dogma arose from meddling with explanations of what could not be
understood, it appertained in every country to the sovereigns alone to
fix both the cult and the unintelligible dogma, and that, consequently,
it was the duty of the citizen to accept the dogma and follow the cult
prescribed by law."  Strange eccentricity of the human mind!  The
shackles of civilization are oppressive to Rousseau, and yet he would
impose the yoke of the state upon consciences.  The natural man does not
reflect, and does not discuss his religion; whilst seeking to recover the
obliterated ideal of nature, the philosopher halts on the road at the
principles of Louis XIV. touching religious liberties.

[Illustration: Rousseau and Madame D'Epinay----338]

Madame d'Epinay had offered Rousseau a retreat in her little house, the
Hermitage.  There it was that he began the tale of _La Nouvelle Heloise,_
which was finished at Marshal de Montmorency's, when the susceptible and
cranky temper of the philosopher had justified the malevolent predictions
of Grimm.  The latter had but lately said to Madame d'Epinay "I see in
Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do
him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you
will do yourself a still more sorry one.  Solitude will complete the
blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust,
ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck
and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your
roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his
country.  I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the
letters you have shown me."

Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d'Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all
the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot; his
quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some
noise.  "Good God!" said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, "wherever
I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot!  Did anybody
ever?  Fellows who are nobody, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a
third floor!  Positively, one can't stand that sort of thing!"  The
rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot.
"Nobody can put himself in my place," wrote Rousseau, "and nobody will
see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the
resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their
rules."

Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not
forgive him for his independence.  His merits as well as his defects
annoyed them equally: his "Lettre contre les Spectacles" had exasperated
Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger.  "It is against that Jean
Jacques of yours that I am most enraged," he writes in his correspondence
with D'Alembert: "he has written several letters against the scandal to
deacons of the Church of Geneva, to my ironmonger, to my cobbler.  This
arch-maniac, who might have been something if he had left himself in your
hands, has some notion of standing aloof: he writes against theatricals
after having done a bad play; he writes against France which is a mother
to him; he picks up four or five rotten old hoops off Diogenes' tub and
gets inside them to bay; he cuts his friends; he writes to me myself the
most impertinent letter that ever fanatic scrawled.  He writes to me in
so many words, 'You have corrupted Geneva in requital of the asylum she
gave you;' as if I cared to soften the manners of Geneva, as if I wanted
an asylum, as if I had taken any in that city of Socinian preachers, as
if I were under any obligation to that city!"

More moderate and more equitable than Voltaire, D'Alembert felt the
danger of discord amongst the philosophical party.  In vain he wrote to
the irritated poet: "I come to Jean Jacques, not Jean Jacques Lefranc de
Pompignan, who thinks he is somebody, but to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who
thinks be is a cynic, and who is only inconsistent and ridiculous.  I
grant that he has written you an impertinent letter; I grant that you and
your friends have reason to complain of that; in spite of all this,
however, I do not approve of your declaring openly against him, as you
are doing, and, thereanent, I need only quote to you your own words:
'What will become of the little flock, if it is divided and scattered?'
We do not find that Plato, or Aristotle, or Sophocles, or Euripides,
wrote against Diogenes, although Diogenes said something insulting to
them all.  Jean Jacques is a sick man with a good deal of wit, and one
who only has wit when he has fever; he must neither be cured nor have his
feelings hurt."  Voltaire replied with haughty temper to these wise
counsels, and the philosophers remained forever embroiled with Rousseau.

Isolated henceforth by the good as well as by the evil tendencies of his
nature, Jean Jacques stood alone against the philosophical circle which
he had dropped, as well as against the Protestant or Catholic clergy
whose creeds he often offended.  He had just published _Le Contrat
Social,_ "The Gospel,"; says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, "of the theory as to
the sovereignty of the state representing the sovereignty of the people."
The governing powers of the time had some presentiment of its danger;
they had vaguely comprehended what weapons might be sought therein by
revolutionary instincts and interests; their anxiety and their anger as
yet brooded silently; the director of publications (_de la librairie_),
M. de Malesherbes, was one of the friends and almost one of the disciples
of Rousseau whom he shielded; he himself corrected the proofs of the
_Emile_ which Rousseau had just finished.  The book had barely begun to
appear, when, on the 8th of June, 1762, Rousseau was awakened by a
message from la Marchale de Luxembourg: the Parliament had ordered
_Emile_ to be burned, and its author arrested.  Rousseau took flight,
reckoning upon finding refuge at Geneva.  The influence of the French
government pursued him thither; the Grand Council condemned _Emile_.
One single copy had arrived at Geneva it was this which was burned by the
hand of the common hangman, nine days after the, burning at Paris in the
Place de Greve.  "The Contrat Social has received its whipping on the
back of Emile," was the saying at Geneva.  "At the instigation of M. de
Voltaire they have avenged upon me the cause of God," Jean Jacques
declared.

Rousseau rashly put his name to his book; Voltaire was more prudent.
One day, having been imprisoned for some verses which were not his, he
had taken the resolution to impudently repudiate the paternity of his own
works.  "You must never publish anything under your own name," he wrote
to Helvetius; "La Pucelle was none of my doing, of course.  Master Joly
de Fleury will make a fine thing of his requisition; I shall tell him
that he is a calumniator, that La Pucelle is his own doing, which he
wants to put down to me out of spite."

Geneva refused asylum to the proscribed philosopher; he was warned of
hostile intentions on the part of the magnific signiors of Berne.
Neuchatel and the King of Prussia's protection alone were left; thither
he went for refuge.  Received with open arms by the governor, my lord
Marshal (Keith), he wrote thence to the premier syndic Favre a letter
abdicating his rights of burghership and citizenship in the town of
Geneva.  "I have neglected nothing," he said, "to gain the love of my
compatriots; nobody could have had worse success.  I desire to indulge
them even in their hate; the last sacrifice remaining for me to make is
that of a name which was dear to me."

Some excitement, nevertheless, prevailed at Geneva; Rousseau had
partisans there.  The success of _Emile_ had been immense at Paris, and
was destined to exerciso a serious influence upon the education of a
whole generation.  It is good," wrote Voltaire, "that the brethren should
know that yesterday six hundred persons came, for the third time, to
protest on behalf of Jean Jacques against the Council of Geneva, which
had dared to condemn the Vicaire savoyard."  The Genevese magistrates
thought it worth while to defend their acts; the _Lettres ecrites de la
Campagne,_ published to that end, were the work of the attorney-general
Robert Tronchin.  Rousseau replied to them in the _Lettres de la
Montagne,_ with a glowing eloquence having a spice of irony.  He hurled
his missiles at Voltaire, whom, with weakly exaggeration, he accused of
being the author of all his misfortunes.  "Those gentlemen of the Grand
Council," he said, "see M. de Voltaire so often, how is it that he did
not inspire them with a little of that tolerance which he is incessantly
preaching, and of which he sometimes has need?  If they had consulted him
a little on this matter, it appears to me that he might have addressed
them pretty nearly thus: 'Gentlemen, it is not the arguers who do harm;
philosophy can gang its ain gait without risk;' the people either do not
hear it at all or let it babble on, and pay it back all the disdain it
feels for them.  I do not argue myself, but others argue, and what harm
comes of it?  We have arranged that my great influence in the court and
my pretended omnipotence should serve you as a pretext for allowing a
free, peaceful course to the sportive jests of my advanced years; that is
a good thing, but do not, for all that, burn graver writings, for that
would be too shocking.  I have so often preached tolerance!  It must not
be always required of others and never displayed towards them.  This poor
creature believes in God, let us pass over that; he will not make a sect.
He is a bore; all arguers are.  If all bores of books were to be burned,
the whole country would have to be made into one great fireplace.  Come,
come, let us leave those to argue who leave us to joke; let us burn
neither people nor books and remain at peace, that is my advice.  That,
in my opinion, is what might have been said, only in better style, by M.
Voltaire, and it would not have been, as it seems to me, the worst advice
he could have given."

My lord Marshal had left Neuchatel; Rousseau no longer felt safe there;
he made up his mind to settle in the Island of St. Pierre, in the middle
of the Lake of Bienne.  Before long an order from the Bernese senate
obliged, him to quit it "within four and twenty hours, and with a
prohibition against ever returning, under the heaviest penalties."
Rousseau went through Paris and took refuge in England, whither he was
invited by the friendliness of the historian Hume.  There it was that he
began writing his _Confessions_.

Already the reason of the unhappy philosopher, clouded as it had
sometimes been by the violence of his emotions, was beginning to be
shaken at the foundations; he believed himself to be the victim of an
immense conspiracy, at the head of which was his friend Hume.  The latter
flew into a rage; he wrote to Baron d'Holbach: "My dear Baron, Rousseau
is a scoundrel."  Rousseau was by this time mad.

He returned to France.  The Prince of Conti, faithful to his
philosophical affections, quartered him at the castle of Trye, near
Gisors.  Thence he returned to Paris, still persecuted, he said, by
invisible enemies.  Retiring, finally, to the pavilion of Ermenonville,
which had been offered to him by M. de Girardin, he died there at the age
of sixty-six, sinking even more beneath imaginary woes than under the
real sorrows and bitter deceptions of his life.  The disproportion
between his intellect and his character, between the boundless pride and
the impassioned weakness of his spirit, had little by little estranged
his friends and worn out the admiration of his contemporaries.  By his
writings Rousseau acted more powerfully upon posterity than upon his own
times: his personality had ceased to do his genius injustice.

He belonged moreover and by anticipation to a new era; from the restless
working of his mind, as well as from his moral and political tendencies,
he was no longer of the eighteenth century properly speaking, though the
majority of the philosophers outlived him; his work was not their work,
their world was never his.  He had attempted a noble reaction, but one
which was fundamentally and in reality impossible.  The impress of his
early education had never been thoroughly effaced: he believed in God, he
had been nurtured upon the Gospel in childhood, he admired the morality
and the life of Jesus Christ; but he stopped at the boundaries of
adoration and submission.  "The spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau inhabits
the moral world, but not that other which is above," M. Joubert has said
in his _Pensees_.  The weapons were insufficient and the champion was too
feeble for the contest; the spirit of the moral world was vanquished as a
foregone conclusion.  Against the systematic infidelity which was more
and more creeping over the eighteenth century, the Christian faith alone,
with all its forces, could fight and triumph.  But the Christian faith
was obscured and enfeebled, it clung to the vessel's rigging instead of
defending its powerful hull; the flood was rising meanwhile, and the
dikes were breaking one after, another.  The religious belief of the
Savoyard vicar, imperfect and inconsistent, such as it is set forth in
_Emile,_ and that sincere love of nature which was recovered by Rousseau
in his solitude, remained powerless to guide the soul and regulate life.

"What the eighteenth century lacked [M. Guizot, _Melanges biographiques_
(Madame la Comtesse de Rumford)], "what there was of superficiality in
its ideas and of decay in its morals, of senselessness in its pretensions
and of futility in its creative power, has been strikingly revealed to us
by experience; we have learned it to our cost.  We know, we feel the evil
bequeathed to us by that memorable epoch.  It preached doubt, egotism,
materialism.  It laid for some time an impure and blasting hand upon
noble and beautiful phases of human life.  But if the eighteenth century
had done only that, if such had been merely its chief characteristic, can
any one suppose that it would have carried in its wake so many and such
important matters, that it would have so moved the world?  It was far
superior to all its sceptics, to all its cynics.  What do I say?
Superior?  Nay, it was essentially opposed to them and continually gave
them the lie.  Despite the weakness of its morals, the frivolity of its
forms, the mere dry bones of such and such of its doctrines, despite its
critical and destructive tendency, it was an ardent and a sincere
century, a century of faith and disinterestedness.  It had faith in the
truth, for it claimed the right thereof to reign in this world.  It had
faith in humanity, for it recognized the right thereof to perfect itself
and would have had that right exercised without obstruction.  It erred,
it lost itself amid this twofold confidence; it attempted what was far
beyond its right and power; it misjudged the moral nature of man and the
conditions of the social state.  Its ideas as well as its works
contracted the blemish of its views.  But, granted so much, the original
idea, dominant in the eighteenth century, the belief that man, truth, and
society are made for one another, worthy of one another, and called upon
to form a union, this correct and salutary belief rises up and overtops
all its history.  That belief it was the first to proclaim and would fain
have realized.  Hence its power and its popularity over the whole face of
the earth.  Hence also, to descend from great things to small, and from
the destiny of man to that of the drawing-room, hence the seductiveness
of that epoch and the charm it scattered over social, life.  Never before
were seen all the conditions, all the classes that form the flower of a
great people, however diverse they might have been in their history and
still were in their interests, thus forgetting their past, their
personality, in order to draw near to one another, to unite in a
communion of the sweetest manners, and solely occupied in pleasing one
another, in rejoicing and hoping together during fifty years which were
to end in the most terrible conflicts between them."

At the death of King Louis XV., in 1774, the easy-mannered joyance, the
peaceful and brilliant charm of fashionable and philosophical society
were reaching their end: the time of stern realities was approaching with
long strides.




CHAPTER LVI.----LOUIS XVI.--MINISTRY OF M. TURGOT.  1774-1776.

[Illustration: Louis XVI.----347]

Louis XV. was dead; France breathed once more; she was weary of the
weakness as well as of the irregularities of the king who had untaught
her her respect for him, and she turned with joyous hope towards his
successor, barely twenty years of age, but already loved and impatiently
awaited by his people.  "He must be called Louis le Desire," was the
saying in the streets before the death-rattle of Louis XV. had summoned
his grandson to the throne.  The feeling of dread which had seized the
young king was more prophetic than the nation's joy.  At the news that
Louis XV. had just heaved his last sigh in the arms of his pious
daughters, Louis XVI. and Maria Antoinette both flung themselves on their
knees, exclaiming, "O God, protect us, direct us, we are too young."

The monarch's youth did not scare the country, itself everywhere animated
and excited by a breath of youth.  There were congratulations on escaping
from the well-known troubles of a regency; the king's ingenuous
inexperience, moreover, opened a vast field for the most contradictory
hopes.  The philosophers counted upon taking possession of the mind of a
good young sovereign, who was said to have his heart set upon his
people's happiness; the clergy and the Jesuits themselves expected
everything from the young prince's pious education; the old parliaments,
mutilated, crushed down, began to raise up their heads again, while the
economists were already preparing their most daring projects.  Like
literature, the arts had got the start, in the new path, of the
politicians and the magistrates.  M. Turgot and M. de Malesherbes had
not yet laid their enterprising hands upon the old fabric of French
administration, and already painting, sculpture, architecture, and music
had shaken off the shackles of the past.  The conventional graces of
Vanloo, of Watteau, of Boucher, of Fragonard, had given place to a
severer school.  Greuze was putting upon canvas the characters and ideas
of Diderot's _Drame naturel;_ but Vien, in France, was seconding the
efforts of Winkelman and of Raphael Mengs in Italy; he led his pupils
back to the study of ancient art; he had trained Regnault, Vincent,
Menageot, and lastly Louis David, destined to become the chief of the
modern school; Julien, Houdon, the last of the Coustous, were following
the same road in sculpture Soufflot, an old man by this time, was
superintending the completion of the church of St. Genevieve, dedicated
by Louis XV. to the commemoration of his recovery at Metz, and destined,
from the majestic simplicity of its lines, to the doubtful honor of
becoming the Pantheon of the revolution; Servandoni had died a short time
since, leaving to the church of St. Sulpice the care of preserving his
memory; everywhere were rising charming mansions imitated from the
palaces of Rome.  The painters, the sculptors, and the architects of
France were sufficient for her glory; only Gretry and Monsigny upheld the
honor of that French music which was attacked by Grimm and by Jean
Jacques Rousseau; but it was at Paris that the great quarrel went on
between the Italians and the Germans; Piccini and Gluck divided society,
wherein their rivalry excited violent passions.  Everywhere and on, all
questions, intellectual movement was becoming animated with fresh ardor;
France was marching towards the region of storms, in the blindness of her
confidence and _joyante;_ the atmosphere seemed purer since Madame
Dubarry had been sent to a convent by one of the first orders of young
Louis XVI.

Already, however, far-seeing spirits were disquieted; scarcely had he
mounted the throne, when the king summoned to his side, as his minister,
M. de Maurepas, but lately banished by Louis XV., in 1749, on a charge of
having tolerated, if not himself written, songs disrespectful towards
Madame de Pompadour.  "The first day," said the disgraced minister, "I
was nettled; the second, I was comforted."

M. de Maurepas, grandson of Chancellor Pontchartrain, had been provided
for, at fourteen years of age, by Louis XIV. with the reversion of the
ministry of marine, which had been held by his father, and had led a
frivolous and pleasant life; through good fortune and evil fortune he
clung to the court; when he was recalled thither, at the age of sixty-
three, on the suggestion of Madame Adelaide, the queen's aunt, and of the
dukes of Aiguillon and La Vrilliere, both of them ministers and relations
of his, he made up his mind that he would never leave it again.  On
arriving at Versailles, he used the expression, "premier minister."
"Not at all," said the king abruptly.  "O, very well," replied M. de
Maurepas, "then to teach your Majesty to do without one."  Nobody,
however, did any business with Louis XVI. without his being present,
and his address was sufficient to keep at a distance or diminish the
influence of the princesses as well as of the queen.  Marie Antoinette
had insisted upon the recall of M. de Choiseul, who had arranged her
marriage and who had remained faithful to the Austrian alliance.  The
king had refused angrily.  The sinister accusations which had but lately
been current as to the causes of the dauphin's death had never been
forgotten by his son.

An able man, in spite of his incurable levity, M. de Maurepas soon
sacrificed the Duke of Aiguillon to the queen's resentment; the people
attached to the old court accused her of despising etiquette; it was said
that she had laughed when she received the respectful condolence of aged
dames looking like beguines in their coifs; already there circulated
amongst the public bitter ditties, such as,

My little queen, not twenty-one,
Maltreat the folks, as you've begun,
And o'er the border you shall run.  .  .  .

The Duke of Aiguillon, always hostile to the Choiseuls and the House of
Austria, had lent his countenance to the murmurs; Marie Antoinette was
annoyed, and, in her turn, fostered the distrust felt by the people
towards the late ministers of Louis XV.  In the place of the Duke of
Aiguillon, who had the ministry of war and that of foreign affairs both
together, the Count of Muy and the Count of Vergennes were called to
power.  Some weeks later, the obscure minister of marine, M. de Boynes,
made way for the superintendent of the district (generalite) of Limoges,
M. Turgot.

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, born at Paris on the 10th of May, 1727, was
already known and everywhere esteemed, when M. de Maurepas, at the
instance, it is said, of his wife whom he consulted on all occasions,
summoned him to the ministry.  He belonged to an ancient and important
family by whom he had been intended for the Church.  When a pupil at
Louis-le-Grand college, he spent his allowance so quickly that his
parents became alarmed; they learned before long that the young man
shared all he received amongst out-of-college pupils too poor to buy
books.

This noble concern for the wants of others, as well as his rare gifts
of intellect, had gained young Turgot devoted friends.  He was already
leaning towards philosophy, and he announced to his fellow-pupils his
intention of giving up his ecclesiastical status; he was a prior of
Sorbonne; the majority disapproved of it.  "Thou'rt but a younger son of
a Norman family," they said, "and, consequently, poor.  Thou'rt certain
to get excellent abbotries and to be a bishop early.  Then thou'lt be
able to realize thy fine dreams of administration and to become a
statesman at thy leisure, whilst doing all manner of good in thy diocese.
It depends on thyself alone to make thyself useful to thy country, to
acquire a high reputation, perhaps to carve thy way to the ministry; if
thou enter the magistracy, as thou desirest, thou breakest the plank
which is under thy feet, thou'lt be confined to hearing causes, and
thou'lt waste thy genius, which is fitted for the most important public
affairs."  "I am very fond of you," my dear friends," replied M. Turgot,
"but I don't quite understand what you are made of.  As for me, it would
be impossible for me to devote myself to wearing a mask all my life."  He
became councillor-substitute to the attorney-general, and before long
councillor in the Parliament, on the 30th of December, 1752.  Master of
requests in 1753, he consented to sit in the King's Chamber, when the
Parliament suspended the administration of justice.  "The Court," he
said, "is exceeding its powers."  A sense of equity thus enlisted him in
the service of absolute government.  He dreaded, moreover, the corporate
spirit, which he considered narrow and intolerant.  "When you say, We,"
he would often repeat, "do not be surprised that the public should
answer, You."

Intimately connected with the most esteemed magistrates and economists,
such as MM. Trudaine, Quesnay, and Gournay, at the same time that he was
writing in the _Encyclopaedia,_ and constantly occupied in useful work,
Turgot was not yet five and thirty when he was appointed superintendent
of the district of Limoges.  There, the rare faculties of his mind and
his sincere love of good found their natural field; the country was poor,
crushed under imposts, badly intersected by roads badly kept, inhabited
by an ignorant populace, violently hostile to the recruitment of the
militia.  He encouraged agriculture, distributed the talliages more
equitably, amended the old roads and constructed new ones, abolished
forced labor (_corvees_), provided for the wants of the poor and wretched
during the dearth of 1770 and 1771, and declined, successively, the
superintendentship of Rouen, of Lyons, and of Bordeaux, in order that he
might be able to complete the useful tasks he had begun at Limoges.  It
was in that district, which had become dear to him, that he was sought
out by the kindly remembrance of Abbe de Wry, his boyhood's friend, who
was intimate with Madame de Maurepas.  Scarcely had he been installed in
the department of marine and begun to conceive vast plans, when the late
ministers of Louis XV. succumbed at last beneath the popular hatred; in
the place of Abbe Terray, M. Turgot became comptroller-general.

The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbe
Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had
founded fell with him.  Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament
had remained in the nation's eyes the image of absolute power corrupted
and corrupting.  The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goezman had
contributed to decry it, thanks to the uproar the able pamphleteer had
managed to cause; the families of the former magistrates were powerful,
numerous, esteemed, and they put pressure upon public opinion; M. de
Maurepas determined to retract the last absolutist attempt of Louis XV.'s
reign; his first care was to send and demand of Chancellor Maupeou the
surrender of the seals.  "I know what you have come to tell me," said the
latter to the Duke of La Vrilliere, who was usually charged with this
painful mission, "but I am and shall continue to be chancellor of
France," and he kept his seat whilst addressing the minister, in
accordance with his official privilege.  He handed to the duke the
casket of seals, which the latter was to take straight to M. de
Miromesnil.  "I had gained the king a great cause," said Maupeou; "he is
pleased to reopen a question which was decided; as to that he is master."
Imperturbable and haughty as ever, he retired to his estate at Thuit,
near the Andelys, where he drew up a justificatory memorandum of his
ministry, which he had put into the king's hands, without ever attempting
to enter the court or Paris again; he died in the country, at the outset
of the revolutionary storms, on the 29th of July, 1792, just as he had
made the State a patriotic present of 800,000 livres.  At the moment when
the populace were burning him in effigy in the streets of Paris together
with Abbe Terray, when he saw the recall of the parliamentarians, and the
work of his whole life destroyed, he repeated with his usual coolness:
"If the king is pleased to lose his kingdom--well, he is master."

Abbe Terray had been less proud, and was more harshly treated.  It was in
vain that he sought to dazzle the young king with ably prepared
memorials.  "I can do no more," he said, "to add to the receipts, which I
have increased by sixty millions; I can do no more to keep down the.
debts, which I have reduced by twenty millions.  .  .  .  It is for you,
Sir, to relieve your people by reducing the expenses.  This work, which
is worthy of your kind heart, was reserved for you."  Abbe Terray had to
refund nearly 900,000 livres to the public treasury.  Being recognized by
the mob as he was passing over the Seine in a ferry-boat, he had some
difficulty in escaping from the hands of those who would have hurled him
into the river.

The contrast was great between the crafty and unscrupulous ability of the
disgraced comptroller-general and the complete disinterestedness, large
views, and noble desire of good which animated his successor.  After his
first interview with the king, at Compiegne, M. Turgot wrote to Louis
XVI.:--"Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to permit me to place
before your eyes the engagement you took upon yourself, to support me in
the execution of plans of economy which are at all times, and now more
than ever, indispensable.  I confine myself for the moment, Sir, to
reminding you of these three expressions: 1. No bankruptcies; 2. No
augmentation of imposts; 3. No loans.  No bankruptcy, either avowed or
masked by forced reductions.  No augmentation of imposts the reason for
that lies in the condition of your people, and still more in your
Majesty's own heart.  No loans; because every loan always diminishes the
disposable revenue: it necessitates, at the end of a certain time, either
bankruptcy or augmentation of imposts.  .  .  .  Your Majesty will not
forget that, when I accepted the office of comptroller-general, I
perceived all the preciousness of the confidence with which you honor me;
.  .  .  but, at the same time I perceived all the danger to which I was
exposing myself.  I foresaw that I should have to fight single-handed
against abuses of every sort, against the efforts of such as gain by
those abuses, against the host of the prejudiced who oppose every reform,
and who, in the hands of interested persons, are so powerful a means of
perpetuating disorder.  I shall be feared, shall be even hated by the
greater part of the court, by all that solicit favors.  .  .  .  This
people to whom I shall have sacrificed myself is so easy to deceive, that
I shall perhaps incur its hatred through the very measures I shall take
to defend it against harassment.  I shall be calumniated, and perhaps
with sufficient plausibility to rob me of your Majesty's confidence.
.  .  .  You will remember that it is on the strength of your promises
that I undertake a burden perhaps beyond my strength; that it is to you
personally, to the honest man, to the just and good man, rather than to
the king, that I commit myself."

It is to the honor of Louis XVI. that the virtuous men who served him,
often with sorrow and without hoping anything from their efforts, always
preserved their confidence in his intentions.  "It is quite encouraging,"
wrote M. Turgot to one of his friends, "to have to serve a king who is
really an honest and a well-meaning man."  The burden of the necessary
reforms was beyond the strength of the minister as well as of the
sovereign; the violence of opposing currents was soon about to paralyze
their genuine efforts and their generous hopes.

M. Turgot set to work at once.  Whilst governing his district of Limoges,
he had matured numerous plans and shaped extensive theories.  He belonged
to his times and to the school of the philosophers as regarded his
contempt for tradition and history; it was to natural rights alone, to
the innate and primitive requirements of mankind, that he traced back his
principles and referred as the basis for all his attempts.  "The rights
of associated men are not founded upon their history but upon their
nature," says the _Memoire au Roi sur les Municipalites,_ drawn up under
the eye of Turgot.  By this time he desired no more to reform old France;
he wanted a new France.  "Before ten years are over," he would say, "the
nation will not be recognizable, thanks to enlightenment.  This chaos
will have assumed a distinct form.  Your Majesty will have quite a new
people, and the first of peoples."  A profound error, which was that of
the whole Revolution, and the consequences of which would have been
immediately fatal; if the powerful instinct of conservatism and of
natural respect for the past had not maintained between the regimen which
was crumbling away and the new fabric connections more powerful and more
numerous than their friends as well as their enemies were aware of.

Two fundamental principles regulated the financial system of M. Turgot,
economy in expenditure and freedom in trade; everywhere he ferreted out
abuses, abolishing useless offices and payments, exacting from the entire
administration that strict probity of which he set the example.  Louis
XVI. supported him conscientiously at that time in all his reforms; the
public made fun of it.  "The king," it was said, "when he considers
himself an abuse, will be one no longer."  At the same time, a decree of
September 13, 1774, re-established at home that freedom of trade in grain
which had been suspended by Abbe Terray, and the edict of April, 1776,
founded freedom of trade in wine.  "It is by trade alone, and by free
trade, that the inequality of harvests can be corrected," said the
minister in the preamble of his decree.  "I have just read M. Turgot's
masterpiece," wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert "it seems to reveal to us new
heavens and a new earth."  It was on account of his financial innovations
that the comptroller-general particularly dreaded the return of the old
Parliament, with which he saw himself threatened every day.  "I fear
opposition from the Parliament," he said to the king.  "Fear nothing,"
replied the king warmly, "I will stand by you;" and, passing over the
objections of the best politician amongst his ministers, he yielded to M.
de Maurepas, who yielded to public opinion.  On the 12th of November,
1774, the old Parliament was formally restored.

The king appeared at the bed of justice; the princes, the dukes, and the
peers were present; the magistrates were introduced.  "The king my
grandfather," said Louis XVI., "compelled by your resistance to his
repeated orders, did what the maintenance of his authority and the
obligation of rendering justice to his people required of his wisdom.
Today I recall you to functions which you never ought to have given up.
Appreciate all the value of my bounties, and do not forget them."  At the
same time the keeper of the seals read out an edict which subjected the
restored Parliament to the same jurisdiction which had controlled the
Maupeou Parliament.  The latter had been sent to Versailles to form a
grand council there.

Stern words are but a sorry cloak for feeble actions: the restored
magistrates grumbled at the narrow limits imposed upon their authority;
the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Chartres, the Prince of Conti supported
their complaints; it was in vain that the king for some time met them
with refusals; threats soon gave place to concessions; and the
parliaments everywhere reconstituted, enfeebled in the eyes of public
opinion, but more than ever obstinate and Fronde-like, found themselves
free to harass, without doing any good, the march of an administration
becoming every day more difficult.  "Your Parliament may make
barricades," Lord Chesterfield had remarked contemptuously to
Montesquieu, "it will never raise barriers."

M. Turgot, meanwhile, was continuing his labors, preparing a project for
equitable redistribution of the talliage and his grand system of a
graduated scale (_hierarchie_) of municipal assemblies, commencing with
the parish, to culminate in a general meeting of delegates from each
province; he threatened, in the course of his reforms, the privileges of
the noblesse and of the clergy, and gave his mind anxiously to the
instruction of the people, whose condition and welfare he wanted to
simultaneously elevate and augment; already there was a buzz of murmurs
against him, confined as yet to the courtiers, when the dearness of bread
and the distress which ensued till the spring of 1775 furnished his
adversaries with a convenient pretext.  Up to that time the attacks had
been cautious and purely theoretical.  M. Necker, an able banker from
Geneva, for a long while settled in Paris, hand and glove with the
philosophers, and keeping up, moreover, a great establishment, had
brought to the comptroller-general a work which he had just finished on
the trade in grain; on many points he did not share M. Turgot's opinions.
"Be kind enough to ascertain for yourself," said the banker to the
minister, "whether the book can be published without inconvenience to the
government."  M. Turgot was proud and sometimes rude.  "Publish, sir,
publish," said he, without offering his hand to take the manuscript; "the
public shall decide."  M. Necker, out of pique, published his book; it
had an immense sale; other pamphlets, more violent and less solid, had
already appeared; at the same moment a riot, which seemed to have been
planned and to be under certain guidance, broke out in several parts of
France.  Drunken men shouted about the public thoroughfares, "Bread!
cheap bread!"

Burgundy had always been restless and easily excited.  It was at Dijon
that the insurrection began; on the 20th of April, the peasantry moved
upon the town and smashed the furniture of a councillor in the Maupeou
Parliament, who was accused of monopoly; they were already overflowing
the streets; exasperated by the cruel answer of the governor, M. de la
Tour du Pin: "You want something to eat?  Go and graze; the grass is just
coming up."  The burgesses trembled in their houses; the bishop threw
himself in the madmen's way and succeeded in calming them with his
exhortations.  The disturbance had spread to Pontoise; there the riot
broke out on the 1st of May, the market was pillaged; and the 2d, at
Versailles, a mob collected under the balcony of the castle.  Everywhere
ruffians of sinister appearance mingled with the mob, exciting its
passions and urging it to acts of violence: the same men, such as are
only seen in troublous days, were at the same time scouring Brie,
Soissonnais, Vexin, and Upper Normandy; already barns had been burned and
wheat thrown into the river; sacks of flour were ripped to pieces before
the king's eyes, at Versailles.  In his excitement and dismay he promised
the mob that the bread-rate should for the future be fixed at two sous;
the rioters rushed to Paris.

M. Turgot had been confined to his bed for some months by an attack of
gout; the Paris bakers' shops had already been pillaged; the rioters had
entered simultaneously by several gates, badly guarded; only one bakery,
the owner of which had taken the precaution of putting over the door a
notice with shop to let on it, had escaped the madmen.  The
comptroller-general had himself put into his carriage and driven to
Versailles: at his advice the king withdrew his rash concession; the
current price of bread was maintained.  "No firing upon them," Louis XVI.
insisted.  The lieutenant of police, Lenoir, had shown weakness and
inefficiency; Marshal Biron was intrusted with the repression of the
riot.  He occupied all the main thoroughfares and cross-roads; sentries
were placed at the bakers' doors; those who had hidden themselves were
compelled to bake.  The _octroi_ dues on grain were at the same time
suspended at all the markets; wheat was already going down; when the
Parisians went out of doors to see the riot, they couldn't find any.
"Well done, general in command of the flour (_general des farina_)," said
the tremblers, admiring the military arrangements of Marshal Biron.

The Parliament had caused to be placarded a decree against street
assemblies, at the same time requesting the king to lower the price of
bread.  The result was deplorable; the severe resolution, of the council
was placarded beside the proclamation of the Parliament; the magistrates
were summoned to Versailles.  The prosecution of offenders was forbidden
them; it was intrusted to the provost's department.  "The proceedings of
the brigands appear to be combined," said the keeper of the seals; "their
approach is announced; public rumors indicate the day, the hour, the
places at which they are to commit their outrages.  It would seem as if
there were a plan formed to lay waste the country-places, intercept
navigation, prevent the carriage of wheat on the high-roads, in order to
starve out the large towns, and especially the city of Paris."  The king
at the same time forbade any "remonstrance."  I rely," said he on
dismissing the court, "upon your placing no obstacle or hinderance in the
way of the measures I have taken, in order that no similar event may
occur during the period of my reign."

The troubles were everywhere subsiding, the merchants were recovering
their spirits.  M. Turgot had at once sent fifty thousand francs to a
trader whom the rioters had robbed of a boat full of wheat which they had
flung into the river; two of the insurgents were at the same time hanged
at Paris on a gallows forty feet high; and a notice was sent to the
parish priests, which they were to read from the pulpit in order to
enlighten the people as to the folly of such outbreaks and as to the
conditions of the trade in grain.  "My people, when they know the authors
of the trouble, will regard them with horror," said the royal circular.
The authors of the trouble have remained unknown; to his last day M.
Turgot believed in the existence of a plot concocted by the Prince of
Conti, with the design of overthrowing him.

Severities were hateful to the king; he had misjudged his own character,
when, at the outset of his reign, he had desired the appellation of Louis
le Severe.  "Have we nothing to reproach ourselves with in these
measures?"  he was incessantly asking M. Turgot, who was as conscientious
but more resolute than his master.  An amnesty preceded the coronation,
which was to take place at Rheims on the 11th of June, 1775.

A grave question presented itself as regarded the king's oath: should he
swear, as the majority of his predecessors had sworn, to exterminate
heretics?  M. Turgot had aroused Louis XVI.'s scruples upon this subject.
"Tolerance ought to appear expedient in point of policy for even an
infidel prince," he said; "but it ought to be regarded as a sacred duty
for a religious prince."  His opinion had been warmly supported by M. de
Malesherbes, premier president of the Court of Aids.  The king in his
perplexity consulted M. de Maurepas.  "M. Turgot is right," said the
minister, "but he is too bold.  What he proposes could hardly be
attempted by a prince who came to the throne at a ripe age and in
tranquil times.  That is not your position.  The fanatics are more to be
dreaded than the heretics.  The latter are accustomed to their present
condition.  It will always be easy for you not to employ persecution.
Those old formulas, of which nobody takes any notice, are no longer
considered to be binding."  The king yielded; he made no change in the
form of the oath, and confined himself to stammering out a few incoherent
words.  At the coronation of Louis XV. the people, heretofore admitted
freely to the cathedral, had been excluded; at the coronation of Louis
XVI. the officiator, who was the coadjutor of Rheims, omitted the usual
formula addressed to the whole assembly, "Will you have this king for
your king?"  This insolent neglect was soon to be replied to by the
sinister echo of the sovereignty of the people.  The clergy, scared by M.
Turgot's liberal tendencies, reiterated their appeals to the king against
the liberties tacitly accorded to Protestants.  "Finish," they said to
Louis XVI., "the work which Louis the Great began, and which Louis the
Well-beloved continued."  The king answered with vague assurances;
already MM. Turgot and de Malesherbes were entertaining him with a
project which conceded to Protestants the civil status.

M. de Malesherhes, indeed, had been for some months past seconding his
friend in the weighty task which the latter had undertaken.  Born at
Paris on the 6th of December, 1721, son of the chancellor William de
Lamoignon, and for the last twenty-three years premier president in the
Court of Aids, Malesherbes had invariably fought on behalf of honest
right and sound liberty; popularity had followed him in exile; it had
increased continually since the accession of Louis XVI., who lost no time
in recalling him; he had just presented to the king a remarkable
memorandum touching the reform of the fiscal regimen, when M. Turgot
proposed to the king to call him to the ministry in the place of the Duke
of La Vrilliere.  M. de Maurepas made no objection.  "He will be the link
of the ministry," he said, "because he has the eloquence of tongue and of
heart."  "Rest assured," wrote Mdlle. de Lespinasse, "that what is well
will be done and will be done well.  Never, no never, were two more
enlightened, more disinterested, more virtuous men more powerfully knit
together in a greater and a higher cause."  The first care of M. de.
Malesherbes was to protest against the sealed letters (_lettres de
cachet_--summary arrest), the application whereof he was for putting in
the hands of a special tribunal; he visited the Bastille, releasing the
prisoners confined on simple suspicion.  He had already dared to advise
the king to a convocation of the states-general.  "In France," he had
written to Louis XVI., "the nation has always had a deep sense of its
right and its liberty.  Our maxims have been more than once recognized by
our kings; they have even gloried in being the sovereigns of a free
people.  Meanwhile, the articles of this liberty have never been reduced
to writing, and the real power, the power of arms, which, under a feudal
government, was in the hands of the grandees, has been completely centred
in the kingly power.  .  .  .  We ought not to hide from you, Sir, that
the way which would be most simple, most natural, and most in conformity
with the constitution of this monarchy, would be to hear the nation
itself in full assembly, and nobody should have the poltroonery to use
any other language to you; nobody should leave you in ignorance that the
unanimous wish of the nation is to obtain states-general or at the least
states-provincial.  .  .  .  Deign to consider, Sir, that on the day you
grant this precious liberty to your people it may be said that a treaty
has been concluded between king and nation against ministers and
magistrates: against the ministers, if there be any perverted enough to
wish to conceal from you the truth; against the magistrates, if there
ever be any ambitious enough to pretend to have the exclusive right of
telling you it."

Almost the whole ministry was in the hands of reformers; a sincere desire
to do good impelled the king towards those who promised him the happiness
of his people.  Marshal Muy had succumbed to a painful operation.  "Sir,"
he had said to Louis XVI., before placing himself in the surgeon's hands,
"in a fortnight I shall be at your Majesty's feet or with your august
father."  He had succumbed.  M. Turgot spoke to M. de Maurepas of the
Duke of St. Germain.  "Propose him to the king," said the minister,
adding his favorite phrase "one can but try."

In the case of government, trials are often a dangerous thing.  M. de St.
Germain, born in the Jura in 1707, and entered first of all amongst the
Jesuits, had afterwards devoted himself to the career of arms: he had