Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (14 page)

Russia to be a means for increasing Louis XVI’s leverage with Catherine

in precisely such matters as attempting to moderate her ambitions against

Constantinople, and not an instrument for facilitating the subversion or

breakup of the Ottoman Empire. In other respects, however, the Franco-

Russian commercial treaty of January 1787 “represented Louis XVI’s

recognition that Russia was now a permanent part of the European in-

ternational system.”106 Just four decades before, the disdainful French had

refused to allow Russian participation in the talks at Aix-la-Chapelle ending

the War of the Austrian Succession; now, as war once again loomed (and, six

months after Vergennes’s death, broke out) in the contested Balkans,

Versailles’s inability to affect events there was an arresting indicator of how

the power relationship between Bourbon France and Romanov Russia had

changed.

Yet, although Russia’s integration into European high politics was prob-

ably of more fundamental significance than that of Frederician and post-

Frederician Prussia, it was Prussia’s defeat of the Dutch Patriot forces in

1787 that most immediately jolted the French. The war minister, Ségur,

seconded by the naval minister, Castries, urged the mobilization of twenty-

five battalions under the command of Lieutenant General Rochambeau for

possible action in defense of the Patriots; but Calonne’s successor in the

finance ministry, Etienne-Charles Loménie de Brienne, obsessed by the

state’s deepening financial crisis, vetoed this suggestion. Ségur and Castries

thereupon resigned in disgust. The latter, notably, had “never ceased

predicting resumption of the war with England after what he felt was

the premature signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1783.”107 He probably

would have agreed with others in his class – Alexandre de Lameth, the baron

de Bésenval, and the duc de Montmorency-Luxembourg, for example –

that war in 1787 could have rallied army and people to the king and

quenched the fires of domestic revolt. As it was, abandoning the Patriots

served (in Montmorency-Luxembourg’s words) to demonstrate “the inex-

perience, the weakness, and the incompetence” of Vergennes’s successors,

“prompting scorn for alliances with France and disgust with her conduct;

she was the plaything of . . . others.”108

106 Murphy,
Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes
, pp. 453–54. See also on these issues, Blanning,
Origins
, pp. 57–59; and Fox, “Negotiating with the Russians,” pp. 70–71.

107 Jean Egret,
The French Prerevolution, 1787–1788
, trans. Wesley D. Camp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 40–42.

108 Ibid., p. 41.

52

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

What made this derisive commentary even worse for the government

was that it came on top of a withering critique of commercial policies which

allegedly subordinated France’s economic interests to those of the British.

Radical men of letters, aggrieved merchants, and patriotic provincial par-

lementaires all lashed out at London and condemned their own leaders’

impotence in connection with issues of trade in the West Indies, the Near

East, and the Baltic. Moreover, we have already noted how the Anglo-

French or “Eden” Treaty of 1786 multiplied the government’s detractors.109

But even more significantly, perhaps, a number of these observers drew

revealing parallels between overseas and continental affairs, excoriating

French statesmen who would immolate the interests of Dutch Patriots and

Gallic entrepreneurs alike on the bloodstained altars of British and Prussian

greed.

All of this could only ratchet up the pressure on a government already

wrestling with the onerous costs of its global policies. Louis XVI might

wistfully hope in April 1787 that his finance minister could curb expenses

“without cutting the army or the navy.” Loménie de Brienne himself might

reassure Sweden’s anxious ambassador to France in September of that year

that his reforms would eventually permit France to “play the role that be-

comes her” in the world’s affairs. And Keeper of the Seals Chrétien Franc¸ois

Lamoignon might try to comfort the Paris Parlement just two months later

with images of “a formidable navy, of the army regenerated . . . , of . . . a new

port built on the Channel to insure the glory of the French flag.”110 But the

realities confronting France were more accurately indicated by the Austrian

ambassador, Mercy-Argenteau, in a comment upon Dutch developments

confided to Vienna: “It is not credible that the Versailles ministry, in such

straits, would risk getting involved in a war that would make bankruptcy

inevitable.”111 And in 1788 matters would (if possible) only deteriorate fur-

ther, as the new foreign minister, Montmorin, found himself compelled to

desert both Sweden and Turkey in their struggle with avaricious Romanov

Russia.

It is crucial to stress these facts, because only by doing so can we appre-

ciate the sense of urgency motivating Calonne’s and then Brienne’s efforts

to restore the crown’s solvency. Despite their efforts, however, geopolitical,

constitutional, and social issues became fused in such a way as ultimately

to bring about the collapse of the ancien régime.

Actually, these matters were inextricably intertwined well before the

“prerevolution” of 1787–88, as we have already seen. That this was the

case explains why, by August 1786, Calonne was reduced to suggesting to

109 This commentary on trade issues is discussed by Frances Acomb in
Anglophobia in France,
1763–1789
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1950), pp. 117–20.

110 Citations from Egret,
French Prerevolution
, pp. 32, 42, 107.

111 Ibid., p. 41. A letter of 15 September 1787.

The ancien régime

53

Louis XVI the convocation of an Assembly of Notables to tackle the king-

dom’s mounting problems. Necker’s strategy to manage the enormous cost

of Vergennes’s foreign policy had been allowed to lapse after 1781. Some in

the government understood the need for strict accounting procedures, but

the authorities were less sensitive to the equally pressing need to cut back

venal officeholding in the financial administration and to curb concessions

of special favors to parasitical figures at court and to privileged tax-paying

nobles in the countryside. The result was predictable: the crown’s care-

fully nurtured – and publicized – ability to maintain a balance between

“ordinary” income and “ordinary” expenditure, and thus pay the interest

on its loans
out of a surplus in its ordinary income
, began to slip away. By 1786, Calonne found it impossible, whatever expedients he employed, to

bridge an annual gap between fixed expenses and fixed income that – even

in peacetime! – was inexorably passing beyond 100 million livres.112

What made this so serious a problem for the crown was its constitutional

ramifications. Calonne was now discovering, tardily, that, failing the main-

tenance of something like a Neckerite regime of fiscal-administrative aus-

terity and accountability, globally competitive absolutism in France would

have to risk consulting its own subjects on public issues. There was simply

no other way to maintain the state’s credibility in the financial markets

both inside and outside the country; hence the finance minister’s advice to

Louis XVI in August 1786 to convene an Assembly of Notables. Such

a forum, in which (according to Calonne) “it is the most important and

enlightened magnates of the realm to whom the king is pleased to com-

municate his views,” would be less dangerous to royal authority than the

dread Estates General, in which “it is the representatives of the nation who

remonstrate, petition, and consent.” Yet, given the power of public opinion,

and the literate nation’s “memory” of the Estates General meeting sporad-

ically in earlier centuries, how likely was it that the consultative process

initiated by the controller-general could have stopped with a summons to

an Assembly of Notables?113

As it turned out, Calonne almost immediately became caught up in

an uncontrollable dialectic of ministerial proposals and public response.

The proposals themselves, first submitted to the Notables in February

1787, were provocative from the start insofar as they were designed to

strengthen, not mitigate, the sway of bellicose absolutism in France. What

might landed proprietors not fear from a “territorial subvention” (i.e., a

land tax) whose yield and duration were as yet unlimited? What useful

112 On these points, see Eugene N. White, “Was There a Solution to the Ancien Régime’s Financial Dilemma?”
Journal of Economic History
49 (1989): 545–68; and Robert D. Harris,
Necker and the Revolution of 1789
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).

113 Cited in Egret,
French Prerevolution
, p. 4.

54

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

public purposes could provincial, district, and municipal assemblies serve

if, in apportioning taxes fixed arbitrarily at Versailles, they would have to

obey those minions of “ministerial despotism” the intendants? How could

Frenchmen effectually resist the extended stamp tax of such a rejuvenated

state? And why should they enthuse over the abolition of internal tolls

and duties, the reduction of the various salt imposts, the liberation of the

internal commerce in grain, and the conversion of the peasants’ obligatory

road work into cash payments, if such measures, by stimulating taxable

agriculture and trade, merely refilled the coffers of the old absolutism?114

Calonne, attuned narrowly to that old absolutism, had failed to antici-

pate how quickly the Notables would perceive constitutional issues behind

the government’s reforms. He had also miscalculated on the more immedi-

ate question of the government’s solvency. Inevitably, the Notables rejected

his assertion that Necker’s reported budgetary surplus of 1781 had now

become a running deficit; just as inevitably, they demanded access to the

state’s financial accounts, and found their examination of those accounts,

and of the controller-general’s proposed reforms, to be radicalizing their

thinking on all public questions. They may have assumed their duties ini-

tially as advisers to their monarch in a more or less traditional role; but

with the passage of time they became little less than representatives of the

nation, and their convocation little less than a legislature. Yet, when put to

the ultimate test of deciding whether or not to endorse the crown’s legis-

lation, the Notables could only shuffle the awesome responsibility for this

onto “other institutions, other instruments of the nation already estab-

lished or to be called into existence.”115 And could there be much mystery

in the final analysis as to what “institution” or “instrument” would be

indicated? In fact, early on in the Notables’ deliberations a distinguished

jurist from Provence, Leblanc de Castillon, had declared that the Estates

General would have to sanction any new taxes; and Lafayette was to issue a

clarion call for the revival of the historic Estates on the eve of the Notables’

dissolution. The warring Bourbon state could not, even now, lay the ghosts

of venerable constitutional precedent.

It was equally powerless to prevent its argument with the Notables from

being taken up by a “public opinion” to which both parties to the dispute

then found themselves appealing. “A slight fever has gripped the country,”

wrote abbé Morellet to Britain’s Lord Shelburne. “As soon as the public has

seen the Notables . . . occupied with its interests, opinion has given them

a power which they [otherwise] would not have had. . . . by reason of the

confidence acquired they have become like the deputies of our old States

114 For details on Calonne’s proposals, refer to ibid., chap. 1.

115 Gruder, “Paths to Political Consciousness: The Assembly of Notables of 1787 and the

‘Pre-Revolution’ in France,”
French Historical Studies
13 (1984): 348–50.

The ancien régime

55

General.”116 And in fact the Notables’ final referral of the pivotal question

of taxation to either the parlements or the Estates General stemmed, at

least in part, from their sensitivity to popular cartoons painting them as

guileless geese about to be devoured by the ministers.

Yet the government, too, found itself courting the public. Calonne, in

fact, precipitated his own disgrace in March by appealing over the heads

of his adversaries to the literate citizenry with a vehement indictment of

“privileges” and of all royal administration shrouded in “darkness.” This

was, understandably, too much for Louis XVI; yet, significantly, the king

himself handed over to the Notables the fiscal accounts they had been de-

manding. Furthermore, the new steward of the crown’s finances, Loménie

de Brienne, chosen in a conciliatory gesture from among the Notables

themselves, tried – though unavailingly – to satisfy his former colleagues by