The attempts of the King’s Finance Minister, Turgot, to tackle some of the country’s problems were neither reassuring to the people nor welcome at Court where his manner, too, caused offence. He was tactless, high-minded, impatient and touchy; he interfered officiously, so it was said, in departments other than his own. A thoughtless remark of his to the effect that if a woman were to have influence on the King’s decisions it was better that this woman should be Marie Antoinette rather than de Pompadour or Du Barry annoyed both the King, who had attempted to keep his wife out of politics, and the Queen who resented being compared with royal mistresses. Accordingly, in May 1776, having lost the confidence not only of the King and Queen and the Court but of the financiers, the Church and parlement, and being considered too much of a physiocrate by the interventionists, Turgot was dismissed.
The following year, the Swiss financier, Jacques Necker, the Director of the Royal Treasury, was appointed Director-General of Finance, a post which had to be specially created for him since, being a foreigner, he could not serve on the King’s Council of Ministers, all of whom, unlike himself, were French noblemen; and, being a Protestant, he could not be naturalized. It was the common opinion in Paris – an opinion fostered by his formidably clever and inextinguishably romantic wife who held sway over a literary salon in their smart house in the Rue de Cléry – that Necker was a financial genius. It was an opinion with which he himself would not have quarrelled. Silent, ponderous and ruminative, with half-closed eyes in a pallid, yellowish face, he seemed to be constantly lost in thought. If any man could bring order to France’s economy, it was maintained, surely it was he. After all, he had made a fortune for himself as a banker in Paris; and a self-made millionaire could scarcely be other than an improvement on the noble Finance Ministers of the past.
At first all appeared to go satisfactorily. The King and his new Minister got on well together, even though Necker’s silences when broken tended to be succeeded by economic speculations, prognostications and lectures of inordinate length. His cuts in Household expenditure at Versailles naturally aroused resentment at Court, where his vanity soon aroused as much antagonism as Turgot’s high-handedness and where he made a particular enemy of the Comte de Provence whose request for over a million livres, which he claimed was due from his father’s estate, was rejected. Yet it was generally agreed that these reductions of expenditure at Court were not only necessary but inevitable.
When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle, the traites, the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. Necker thought that he had the answer to this problem: arguing that the limits of taxable capacity had already been passed, he proposed to raise the money required by borrowing, on the dubious assumption that a swollen public debt would not place an insupportable burden on the country’s finances. He offered generous rates of interest and in order to attract investors published his Compte Rendu au Roi sur les finances de la Nation, a grossly optimistic and complacent document which transformed an actual deficit of 46,000,000 livres into a fictitious surplus of 10,000,000. Although the public at large, having no means of checking Necker’s figures, accepted his pamphlet with satisfaction and bought thirty thousand copies of it within a week, its fraudulence was immediately noticed by most of the King’s other Ministers. ‘It’s about as true as it is modest,’ Maurepas commented when asked what he thought of it. A few weeks later, after a confidential memorandum written by him for the King’s consideration and proposing a limitation of the parlement’s fiscal powers had been copied and distributed by his enemy, the Comte de Provence, Necker felt his position so undermined that he demanded admittance to the Council of Ministers. The King refused, and Necker resigned.
Necker was succeeded as Director-General of Finance by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a cheerful, amiable, red-haired man of forty-seven who had been an intendant of Flanders. A collector of pictures and the proud possessor of no less than ten Titians, Calonne had a far more pleasant and easy manner than either Turgot or Necker and was well liked at Court. He became an even more welcome figure there when, soon after entering office, he raised further loans which allowed him to be far less severe with taxes than it was feared he might have been. It was not long, however, before Calonne realized in what a perilous state the country’s finances were and that fundamental and wide-ranging reforms were essential to save them from utter collapse and to obviate the risk of the monarchy collapsing with them. He therefore drew up a detailed programme which included, together with many other less contentious measures of both economic and administrative reform, a new tax on land which was to be imposed without regard to the status of its owners and which would accordingly fall most heavily upon the privileged orders. This tax was to be a permanent one, not requiring registration for renewal by the parlements, and would enable the King’s Ministers to disregard the parlementaires’ remonstrances which had been the bane of their previous existence. The apprehensions of the nobility and the clergy that this new tax would prove not only financially burdensome but also the first step towards the extinction of their privileged positions were exacerbated by Calonne’s further proposal that its assessment should be supervised by newly created provincial assemblies where local landowners would have votes in proportion to the amount of land they owned rather than in accordance with their social rank.
Well aware of the opposition that his proposals aroused among both the privileged orders and the members of the parlements, who were now confirmed in their belief that a strong and favoured aristocracy was a necessary bulwark against royal absolutism, Calonne suggested that they should be submitted for approval to a special Assembly of Notables, a convention nominated by the King, of which Henri IV had been able to make successful use in the past.
This Assembly of 144 members, including mayors and magistrates as well as nobles and prelates, met in February 1787, and Calonne, revealing the existence of an immense annual deficit, opened the proceedings with challenging words: ‘Only in the abolition of abuses lies the means to answer our need. The abuses which we must wipe out for the public good are of the widest extent, enjoy the greatest protection, have the deepest roots and the most spreading branches.’ But already the opponents of Calonne’s policies were combining to render them unworkable. Both the Comte de Provence and the King’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, voiced their disapproval of him. So did Loménie de Brienne, the sickly, ingratiating and scarcely less than agnostic Archbishop of Toulouse, who hoped to succeed him. So did Étienne d’Aligre, one of the leading magistrates in the Paris parlement. So did the adherents of Necker who chose to believe their hero’s assertion that France had been solvent at the time of his enforced resignation. So did the influential Archbishop of Narbonne who declared, ‘M. de Calonne wishes to bleed France to death. He is merely asking us whether to make the incision on the feet, the arms or the jugular vein.’ So did Marie Antoinette, who strongly condemned Calonne’s publication of an avertissement which, distributed free all over France as an appeal to public opinion, was condemned by a member of her Household as ‘a terrible diatribe against the clergy and the nobility’. Obliged to listen to these voices raised in condemnation of his Minister, the King at first supported him, then wavered, and constantly asked for advice. ‘He asked advice of everybody,’ wrote Pierre Malouet, a well-informed government official, ‘and seemed to be saying to every person he approached, “What can I do? What should be done?”’ In the end Calonne was dismissed and exiled to his estates in Lorraine, whence, threatened with proceedings against him by the Paris parlement, he fled to England, the first of the émigrés.