Lafayette (44 page)

With the presentation of the busts, Lafayette’s popularity and acclaim in France reached their peak. A poet extolled him as “modest in the midst of success, noble and great without pride, gentle and good without weakness,”
exhibiting “the valor of Achilles to the composure of Nestor.”
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Artists, too, celebrated the “hero of the New World,” with French and American artists alike producing idealized portraits that seldom looked anything like him. Even the most despotic rulers sought to meet the “friend of Washington” and establish at least a tenuous tie to those who controlled the New World’s vast riches. The Russian czarina Catherine the Great invited Lafayette to visit her capital at St. Petersburg in the new year and accompany her and Emperor Joseph to the Crimea.

Just before Christmas, however, a summons from the king forced Lafayette to cancel the Russian trip. At the urging of Finance Minister Calonne, Louis XVI called an Assemblée des Notables—an assembly of the most illustrious members of the realm—to recommend solutions to the nation’s fiscal crisis. The national debt and annual deficits had soared uncontrollably and all but emptied the French treasury. Calonne proposed huge cuts in government spending—first, by limiting royal access to state funds, and second, by enacting sweeping tax reforms. Instead of taxing the poorest of the French, with the least to contribute, Calonne recommended taxing the wealthiest classes—hitherto exempt from most taxes. He asked for a property tax of 2 percent to 5 percent on all lands and a stamp tax on legal documents, wills, ships’ papers, bills of sale, insurance, university degrees, wine containers, newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, playing cards, and dice. He proposed eliminating taxes on peasants, which, he said, added little to the treasury and, in fact, drove workers off the land into misery, reduced annual crops, and contributed to food shortages and famine. He asked for an end to the hated
gabelle
, or salt tax, which made it too costly for the poor to preserve meat, and the corvée, which forced peasants to work on public roads one day a week without pay. By paying peasants to work on the roads and leaving the money they earned from field labor in their pockets, Calonne said the government would raise productivity, increase crops, end famine, and reduce homelessness and poverty.

Calonne also called for the creation of a single, common French market, free of provincial trade barriers and duties. Without barriers and duties, the
ferme
would be unable to create artificial shortages that drove up prices and produced famine and discontent throughout the realm. In the political sector, Calonne suggested the establishment of provincial assemblies to relieve Versailles of the responsibility—and costs—of dealing with regional problems that could be handled more effectively, efficiently, and at less cost at the local level.

Although dear to Lafayette’s republican heart, Calonne’s proposals were nothing short of a social, political, and economic revolution—far too radical for the king to promulgate by decree without setting off a rebellion by aristocrats, most of them high-ranking military officers with large army divisions
under their command. Rebellious aristocrats had almost toppled Louis XIV in the early seventeenth century, and Louis XVI knew he would have to move cautiously. Calonne warned him that the nation’s economy was too close to collapse for unobtrusive, piecemeal reforms. Immediate change was the only solution. The king hoped that by convening the nation’s “notables” he could flatter them into approving Calonne’s program as a patriotic duty, although it would cost them the most.

Lafayette hailed Calonne—and the king—as “patriotic” and “noble”— deserving of the nation’s “gratitude and good will.” He envisioned the Assemblée des Notables as a French equivalent of the American Continental Congress, which, after all, had also been an assembly of the most privileged, illustrious men. Except for Sam Adams, who had been born to but had lost his family’s wealth, the fifty-six American “notables” who met at Philadelphia in 1774 ranged from rich to incredibly so: there had been five northern farmers, seven southern planters, thirty lawyers, eleven merchants, one builder, and one wharf owner. Even Lafayette’s beloved hero George Washington owned sixty thousand acres and was arguably the richest planter in the south.

The French king named 144 notables: seven princes of the blood, including his two brothers; thirty-six noblemen, including Lafayette; thirty-seven magistrates; twelve government officials; twelve provincial representatives; twenty-six municipal representatives; and fourteen prelates. “The choice of members in the assembly,” Lafayette told Washington, “was based on their morality, talents and importance.”
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What Lafayette conveniently overlooked in his eagerness to embrace the French Assembly was that eleven signatories of the American Declaration of Independence—one-fifth of the signers—had been Freemasons devoted to republican self-government and social reform. Moreover, almost all signatories were Protestants—heirs to more than one hundred fifty years of self-rule in congregations that not only formed the seats of government in most communities but also dispensed compulsory public education in many states and, in the north, propagated near-universal literacy among poor and rich alike.

The French notables were universally Roman Catholic, rooted in centuries of centralized, absolute rule by priests and divinely appointed kings— unused to and untrained in self-government in a nation more than 75 percent illiterate. Apart from Lafayette, there were but a handful of Freemasons dedicated to social reform, and, unlike American “notables” at Philadelphia, French
notables
did not gather in Versailles to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, but to preserve the first and enhance the second. And of the few with honor, none held it too sacred to sell at the right price.

On February 22, the clarion calls of the king’s heralds signaled the opening of the historic Assembly in the Salles des Menus Plaisirs.
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Apart from the notables themselves, ambassadors from other nations, including America’s Thomas Jefferson, witnessed the pomp and ceremony as the king mounted the throne in his splendid blue velvet robe, bordered in snow-white ermine; his long, broad cape trailed behind, inlaid with gold and white fleurs-de-lys—the emblem of the House of Bourbon. Atop the king’s fat, pasty countenance, the great jewel-encrusted crown of Saint-Louis balanced unsteadily as he began muttering in a bored, barely audible monotone the words that would ultimately be his death sentence. He urged the Assembly to help him reform the realm socially, economically, and politically by approving equitable taxation, freedom of commerce, relief for the indigent, and establishment of provincial assemblies to manage local affairs. After Calonne had echoed the king’s words, the Assembly dissolved into seven committees, or bureaux, each chaired by a prince of the blood. The king’s youngest brother, the comte d’Artois, chaired Lafayette’s bureau.

At first, all went reasonably well. For six weeks, the bureaux feigned interest in tax reform and the plight of peasants, and, when they reconvened in full assembly, they agreed to recommend that the king abolish the hated salt tax, end internal trade barriers for grain, and cut peasant income taxes from 20 percent to 10 percent. They even approved establishing provincial assemblies to give each province more autonomy. But they angrily rejected property taxes and other levies that would have affected them and the rest of the aristocracy—and were essential for ending the national fiscal crisis.
As Talleyrand, the powerful bishop of Autun, put it, “They found glory in opposition.”
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Lafayette was equally annoyed. He told Washington that most of the “notables” were “not ables” who belonged to “a bigoted party” of anti-Protestants and “wicked people” who opposed reform.
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The debate soon spilled out of the assembly halls into the streets, where ambitious rabble-rousers harangued hungry crowds with demands for redress. Once grist for the conversational mills of privileged literates, the ideas of the philosophes—Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the like—echoed through the streets. For the first time, thoughts of liberty, equity, and representation penetrated the minds of commoners, who had always believed unquestioningly that God alone had ordained their place in the French political, social, and economic system. Fiery young orators spurred them on—mostly ambitious young lawyers such as Maximilien Robespierre and Georges-Jacques Danton, commoners whose education taught them to envy those born to wealth and power. Mobs of illiterates who had never before thought of politics, let alone voiced opinions, called for the king’s head, Calonne’s head— anyone’s head. All called for destruction of the
barrières
, or ring of customs posts the
ferme
had erected around Paris to tax incoming foodstuffs, wine, and firewood. The mobs grew into small armies of 10,000 and 20,000 that marched to Versailles to demand change. The press joined the fracas. “Caricatures, placards, bon mots have been indulged by all ranks of people,” Jefferson wrote to Adams. “The King long in the habit of drowning his cares in wine, plunges deeper and deeper; the Queen cries but sins on.”
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“When Calonne assembled the notables,” explained political writer Antoine Rivarol, “he opened the eyes of the people to the defects of the government’s leaders as well as the defects in the fiscal situation. The nation could not find a single great statesman in that assembly, and it lost confidence in government forever.”
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As the split widened between Assembly “not ables” and street mobs, Lafayette asserted himself, assuming leadership of a progressive “American” faction, as it grew to be called. He attacked the
ferme
for blocking free trade, but had little impact. He proposed civil rights for Protestants, but the comte d’Artois ruled him out of order in mid-sentence, saying the proposal was beyond the scope of the Assembly’s agenda.

Outside, the crowds continued growing.

In the midst of the whirlwind, a notorious adventurer and propagandist, the comte de Mirabeau, published a pamphlet
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with sensational charges that some notables with ties to the court had made fortunes buying inexpensive properties with knowledge in advance that they could resell them to the court at outrageously high profits. The pamphlet was an ill-disguised attack on the queen and her brother-in-law, the comte d’Artois, who had used state funds to buy the Château de Saint-Cloud, west of Paris, from their cousin,
the duc d’Orléans, for 1.5 million livres ($15 million in today’s currency).

Although the queen blamed the affair on Finance Minister Calonne, Lafayette demanded “a serious examination” of the charges. “I question why ministers of finance would recommend royal purchases of lands that he cannot possibly use. . . . I might also ask why they are buying more property for the king, when most people agree he should be selling the surplus lands he already owns.” The comte d’Artois interrupted, calling Lafayette’s language too strong, but the intrepid French knight fancied himself another Patrick Henry, in the Virginia House of Burgesses:

“My sense of patriotism is alarmed and demands a full inquiry,” he cried. “The millions being dissipated come from taxes, which cannot be justified except to meet the real needs of the state. The millions abandoned to plunder and greed are the fruit of sweat, tears and blood of the people, and the number of people sacrificed to misery to amass the sums so carelessly wasted shames the sense of justice and goodness that we know to be the natural sentiments of his majesty.”
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To the dismay of the red-faced comte d’Artois, Lafayette demanded the arrest of speculators who profited from advance knowledge of government land purchases. The notables endorsed Lafayette’s call for an inquiry, which the embarrassed count had to request from his royal older brother.

The assault on speculators raised Lafayette to unofficial leadership of reform-minded progressives outside the Assembly, and, to encourage the growth of his following, Lafayette published and distributed his speech in pamphlet form, sending the first copy to Washington. Adrienne wrote to Lafayette’s aunt at Chavaniac: “News of the Assembly is still brilliant, my dear aunt . . . and it will come as no surprise to you that the particular Notable in whom you take a personal interest is acquitting himself well.”
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Lafayette’s performance at the Assembly provoked personal attacks against him in anonymously written pro-Royalist pamphlets and letters that floated on the streets of Paris each day. “Monsieur de Calonne went to find the king and demand that I be imprisoned in the Bastille,” Lafayette wrote to Washington. “The King and family and the great men about court, some friends excepted, don’t forgive me the liberties I have taken, and the success it had among other classes of the people.”
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