Part 13

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.

Once again Turgot, realising to the full the difficulties, the impossibilities even, of his position, resolved to do what he could. Within a few hours of his appointment he wrote a long letter to the King, urging the absolute necessity of economy in every department, denouncing bribes, privileges, exemptions, and pleading--daring to plead--equality in the imposition of taxes. No bankruptcy, no increase of taxation, no loans--this was to be the motto of his Controllership. ‘I feel all the perils to which I expose myself,’ he wrote. He was not even religious in the sense--what a sense!--that officials were expected to be religious. ‘You have given me a Controller who never goes to Mass,’ grumbled Louis to Maurepas. ‘Sire,’ answered the Minister, very happily, ‘Terrai always went.’

The new Controllership was still a nine days’ wonder when Turgot restored throughout France what he had restored in Limoges--free trade in grain. In 1770 he had written on the subject some famous ‘Letters’ in answer to Terrai’s revocation of the edict and the witty ‘Dialogues’ of Galiani which supported that revocation. Then, bolder still, he suppressed an abominable piece of official jobbery, the _Pot de Vin_, or bribe of 100,000 crowns which the Farmers-General had always presented to the Controller when he signed a new edict. If the Farmers turned away sulkily, angry with a generosity they were by no means prepared to imitate, from the country came a long burst of passionate applause.

‘It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people,’ said the King. Well, this poor Louis did love them, but his was not the love that could stand firm by the man sent to save them. ‘Everything for the people, nothing by them,’ was Turgot’s motto, and, perhaps, his mistake. The King was to be the lever to raise his kingdom; and the weak tool broke in the Minister’s hand.

The first disaster of Turgot’s Controllership was the disaster that spoiled his Intendancy. In 1774-5 scarcity of bread made many distrust his edict restoring to them free trade in grain. With his firm hand over Louis’s shaking one he suppressed the bread riots of that winter, as it was never given to a Bourbon to suppress anything. But he would not in justice suppress, though he might have suppressed, Necker’s adverse pamphlet on the question, called ‘The Legislation and Commerce of Grain;’ though half the Encyclopædists, and many of Turgot’s personal friends, were led thereby to adopt the opinions of the solid Genevan banker.

In the January of 1775, Turgot presented his Budget. The deficit left by Terrai was enormous. Let us pay then, said Turgot’s sound common-sense, the legitimate contracts of Government, not by your dear old remedy, taxation, for the ruined country can yield no more, but by limiting the expenses of that Government and of the Court. Officials and courtiers alike took as a judgment from Heaven the fact, that very shortly after this monstrous proposal, the audacious proposer was sharply attacked by the gout.

Turgot’s Controllership lasted in all twenty months, and for seven of them he was very ill. When he was blamed once for overworking himself and trying to force everybody’s hand, ‘Why, do you not know,’ he answered simply, ‘in my family we die of gout at fifty?’ His present illness kept him in his room many weeks, but did not prevent him from dictating an enormous correspondence, and trying urgently to persuade his master to begin his economical reforms by having his coming coronation ceremonies performed cheaply at Paris, instead of expensively at Rheims; and to make good his professions of tolerance by omitting from the service the oath binding him to extirpate heretics. Of course Louis was too weak for these drastic measures; he characteristically contented himself by mumbling the oath, and the senseless expenses of the coronation were as large as ever.

But Turgot, undaunted, went on working. In January 1776 he presented to the King what have been justly called the Six Fatal Edicts--the first for the suppression of _corvée_, four for the suppression of the offices interfering with the provisioning of Paris, and the sixth for the suppression of _jurandes_ or the government of privileged corporations. The first and sixth were the real cause of battle, and embodied one of the great aims of Turgot’s administration--to make the nobility and clergy contribute to the taxes.

A shrill outcry of indignation rang through Versailles. Make us pay! _Us!_ The Court had always scorned Turgot with his shy, quiet manner, his gentle aloofness, and the reflection cast, in the most odious taste, by the purity of his life on its own manner of living. But now it hated him. Tax _us_! Curtail _our_ extravagances! Reduce _our_ expenditure! What next? He has already abolished a number of our very best sinecures and lessened the salaries attached to several enticing little offices where we were enormously paid for doing nothing gracefully! He has given posts to persons fitted for them instead of to our noble and incompetent relations! If one of _us_ (even when one of us is the Duc d’Orléans himself) wants to do something--well--illegal, he will not allow it! As though the makers of law could not be its breakers if they chose! And Versailles rustled indignantly in its unpaid-for silks, whispered, murmured, connived at the fall of this quiet, strong person who had not a thought in common with them--nor a thought of himself.

But he had a more dangerous enemy than the Court--the Queen. Quick-witted, wilful, impetuous, with a husband whose slow, hesitating intellect she must needs despise, clever enough to love to meddle with great things, but not wise enough to meddle well--Marie Antoinette took her first deep step down the stairway of ruin when she chose to be Turgot’s enemy instead of Turgot’s friend. Could he have saved her too, if she would have let him, as, but for her, men thought he might have saved France? God knows. Marie Antoinette wanted to be amused, and her particular amusement, gambling, was very expensive; she was infinitely good-natured and impetuously in love at the moment with Madame de Lamballe, and wanted for her the revival of the old post of Superintendent of the Household, with its enormous emoluments. And at her side stood Turgot, saying, ‘No.’ Maurepas had long since deserted him. It was much easier, and safer for one’s own interest, to give the Queen what she wanted and have done with it. As for Louis, he was, as usual, weak with the weakness that brought him to the guillotine and ended the French monarchy.

Turgot so far controlled him that the six Edicts were registered by the unwilling Parliament of Paris. Then Monsieur, afterwards Louis the Eighteenth, expressed in a pamphlet of very feeble wit the feelings of the upper classes against this terrible reformer. That paltry skit had already turned the King against his Minister, when Maurepas showed him a sharp financial criticism on Turgot’s calculations as Controller-General, and some forged letters purporting to come from Turgot and containing expressions offensive to the Royal Family. Not man enough to take them to Turgot and demand explanation, the wretched King went on distrusting him and giving him feeble hints to resign.

But until there was a better man to occupy his place, Turgot would take no hints. For the sake of France he would push those Edicts through, and gain his principles before he lost his power.

Then another friend failed him. Malesherbes, the brave old hero, who was hereafter to defend and to die for his King, but who, as Condorcet said, found on every subject ‘many fors and againsts but never one to make him decide,’ resigned his post in Turgot’s government. ‘You are fortunate,’ says hapless Louis gloomily, ‘to be able to resign. I wish I could.’ The storm was coming up fast. But the first man on whom it was to fall remained calm and staunch.

On April 30, 1776, Turgot wrote to his King a note begging him not to appoint Amelot as Malesherbes’ successor, and containing these ominous words: ‘Do not forget, Sire, that it was weakness that brought the head of Charles the First to the block.’ Louis made no answer. Finally, the match was put to the tinder of the Queen’s wrath by Turgot’s dismissal from office of her worthless protégé, de Guines; and the Minister, it was whispered, had also declined to pay a debt she had incurred for jewellery, as against the new rules he had himself made. Rules for a Queen! This must certainly be the end of Queens or of Ministers! In this case, it was the end of both; only Turgot’s fall came first.

As he was sitting writing, on May 12, 1776, Bertin arrived to announce to him that he was no longer Controller-General. He had been drawing up an edict; laying down his pen he observed quietly, ‘My successor will finish it.’ His successor, it has been well said, was the National Assembly.

Two days later, Marie Antoinette wrote exultantly to her mother of his dismissal. What did she care for the just reproaches of the King and of the whole nation, which that old kill-joy, Mercy Argenteau, declared that this deed would bring on her head? She would have liked her enemy turned out of office and sent to the Bastille the very day that de Guines was made a Duke. Poor Queen! Her little triumph was so short, and her bitter punishment so long!

On May 18, Turgot took farewell of his master in language nobly dignified and touching. ‘My one desire,’ he said, ‘is that you may find I have judged wrongly, that I have warned you of imaginary dangers.’

Clugny was appointed Controller-General; _corvée_ and _jurandes_ were re-established; the edict establishing free trade in grain was revoked. The Court rejoiced aloud; the Paris Parliament was delighted. Old Voltaire at Ferney, indeed, wept and said that this was death before death, that a thunderbolt had fallen on his head and his heart; and the wise knew that nothing could save France now.

Turgot retired quietly into private life. That he was disappointed, not for himself, but for his country, is very true. True, too, he was angered at the backstairs policy which had dismissed him. But far beyond this, there was so much he could have done, which now he could never do! Faithful to his life-long principle of gathering up the fragments that remain, he read and studied much, corresponded with Hume and Adam Smith, often met and talked with Franklin, went to see Voltaire when he came to Paris in 1778, made experiments in chemistry and physics, and was active in private benevolence.

Was the brief evening of his life solitary? The one human affection which, in its perfection, makes loneliness impossible, was not his; or at best was his only as a dream or a memory. But in the great family of earth’s toiling children he must have known there were many to love and bless him, many he had saved from wrong or from sorrow, some whom he had made from beasts into men. Another blessing was his--he did not long survive his active labours. He died March 21, 1781, aged fifty-four.

A failure, this life? It may be so; but a failure beside which many a success is paltry.

Turgot could not save France from her Revolution, but he gave her, and all countries, practical, working theories on government, on the liberty of the press, on the best means of helping the poor, on the use of riches, on civil, political, and religious liberty, which are still invaluable.

He has been justly said to have founded modern political economy; to have bequeathed to future generations ‘the idea of the freedom of industry;’ and to have made ready the way for the reforms which are the glory of our own day.

Among Voltaire’s fellow-workers there are far more dazzling personalities. But from their fiery words, exalted visions, and too glorious hopes one turns with a certain sense of relief to this quiet, strong, practical man, and understands why the people, whose instinct in judging the character of their rulers seldom betrays them in the long run, specially acclaimed Turgot as a friend.

IX

_BEAUMARCHAIS: THE PLAYWRIGHT_

Some men do great things incidentally and unintentionally. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais bothered his clever head scarcely at all with schemes for the well-being of his country--was little concerned with humanity and very much with one man--himself. Yet by a special irony of destiny the author of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ played one of the chief parts in the prelude to the drama of the Revolution.

Born in Paris on January 24, 1732, the son of a watchmaker with a large family, Pierre Augustin Caron early learnt his father’s trade, picked up a little Latin at a technical school at Alfort and the rest of his education from experience and from the world.

A lively, impudent, good-looking boy, young Caron was from the first clever with that smart cleverness which is as distinct from genius or from wisdom, as kindness is distinct from sympathy

He was as sharp over his watchmaking as over everything he undertook in life. He had his first lawsuit--the first of so many!--over a discovery he made in his trade, and won it. But he was young, gay, musical, and Parisian. His trade was only a part of his life. There were debts and escapades. Then the watches took to disappearing mysteriously out of old Caron’s shop; and finally old Caron turned his scapegrace out of doors, till the mother pleaded, not in vain, for the prodigal’s return.

Then the prodigal made the loveliest and smallest of watches for Madame de Pompadour’s ring. The King was pleased to desire one also, and the King’s daughters, Mesdames, followed their father’s example; while the courtiers could not, of course, be out of the fashion. Pierre Caron, tall, handsome, audacious, was presented at Versailles, and made watchmaker to his Majesty. In 1755, another piece of luck befell him. (This Caron was one of the luckiest of human beings all through his life.)