His mother, who, _en vraie Parisienne_, thought everything of appearance
and manners, worried him on the subject of his clumsiness and stupidity,
which naturally made the child self-conscious and increased the faults
fourfold. When visitors arrived to flatter Madame by admiring her
children, Anne Robert hid under the sofa or the table; and when he was
removed from his retreat, could produce no company manners at all. No
wonder the mother never even suspected the strong intellect and the
wonderful character that so much awkwardness concealed.
Anne Robert’s birth was contemporaneous with Voltaire’s visit to
England, and took place on May 10, 1727. The child had already two
brothers. The eldest was bound, after the foolish custom of the day, to
follow his father’s profession; the second brother must go into the
army; and for Anne Robert there was nothing left but the Church.
He followed Voltaire and Helvétius at the school of Louis-le-Grand, and
when sufficiently advanced, moved on to the College of Plessis. As a
schoolboy his pocket-money disappeared with the usual rapidity, but not
in the usual way. This shy little student gave it to his poorer
companions, to buy books. From the time he was sixteen--that is in
1743--until 1750, he was a divinity student. At Saint-Sulpice, whither
he went in 1748 on leaving Plessis, he took his degree as a Theological
Bachelor, and from there entered the Sorbonne.
The Sorbonne, which was swept away by the Revolution, was a very ancient
Theological College and in some respects not unlike an English
university. Young Turgot found there Morellet and Loménie de Brienne,
besides a certain Abbé de Cicé, to whom in 1749 he addressed one of the
first of his writings, a ‘Letter on Paper Money.’
In 1749, Turgot was made Prior of the Sorbonne, in which _rôle_ he had
to deliver two Latin lectures, choosing for his themes, ‘The Advantages
of Christianity,’ and ‘The Advance of the Mind of Man.’ All the time he
was reading, thinking, observing on his own account, studying
especially Locke, Bayle, Clarke, and Voltaire. A priest he soon knew he
could not be. To be sure, the fact that his friend Loménie de Brienne is
a sceptic will not prevent _him_ becoming a cardinal and Archbishop of
Toulouse; he would have been Archbishop of Paris had his Majesty not
been so painfully particular as to demand that the Primate of the
capital should at least believe in a God. But Turgot was of other metal
and was not minded to live a lie. All his friends begged him to keep to
the lucrative career assigned him, surely, by Providence! ‘You will be a
bishop,’ says Cicé comfortably, ‘and then you can be a statesman at your
leisure.’
The argument was very seductive; but this student was in every respect
unlike other students, with a character breathing a higher and finer air
than theirs. Morellet records, not without the suspicion of a sneer,
that from their coarse boyish jokes he shrank as one shrinks from a
blow. Even Condorcet, himself so pure in life, laughed at people wasting
time in quenching the desires of the flesh; but Turgot vindicated purity
as well as practised it, and reached a level of principle, as of
conduct, which in the eighteenth century was unfortunately almost
unique.
His father, wiser than most parents in like circumstances, countenanced
his objections to the priesthood. He had already studied law, as well
as theology. In 1750 he left the Sorbonne, and Loménie gave a farewell
dinner in his rooms, with Turgot and Morellet of the party, and the
light-hearted guests planned a game of tennis behind the church of the
Sorbonne for the year 1800.
The year 1800! Before then the Sorbonne itself had perished with Church,
monarchy, and nobility; shallow Brienne, having done mighty mischief,
had poisoned himself in the château his ill-earned wealth had been
gained to restore; Morellet was writing revolutionary pamphlets; and
Turgot was dead.
In 1752, two years after he left the Sorbonne, Anne Robert obtained the
legal post of Deputy Counsellor of the Procurator-General, and a year
later was made Master of Requests.
One must picture him at this time as a tall, broad-shouldered, rather
handsome man, with that old boyish constraint in his manner, and that
strict high-mindedness which his own generation could not be expected to
find attractive. Add to these qualities that he was not in the least
carried away by dreams and visions, as were nearly all his friends, that
even then he saw the world as it was, and meant to do with it what he
could--that, though in lofty aim he may have been an idealist, he never
fell into the idealist’s fault of believing that, because there is
everything to do, he must do everything, or nothing. Just, reasonable,
practical--what a wholesome contrast to your visionary Rousseaus, ay,
and to your impulsive Voltaires! He was not a brilliant person, this; it
is said that he was slow in everything he undertook. Nor had he given
over the vigour of his youth and the strength of his understanding to
any one party. He was studying them all.
He was about three or four and twenty when he first began to go into the
intellectual society of Paris--when Montesquieu, d’Alembert, Galiani,
Helvétius, found the stiffness of manner more than redeemed by the
wealth of the mind. Presently he was introduced to Madame de Graffigny,
and complimented her by writing a long review of her ‘Letters from a
Peruvian,’ which, as giving his own views on education, on marriage, and
on the fashionable avoidance of parenthood, retains all its interest. It
is strange to hear a pre-Revolutionary Frenchman urging
love-marriages--‘Because we are sometimes deceived, it is concluded we
ought never to choose’--and strange also that, out of all the great
reformers with whom his name is associated, Turgot alone perceived the
fearful havoc which neglect of family duties makes in the well-being of
the State.
He was presented to Madame de Graffigny by her niece, Mademoiselle de
Ligniville. The bright and charming Minette naturally did not find it at
all difficult to draw Anne Robert of five-and-twenty from the
intellectual society of her aunt’s _salon_ to a game of battledore and
shuttlecock _à deux_. Morellet, watching the pair, professed himself
pained and astonished that their friendship did not end as nearly all
such friendships do and should.
Most of Turgot’s biographers have sought the reason why Mademoiselle de
Ligniville became Madame Helvétius and not Madame Turgot--and have not
found it. As for Turgot, he said nothing. It remains idle to speculate
whether he conceived for her a passion, which his _gaucherie_ and
shyness, perhaps, prevented her from returning; or whether he had
already devoted his life to his public duty, and thought that private
happiness would be deterrent and not spur to his work for the race. An
unhappy or an unrequited affection is one of the finest incentives to
labour and success one can have. It may be that Turgot had it. The only
certain facts are that Minette married Helvétius, and that Turgot
remained her life-long friend.
In 1754 he made the acquaintance of Quesnay and of de Gournay, the
political economists, who influenced not a little his life and thought.
He soon began writing articles for the Encyclopædia, though he never
joined in that battle-cry of the Encyclopædists, _Écrasez l’infâme_, and
was wholly without sympathy for the atheism of d’Holbach and the
materialism of Helvétius. Turgot, indeed, may be said to have been, in
the broadest acceptation of the term, a Christian; or rather he would be
called, and call himself, a Christian to-day. But his Christianity was
not of Rome nor yet of Protestantism, but that in whose honest doubt
there lives more faith than in half the creeds. He certainly gave little
expression to it. It was the religion of the wise man--which he never
tells.
When he was on a geologising tour in Switzerland, in 1760, he saw the
great Pontiff of the Church of Antichrist at Délices. That generous old
person was warm in delight and admiration for his guest. D’Alembert had
introduced him, and d’Alembert’s friends must always be welcome. And
then Turgot’s article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopædia had made even
more impression on this impressionable Voltaire than on the world of
letters in general. He took this young disciple to his heart at once.
Well, then, if he is not precisely a disciple, he is at least a most
‘lovable philosopher,’ and ‘much fitter to instruct me than I am to
instruct him!’ It was Voltaire who was dazzled by the young man’s
splendid possibilities, not the young man who was dazzled by Voltaire’s
matchless fame and daring genius. Turgot was never dazzled; it was his
greatness, if it was also his misfortune, to see men and the world
exactly as they are.
In 1761 he was made Intendant of Limoges. It was the great opportunity;
he had wanted practical work--not to think, to write, or to dream.
Voltaire wrote of him afterwards as one ‘qui ne chercha le vrai que pour
faire le bien.’ He wanted to Do; and here was everything to be done.
The picture of provincial France before the Revolution has been painted
often, but the subject is one of which the painter can never tire and to
which he can never do justice.
The Limoges which Turgot found was one of the most beautiful districts
of France--and one of the most wretched. Here, on the one side, rose the
châteaux of the great absentee noblemen, who, always at Court, left
behind them middlemen to wring from the poor innumerable dues, with
which my lord, forsooth, must pay his debts of honour and make a fine
figure at Versailles. The few nobles who did live on their country
estates expected their new young Intendant to be an agreeable social
light, as his predecessors had been, who would keep, for the _élite_ of
the neighbourhood, an open house where one would naturally find good
wine, rich fare, and delightful, doubtful company.
On the other hand were the clergy--often ignorant, but generally cunning
enough to play on the deeper ignorance of their flock by threats of the
Hereafter, and to keep from them that knowledge which is the death-blow
of superstition.
Then there were the poor. Picture a peasantry whose homes were
windowless, one-roomed huts of peat or clay; who subsisted, in times of
plenty, on roots, chestnuts, and a little black bread; who had neither
schools nor hospitals, teachers nor doctors; who were the constant prey
of pestilence and famine; whose bodies were the possession of their
lords, and whose dim souls were the perquisites of the priests. Consider
that these people were not allowed to fence such miserable pieces of
land as they might possess, lest they should interfere with my lord’s
hunting; nor to manure their wretched crops, lest they should spoil the
flavour of his game; nor to weed them, lest they should disturb his
partridges. Consider that, if such land could have borne any fruit, a
special permission was required to allow its owners to build a shed to
store it in. Consider that their villages, in which they herded like
beasts, were separated from other villages by roads so vile that they
would have rendered commerce difficult, if legal trammels had not made
it impossible. Consider that these people had been scourged for
generations by hundreds of unjust and senseless laws, made by and for
the benefit of their oppressors, and that they were now the victims of
taxes whose very name has become an indictment, and whose description is
a justification of the French Revolution.
On the one flank they were whipped by the _taille_--the tax on the
income and property of the poor, which absorbed one-half of the net
products of their lands--and on the other by the _corvée_, which
compelled them to give yearly twelve or fifteen days’ unpaid labour on
the roads and the use of a horse and cart, if they had them. The
_milice_ demanded from each parish its quota of soldiers (the rich being
exempt as usual), and compelled the parishes to lodge passing
detachments of military and to lend cattle to draw the military
equipages. The _gabelle_, or tax on salt, forced each poor man to buy
seven pounds of salt per annum--whether, as in one province, it was a
halfpenny a pound, or, as in another, it was sixpence--and let the
noble, the priest, and the Government official go free. Toll-gates were
so numerous in the country that it is said fish brought from Harfleur to
Paris paid eleven times its value on the journey. Wine was taxed; corn
was taxed.
But this was not all. If these taxes were cruelly unjust, they were
settled and regular. Irregular taxes could be levied at any moment at
the caprice of the despot at Versailles, who no more realised the
condition of his peasantry than an ordinary Briton realises the
condition of a tribe of Hottentots. One, called with an exquisite irony
the Tax of the Joyful Accession, had been raised when Louis the
Fifteenth reached the throne of France--to topple it down the abyss.
Another was the _vingtième_, or tax on the twentieth part of a franc,
which could be doubled or trebled at the pleasure of the Government.
Apart altogether from the taxes, the peasantry were subject to tithes
exacted by the Church, itself exempt from all taxation, to large fees
for christening and marrying, for getting out of the misery of this
world and avoiding worse misery in the next.
The clergy were on the spot to exact these dues, just as the middleman
was on the spot to exact the dues for the nobles. Some of these dues and
seigneurial rights are so shameful and disgusting that their very terms
are unrepeatable. Even that vile age permitted many of them to lapse and
become a dead letter; but the number, and the full measure of the
iniquity of those that were insisted on, has never been counted, and
will never be known until the Day of Judgment.
What effect would hundreds of years of such oppression have on the
character of the oppressed? Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious
with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their
unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals,
without the animals’ instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the
morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to
curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to
dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life
indeed--they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die,
and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was
sent to redeem.
What wonder that many men gave up such a task in despair; that many even
good men found it easier to prophesy a Golden Age in luxurious Paris
than to fight hand to hand against the awful odds of such an awful
reality? Turgot was thirty-four when he went to Limoges, and forty-seven
when he left it. He spent there the most vigorous years of his life; if
he did not do there his most famous work, he did his noblest.
He began at once. It was nothing to him that his own caste shot out the
lip and scorned him. Cold and awkward in manner, regular and austere in
habit, and as pure as a good woman, of course they hated him. But it
was much to him that the clergy who ruled the people were also his foes,
that that very people themselves were so dull and hopeless, that they
too suspected his motives and concluded that because for them every
change had always been for the worse, every change always would be.
Slowly, gradually, he gained the favour of the priest and the love of
the flock. He could not turn their hell into heaven: he could not make
earth at all what Condorcet, uplifted in noble vision, would dream it
yet might be. But he could do something.
In 1765, he procured for Limoges an edict restoring free trade in grain
in that province. Versailles, wholly abandoned to its amusements, did
not in the least care whether edicts were granted or whether they were
revoked. Turgot did care. He perceived that the Court was not minded to
be plagued with his reforms; and he plagued it till it gave him what he
wanted--to go away.
Then he turned to the other taxes. The existence of a privileged class
which pays nothing and devours much by its shameful exactions, is itself
a monstrous thing. _Taille_ is the crowning iniquity; but it will take a
Reign of Terror to kill it. In the meantime Turgot, in the teeth of the
besotted ignorance and opposition of the wretched beings he was trying
to help, could and did see that it was fairly administered.
In place of the personal service demanded by the _corvée_, he
substituted a money-tax; which was better for the taxed and better also
for the roads.
With regard to the _milice_, he proposed wide changes. But since the
Government would not rouse itself to act on the proposals, he took
advantage of its self-indulgent indifference and permitted evasions of
the law; when an unlucky creature drew a black ticket in the
conscription in Limoges, the new Intendant permitted him to find a
substitute or to pay a fee. He also built barracks, which removed the
necessity for quartering the soldiers on the poor.
The fearful trammels which ‘crippled trade and industry and doomed
labour to sterility,’ he in part removed. He made new roads; he became
President of the first Agricultural Society in the district; he founded
a veterinary college. In the teeth of strong opposition he promoted the
cultivation of the potato; and by having it served daily at his own
table proved to the ignorance of the peasants that it was at least safe
for human food. He also introduced the growth of clover, and entirely
suppressed a worrying little tax on cattle. He first brought to Limoges
a properly qualified midwife, who taught her business to other women.
This was the beginning of the Hospice de la Maternité. During Turgot’s
Intendancy the china clay, of which the famous Limoges pottery was
afterwards made, was discovered.
Besides these public acts, he was engaged in hundreds of small
individual charities. Among others, he educated at his own expense a
youth whose father had been entirely ruined by taxation and famine. The
youth was Vergniaud, afterwards the stirring orator of the Revolution.
In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his
servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out
his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he
was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here,
as he said of himself, though he was ‘the compulsory instrument of great
evil,’ he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if
every man did the little he could--what a different world!
In 1765, he paid a visit to Paris, and in the Calas case, made famous by
Voltaire, spoke on the side of tolerance with a vehemence unusual to
him. Morellet, d’Alembert, and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse were still his
friends. Condorcet was in his closest intimacy, and destined hereafter
to write his Life--‘one of the wisest and noblest of lives,’ says John
Stuart Mill, ‘delineated by one of the noblest and wisest of men.’
In Paris, he met Adam Smith, the political economist. As a result of
their acquaintance Turgot produced in the next year his ‘Reflections on
the Reformation and Distribution of Wealth,’ fertile in conception, arid
in style, and anticipating many of the ideas familiar to English readers
through Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations.’
But the insistent claims of Limoges on his time and pity narrowed his
hours for study, even for the study that would serve it well. In 1767 he
cleared the province of wolves, by a system analogous to that by which
Edgar rid Wales of the same pest.
Then, in 1770, Limoges and its Intendant began their fight with want.
When Turgot came to the province, the wretched place was a million
francs in arrears for its taxes. Some he had certainly lessened. The
work he had started was just beginning to bear its first little harvest
of good, when there came the withering blast of the two years’ famine.
Its horrors were unthinkable. Turgot wrote to Terrai, the
Controller-General, that it was impossible to extort the taxes and the
arrears without ruin--_ay, and with ruin_--to the taxed. The people
could not only not pay what was demanded of them, but they had nothing
to sell for the barren necessities of their own existence. God knows
they had learnt by long and bitter practice to subsist on little enough!
But now they must surely sit down and die.
Strong and calm, Turgot rose up again. From the Parliament at Bordeaux
he obtained permission to levy a tax on the rich in aid of the
sufferers. He himself opened workshops in which he gave work, and paid
for it, not in coin, which would certainly be spent at the nearest
_cabaret_, but in leather tickets which could be exchanged for food at
the cheap provision shops, also of his own institution.
Far beyond his age in every practical scheme for the benefit of mankind,
he was beyond our own age in that he clearly perceived that the free
soup-kitchen, and all the sentimental philanthropy which gives money in
lieu of work, instead of paying money for work, must be demoralising,
and in the long run create more misery than it relieves. ‘Such
distributions,’ said he, ‘have the effect of accustoming the people to
mendicity.’ Even through a famine he sent to prison every beggar he
could lay hands on. Then, again far beyond his age, he induced the
ladies of the district to teach the poor girls needlework; and so to
give them ‘the best and most useful kinds of alms--the means to earn.’
The fight was long and hard. But it had its reward. The people came to
love him who had helped them to help themselves; who had given them, not
the bitter bread and scornful dole of charity, but the power to earn a
livelihood and their first taste of self-respect.
On May 10, 1774, Louis the Sixteenth succeeded to the throne of
sixty-six kings; and on July 20, Turgot was made Minister of Marine and
thus called to wider and fuller work. The Limogian peasants clung about
his knees with tears, and the Limogian nobles rejoiced openly at his
departure. The one leave-taking was as great a compliment as the other.
The merits of this ‘virtuous philosophic Turgot, with a whole reformed
France in his head,’ had not been in the least the reason of his
promotion. But schoolfellow Cicé had whispered pleasant things of him to
Madame Maurepas, the wife of the Minister; and Madame had settled the
matter with her husband, who was a lively shrewd old man of
seventy-four, not inconvenienced by any idea of duty, and with a very
strong sense of humour.
Turgot was Minister of Marine for just five weeks; but in that time he
had eighteen months’ arrears of wages paid to a gang of workmen at
Brest, and made many plans for the improvement of the colonies, which
more than twenty years ago, at the Sorbonne, he had significantly
compared to ‘fruits which cling to the parent tree, only until they are
ripe.’ On August 24, 1774, he was made Controller-General of Finances in
the place of Terrai.
It sounded a fine position, but was it? Limoges represented all France
in little. A ruined Treasury, a starving people, in high places
corruption and exaction, and in low places misery such as has rarely
been seen since the world began.
Terrai, profligate and dissolute--‘What does he want with a muff?’ said
witty Mademoiselle Arnould when he had appeared with one in winter; ‘his
hands are always in our pockets’--had left to his successor, debt,
bankruptcy, chaos. The King was not quite twenty, weak with the amiable
weakness which is often more disastrous in a ruler than vice. The Queen
was nineteen, careless and gay, loving pleasure and her own way, and
meaning to have both in spite of all the controllers in the world.
Maurepas, being undisturbed by principles, would readily abandon his
protégé if he perceived for himself the least danger in that patronage.
Voltaire, indeed, wrote that he saw in Turgot’s appointment a new heaven
and a new earth, and the enlightened among the people dreamt that the
Millennium had come, but Voltaire was but a voice crying in the
wilderness, and in the councils of State the people had neither lot nor
part.