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.TURGOT, ANNE-ROBERT-JACQOES. 



TURGOT, ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES. 



200 



ing the contractor still remained, for it was beyond the power of an 

 intendaut to alter it. 



On the death of Louis XV. a wider field was opened for the execution 

 of Turgot's enlarged and beneficent policy. The state of France, 

 oppressed and exhausted by an accumulation of abuses, demanded a 

 reforming minister ; and the public voice called Turgot to the highest 

 offices, as a man who united to all the knowledge which is the result 

 of study the experience acquired by habits of business. He was at 

 first appointed minister of the marine ; but after continuing only a 

 month in this situation, in which he felt that he wanted much of the 

 necessary knowledge, he received the appointment of comptroller- 

 general of finance, an employment for which all the labours of his 

 previous life had prepared him. The comptroller-general of finance 

 was then prime minister of France. 



In his letter to the king of the 24th of August 1774, Turgot said, 

 " I confine myself at present, Sire, to remind you of these three words 

 no bankruptcy, no augmentation of imposts, no loans. To fulfil 

 these three conditions," he says, " there is but one means : to reduce 

 the expenditure below the receipt, and sufficiently below it to be able 

 to economise every year twenty millions, in order to clear off the old 

 debts. Without that the first cannon fired will force the state to a 

 bankruptcy." He then explained at some length the means which he 

 considered the best for effecting the saving in question, and thus 

 concluded : " These are the points which your majesty has permitted 

 me to recall to you. Your majesty will not forget that in accepting 

 the place of comptroller-general, I felt all the value of the confidence 

 with which you honoured me. I felt that you intrusted to me the 

 happiness of your people, and, if I may be allowed to say so, the care 

 of rendering your person and your authority beloved ; but at the same 

 time I felt all the danger to which I exposed myself. 1 foresaw that 

 I should have to contend alone against abuses of every kind, against 

 the efforts of those who gain by those abuses, against the mass of 

 prejudices which are opposed to all reform, and which are so powerful 

 a means in the hands of interested persons to eternalise disorders. 

 I shall even have to struggle against the natural goodness, against the 

 generosity of your majesty, and of the persons who are most dear to 

 you. I shall be feared, even hated, by the greatest part of the court, 

 by all who solicit favours; and they will impute to me all the refusals, 

 they will represent me as a harsh man (dur), because I shall have 

 represented to your majesty that you ought not to enrich even those 

 whom you love at the expense of the substance of your people. That 

 people to whom I shall have sacrificed myself are so easily deceived, 

 that perhaps I shall incur their hatred by the very measures which I 

 shall employ in their defence. I shall be calumniated, and perhaps 

 with sufficient appearance of truth to deprive me of the confidence of 

 your majesty. I should not regret the loss of a place to which I never 

 raised my expectations. I am ready to give it up as soon as I can no 

 longer hope to be useful in it ; but your esteem, the reputation of 

 integrity, the public good-will, which have determined your choice in 

 my favour, are dearer to me than life. Your majesty will remember 

 that it is on the faith of your promises that I undertake a burden 

 perhaps above my strength ; that it is to you personally, to the 

 honest, the just, and good man, rather than to the king, that I give 

 myself up." 



One of the first measures of Turgot was the establishment of a free 

 trade in corn in the interior of the kingdom. He threw down those 

 artificial barriers, in the construction of which man had employed a 

 perverted ingenuity, to prevent one province which might chance to 

 labour under a temporary famine arising from a bad harvest from 

 being relieved by the superabundance of a more fortunate district, and 

 thus constantly retain some part of the kingdom in misery and distress, 

 and at the same time cramp the energies and diminish the resources 

 of the whole. He felt at the same time how much perfect freedom in 

 the external trade in corn would add to the security of subsistence, 

 but he knew that the time was not yet arrived when such a measure 

 could be attempted with success. Besides the restrictions on the free 

 passage of corn from one part of the kingdom to another, there were 

 numerous local restrictions and exactions, most of which (such as the 

 exclusive privilege of bakers, the ' banalite" ' of mills, &c.) were 

 removed during Turgot's administration. He also passed a law 

 abolishing the corvdes throughout France, a law which, with the 

 characteristic infatuation of the privileged classes, who would give up 

 nothing till it was too late, was revoked immediately after Turgot's 

 removal from office. By these different laws, the servitude of the 

 inhabitants of tLe rural districts was nearly destroyed. Turgot also 

 abolished most of the restrictions and exclusive privileges under which 

 the inhabitants of the towns suffered. Freedom of trade was granted 

 to the glass-works of Normandy, which, being obliged to supply Paris 

 and Rouen with a certain quantity of glass at a low price, would have 

 derived no advantage from bringing their manufacture to perfection, 

 and had remained in that state of mediocrity to which oppressive laws 

 condemn all the manufactures which have the misfortune to be 

 .subjected to them. 



In regard to his financial operations, the characteristics of Turgot's 

 administration were exactness in payments, fidelity to engagements, 

 a reduction of expenditure whenever it could be effected without 

 hardship and injustice. Pensions were three years in arrear : Turgot 

 caused two years to be paid at once of all those which did not exceed 



400 livres; that is, of all which were necessary for the subsistence of 

 the parties to whom they had been granted. Ten millions due for 

 advances made to the colonies had been payable for five years, and 

 the payment of them had been suspended. Turgot paid at first 

 1,500,000 livres, and secured a million yearly for the payment of the 

 rest. The finance appointments had been multiplied with the sole 

 object of procuring a temporary supply by the first sale of oiiices. 

 Most of the offices were double. Turgot proposed to reduce the 

 double offices to a single one ; to make the functionary whose office 

 was retained reimburse him whose office was abolished ; and wheu 

 one person held two places, to suppress the salary of one of them. 



"Such," observes Condorcet, "had been the operations, such were 

 the views of M. Turgot ; and it was thus that, while they accused him 

 of not knowing finance, apparently to console themselves for the 

 superiority which they were obliged to acknowledge in all the impor- 

 tant parts of the administration, he had augmented the public revenue 

 without putting on a new impost, and after having suppressed or 

 diminished several ; and that without having recourse to new loans, 

 he had made repayments and diminished the debt. All these labours 

 had been the work of twenty months ; and two attacks of gout, an 

 hereditary malady in the family of M. Turgot, had hindered him for 

 several months from carrying on his plans. The forced labour to 

 which his zeal for the public good had made him devote himself at 

 the peril of his life had prolonged these attacks, and rendered them 

 dangerous." ('Vie de M. Turgot,' pp. 115, 116.) 



In short, those men of all ranks and every profession who subsi&ted 

 at the expense of the nation without performing any service in return, 

 who lived by abuses nobles, courtier?, financiers, farmers of the 

 revenue all united in a powerful confederacy against Turgot, and suc- 

 ceeded in driving him from his office after he had held it not two years. 



After his retirement from office he occupied himself less than for- 

 merly with political matters, particularly with such as had reference 

 to the government and the laws of France. The sciences to which he 

 now chiefly devoted his attention were the physical and mathematical. 

 He likewise continued to indulge his early taste for littrature and 

 poetry. He bad never lost the habit of making verses an amuse- 

 ment very valuable to him in his journeys and during the sleepless 

 nights caused by the gout. Bnt he seldom showed his verses : a few 

 fragments were made public, and were attributed by the critics to 

 Voltaire. All that was known of his lucubrations in that department 

 was a single Latin verse, intended for the portrait of Franklin 



" Eripuit cselo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis." 



Among the many points in which Turgob was in advance of the 

 statesmen of his age, there is none that will strike an English reader 

 more than the view he took of the American war as comj aivd with 

 the views even of the most enlightened of the contemporary English 

 statesmen on that subject. Even Burke, who saw farther than the 

 others, had not admitted into his calculation the consideration of the 

 most remote possibility of the ultimate independence of the colonies. 

 Turgot's ' Mcmoire ' on the American war contains views on the nature 

 of colonies that have been recognised since by the soundest thinkers 

 on those subjects as correct ones. His work on the laws against usury 

 contains almost all that is valuable in Bentham's Letters on the usury 

 laws, written many years later : not that Bentham copied Turgot ; he 

 probably did not know of his work ; but the fact is as stated. His 

 article 'Fondation,' also in the ' Encyclopedic, ' contains many ideas 

 which were new at the time, and some, the soundness of which has 

 not yet been overthrown. 



The principal fault that was attributed to Turgot as a statesman 

 was want of address, a charge against which he warmly defends him- 

 self in his letter to Dr. Price, who bad sent him the new edition of 

 his ' Observations on Civil Liberty,' in which Price had "suppressed 

 the imputation of want of address, which he had inserted in his 

 ' Additional Observations.' " But as we are informed by his biographers 

 that Turgot could' not dissemble his hatred for knaves, his contempt 

 for cowardice or baseness ; that those sentiments involuntarily showed 

 themselves on his countenance ; even when we take along with this 

 what these friendly biographers add, that as they were only the con- 

 sequence of his love for mankind, they neither inspired him with a 

 spirit of injustice nor of vengeance : yet when we consider of what 

 materials that portion of his countrymen were composed with whom 

 he must have come chiefly in contact as prime minister of France, we 

 need not be surprised that he made himself many enemies; and that 

 want of address was imputed to him even by those who were not his 

 enemies. But in whatever degree the charge may derogate from his 

 claim -to practical talent in statesmanship, it leaves untouched his 

 character as a statesman for reach of intellectual vision, for purity 

 and benevolence of intention, for undeviating adherence to principle 

 hitherto unrivalled. 



Turgot's attacks of gout before his ministry had been painful, but 

 not dangerous. The violent and incessant labour to which he devoted 

 himself in the midst of these attacks during his ministry changed the 

 nature of them ; and when he was restored to leisure, it was too late 

 for repose to repair the mischief that had been done. The attacks 

 became more and more frequent, and at last he sank under them. 

 His last attack, which was long and severe, did not impair his mind 

 nor even his temper. " He only displayed towards his friends," says 



