and changes that would introduce a new order’, and would ‘make justice shine even brighter than the crown, give the nation new life, and patriotism a new boost’, bringing about ‘an unforgettable era in the history of the monarchy’.
He wasn’t wrong about the unforgettable era that was just about to begin.
When Louis XVI saw Calonne’s new reforms, he told him: ‘This is pure Necker that you’re giving me,’ but he agreed to present an updated finance plan to an Assemblée des notables. Though he must have guessed that it was going to be a very hard sell.
Calonne’s central idea was similar to Necker’s, and just as naively optimistic. In order to clean up France’s finances and calm the social climate, Calonne suggested that:
France must not be afraid to show itself as it is. By confessing abuses, it also shows its resources … By revealing what has been undermining its strengths, we show that we are on the right track to revive them. By instructing the nation about its ingrained wrongs, we will enable it to find a remedy for itself and to understand that it must be efficient.
Everything would be fine as soon as the country made a clean breast of its former failings.
But clean breasts weren’t enough to pacify the privileged classes, especially when accompanied by Calonne’s assertion that: ‘One cannot walk a single step in this kingdom without finding different laws, contradictory customs, privileges and exceptions … This wholesale dissonance … increases disorder.’
Calonne’s remedy for the privileges and exceptions would be to tax the clergy, cut the taille that discriminated against the poor, and introduce a ‘territorial subsidy’, in other words a standard tax on all income from land and property, however big the landowner. He even suggested that it was necessary to sell certain royal properties over the next 25 years to pay off the national debt.
But like Necker, by proposing economic reforms that might have saved the monarchy, Calonne had gone a painful truth too far.
When the Assemblée des notables was convenedfn8 in February 1787, it voted against Calonne’s plans. This was hardly a shock given that the assembly’s 147 notables included all of Louis XVI’s brothers and male cousins, 12 dukes, 33 noble parlementaires, 12 bishops and archbishops (all noble), 8 marshals (all noble) and 25 unelected city representatives – all of them landlords. In short, it was a gathering of the men who had the most to lose if they voted for economic reform.
To be fair, Louis XVI gave his full support to Calonne during the opening days of the Assemblée’s debates, standing up to his critics and urging him not to weaken. But either Louis recognized that it was a hopeless cause or, as some say, he was finally swayed by Marie-Antoinette’s opposition to the reforms, because in April 1787 he suddenly fired Calonne and exiled him to his country home in the eastern province of Lorraine.
Calonne didn’t think this was far enough away to escape his enemies, who had waged a scandal-sheet campaign against him and got the public calling him ‘Monsieur Déficit’. There were also calls to have him convicted of embezzlement, so he fled to London.
The Assemblée des notables disbanded in May 1787, no doubt highly pleased with the efficiency of its stonewall tactics. But in political terms, it was as if each member, including Louis XVI, had calmly pulled out a duelling pistol, cocked it, and shot themselves in their silk-stockinged foot.
Panic was starting to set in. Public opinion was being stirred up by pamphleteers on all sides, both those who wanted change and those who were determined to destroy the reputation of any reformer who raised his head above the parapet.
Perhaps taking a hint from Necker about the need to increase productivity, printers were pumping out an ever-growing torrent of gossip, slander, jokes and songs about Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI’s brothers and his ministers and, to a lesser extent, Louis XVI himself.
As soon as the Assemblée des notables was over, Louis appointed its president as his Principal Minister of State. This was Etienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, the 59-year-old Archbishop of Toulouse, a great favourite of Marie-Antoinette.
It looked as though Louis had finally given in to the anti-reformers. An aged clergyman, the mouthpiece of the body that had just sabotaged Calonne’s rescue plan, a man who enjoyed the full support of the free-spending Queen, was being put in charge of France’s politics and finances. Worse still, Brienne had suffered personal humiliation at Louis XVI’s hands a few years earlier, when the King had refused him the post of Archbishop of Paris, which was not only prestigious but also paid a salary of 200,000 livres per year. It seemed unlikely that Brienne would be a loyal counsel to the monarch.
In fact though, Brienne was yet another shrewd appointment. He was not what we would call today a classic archbishop. Like all high-ranking French clergymen of the time, he was simply an aristocrat who had chosen a religious career path. As a reason for turning him down for promotion, Louis XVI had said: ‘At the very least the Archbishop of Paris should believe in God.’
As Archbishop of Toulouse in the 1760s, Brienne had used his power and money to improve the city, and had shut down its inquisition. He was a friend of Louis XVI’s former minister Turgot (a reformer) and even of the atheist troublemaker Voltaire. In his inauguration speech as a member of the Académie française in 1770, Brienne had said that the people longed for a king who shows ‘goodness, charity and justice’, and instead of the blinding light of Louis XIV’s splendour, France needed a moderate monarch, ‘a soft, temperate warmth to feed and vivify it’. The King as a homely log fire rather than a distant star.
In fact, Louis XVI knew that he would have to stand up to the landowning conservatives, who seemed to think that they could carry on filling their pockets while France itself slid into bankruptcy and food shortages. He had appointed Brienne because he was a man of the changing times, definitely not the kind of old-school French clergyman who believed that what the poor needed most was prayer, taxation and the occasional burning at the stake to keep them on the path to salvation.
One of Brienne’s first moves was to stop work on Paris’s Mur des Fermiers généraux, saying that it was such a waste of money that it ought to be dismantled, and the stone sold off to raise public revenue. This didn’t actually happen until 1860, but it was a symbol of where his sympathies lay.
As president of the Assemblée des notables, Brienne had studied all the files and heard all the arguments. Before the Assemblée disbanded at the end of May 1787, he presented the members with a compromise package that he hoped would convince the hard-line anti-reformers.
Tax reform in favour of the poor was still on the table, as were Necker’s assemblées provinciales, but Brienne offered the privileged classes an olive branch in the shape of a law allowing total free trade of grain – a dangerous move in that it made France more vulnerable when harvests were bad, because speculators could raise prices at will. But Brienne expressed the hope that this would ‘prevent shortages and excessive prices and encourage agriculture’.
Docking charges in France’s ports were to be scrapped, making it cheaper for French traders to export (and, of course, for foreigners to import). This was another move that would please the rich.
The notables were in no mood for compromise, though, and voted down Brienne’s proposals, which is why they were disbanded.
To their credit, Louis XVI and Brienne did not give up. Once the Assemblée was over, Louis put more or less the same proposal to the Paris parliament. But they were magistrates, experts in prevaricating, and postponed any decision by saying that it was impossible to vote for a change in the tax laws unless they had all the latest figures on spending and income. Louis replied that they had it – Calonne’s embarrassingly detailed 500-page audit published just a few months earlier. Sorry – not recent enough, came the reply, and they refused to pass the bill.
Three days later, Louis issued a ‘Déclaration du Roi’ outlining what he intended to make law, with the parliament’s approval or without it. It was as radical as anything put forward by Necker or Calonne.
The corvée (the tax in the form of labour) would be turned into a ‘fairer payment in cash, which will not cause the abuses that the old system made it impossible to avoid’ (namely that in the past only the poorest labourers actually performed the work). Meanwhile the taille, ‘a tax that was a burden for the less well-off classes of our people’ would be reduced thanks to the sale of six million livres of bonds.
Louis XVI’s new declaration also contained Calonne’s plan for a ‘territorial subsidy’, a property tax to be paid by everyone, including the clergy and the aristocracy. Brienne and Louis were still insisting that this new, fairer system should be overseen by assemblées provinciales, and Brienne had added even more democracy to the concept, proposing that, although they would not be elected, these assemblies should be composed equally of members of the nobility, the clergy and commoners.
In a separate paper with the catchy title Simplification and Generalization of Finances, and Suppression of Unfairness in Taxation Brienne wrote that: ‘These assemblées provinciales will always be seen by the nation as a gift from the King and as the reflection of a mild, moderate government. What greater gift than to let one’s subjects decide how taxation should be imposed? What better way to ensure that they are attributed fairly?’
Fairness was the last thing on the Paris parliament’s mind, though, and they simply declared the whole process illegal, so Louis banished them all to Troyes, 160 kilometres away to the southeast, a pleasant medieval town that seems to have been considered a boring backwater in 1787, a place where you sent badly behaved judges to cool off.
Three months later, Louis XVI reconvened the parliamentarians in Paris, hoping that they would have learnt their lesson. To make doubly sure, the November session of parliament opened with a statement by his Keeper of the Seals (de facto Minister of Justice), Chrétien François de Lamoignon, who affirmed that:
The principle, universally acknowledged by the whole kingdom, is that the King alone must possess sovereign power in his kingdom … He is answerable only to God in the exercise of his power … The King is the sovereign of the Nation, and everything he does is with its interests in mind, and … legislative power resides in the person of the King independent of all other powers. These, gentlemen, are the inviolable powers of the monarchy of France
Crucially, though, despite this apparent show of force, Louis XVI had weakened. The bill he was ordering the parliamentarians to accept was watered down. The universal ‘territorial subsidy’ that would have forced the privileged classes to agree to democratic taxation had gone. In its place was a plan to borrow 420 million livres over five years, which was simply postponing the crisis.
The parliamentarians must have felt emboldened, especially when the King’s own cousin, the ambitious Louis Philippe d’Orléans (father of the future King Louis-Philippe), objected to the royal show of force, declaring that ‘this is illegal.’
Louis replied: ‘No, it’s legal, because I want it,’ which was in fact simply a statement of French monarchic law. As punishment for this treasonable outburst, Louis banned his cousin from sitting in parliament – for two whole days.
In May 1788, after months of back and forth between Paris and Versailles, with no decisions taken, things finally came to a head.
One of the most vociferous members of the Paris parliament was a magistrate called Jean-Jacques Duval-d’Esprémesnil. The model of a disreputable aristo, he was involved in a very modern-sounding scheme to demolish a hospital in central Paris and sell the valuable plot of land to property speculators.
Always keen to protect his own interests, Duval-d’Esprémesnil stole some documents detailing Brienne’s and Louis XVI’s plans to reduce the political power of the parliaments, and revealed their contents to his colleagues. When a warrant was issued for his arrest, he took refuge in parliament, along with an accomplice, Anne-Louis-Marie Goislard de Monsabert (yet another French male with a female first name). Around 900 armed soldiers were sent in to fetch them, but they had no idea what the fugitives looked like. When the captain asked the parliamentarians to identify Duval and Goislard, all of them stepped forward, saying either ‘je suis Duval’ or ‘je suis Goislard’.fn9 The guards went away frustrated.
Duval and Goislard eventually gave themselves up, and Duval was sent to cool his heels for four months on the island of Sainte-Marguerite, just off the Mediterranean coast from Cannes. This sounds idyllic, but it was in fact the prison where, a century earlier, the Man in the Iron Mask had rotted for 11 years before being transferred to the Bastille.
Meanwhile back in Versailles, Louis XVI and Brienne made one final attempt to impose their will on the men who wanted to defend the unworkable status quo. Louis summoned the Paris parliamentarians to Versailles and tried to force them to accept a ruling that their power, and that of every parliament in the regions, should be replaced by a ‘plenary court’ under the authority of the King. This court was not going to be a democratically elected body, of course – it would be composed of princes, nobles, marshals and clergymen, along with some noble magistrates. But the Parisian parliamentarians, who were being held semi-hostage in Versailles, declared that it would be illegal for them to disregard the ‘ancient and lawful institution of parliament’.
Their colleagues in Rennes, in Brittany, went further: they said that anyone attending a plenary court would be ‘infâme’ (‘foul and dishonourable’), so Louis had 12 of them arrested, provoking rioting in the streets. More or less the same thing happened in Grenoble, where the parliament threatened to declare independence for the Dauphiné region, and troops had to be sent in to maintain order.
Brienne had failed, and was given a cardinal’s hat and allowed to disappear to Italy. Louis XVI was left in Versailles with the realization that the magistrates had in effect started a revolution – in favour of aristocratic privilege, and against the democratic change that he, the apparently powerless absolute monarch, wanted.
Hypocritically, the Parisian parliamentarians now affirmed their loyalty to Louis XVI – rather as if they were holding a pistol to his head and promising that everything would be OK as long as he didn’t do anything stupid.
In a declaration on 3 May 1788, they recognized ‘that France is a monarchy governed by the King, according to its laws, and that these laws … include the right of the reigning royal family, from male to male, in order of birth, excluding all girls and their descendants’. It was the status quo in its purest form.
However, the declaration went on to affirm the parliamentarians’ own rights, and those of the ruling class in general, insisting on ‘the unmovability of magistrates; the right of courts to examine the King’s wishes in each province, and to order their application only when they conform to the laws of that province, and the fundamental laws of the state’.
What they were saying in effect was that the absolute monarchy was over. France’s ancient law, Qui veut le roy, si veut la loy (if the King wants it, the law wants it), no longer applied. When Antoine Loysel published his list of French laws and customs in 1607, this was the first line in the first chapter of the first volume. Now it counted for nothing.
This was more than a year before most history books deem that the French Revolution began. No one had tried to storm the Bastille; no one was calling for the King’s head; most ordinary French people were going about their daily business, hoping that Louis XVI’s call for fairer taxes would be implemented.
But it was revolution. Not by the people calling for Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité – that was what Louis XVI and his successive finance ministers had been trying to give them, albeit in a smaller dose than many would have liked. This was revolution by the rich, calling for their own liberty to carry on preventing any equality.
The former royal attendant Félix d’Hézecques described the irony of the situation succinctly in his memoirs: ‘The magistrates, those natural defenders of the monarchy, and the princes themselves, born supporters of the throne, got together to destroy the monarchy and the throne.’
If there had been a referendum of the whole nation in May 1788, Louis XVI’s manifesto would almost certainly have been a promise to put all of Necker’s ideas into practice. And if, during the referendum campaign, Louis had been able to prevent provincial parliaments broadcasting fake news to the effect that all he wanted was to carry on buying necklaces for Marie-Antoinette, the people would almost certainly have voted in favour of their monarch’s policies.
But as of May 1788, Louis had no real power. Despite being an indecisive man by nature, with a reputation for wanting to spend every day hunting instead of managing the country’s affairs, for a few years he had appointed a series of highly motivated ministers, and encouraged them to stand toe to toe with the most objectionable, self-serving members of France’s aristocracy. Occasionally, he had even missed out on a day’s hunting to defend democracy in person. He had also put up with public humiliation while Turgot, Necker, Calonne and Brienne battled to put the country on a stabler, fairer footing. Admittedly, despite the cuts to his personal budget, Louis XVI and his family were still living a life of unimaginable luxury compared to most of his subjects, but he had genuinely tried to ease the burden on them.
In May 1788, however, these attempts at peaceful, relatively democratic, reform were over. The anarchy and violence of July 1789 and beyond were now inevitable.