IT CANNOT HAVE BEEN EASY FOR LOUIS XVI’S FINANCE MINISTER, CALONNE, to inform the king that the French monarchy was on the verge of financial collapse. Calonne had made his name as an unswerving defender of absolutist principles: according to rumor, he had helped draft the bellicose “flagellation speech” in which Louis XV had denounced the parlements in 1766. He had fought his way to office in 1783 by promising that he could resolve the monarchy’s financial problems without imposing drastic reforms. As he realized in the summer of 1786 that his policies had increased the royal deficit without producing the economic growth he had counted on—and that opposition to him was mounting—Calonne reacted by upping the stakes. Something had to be done: a special tax imposed during the American war was due to expire in 1787, depriving the government of vitally needed revenue just as the cost of servicing the loans taken out to pay for the war reached its peak. With half of the king’s annual revenue pledged to pay interest on the debt, the financial situation had become unsustainable. Lenders, increasingly nervous about the possibility of a royal bankruptcy, were demanding ever higher rates of interest. A drastic change of course was imperative.
In a lengthy memorandum for the king, Calonne announced that “the only way to bring real order into the finances is to revitalize the entire state by reforming all that is defective in its constitution.” The plan he suggested was mostly borrowed from proposals originally put forward by his predecessors, Turgot and Necker. Calonne called for the abolition of the special tax privileges that had set the nobility and the Church apart from the rest of the population. As the Physiocratic economic reformers had long advocated, a myriad of special taxes would be replaced by a single tax on landed property, which would be levied on owners regardless of their social status. Critics immediately realized that Calonne’s proposed land tax promised the crown a stream of income that would grow automatically as the economy expanded without allowing the parlements to object as they traditionally did when ministers proposed new taxes. To deflect charges that he was trying to make the government more powerful, Calonne offered taxpaying landowners a voice in decision-making: they would be allowed to elect provincial assemblies, which would have the power to review expenditures and offer advice on policies. In contrast to the traditional estates that existed in some provinces, the provincial assemblies would represent all property-owners and would not have reserved seats for nobles and high clergy. Turgot’s former adviser André Morellet excitedly called the plan “an announcement of liberty and equality.”1
A career spent in royal service battling the aristocratic parlements, for whom social equality was anathema, and for whom liberty meant opposing royal authority, convinced Calonne that it would be impossible to promulgate his radical program in the form of ordinary laws. Instead, he proposed to revive a long-forgotten institution, last resorted to in 1626, by convoking an “Assembly of Notables” made up of deputies handpicked by the government. His hope was that endorsement of his program by a group of prominent figures, including representatives of the parlements themselves, would stifle opposition.
Calonne’s first challenge was to win over the king. Louis XVI was not a backward-looking conservative: since coming to the throne in 1774, he had approved a number of reforms, including the abolition of serfdom on the royal estates and the end of torture in judicial proceedings. Cautious by nature, however, he had no ambition to play the part of an enlightened despot, unlike his Habsburg brother-in-law, the Austrian emperor Joseph II, who had created an uproar throughout his lands in the early 1780s by curtailing the powers of the Catholic Church, granting toleration to Protestants and Jews, and trying to impose a single scheme of rational administration on disparate territories scattered from Belgium to Hungary.
Throughout the second half of 1786, Calonne worked to overcome the king’s fears that “the proposed plan is too broad and involves changes that are too great.” Anticipating the language that would be used by the revolutionaries who would soon succeed him, Calonne urged Louis to recognize that “one cannot do great things if one is stopped by fear of difficulties.” The financial crisis was an opportunity for the king to “immortalize” himself by freeing the monarchy once and for all from its chronic lack of revenue.2 And so Louis XVI, who had already reluctantly let himself be persuaded to embark on one history-altering adventure when he approved French intervention on behalf of the American colonists, allowed Calonne to set in motion the series of events that would lead to the complete overthrow of his monarchy.
Although the summoning of an Assembly of Notables had respectable precedent in French law, the sudden decision to revive such a long-forgotten institution jolted the public almost as much as the content of Calonne’s reform proposals. Such an event “could hardly take place under an absolute monarch and despotic ministers, except in a disastrous crisis to which they do not know any remedy,” one chronicler wrote.3 Although the same journalist warned that the Notables would find themselves acting like toy “Chinese pagodas,” the eighteenth-century version of bobblehead figures, by doing nothing but nodding their approval of Calonne’s proposals, ambitious courtiers, church prelates, and magistrates scrambled for places in the upcoming assembly.
While the convocation of the Notables alarmed some and spurred the ambitions of others, it also encouraged utopian hopes that went far beyond the solution of France’s financial problems. At the beginning of January 1787, as Calonne was assembling the Notables, a man with ambitions of another kind, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, convened a very different kind of group: a club of reform-minded intellectuals. Born in 1754, the same year as Louis XVI, Brissot, the son of an innkeeper from the cathedral town of Chartres, was typical of a younger generation who dreamed of following in the footsteps of the philosophes who had compiled the Encyclopédie. Whereas Diderot, d’Alembert, and their colleagues in the 1740s and 1750s had taken on an entrenched conservative establishment, Brissot’s generation came on the scene at a time when the principles of the Enlightenment had become conventional wisdom among France’s educated classes. Middle-aged disciples of the philosophes monopolized positions in the prestigious Académie française and the editorships of France’s major periodicals, but none of them seemed to have many fresh ideas. Those younger still, including Brissot, imagined themselves capable of great things, but had to struggle to find places for themselves.
At the same time, despite decades of criticism by the philosophes, French institutions remained largely unchanged. An absolute monarch still ruled from Versailles, a hereditary aristocracy still monopolized prestigious positions, and the Catholic Church still imposed its rules on a population increasingly detached from its teachings. Brissot took up the causes the earlier philosophes had espoused, attacking religious dogma, entrenched privileged groups, and oppressive laws. Like Voltaire, he visited England, where he wrote for a French-language newspaper and tried unsuccessfully to found a cosmopolitan society to bring together progressive thinkers from many countries. When he returned to France in 1784, he was accused of writing scandalous pamphlets and became, like so many other French writers before him, an unwilling guest in the Bastille. Released from prison, he found an outlet for his literary talents and a source of badly needed income by helping to compose publications designed to either promote or denigrate the new joint-stock companies encouraged by Calonne’s policies.
The American Revolution inspired Brissot: its success demonstrated that real changes in the world could happen. In 1787, Brissot and his friend Étienne Clavière, a Genevan banker, collaborated on a short book defending the new American republic against its critics. Clavière had been exiled from Switzerland for his participation in an unsuccessful revolutionary movement there in 1782. Brissot also followed the Dutch Patriot movement, which used republican rhetoric about patriotism to challenge the country’s ruler, the stadholder, in the mid-1780s. Through his British connections, Brissot kept up with the first stages of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. Interested in everything and known for his ability to write quickly and fluently, Brissot built up a circle of acquaintances that ranged from fellow underemployed writers with advanced ideas to great nobles. Through his wife, Félicité, who had once been a governess to the children of the duc d’Orléans, the king’s cousin, Brissot gained entrée to the circle of the richest man in the kingdom.
For Brissot and his friends, the convocation of the Assembly of Notables suddenly opened the prospect of hitherto undreamed-of reforms in France. Brissot hastened to invite like-minded friends to take advantage of the opportunity by joining his “Gallo-American Society” to work “for the good of all men.” He and his friends held no positions of power, but they knew how to get ideas into circulation, a talent that would become increasingly valuable in the years ahead. Among the proposals the ever-inventive Brissot and his colleagues batted around were a campaign to promote the planting of potatoes in France, in order to increase the food supply and relieve the misery of the poor; the possibility of expanding Calonne’s free trade treaty with Britain to include other nations, as a way of ensuring world peace; and “the destruction of Negro slavery.”4
Brissot and his friends were only a few of the many figures who saw the summoning of the Assembly of Notables as a sign that truly radical changes in French government and society were suddenly possible. Many of them, including Brissot himself, would go on to play major roles in the French Revolution. Some of the future revolutionaries, such as the marquis de Lafayette and the marquis de Condorcet, were political insiders. Lafayette, who came from a wealthy court family and had married into an even wealthier clan, had become a celebrity because of his engagement in the American war of independence. Condorcet, from a more modest noble family, was a brilliant mathematician, a former collaborator of the reforming minister Turgot, and a member of the major royal academies. He was an active pamphleteer who had, among other things, put forward a proposal for the gradual abolition of slavery as early as 1781. Other figures galvanized into activism in 1787 were still known only locally. Henri Grégoire, for example, the local priest of the small Lorraine town of Emberménil, had argued for reform of the Church; he attracted attention in 1787 with an essay advocating civil equality for the Jews, an unusual position for a Catholic priest. Some of the younger future revolutionaries, such as the law student Jean-Marie Goujon, were just beginning to translate their youthful emotions into political ideas. Goujon’s family had sent him on a long voyage to one of France’s Indian Ocean colonies, where he had witnessed “the whites’ antisocial contempt for the blacks,” as his friend and biographer Pierre-François Tissot later recalled. There, he absorbed his “first lessons of humanity” when he was a mere seventeen.5
The most visible of these future revolutionaries could claim to be both an insider and an outsider. Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, came from a distinguished noble family. His father, the Victor Riquetti de Mirabeau, had been converted to Physiocratic economic doctrines and had written one of the mid-eighteenth century’s most widely read works on economics, L’ami des hommes (The friend of man), published in 1760. Despite his reputation for philanthropic concern for the betterment of humanity, the elder Mirabeau was in constant conflict with his son from childhood on. So badly disfigured by a childhood case of smallpox that he was often called “the ugliest man in France,” Count Mirabeau became notorious for his outrageous behavior. Despite his scarred face, the future revolutionary proved irresistible to women; he spent money on a prodigious scale, threatening to deplete the family fortune. He courted and won a wealthy local heiress, but the match did not settle him down. When his father punished him by obtaining a lettre de cachet, a royal order calling for his detention in a provincial town, he got himself condemned to death for running off to the Netherlands with a married woman. The sentence was not carried out, but, after being extradited back to France, Mirabeau found himself imprisoned more strictly, again at his father’s request.
Mirabeau used his time in prison to write several scandalous pornographic works, but he also developed a talent as a political polemicist. Upon his release, he issued a lengthy denunciation of the arbitrary justice to which he had been subjected. “Oh my blind compatriots! It would be no more difficult to erase your name than mine from the list of citizens,” he warned.6 He called for a government in which laws were made by elected representatives who would protect individual liberty. Mirabeau’s emergence as a public figure did not temper his private behavior. He continued to run up debts and plunge into new love affairs, even as he brought a widely publicized lawsuit against his own wife. Pleading his own case, Mirabeau revealed the extraordinary oratorical talent that would make him the dominant figure of the early French Revolution.
The controversies of the mid-1780s provided Mirabeau opportunities to build his reputation. Benjamin Franklin encouraged him to step into a debate aroused by French participation in the American Revolution. There had been a proposal to create a special status for veterans of the war by making them and their descendants members of an exclusive “Society of the Cincinnati,” an idea Franklin opposed. Mirabeau used the American dispute as an opportunity to make a scathing criticism of hereditary privileges in general. The spectacle of a titled nobleman denouncing the ancestors of the noblesse d’épée as “thirty thousand ironclad oppressors,” and the forefathers of the noblesse de robe as “calculating vampires who have… sucked the blood of twenty million French,” added to his notoriety.7 Mirabeau joined Brissot in selling his writing talents to investors who wanted to promote stock market schemes. To stop the flow of Mirabeau’s pamphlets, Calonne sent him off to the Prussian capital of Berlin in 1786, where he composed a denunciation of anti-Jewish prejudice, adding to his reputation as a defender of liberty and equality. The announcement of the Assembly of Notables brought him rushing back to Paris: he saw that Calonne would need public spokesmen, and he hoped to be appointed as the assembly’s official secretary. When he was passed over in favor of the less controversial economist Dupont de Nemours, however, he prepared to throw his weight against Calonne and his program. The ability of men like Mirabeau and Brissot to influence public opinion would soon make them a real force.
The Notables selected by Calonne and the king were neither utopian dreamers like Brissot nor “class traitors” like Mirabeau. They included seven “princes of the blood” who stood in the line of royal succession, fourteen archbishops and bishops, and an impressive contingent of “dukes and peers,” including “marshals of France” representing the military aristocracy; marquis, including the young Lafayette, the hero of the American war; and a lowly baron. The royal administration was represented by a selection of councilors of state and intendants, outnumbered nearly three to one by judges from the various parlements. Twenty-five mayors, nearly all of them nobles, were to speak for the interests of France’s cities. Urban artisans like Jacques Ménétra and peasants were entirely excluded, as were the parish priests who made up the majority of the clergy. All the Notables were, it went without saying, male; whatever influence women exercised on their deliberations was indirect, through the ability of wives, mistresses, and fashionable salon hostesses to put ideas in their heads.
Nevertheless, the Notables were not entirely isolated from the currents of change affecting French society. The ambitious archbishop of Toulouse, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, was so imbued with Enlightenment ideas that Louis XVI had refused to appoint him as archbishop of Paris in 1781. “An archbishop,” Louis said, “should at least believe in God.”8 Lafayette brought with him the spirit of republican liberty he had witnessed during his time in America. Many of the Notables had experience in public administration, and they were well aware of the difficulties facing the monarchy. Many of them also bore scars from the bitter political fights between the crown and the parlements during the last decade of Louis XV’s reign, and in particular, Chancellor Maupeou’s attempt to replace those refractory courts with a more pliable judiciary. Although Calonne had been one of Maupeou’s henchmen, he did not systematically exclude opponents of the Maupeou coup from the Assembly of Notables. He also appointed several prominent “Neckerists” loyal to his bitter rival.
Calonne had originally hoped to move quickly, but his schedule was thrown off when the foreign minister, Vergennes, died on February 13, 1787. Louis XVI had trusted Vergennes deeply and lamented his passing, saying, “I have lost the only friend I could count on, the only minister who never deceived me.”9 Although temperamentally more conservative than Calonne, Vergennes had recognized that the monarchy’s financial ills were depriving it of resources to play the role of a great power abroad and had therefore given his support to Calonne’s project. On February 22, the Notables finally convened for their opening session. Unaccustomed to public speaking, Louis XVI read only a few words, not enough to impress the Notables with his determination. It was left to Calonne, a far more polished orator, to lay out his program and try to convince his audience that it represented the king’s views.
Calonne’s sweeping proposals threatened the special interests of the privileged groups from which the Notables were drawn, but they also raised serious questions that concerned all the king’s subjects. Showering the Notables with figures, Calonne argued that the new land tax would raise more revenue without affecting the poorer subjects. The Notables pointed out, however, that Calonne himself talked of a royal budget deficit of more than a hundred million livres a year, and the new tax, according to his own estimates, would produce only about a third of that sum in increased revenue. They objected to the unlimited revenue the new taxes would bring in as well as to the details of how they were supposed to be collected. Most importantly, however, the Notables asserted that they lacked the authority to approve new taxes. “It would require the Estates General to give an adequate consent to a tax of this nature,” one of them insisted, reviving the demand first voiced twelve years earlier by the reforming minister Malesherbes after the Maupeou coup.10
Other parts of Calonne’s program also aroused opposition among the Notables. The provincial assemblies he intended to create, in which half the seats would be reserved for representatives of the Third Estate, while the other half would be filled by the clergy and the nobility, struck many of the Notables as a threat to the kingdom’s traditional social hierarchy. “At every turn the Plebeian finds himself the equal of the Minister of the Altar, of the Noble or of the Magistrate,” the duc d’Harcourt complained.11 In a foretaste of the bitter personal rivalries that would poison revolutionary politics, Calonne also found himself fighting a proxy duel with Necker. By insisting that the budget had been in balance when Necker was in office, the “Neckerists” put the blame for the financial crisis entirely on Calonne’s shoulders and insinuated that he could not be trusted to resolve it.
Frustrated by the Notables’ unexpectedly stubborn opposition, Calonne was also weakened by an attack from a coterie of pamphleteers led by Mirabeau. Their collectively written Denunciation of Speculation exposed Calonne’s use of government funds to buy off speculators who had threatened the launch of the new India Company a few years earlier. But Mirabeau, Brissot, and their collaborators raised more fundamental issues that would loom increasingly large as the crisis facing the monarchy deepened. France’s problems could only worsen, they warned, “as long as we have no constitution,” a set of rules that would make it impossible for someone as untrustworthy as Calonne to exercise power. To have a constitution, they wrote, would mean replacing the uneven patchwork of existing laws with national institutions “guided by a single spirit… according to uniform principles,” and a society in which citizens would be “classified from now on according to the useful contributions they make to society.”12 The pamphlet’s language suggested a revolutionary remaking of the country that would eliminate such basic features of French life as the differences between provinces and the existence of privileged classes.
Now far behind the timetable he had anticipated, Calonne decided to take yet another risky gamble. Initially, his proposals and the Assembly of Notables’ proceedings were supposed to be secret. On March 30, 1787, however, Calonne abruptly brought the whole of the French population into the debate by having the royal printer in Versailles publish his proposals, together with a cover letter denouncing the selfish motives of his opponents. Free copies of Calonne’s cover letter, or “Avertissement,” were distributed in the streets, and parish priests were directed to read it aloud to their congregations. Within two weeks, according to one chronicler, “people arriving in Paris said they had seen it distributed in the marketplaces of the smallest towns.” Some readers responded positively: Jérôme Pétion, a future revolutionary mayor of Paris, for example, wrote to his friend Brissot that “there are excellent views in Calonne’s projects, views very favorable to the people.” The Notables, however, reacted with outrage. The minister, they claimed, was trying to incite the mass of the population against them. Lafayette, despite his enthusiasm for the American Revolution, had to agree that “even in Boston this appeal would have been regarded as an act of sedition.”13 Calonne’s opponents convinced the king that if there was to be any hope of getting the Notables to approve significant reforms, the minister had to go. A week after the publication of the “Avertissement,” he found himself out of office.
Calonne’s dismissal did nothing to resolve the financial problems that had led to the Assembly of Notables being held in the first place. For a few weeks, Louis XVI, showing unaccustomed energy, tried hard to persuade the Notables to accept a modified version of Calonne’s plan. But even the king’s personal meetings with leading members of the Notables proved fruitless. Estimates of the deficit escalated steadily, making the public and the stock market increasingly nervous. Unwilling to give in to pressure from many of the Notables to summon Necker, the king finally agreed to turn the management of royal finances over to Brienne, Calonne’s main critic among the Notables. The king hoped that Brienne could win their endorsement of at least some significant measures.
Initially, Brienne pushed for modified versions of Calonne’s proposals: for example, he amended the land tax so that it would be collected in cash rather than in agricultural produce, and he put a limit on the amount of revenue it would produce, thinking this would quell opposition to the idea. The assembly’s secretary, Dupont de Nemours, optimistically concluded that Brienne had conceded the principle that there could be no taxation without the consent of the governed, and that, as a result, France would now be “a republic, where there remains a magistrate, decorated with the title and honors of royalty, but perpetually obliged to assemble his people and to ask them to provide for his needs.” Brienne quickly learned, as many others would discover during the Revolution, that accepting a government position drastically altered his standing with his former allies. The Notables remained steadfast in their opposition to any increase in taxes or alteration of privileges. They cloaked their objections in language about defending the public good and protecting liberties, making it difficult to denounce them as selfish defenders of special interests. The assembly was willing to endorse the creation of provincial assemblies and to approve a new loan to enable the government to pay its most pressing bills, but they wanted to see the royal power to collect and spend revenue severely restricted, an idea that one journalist likened to treating the king like a “prodigal son” who needed to be taught not to “repeat the same mistakes.”14
Within a few weeks, Brienne and the king concluded that there was no point in prolonging the Notables’ sessions and sent them home. The assembly’s failure demoralized the king; according to the Austrian ambassador, he lost interest in his official duties, spending his time hunting, eating, and drinking to the point where he sometimes “lost his reason.” The Notables were as frustrated as the king and his minister: in one of the last meetings of the bureau to which he had been assigned, Lafayette startled its chairman, the king’s younger brother the comte d’Artois, by openly calling for the convocation of the Estates General. Calonne’s gamble that radical reforms could be brought about through a voluntary consensus among the kingdom’s elites had failed, and his attempt had badly undermined the credibility of existing institutions. As the great nineteenth-century French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville would remark, Calonne had demonstrated that “the most perilous moment for a bad government is when it seeks to mend its ways.”15
Left to proceed with little input from the king, Brienne began to implement the changes in local and provincial government that the Notables did approve, supported significant reforms in the military, and moved ahead with a proposal to grant limited civil rights to the kingdom’s Protestant minority, a major shift in policy that appealed to enlightened opinion but alarmed many of the Catholic clergy. Had he succeeded, Brienne might have been remembered as a great reforming minister. The financial problems facing the government did not permit him the time he would have needed, however, and in the public debate about the underlying issues that the proposed reforms had opened up, it became clear that many groups would no longer accept radical changes without a real voice in shaping them.
During his first year in power, Brienne tried all the timeworn tactics for dealing with the parlements that had developed during the reign of Louis XV. The older magistrates who had taken part in the noisy struggles of the Maupeou era were familiar with this playbook. Younger members, such as the talented orator Duval d’Eprémesnil and the ambitious radical Adrien Duport, put forward a heady, if confused, brew that combined traditional arguments with new ideas. On the traditional side, they spoke of how the parlements functioned as a check on royal power; more radically, they praised representative government and cited the examples of England and the United States. Beleaguered defenders of the ministry complained that the young hotheads in the Paris Parlement had become addicted to demagogic opposition for its own sake. “The more dangerous and violent [an opinion] is, the more it exposes them to the opprobrium of the Court, the more glorious it becomes to profess it,” a critic wrote.16
After approving an emergency loan to keep the government afloat in May 1787, the Paris Parlement accepted several of Brienne’s reforms that did not involve new taxes. When proposed stamp and land taxes were presented for registration at the beginning of July, however, the magistrates balked. Adopting the tactics of the Notables earlier in the year, they called on the king to present them with a comprehensive account of royal revenue and expenditures and a detailed list of the cuts in expenditures that he would make. The king’s representative, his younger brother the comte d’Artois, indignantly rejected these demands as violations of the king’s right to govern without interference. On July 16, the parlement issued another remonstrance, this time asserting its “wish to see the nation assembled before any new taxes. Only it, knowing the true state of the finances, can do away with great abuses and offer great resources.”17 The judges thus endorsed the call for the convocation of the Estates General that Lafayette had made at the end of the Assembly of Notables.
In a formal ceremony at Versailles on August 6, the king compelled the parlement to register the tax decrees, but as soon as they returned to their Parisian chambers, the magistrates voided them. Days later, they further challenged the king by voting to indict Calonne for financial malfeasance, and rejecting any tax that treated nobles and commoners in the same way. The ministry struck back with a countermeasure that had frequently been employed under Louis XV, exiling the magistrates to the provincial town of Troyes. As was equally traditional, law clerks and others whose jobs depended on the presence of the judges staged noisy public demonstrations in the capital. Meanwhile, the exiled magistrates issued proclamations inciting judges in the lower courts to refuse to recognize the tax edicts. Brienne tried to avoid a brutal confrontation with the parlements by suggesting a compromise: he would renounce the new stamp and land taxes and instead continue collecting the wartime taxes imposed years earlier, which were due to expire. In his view, this measure would not require the judges to approve any new taxes. He would bring the deficit down by implementing rigorous cuts in government expenditures, and in the meantime, he would take out new loans that would be easier to repay once the government’s credit had improved. And, once he had demonstrated that his program of financial recovery was succeeding, he would satisfy the public clamor by calling a meeting of the Estates General in five years’ time. Despite the inflammatory rhetoric of their public declarations, the parlement judges were rapidly tiring of their forced vacation in Troyes. Assured that the parlement would ratify his measures, Brienne allowed the magistrates to return to Paris.
The government’s eagerness to resolve the standoff with the parlement was intensified by a humiliating foreign crisis that reached its peak in September 1787, when Prussia sent troops to occupy the Netherlands, one of France’s traditional allies. Their aim was to quash the “Patriot” movement against the country’s ruler, the stadholder, that had been developing there for several years. In Versailles, the ministry recognized that it simply did not have the money to oppose the Prussians. The Dutch Patriot movement prefigured the revolution about to break out in France. Calling for a government elected by all citizens, Patriot propagandists were the first to use the word “democracy” in its modern sense. In 1785, they circulated a proposed declaration of rights whose language anticipated that of the French declaration of 1789. The Prussian intervention made many of the Dutch Patriots flee to France, where they denounced the French court for abandoning them. Lafayette, who saw the Dutch movement as an echo of the American struggle for independence, called the French failure to support the Patriots “a blot which it will be difficult to wash out.”18 Even conservative French diplomats and military officers blamed the government for letting itself get into a situation where it could not stand up to foreign rivals and protect the national interest.
Brienne and his colleague Chrétien-François Lamoignon, marquis de Basville, the minister of justice, prepared carefully for a formal ceremony at the Paris Parlement on November 19, 1787. The judges had been promised that they would be allowed to speak freely and take a vote on the ministry’s proposals. After more than eight hours of debate, they were finally ready to vote when Louis XVI suddenly intervened, announcing: “I order that my edict be registered.” This was the formula traditionally employed at a lit de justice ceremony. A wave of shock ran through the hall at this reversion to the procedures of absolute monarchy. The king’s cousin the duc d’Orléans, the person closest to the line of succession after the king’s sons and brothers, declared the king’s action illegal, and Louis XVI replied with words that his ancestor Louis XIV would have endorsed: “It is legal because I will it.”
In the short run, the king’s will prevailed. The duc d’Orléans’s protest earned him a lettre de cachet exiling him to one of his country estates, and several magistrates who had supported him were arrested and imprisoned. Investors eagerly subscribed to the first of Brienne’s planned loans, which offered favorable terms. The government turned its attention to installing the newly approved provincial assemblies, which Brienne hoped might become a mechanism for implementing features of the land tax the parlements had rejected, particularly the extension of tax collection to the property of the privileged orders. Among other things, this reform brought changes to peasant villages. Accustomed to managing many of their local affairs through various traditional arrangements with their seigneurs, or overlords, villagers now discovered that they were supposed to adopt a uniform system of municipal government. In the tiny village of Silly-en-Multien, the diary-keeping schoolteacher Pierre Delahaye noted the details of the unfamiliar voting procedure. There, as in many rural communities, the reform caused a substantial shift in the local balance of power. Wealthy peasants dominated the new elected village councils at the expense both of the seigneur and of their poorer neighbors.
While the government pushed forward with its reform efforts, the loose network of radicals that had begun to coalesce around Brissot, Mirabeau, and their friends also continued to develop. In February 1788, Brissot founded the Société des amis des noirs (Society of the Friends of the Blacks). Inspired by the abolitionist movement in England, the Friends of the Blacks quickly attracted a list of members that read like a “Who’s Who” of future revolutionaries. They included Mirabeau, Lafayette, Condorcet, Clavière, and the abbé Emmanuel Sieyès. Open to nobles and commoners alike and even to women, who played a large role in the British antislavery movement, the society was the first example of the kind of institution that would play a large role after 1789: the revolutionary political club. Brissot recognized that the cause of abolition offered a way to put the issue of liberty on the agenda without openly challenging the government. Clavière met with Brienne in March 1788 and reported back to the club that the minister had said “it pained him to see that the slave trade and the slavery of the Negroes were continuing, [and] that it would be desirable to find a way to abolish them,” although he warned that any reform would have to also be “in the interest of the planters and the treasury.”19 Brissot, Mirabeau, and a growing number of other pamphleteers also continued to develop their talents at using the press to stir up public discussion. Mirabeau obtained permission to put out a journal that became a vehicle for abolitionist propaganda. He also published documents such as the proposed declaration of rights drawn up by Dutch Patriot republicans in 1785.
Despite the initial success of the measures forced through the parlement in November, Brienne knew he still faced a volatile situation. He had hoped that an edict granting civil toleration to France’s Protestant minority, presented to the parlement on November 19 along with his controversial financial measures, would help him in the battle for public opinion. It did in fact split the parlementary firebrands: Duval d’Eprémesnil opposed it, siding with conservative Catholics, while Adrien Duport supported it. The leading spokesman for the French Protestant community, the pastor Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, was disappointed that public Protestant worship would still not be permitted; he became one of the pamphleteers demanding an expanded version of political liberty. Meanwhile, the Catholic bishop of Dol, spokesman for the provincial estates of Brittany, warned the king that granting rights to the Protestant minority would “violate his Coronation Oath, and that such a measure would infallibly be a source of civil dissensions, and commotions in his kingdom.”20 The debates about the measure were a foretaste of the violent controversies about religion that would take place during the Revolution.
In the early spring of 1788, Brienne and Lamoignon decided to broaden their efforts with a set of reforms to France’s judicial system even more sweeping than Maupeou’s coup in 1771. They wanted to create a new central Cour plenière, a plenary court, to replace the various parlements in registering royal edicts. The parlements themselves would be restricted to hearing appeals from judgments rendered in lower-level courts, whose jurisdictions would be augmented. Brienne and Lamoignon hoped that the expanded responsibilities granted to lower courts at the expense of the parlements would win them the support of provincial judges and enable them to weather the storm they knew would break out when their plan was announced. To broaden the appeal of their reform, Brienne and Lamoignon also decreed that litigants would no longer have to pay judges to hear their cases; moreover, judicial procedures would be simplified.
Forewarned of what was coming, the members of the Paris Parlement prepared to resist. On April 29, 1788, the judges issued a decree denouncing any efforts to change the procedures for the collection of taxes, and on May 3 they went even further, setting down in writing what they proclaimed to be the fundamental constitutional principles of the kingdom. Their declaration acknowledged that “France is a monarchy,” but asserted that the king was required to govern “according to the laws.” Those laws included, they claimed, “the right of the Nation to freely consent to taxes through regularly convoked and regularly organized meetings of the Estates General.” Other fundamental laws that they claimed the king could not alter included the permanence of judicial appointments and guarantees against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.21 Rather than speaking of royal subjects, the declaration used the term “citizens.” The privileged judges of the parlement thus became the first to insist that freedom depended on the recognition of fundamental constitutional laws that stood above the power of the king and to demand a true representative assembly to speak for the nation.
With its defiant declaration, the Paris Parlement raised the political stakes beyond anything that had occurred in any of its previous clashes with the monarchy over the course of the eighteenth century. The judges and their supporters prepared themselves for the government’s inevitable reaction. Cheered on by an unruly crowd of supporters, the magistrates waited while royal troops, the Gardes françaises, surrounded their building, and then, between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. on May 6, 1788, finally entered their chamber to arrest Duval d’Eprémesnil and one of his allies. After a lengthy standoff, the two magistrates finally gave themselves up. With his sense of theater, Duval d’Eprémesnil announced, “I am the victim who is being sacrificed on the altar; my crime is to have defended public liberty against the innumerable attacks made on it.” His words resonated in the heart of the young legal apprentice Goujon, who wrote to his parents, “Sensible people say nothing, but lament in their hearts all these changes that attack the essence of our constitution and our liberty.” Goujon, whose evolution over the next few years would make him the very model of a perfect revolutionary, was only one of many who were stirred by the judges’ resistance. The lawyer Charles Lacretelle, later to become one of the Revolution’s first historians, never forgot “the impression made on me by the sight of those magistrates who came to offer themselves and perhaps to sacrifice themselves to save freedom, which seemed at that time to have no other shelter than their togas.”22