THE DEATH OF LOUIS XV ON MAY 10, 1774, WHICH PROPELLED HIS twenty-year-old grandson to the throne, came as a shock, but one the French monarchy’s institutions were prepared to absorb. Since the death of Louis XVI’s father in 1765, everyone had known that, barring his own death, the youth would be the next king. His precocious marriage to Marie-Antoinette may have been unhappy and, as of 1774, still unfruitful in terms of producing an heir, but it had settled a major question about the future of the dynasty and promised continuity in France’s foreign policy. The old king’s liaison with the disreputable Madame du Barry, and his backing of the Maupeou coup against the parlements, had so discredited Louis XV in Paris that the court decided to hold his burial at night and almost in secret. His unpopularity, however, did not extend to the monarchy as an institution. “Every day gives new hope by the prospect of an imminent improvement. The new monarch’s sense of economy, his disdain for luxury and appearances, seem to guarantee it,” wrote a journalist who had led the opposition to Maupeou.1
Louis XVI certainly wanted to make some changes. Gossip about royal mistresses would no longer swirl around the court, and the elderly comte de Maurepas persuaded the young king to dismiss Louis XV’s controversial team of hardline ministers and recall the parlements. At the ceremony for the reinstallation of the Paris Parlement, the judges were sternly instructed not to resort to the obstructionist tactics they had used against Louis XV. Undaunted, they soon showed that they still saw themselves as entitled to resist the king and his ministers. Warned that the restoration of the parlements might weaken his authority, Louis XVI supposedly replied, “It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me that it is the general will, and I wish to be loved.”2
Whereas the reinstatement of the parlements was a return to tradition, Louis XVI’s appointment of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot as his finance minister represented a break with the past. It raised the hopes of those who looked to the new king to implement the enlightened ideas of the Encyclopédistes and especially of the Physiocrats, the economic theorists whose advocacy of deregulation had already inspired several previous efforts at reform under Louis XV. As intendant in the province of the Limousin in the 1760s, Turgot had vigorously promoted policies to modernize agricultural methods and had shown his willingness to do away with institutions such as the corvée, the system under which peasants were required to work for several days a year on repairing roads and other projects, a practice the Physiocrats condemned as an inefficient interference with personal liberty. In an article on charitable foundations that he contributed to the Encyclopédie, Turgot had argued that institutions rooted in the past could be abolished if they failed to meet the needs of the present or limited the rights of individuals. He thus advanced the notion that all aspects of French life were open to reform. Elevated to the ministry, Turgot took aim at the system of laws that limited the free sale of grain within the kingdom. Meant to ensure that speculation did not lead to sharp rises in the price of bread in years of bad harvests, these rules restricted the movement of grain from one region to another and allowed local authorities to control its price.
Physiocratic theorists argued that regulations on the sale of grain were an unjust restriction on individual property rights. Such regulations discouraged landowners from investing in improvements to agriculture, because they could not be sure they would be allowed to reap the profits from increased production. Consumers—a group that included both urban populations and much of the peasantry, since few farmers grew the grain for their own bread—were unconvinced. As one Physiocrat, Quesnay, had openly said in his articles for the Encyclopédie, the abolition of regulations was meant to push prices up and force the poor to work harder to earn their bread, hardly a recipe for gaining popular support. A growing economy, however, would, in his view, and Turgot’s, benefit the monarchy by enlarging its revenue base without the necessity of raising taxes.
Like earlier efforts to end grain-trade restrictions in the 1760s, Turgot’s reforms were poorly timed. The 1774 harvest was less successful than usual, especially in northern France, the region most dependent on the grain crop, and the result was the broadest wave of social unrest the kingdom had experienced in many decades. For nearly a month in the spring of 1775, as grain prices rose and supplies ran low, a wave of riots known as the guerre des farines, the “flour war,” broke out across the region. In the towns, crowds stormed bakeries and demanded that bread prices be lowered. In the countryside, peasants blocked merchants’ efforts to ship grain out of their districts; they also confronted wealthy landowners, who were suspected of holding crops off the market to wait for higher prices. The disturbances affected the royal residence of Versailles and the capital, where a major outbreak took place on May 3, 1775. One journalist mentioned rumors that “the rebels want to seize the Bastille” only to dismiss the threat as “physically impossible.”3 Women were often prominent in these disturbances: making sure their families could afford bread for their daily needs was always one of their major concerns. At Brie-Comte-Robert, Madelaine Pochet, described in police reports as “the woman with the red scarf on her head,” insulted local farmers and demanded that they sell their reserves at a price approved by the crowd.4 The government reacted strongly, mobilizing twenty-five thousand troops around Paris and insisting on the need to protect the rights of property-owners, although Turgot also opened “charitable workshops” to enable the unemployed to earn what they needed to support themselves.
The flour war was brought under control after a few weeks, but the outbreaks showed how powerful a popular protest could become and how quickly it could spread. The uprisings sparked the first major political debate of Louis XVI’s reign and brought to the surface issues that would be central in the French Revolution fifteen years later. Whereas Turgot, like neoliberal economists today, argued that ending regulation would bring long-term benefits for the kingdom as a whole by encouraging more efficient farming methods and increased production, the recently restored parlementary law courts seized the opportunity to pose as protectors of the population by criticizing his measures. Eager to prove that objections like those of the parlements were not just the expression of special interests, the distinguished magistrate Malesherbes, who had defended the Encyclopédie in the 1750s and was now the spokesman for the government’s fiscal court, the Cour des Aides, inserted a radical twist into the familiar argument about the need for intermediate bodies to check the ministers’ arbitrary actions. He called for the revival of the Estates General, an elected assembly that had met at intervals during the medieval and Renaissance eras but that France’s absolutist kings had ceased to convene after 1615. Malesherbes insisted that “in France, the nation has always been profoundly conscious of its rights and of its freedom,” showing that memories of France’s distant past could have potentially revolutionary implications in the present. His complaint that the principles protecting French freedom “have never been duly drawn up” in the form of a constitutional document also looked forward to the demands that would be made at the start of the Revolution.5
While the parlements and Malesherbes revived history-based arguments against reforms, Turgot’s ambitious rival, the banker Jacques Necker, attacked from a different direction. Launching the career that would keep him at the center of French politics until the Revolution, Necker published an Essay on the Commerce in Grains that denounced Turgot’s measures as ill-timed and impractical. It was the first time an aspirant for ministerial office tried to win power by appealing openly to public opinion and offering a contrasting program. Outraged, Turgot and his friends blamed Necker for inciting the grain riots. An anonymous journalist raised a question that would be debated even more vehemently during the French Revolution: Should the right of property take precedence over the needs of the poor? “To refuse to one’s fellow man the nourishment he needs, if he cannot pay the price one wants for it, is an action as highhanded as that of a robber in the forest, who uses his pistol to demand that a traveler give up his purse or his life,” he wrote.6
Once the flour war had been quelled, Turgot, still confident of Louis XVI’s backing, pushed ahead with other reforms. In April 1776, he persuaded the king to issue a package of six edicts, all of them reflecting his conviction that individuals should be freed as much as possible to pursue their economic interests and that special privileges should be done away with. As he had tried to do in the Limousin when he was an intendant, Turgot proposed to abolish the corvée system of forced labor that provided for the upkeep of roads and public works. In its place, he wanted to impose a tax paid by all landowners regardless of their social status, a measure that inspired fierce resistance from nobles, who objected to being treated the same as commoners. Equally controversial was Turgot’s proposal to abolish the guilds to which skilled artisans like Jacques Ménétra belonged and open all trades to anyone who wanted to practice them. Throughout France, aggressive entrepreneurs were already finding ways around guild restrictions by shifting production to rural areas where those rules did not apply. They were also sometimes illegally hiring journeymen and even women workers.
Turgot’s edict legalized these practices and did away with regulations on manufacturing procedures that had been justified as a way to protect consumers from shoddy goods. In Turgot’s mind, the elimination of guild privileges would benefit not only business owners but also “that class of men, who, owning nothing except their ability to work, have more than others the need and the right to use to their full extent the only resources they have to make a living.”7
Turgot’s edicts, like his earlier effort to deregulate the grain trade, ran into vehement opposition. Guild masters and skilled artisans complained that they were being deprived of rights they had spent years to earn and that consumers would suffer because of a decline in the quality of workmanship. Turgot’s reforms also threatened government finances: payments for guild licenses and other privileges were a significant source of royal and municipal revenue. The monarchy had often encouraged corporate groups such as guilds to borrow in their own name in order to pay their taxes, since these groups could often secure loans at better rates than the king himself. In the Paris Parlement, a young magistrate, Jean Jacques Duval d’Eprémesnil, began to make a name for himself with his vehement opposition to the radical doctrines that he detected behind all of Turgot’s actions. Duval d’Eprémesnil would play a major role in the crisis leading to the Revolution in 1789. At almost the same moment when, on the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Jefferson was drafting the American Declaration of Independence’s ringing words about liberty and equality, Duval d’Eprémesnil drew up remonstrances warning that “any system tending under the guise of humanity and benevolence to establish an equality of duties between men, and to destroy these distinctions, necessary in a well-ordered monarchy, would soon lead to disorder.” Unrestricted liberty, he concluded, “would soon be transformed into license, opening the door to every abuse.”8
Louis XVI initially seemed committed to backing Turgot, staging a lit de justice in early May 1776 to compel the Paris Parlement to accept the six edicts. Had he remained steadfast, he might have been remembered as a forceful reforming monarch. Within a few weeks, however, the young king changed his mind, saddling himself instead with an enduring reputation as a waverer who could not stick to a consistent policy. Louis’s change of heart reflected several factors. Turgot had insisted that his reforms needed to be accompanied by reductions in wasteful government spending, which had brought him into conflict with Marie-Antoinette and other influential court figures. In line with the thinking of the Physiocrats, Turgot had also envisaged a system of local and regional assemblies, chosen by taxpayers without regard for social status, that would cooperate with the intendants in levying taxes and supervising expenditures. His ideas were openly discussed in publications such as the Gazette de Leyde, which Louis XVI read regularly. In the Gazette, the king would have seen an editorial comment that “it would not be one of the least remarkable singularities of our century that France should return to the nation the right of taxing itself… while England works to take it away from its American subjects.” One of Turgot’s close collaborators, Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, prepared a “Memorandum on Municipal Assemblies” outlining a plan that would have done away with traditional provincial institutions such as estates and parlements. When Louis XVI read the document, he concluded that his minister wanted to “establish a new form of government in France, and to denigrate the old institutions, which the author considers as the products of centuries of ignorance and barbary.”9 Louis had certainly not been brought up to stage such a sweeping revolution in his kingdom.
Ironically, however, one of the biggest reasons for Turgot’s downfall was his resistance to French involvement in another revolution, the one in Britain’s North American colonies that had begun in 1775, almost at the same moment as France’s flour war. Some of the French saw aiding the Americans as an opportunity to strike back at the rival power that had inflicted a stinging defeat on their country in the Seven Years’ War. Others, like the young Gilbert du Motier, the marquis de Lafayette, were inspired by the ideals of freedom articulated in the rebels’ manifestos, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. At court, Louis XVI’s foreign minister, Charles Vergennes, a normally cautious diplomat, and the navy minister, Antoine de Sartine, urged the king to approve clandestine aid to the Americans, despite the dangerous precedent of supporting a popular revolt against a monarchy. Turgot, acutely aware of the debt burden left behind by the Seven Years’ War, strongly opposed involvement in another costly conflict. Even though he had little of the warrior about him, Louis XVI could not resist the appeal of humbling the British and reestablishing France as Europe’s dominant power.
On May 12, 1776, Turgot was abruptly dismissed from office, and his ambitious reform plans were largely scrapped. Louis XVI would not go down in history as an enlightened despot, wielding royal powers to impose radical changes. The fall of Turgot did not result in a complete return to the previous status quo, however. By appointing Turgot’s critic, Necker, to oversee the monarchy’s finances, Louis XVI opted for a man whose policies were more pragmatic than his rival’s but whose ascent also represented an innovation. Originally a Genevan banker, Necker was a commoner, a foreigner, and, most shockingly, a Protestant.
Whereas Turgot had dreamed of remaking fundamental features of France’s economy and social structure, Necker thought he could master the kingdom’s financial problems by reducing waste in government spending and abolishing unnecessary offices. He hoped to avoid open confrontations with the parlements and unpopular tax increases. His immediate problem, however, was to finance the French involvement in the American war. News of the major American victory over the British at the Battle of Saratoga, which reached France at the end of 1777, persuaded Louis XVI to accept Vergennes’s recommendation that France move from covert support to open alliance with the Americans and war with the British. Although the conflict was fought overseas and involved relatively small numbers of French troops, it required a huge investment in the French navy. Trees all over France were felled to provide the timber to build the ships of the line that were the eighteenth century’s costliest weapons. Throngs of sailors were recruited from the country’s coastal regions, and money had to be found to pay for the supplies they needed on their months-long voyages across the Atlantic. Necker proved indispensable in lining up loans that made the war possible, at the price of adding staggering sums to the monarchy’s already formidable debt.
The French effort paid off when Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse’s ships successfully blockaded General George Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown, allowing George Washington to force the British to surrender. The defeat drove the British to accept American independence, but the French hopes for an outcome that would have decisively shifted the worldwide balance of imperial power were disappointed when a British naval victory in the Caribbean in April 1782 scuttled a planned attack on the major sugar island of Jamaica. The Treaty of Paris, signed on January 20, 1783—ironically, almost exactly ten years to the day before the execution of Louis XVI in 1793—was a humiliation for the British, but it gave the French few tangible gains.
France’s support for the American rebels had important domestic repercussions. In the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, free men of color were recruited to serve in an attack on the city of Savannah, Georgia. The assault failed, but service in the army gave its participants military experience and the conviction that they deserved the same rights as whites. French soldiers and officers who served in North America did not necessarily return to Europe as convinced advocates of revolution and republicanism—many of them were put off by the rough manners of the Americans and the undisciplined nature of their military effort—but printed reports and American propagandists inspired a wave of enthusiasm for the supposed virtues of the simple American farmers who had defeated the haughty British. Foremost among the propagandists was the elderly Benjamin Franklin, who arrived in Paris in 1776 as the official spokesman for the movement. Franklin shrewdly concealed the sophistication he had acquired over his many years as a public figure in America and Britain. Sporting a fur hat unlike anything seen before at Versailles, he played the role of a rustic sage with great success. Women swooned over him, and future revolutionaries, such as Count Mirabeau, listened eagerly to his political ideas. The image of America as a land of “new men” living in harmony with nature was the main theme of the best-selling Letters of an American Farmer, written by the French-born Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Crèvecoeur was not entirely uncritical of America—he devoted part of one chapter to denouncing the evils of slavery—but he presented the country as a radical alternative to the aristocratic and inegalitarian societies of the Old Continent.
Other publications spread American political ideas as well. During his years in France, Franklin oversaw translations of key revolutionary documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the republican constitutions adopted by the various American states. Some influential French figures were deeply impressed by these experiments in republican liberty. The idea of defining the fundamental features of a political system in a written constitution and limiting governmental powers through a declaration of rights had an undoubted influence on the French Revolution. Other French thinkers, however, such as Turgot and the republican theorist Mably, were more critical. Turgot blamed the Americans for reproducing too many of the irrational features of the British monarchy, such as bicameral legislatures, in their new governments, and Mably warned that the unrestricted freedom of speech promised in the country’s constitution might allow opponents of freedom to undermine it. These critiques foreshadowed ways in which the French Revolution would diverge from the American one.
By the time the American war ended, Necker’s time in office was also over. Even though they were modest compared to Turgot’s projects, his own reform efforts provoked strong opposition. Convinced, like Turgot, that the monarchy would benefit from the introduction of some form of representation, Necker had tried to create elected assemblies in two French provinces, leading his ministerial rival, Vergennes, to complain to Louis XVI that “English and Genevan principles are filtering in to our administration.”10 Necker’s efforts to eliminate unnecessary government positions and put the collection of taxes under government control, at the expense of the private financiers who had traditionally profited from the process, made other enemies. Most controversially, Necker decided in early 1781 to take the unprecedented step of publishing a summary of the monarchy’s annual revenues and expenses. His Compte rendu au roi (Account to the king) became a runaway best seller: for the first time, royal subjects were offered a comprehensive overview of the sources of the king’s income and how it was spent. The goal of Necker’s initiative was to convince the public that the French government was creditworthy: his figures purported to show that its regular income exceeded “ordinary” expenses by a healthy margin. Critics were quick to point out, however, that Necker had not included the cost of the ongoing war, and the payments that would be needed to pay back the loans he had taken out to finance it. Conservatives were appalled at the idea of provoking a public discussion about the secrets of the government.
Sensing that his support was fading, Necker forced Louis XVI to make a decision: either give him firm support by officially appointing him to the royal council, in spite of his Protestantism, or else let him go. The king accepted Necker’s resignation, thereby adding to his reputation for abandoning reform-minded ministers when they found themselves in difficulty. After the flurry of discussion set off by Necker’s Compte rendu, the issue of royal finances ceased to be a major topic for a few years. The heavy debts Necker had incurred to pay for the war still had to be repaid, but temporary wartime taxes were still in effect, giving the government breathing space. Public attention shifted to other matters, such as the pioneering balloon ascensions of daring aeronauts like Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, who made the first manned flight, reaching an altitude of three thousand feet, on November 21, 1783. “It was a moment which can never be repeated, the most astounding achievement the science of physics has yet given to the world,” the popular author Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote, and the ascent, witnessed by the king himself, seemed to position France as Europe’s leader in science as well as politics.11
The king found a new finance minister he trusted in the person of Charles-Alexandre Calonne, who promised that the monarchy’s expenses could be met through energetic promotion of economic growth, without the controversial reforms his predecessors had tried to introduce. The first three years of his time in office saw a rapid increase in stock-market speculation, sometimes directly encouraged by the government in the hopes that new companies would spur spending and investment. Calonne also hoped to expand French foreign commerce. An edict issued in August 1784 allowed French colonists to trade directly with merchants from other countries, especially the newly independent United States. This breach of the traditional exclusif, the system that reserved colonial trade for metropolitan French merchants, was unpopular in port cities such as Bordeaux and Le Havre, but it had strong support from Caribbean plantation owners. Their happiness about the trade reform was not enough to offset their outrage when Calonne’s colleague Charles de Castries, the navy minister, issued an edict in December 1784 meant to curb the worst excesses of the slavery system in the islands. “This edict violates the sacred rights of property, and puts a dagger in the hands of the slaves, by giving control over their discipline and their regime to someone other than their masters,” one colonist wrote of the limits imposed on the punishments owners could inflict.12
In 1786, Calonne took an even more sweeping step in the direction of opening up the French economy by negotiating a free trade treaty with the British. Well aware that British manufacturers, especially the makers of textiles, were introducing new mechanized production methods that allowed them to sell their products more cheaply than their French rivals, Calonne hoped the pressure of competition would drive his own countrymen to modernize and become more efficient. In the meantime, he calculated that increased exports of French agricultural products, such as wine, would offset the impact on manufactured goods. Just as the Castries edict outraged slaveowners, the Eden Treaty, named for the British diplomat who negotiated it, set off a furious backlash from French manufacturers, who feared being overwhelmed by British competition, as well as from workers, who worried about losing their jobs. Jean-Marie Roland, Madame Roland’s husband and a future revolutionary politician, wrote that “we have just concluded a commercial treaty with the English which may well enrich our great-grandchildren but has deprived 500,000 workers of bread and ruined 10,000 commercial houses.”13 In Lyon, France’s largest manufacturing city, silkworkers fearing competition from cheap English-made fabrics staged the largest urban rebellion in decades in August 1786, forcing the government to send in troops to restore order.
As his ministers adopted policies that angered key sectors of public opinion, Louis XVI’s ability to back them was undermined by a scandal that severely damaged the reputation of the queen. On August 15, 1785, a great nobleman, Cardinal Rohan, was publicly arrested in the palace of Versailles, accused by the king in person of having falsely claimed that Marie-Antoinette had asked him to buy a fabulously expensive diamond necklace on her behalf. Rohan had fallen for an elaborate scheme concocted by an adventuress by the name of Madame de la Motte and her husband. Madame de la Motte had pretended to be a confidante of the queen and assured the cardinal that arranging the purchase of the necklace would win him her favor. Rohan obtained the necklace, showing the jewelers letters forged by the conspirators promising that the queen would pay for it, and turned the jewels over to La Motte to be given to the queen. Instead, La Motte and her accomplices broke up the necklace and sold the diamonds separately, netting a handsome profit.
The scheme was exposed when the jewelers, impatient for payment, presented the forged letter with Marie-Antoinette’s signature to Versailles. Marie-Antoinette, well aware of how her reputation for extravagance had undercut her popularity, was appalled and demanded harsh punishment for the cardinal. Louis XVI obliged her by arranging for a public arrest in front of the rest of the court. The revelations that ensued exposed the cardinal’s involvement with a cast of dubious characters, including one Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, an Italian con man who claimed to be over a thousand years old. The spectacle of a great nobleman and church dignitary consorting with such company did nothing to improve the reputation of the French aristocracy. But Rohan also had powerful supporters, including leading members of the Paris Parlement, where his case was heard. His advocates insisted that he had been the innocent dupe of the La Mottes, a defense that implied that it was reasonable for him to have believed that the queen’s love of luxury might have led her to turn to him to obtain the necklace. Louis XVI was left looking powerless, as if he could not control his wife’s behavior, a devastating blow for a ruler who was supposed to be the “father of the people.”
After twelve years on the throne, the still young Louis XVI—he was only thirty-two in 1786—found himself beleaguered from all sides. He was tied to a wife who had become a symbol both of female excesses and of the unpopular Austrian alliance; his own apparent weakness as a husband had undermined his authority, perhaps irreparably; and his ministers’ policies had alienated influential parts of the population. Then, in August 1786, after three years spent reassuring the king that the monarchy’s finances were under control, the finance minister, Calonne, suddenly informed his master that unless something drastic was done, he would face another disaster: the threat of government bankruptcy. Firmly convinced that it was up to him to decide how to respond to this crisis, Louis XVI was about to discover that his subjects were no longer willing to let him set his country’s course.