a contribution to a kind of literature which has seriously modified the
practical arrangements and social relations of the western world. In
1766 he published his Essay on the Formation and Distribution of
Wealth--a short but most pithy treatise, in which he anticipated some of
the leading economic principles of that greater work by Adam Smith,
which was given to the world ten years later. Turgot's Essay has none of
the breadth of historic outlook, and none of the amplitude of concrete
illustrations from real affairs, which make the Wealth of Nations so
deeply fertile, so persuasive, so interesting, so thoroughly alive, so
genuinely enriching to the understanding of the judicious reader. But
the comparative dryness of Turgot's too concise form does not blind the
historian of political economy to the merit of the substance of his
propositions. It was no small proof of originality and enlightenment to
precede Adam Smith by ten years in the doctrines of free trade, of free
industry, of loans on interest, of the constitutive elements of price,
of the effects of the division of labour, of the processes of the
formation of capital. The passage on interest will bear reproducing once
more:--'We may regard the rate of interest as a kind of level, below
which all labour, all cultivation, all industry, all commerce ceases. It
is like a sea spreading out over a vast district; the tops of the
mountains rise above the waters and form fertile and cultivated islands.
If the sea by any chance finds an outlet, then in proportion as it goes
down, first the slopes, next the plains and valleys, appear and clothe
themselves with productions of every kind. It is enough that the sea
rises or falls by a foot, to inundate vast shores, or to restore them to
cultivation and plenty.' There are not many illustrations at once so apt
and so picturesque as this, but most of the hundred paragraphs that make
up the Reflections are, notwithstanding one or two of the characteristic
crotchets of Quesnai's school, both accurate and luminous.
V.
In May 1774 Lewis XV. died. His successor was only twenty years old; he
was sluggish in mind, vacillating in temper, and inexperienced in
affairs. Maurepas was recalled, to become the new king's chief adviser;
and Maurepas, at the suggestion of one of Turgot's college friends,
summoned the Intendant from Limoges, and placed him at the head of the
department of marine. This post Turgot only held for a couple of months;
he was then preferred to the great office of Controller-General. The
condition of the national finance made its administration the most
important of all the departments of the government. Turgot's policy in
this high sphere belongs to the general history of France, and there is
no occasion for us to reproduce its details here. It was mainly an
attempt to extend over the whole realm the kind of reforms which had
been tried on a small scale in the Limousin. He suppressed the
_corvees_, and he tacked the money payment which was substituted for
that burden on to the Twentieths, an impost from which the privileged
class was not exempt. 'The weight of this charge,' he made the king say
in the edict of suppression, 'now falls and must fall only on the
poorest classes of our subjects.' This truth only added to the
exasperation of the rich, and perhaps might well have been omitted.
Along with the _corvees_ were suppressed the jurandes, or exclusive
industrial corporations or trade-guilds, whose monopolies and
restrictions were so mischievous an impediment to the wellbeing of the
country. In the preamble to this edict we seem to be breathing the air,
not of Versailles in 1775, but of the Convention in 1793:--'God, when he
made man with wants, and rendered labour an indispensable resource, made
the right of work the property of every individual in the world, and
this property is the first, the most sacred, and the most
imprescriptible of all kinds of property. We regard it as one of the
first duties of our justice, and as one of the acts most of all worthy
of our benevolence, to free our subjects from every infraction of that
inalienable right of humanity.'
Again, Turgot removed a tax from certain forms of lease, with a view to
promote the substitution of a system of farming for the system of
_metayers_. He abolished an obstructive privilege by which the Hotel
Dieu had the exclusive right of selling meat during Lent. The whole of
the old incoherent and vexatious police of the corn-markets was swept
away. Finally, he inspired the publication of a short but most
important writing, Boncerf's _Inconvenients des Droits Feodaux_, in
which, without criticising the origin of the privileges of the nobles,
the author showed how much it would be to the advantage of the lords to
accept a commutation of their feudal dues. What was still more
exasperating both to nobles and lawyers, was the author's hardy
assertion that if the lords refused the offer of their vassals, the king
had the power to settle the question for them by his own legislative
authority. This was the most important and decisive of the
pre-revolutionary tracts.
Equally violent prejudices and more sensitive interests were touched by
two other sets of proposals. The minister began to talk of a new
territorial contribution, and a great survey and re-assessment of the
land. Then followed an edict restoring in good earnest the free
circulation of corn within the kingdom. Turgot was a partisan of free
trade in its most entire application; but for the moment he contented
himself with the free importation of grain and its free circulation at
home, without sanctioning its exportation abroad. Apart from changes
thus organically affecting the industry of the country, Turgot dealt
sternly with certain corruptions that had crept into the system of
tax-farming, as well as with the monstrous abuses of the system of
court-pensions.
The measures we have enumerated were all excellent in themselves, and
the state of the kingdom was such as urgently to call for them. They
were steps towards the construction of a fabric of freedom and justice.
But they provoked a host of bitter and irreconcilable enemies, while
they raised up no corresponding host of energetic supporters. The reason
of the first of these circumstances is plain enough, but the second
demands a moment's consideration. That the country clergy should
denounce the Philosopher, as they called him, from the pulpit and the
steps of the altar, was natural enough. Many even of his old colleagues
of the Encyclopaedia had joined Necker against the minister. The greatest
of them all, it is true, stood by Turgot with unfailing staunchness; a
shower of odes, diatribes, dialogues, allegories, dissertations, came
from the Patriarch of Ferney to confound and scatter the enemies of the
new reforms. But the people were unmoved. If Turgot published an
explanation of the high price of grain, they perversely took explanation
for gratulation, and thought the Controller preferred to have bread
dear. If he put down seditious risings with a strong hand, they insisted
that he was in nefarious league with the corn-merchants and the bakers.
How was it that the people did not recognise the hand of a benefactor?
The answer is that they suspected the source of the new reforms too
virulently to judge them calmly. For half a century, as Condorcet says
pregnantly, they had been undergoing the evils of anarchy, while they
supposed that they were feeling those of despotism. The error was grave,
but it was natural, and one effect of it was to make every measure that
proceeded from the court odious. Hence, when the parlements took up
their judicial arms in defence of abuses and against reforms, the common
people took sides with them, for no better reason than that this was to
take sides against the king's government. Malesherbes in those days, and
good writers since, held that the only safe plan was to convoke the
States-General. They would at least have shared the responsibility with
the crown. Turgot rejected this opinion. By doctrine, no less than by
temperament, he disliked the control of a government by popular bodies.
Everything for the people, nothing by the people: this was the maxim of
the Economists, and Turgot held it in all its rigour. The royal
authority was the only instrument that he could bring himself to use.
Even if he could have counted on a Frederick or a Napoleon, the
instrument would hardly have served his purposes; as things were, it was
a broken reed, not a fine sword, that he had to his hand.
The National Assembly and the Convention went to work exactly in the
same stiff and absolute spirit as Turgot. They were just as little
disposed to gradual, moderate, and compromising ways as he. But with
them the absolute authority on which they leaned was real and most
potent; with him it was a shadow. We owe it to Turgot that the
experiment was complete: he proved that the monarchy of divine right was
incapable of reform.[45] As it has been sententiously expressed, 'The
part of the sages was now played out; room was now for the men of
destiny.'
[Footnote 45: Foncin's _Ministere de Turgot_, p. 574.]
If the repudiation of a popular assembly was the cardinal error in
Turgot's scheme of policy, there were other errors added. The
publication of Boncerf's attack on the feudal dues, with the undisguised
sanction of the minister, has been justly condemned as a grave
imprudence, and as involving a forgetfulness of the true principles of
government and administration, that would certainly not have been
committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model,
nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of
reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the
king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it
augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough
to bring new friends.[46] Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by
personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent
absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., wrote a
satire on the government during Turgot's ministry, and in it there is a
picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: 'There was
then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more
rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity
than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly
formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other;
made harsh and distant by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much
a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which
he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot.'
[Footnote 46: See Mauguin's _Etudes Historiques sur l'Administration de
l'Agriculture_, i. 353.]
It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man's
character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already
suspected by friends. The coarse account given by the Count of Provence
shows us where Turgot's weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was
distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even
his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short
ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could
see nobody save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness,
and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the
pages of the noble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in
dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian,
could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.
The king had once said pathetically: 'It is only M. Turgot and I who
love the people.' But even with the king, there were points at which the
minister's philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the
friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form of
superstition; and he, who as a youth had refused to go through life
wearing the mask of the infidel abbe, had too much self-respect in his
manhood to practise the rites and uses of a system which he considered
a degradation of the understanding. One day the king said to Maurepas:
'You have given me a Controller-general who never goes to mass.' 'Sire,'
replied that ready worldling, 'the Abbe Terray always went'--and Terray
had brought the government to bankruptcy. But Turgot hurt the king's
conscience more directly than by staying away from mass and confession.
Faithful to the long tradition of his ancestors, Lewis XVI. wished the
ceremony of his coronation to take place at Rheims. Turgot urged that it
should be performed at Paris, and as cheaply as possible. And he
advanced on to still more delicate ground. In the rite of consecration,
the usage was that the king should take an oath to pursue all heretics.
Turgot demanded the suppression of this declaration of intolerance. It
was pointed out to him that it was only a formality. But Turgot was one
of those severe and scrupulous souls, to whom a wicked promise does not
cease to be degrading by becoming hypocritical. And he was perfectly
justified. It was only by the gradual extinction of the vestiges of her
ancient barbarisms, as occasion offered, that the Church could have
escaped the crash of the Revolution. Meanwhile, the king and the priests
had their own way: the king was crowned at Rheims, and the priests
exacted from him an oath to be unjust, oppressive, and cruel towards a
portion of his subjects. Turgot could only remonstrate; but the
philosophic memorial in which he protested in favour of religious
freedom and equality, gave the king a serious shock.
We have no space, nor would it be worth while, to describe the intrigues
which ended in the minister's fall. Already in the previous volume, we
have referred to the immediate and decisive share which, the queen had
in his disgrace.[47] He was dismissed in the beginning of May 1776,
having been in power little more than twenty months. 'You are too
hurried,' Malesherbes had said to him. 'You think you have the love of
the public good; not at all; you have a rage for it, for a man must be
nothing short of enraged to insist on forcing the hand of the whole
world.' Turgot replied, more pathetically perhaps than reasonably,
'What, you accuse me of haste, and you know that in my family we die of
gout at fifty!'
[Footnote 47: See vol. i. p. 31.]
There is something almost tragic in the joy with which Turgot's
dismissal was received on all sides. 'I seem,' said Marmontel, 'to be
looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just
heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged.' Voltaire and
Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by
the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. 'This event,' wrote
Condorcet, 'has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same
pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have
shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the people
wrings my heart. They dance and sport, as if they had lost nothing. Ah,
we have had a delicious dream, but it has been all too short.' Voltaire
was equally inconsolable, and still more violent in the expression of
his grief. When he had become somewhat calmer, he composed those
admirable verses,--_To a Man_:
Philosophe indulgent, ministre citoyen,
Qui ne cherchas le vrai que pour faire le bien,
Qui d'un peuple leger et trop ingrat peut-etre
Preparais le bonheur et celui de son maitre,
Ce qu'on nomme disgrace a paye tes bienfaits.
Le vrai prix de travail n'est que de vivre en paix.
Turgot at first showed some just and natural resentment at the levity
with which he had been banished from power, and he put on no airs of
theatrical philosophy. He would have been untrue to the sincerity of his
character, if he had affected indifference or satisfaction at seeing his
beneficent hopes for ever destroyed. But chagrin did not numb his
industry or his wide interests. Condorcet went to visit him some months
after his fall. He describes Turgot as reading Ariosto, as making
experiments in physics, and as having forgotten all that had passed
within the last two years, save when the sight of evils that he would
have mitigated or removed, happened to remind him of it. He occupied
himself busily with chemistry and optics, with astronomy and mechanics,
and above all with meteorology, which was a new science in those days,
and the value of which to the study of the conditions of human health,
of the productions of the earth, of navigation, excited his most ardent
anticipations. Turgot also was so moved by the necessity for a new
synthesis of life and knowledge as to frame a plan for a great work 'on
the human soul, the order of the universe, the Supreme Being, the
principles of societies, the rights of men, political constitutions,
legislation, administration, physical education, the means of perfecting
the human race relatively to the progressive advance and employment of
their forces, to the happiness of which they are susceptible, to the
extent of the knowledge to which they may attain, to the certainty,
clearness, and simplicity of the principles of conduct, to the purity of
the feelings that spring up in men's souls.' While his mind was moving
through these immense spaces of thought, he did not forget the things of
the hour. He invented a machine for serving ship's cables. He wrote a
plea for allowing Captain Cook's vessel to remain unmolested during the
American war. With Adam Smith, with Dr. Price, with Franklin, with Hume,
he kept up a grave and worthy correspondence. Of his own countrymen,
Condorcet was his most faithful friend and disciple, and it is much to
Condorcet's credit that this was so, for Turgot never gave way to the
passionate impulses of the philosophic school against what Voltaire
called the Infamous, that is to say, against the Church, her doctrines,
her morality, her history.
We have already said that the keyword to Turgot's political aims and
social theory was not Pity nor Benevolence, but Justice. It was Justice
also, not temporary Prejudice nor Passion, that guided his judgment
through the heated issues of the time. This justice and exact
reasonableness it was impossible to surprise or throw off its guard. His
sublime intellectual probity never suffered itself to be tempted. He
protested against the doctrines of Helvetius's book, _de l'Esprit_, and
of D'Holbach's _Systeme de la Nature_, at a moment when some of his best
friends were enthusiastic in admiration, for no better reason than that
the doctrines of the two books were hateful to the ecclesiastics and
destructive of the teaching of the Church. In the course of a
discussion, Condorcet had maintained that in general scrupulous persons
are not fit for great things: a Christian, he said, will waste in
subduing the darts of the flesh time that he might have employed upon
things that would have been useful to humanity; he will never venture to
rise against tyrants, for fear of having formed a hasty judgment, and so
forth in other cases. 'No virtue,' replies Turgot, 'in whatever sense
you take the word, can dispense with justice; and I think no better of
the people who do your _great things_ at the cost of justice, than I do
of poets who fancy that they can produce great wonders of imagination
without order and regularity. I know that excessive precision tends to
deaden the fire alike of action and of composition; but there is a
medium in everything. There has never been any question in our
controversy of a capuchin wasting his time in quenching the darts of the
flesh, though, by the way, in the whole sum of time wasted, the term
expressing the time lost in satisfying the appetites of the flesh would
probably be found to be decidedly the greater of the two.' This
parenthesis is one of a hundred illustrations of Turgot's habitual
refusal to be carried out of the narrow path of exact rationality, or to
take for granted a single word of the common form of the dialect even of
his best friends and closest associates. And the readiness with which
men fall into common form, the levity with which they settle the most
complex and difficult issues, stirred in Turgot what Michelet calls
_ferocite_, and Mr. Matthew Arnold calls _soeva indignatio_. 'Turgot
was filled with an astonished, awful, oppressive sense of the _immoral
thoughtlessness_ of men; of the heedless, hazardous way in which they
deal with things of the greatest moment to them; of the immense,
incalculable misery which is due to this cause' (_M. Arnold_).
Turgot died on the 20th of March 1781, leaving to posterity the memory
of a character which was more perfect and imposing than his
performances. Condorcet saw in this harmonious union and fine balance of
qualities the secret of his unpopularity. 'Envy,' he says, 'seems more
closely to attend a character that approaches perfection, than one that,
while astonishing men by its greatness, yet by exhibiting a mixture of
defects and vices, offers a consolation that envy seeks.'
Transcribers' Notes:
Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have been
amended without note. Minor inconsistencies in hyphenation have been
resolved where possible, or retained where there was no way to determine
which was correct, again without note. Other errors have been amended,
and are listed below.
OE/oe ligatures have not been retained in this version.
List of Amendments:
Page 50--superstitution amended to superstition--"... treated as
superstition by those ..."
Page 126--devolopment amended to development--"... lead gradually to the
development of sound ..."
End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley