Among Voltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s.
But Turgot was something more even than the best man of his party. He was the best worker. While Voltaire clamoured and wept for humanity, while d’Alembert thought, Grimm wrote, Diderot talked, and Condorcet dreamed and died, Turgot laboured. Broad and bold in aim, he was yet content to do what he could. Of him it might never be said ‘L’amour du mieux t’aura interdit du bien.’ To do one’s best here and now, with the wretched tools one has to hand, in the teeth of indolence, obstinacy, and the spirit of routine, to compromise where one cannot overcome, and instead of sitting picturing some golden future, to do at once the little one can—that was this statesman’s policy.
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ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.
From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy.
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It was so far successful, that all men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.
His father was the Provost of Merchants in Paris, and has earned the gratitude of Parisians by enlarging the Quai de l’Horloge and joining it by a bridge to the opposite bank of the Seine, and by erecting the fountain in the Rue de Grenelle de St. Germain.
Anne Robert Jacques was his third son, and a timid, shy little creature. His mother, who, en vraie Parisienne, thought everything of appearance and manners, worried him on the subject of his clumsiness and stupidity, which naturally made the child self-conscious and increased the faults fourfold. When visitors arrived to flatter Madame by admiring her children, Anne Robert hid under the sofa or the table; and when he was removed from his retreat, could produce no company manners at all. No wonder the mother never even suspected the strong intellect and the wonderful character that so much awkwardness concealed.
Anne Robert’s birth was contemporaneous with Voltaire’s visit to England, and took place on May 10, 1727. The child had already two brothers. The eldest was bound, after the foolish custom of the day, to follow his father’s profession;{208} the second brother must go into the army; and for Anne Robert there was nothing left but the Church.
He followed Voltaire and Helvétius at the school of Louis-le-Grand, and when sufficiently advanced, moved on to the College of Plessis. As a schoolboy his pocket-money disappeared with the usual rapidity, but not in the usual way. This shy little student gave it to his poorer companions, to buy books. From the time he was sixteen—that is in 1743—until 1750, he was a divinity student. At Saint-Sulpice, whither he went in 1748 on leaving Plessis, he took his degree as a Theological Bachelor, and from there entered the Sorbonne.
The Sorbonne, which was swept away by the Revolution, was a very ancient Theological College and in some respects not unlike an English university. Young Turgot found there Morellet and Loménie de Brienne, besides a certain Abbé de Cicé, to whom in 1749 he addressed one of the first of his writings, a ‘Letter on Paper Money.’
In 1749, Turgot was made Prior of the Sorbonne, in which r?le he had to deliver two Latin lectures, choosing for his themes, ‘The Advantages of Christianity,’ and ‘The Advance of the Mind of Man.’ All the time he was reading, thinking, observing on his own account, studying{209} especially Locke, Bayle, Clarke, and Voltaire. A priest he soon knew he could not be. To be sure, the fact that his friend Loménie de Brienne is a sceptic will not prevent him becoming a cardinal and Archbishop of Toulouse; he would have been Archbishop of Paris had his Majesty not been so painfully particular as to demand that the Primate of the capital should at least believe in a God. But Turgot was of other metal and was not minded to live a lie. All his friends begged him to keep to the lucrative career assigned him, surely, by Providence! ‘You will be a bishop,’ says Cicé comfortably, ‘and then you can be a statesman at your leisure.’
The argument was very seductive; but this student was in every respect unlike other students, with a character breathing a higher and finer air than theirs. Morellet records, not without the suspicion of a sneer, that from their coarse boyish jokes he shrank as one shrinks from a blow. Even Condorcet, himself so pure in life, laughed at people wasting time in quenching the desires of the flesh; but Turgot vindicated purity as well as practised it, and reached a level of principle, as of conduct, which in the eighteenth century was unfortunately almost unique.
His father, wiser than most parents in like circumstances, countenanced his objections to the{210} priesthood. He had already studied law, as well as theology. In 1750 he left the Sorbonne, and Loménie gave a farewell dinner in his rooms, with Turgot and Morellet of the party, and the light-hearted guests planned a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne for the year 1800.
The year 1800! Before then the Sorbonne itself had perished with Church, monarchy, and nobility; shallow Brienne, having done mighty mischief, had poisoned himself in the chateau his ill-earned wealth had been gained to restore; Morellet was writing revolutionary pamphlets; and Turgot was dead.
In 1752, two years after he left the Sorbonne, Anne Robert obtained the legal post of Deputy Counsellor of the Procurator-General, and a year later was made Master of Requests.
One must picture him at this time as a tall, broad-shouldered, rather handsome man, with that old boyish constraint in his manner, and that strict high-mindedness which his own generation could not be expected to find attractive. Add to these qualities that he was not in the least carried away by dreams and visions, as were nearly all his friends, that even then he saw the world as it was, and meant to do with it what he could—that, though in lofty aim he may have been an idealist, he never fell into the idealist’s fault of believing{211} that, because there is everything to do, he must do everything, or nothing. Just, reasonable, practical—what a wholesome contrast to your visionary Rousseaus, ay, and to your impulsive Voltaires! He was not a brilliant person, this; it is said that he was slow in everything he undertook. Nor had he given over the vigour of his youth and the strength of his understanding to any one party. He was studying them all.
He was about three or four and twenty when he first began to go into the intellectual society of Paris—when Montesquieu, d’Alembert, Galiani, Helvétius, found the stiffness of manner more than redeemed by the wealth of the mind. Presently he was introduced to Madame de Graffigny, and complimented her by writing a long review of her ‘Letters from a Peruvian,’ which, as giving his own views on education, on marriage, and on the fashionable avoidance of parenthood, retains all its interest. It is strange to hear a pre-Revolutionary Frenchman urging love-marriages—‘Because we are sometimes deceived, it is concluded we ought never to choose’—and strange also that, out of all the great reformers with whom his name is associated, Turgot alone perceived the fearful havoc which neglect of family duties makes in the well-being of the State.
He was presented to Madame de Graffigny by her{212} niece, Mademoiselle de Ligniville. The bright and charming Minette naturally did not find it at all difficult to draw Anne Robert of five-and-twenty from the intellectual society of her aunt’s salon to a game of battledore and shuttlecock à deux. Morellet, watching the pair, professed himself pained and astonished that their friendship did not end as nearly all such friendships do and should.
Most of Turgot’s biographers have sought the reason why Mademoiselle de Ligniville became Madame Helvétius and not Madame Turgot—and have not found it. As for Turgot, he said nothing. It remains idle to speculate whether he conceived for her a passion, which his gaucherie and shyness, perhaps, prevented her from returning; or whether he had already devoted his life to his public duty, and thought that private happiness would be deterrent and not spur to his work for the race. An unhappy or an unrequited affection is one of the finest incentives to labour and success one can have. It may be that Turgot had it. The only certain facts are that Minette married Helvétius, and that Turgot remained her life-long friend.
In 1754 he made the acquaintance of Quesnay and of de Gournay, the political economists, who influenced not a little his life and thought. He soon began writing articles for the Encyclop?dia,{213} though he never joined in that battle-cry of the Encyclop?dists, écrasez l’infame, and was wholly without sympathy for the atheism of d’Holbach and the materialism of Helvétius. Turgot, indeed, may be said to have been, in the broadest acceptation of the term, a Christian; or rather he would be called, and call himself, a Christian to-day. But his Christianity was not of Rome nor yet of Protestantism, but that in whose honest doubt there lives more faith than in half the creeds. He certainly gave little expression to it. It was the religion of the wise man—which he never tells.
When he was on a geologising tour in Switzerland, in 1760, he saw the great Pontiff of the Church of Antichrist at Délices. That generous old person was warm in delight and admiration for his guest. D’Alembert had introduced him, and d’Alembert’s friends must always be welcome. And then Turgot’s article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclop?dia had made even more impression on this impressionable Voltaire than on the world of letters in general. He took this young disciple to his heart at once. Well, then, if he is not precisely a disciple, he is at least a most ‘lovable philosopher,’ and ‘much fitter to instruct me than I am to instruct him!’ It was Voltaire who was dazzled by the young man’s splendid possibilities, not the young man who was dazzled by Voltair{214}e’s matchless fame and daring genius. Turgot was never dazzled; it was his greatness, if it was also his misfortune, to see men and the world exactly as they are.
In 1761 he was made Intendant of Limoges. It was the great opportunity; he had wanted practical work—not to think, to write, or to dream. Voltaire wrote of him afterwards as one ‘qui ne chercha le vrai que pour faire le bien.’ He wanted to Do; and here was everything to be done.
The picture of provincial France before the Revolution has been painted often, but the subject is one of which the painter can never tire and to which he can never do justice.
The Limoges which Turgot found was one of the most beautiful districts of France—and one of the most wretched. Here, on the one side, rose the chateaux of the great absentee noblemen, who, always at Court, left behind them middlemen to wring from the poor innumerable dues, with which my lord, forsooth, must pay his debts of honour and make a fine figure at Versailles. The few nobles who did live on their country estates expected their new young Intendant to be an agreeable social light, as his predecessors had been, who would keep, for the élite of the neighbourhood, an open house where one would naturally find{215} good wine, rich fare, and delightful, doubtful company.
On the other hand were the clergy—often ignorant, but generally cunning enough to play on the deeper ignorance of their flock by threats of the Hereafter, and to keep from them that knowledge which is the death-blow of superstition.
Then there were the poor. Picture a peasantry whose homes were windowless, one-roomed huts of peat or clay; who subsisted, in times of plenty, on roots, chestnuts, and a little black bread; who had neither schools nor hospitals, teachers nor doctors; who were the constant prey of pestilence and famine; whose bodies were the possession of their lords, and whose dim souls were the perquisites of the priests. Consider that these people were not allowed to fence such miserable pieces of land as they might possess, lest they should interfere with my lord’s hunting; nor to manure their wretched crops, lest they should spoil the flavour of his game; nor to weed them, lest they should disturb his partridges. Consider that, if such land could have borne any fruit, a special permission was required to allow its owners to build a shed to store it in. Consider that their villages, in which they herded like beasts, were separated from other villages by roads so vile that they would have rendered commerce difficult,{216} if legal trammels had not made it impossible. Consider that these people had been scourged for generations by hundreds of unjust and senseless laws, made by and for the benefit of their oppressors, and that they were now the victims of taxes whose very name has become an indictment, and whose description is a justification of the French Revolution.
On the one flank they were whipped by the taille—the tax on the income and property of the poor, which absorbed one-half of the net products of their lands—and on the other by the corvée, which compelled them to give yearly twelve or fifteen days’ unpaid labour on the roads and the use of a horse and cart, if they had them. The milice demanded from each parish its quota of soldiers (the rich being exempt as usual), and compelled the parishes to lodge passing detachments of military and to lend cattle to draw the military equipages. The gabelle, or tax on salt, forced each poor man to buy seven pounds of salt per annum—whether, as in one province, it was a halfpenny a pound, or, as in another, it was sixpence—and let the noble, the priest, and the Government official go free. Toll-gates were so numerous in the country that it is said fish brought from Harfleur to Paris paid eleven times its value on the journey. Wine was taxed; corn was taxed.{217}
But this was not all. If these taxes were cruelly unjust, they were settled and regular. Irregular taxes could be levied at any moment at the caprice of the despot at Versailles, who no more realised the condition of his peasantry than an ordinary Briton realises the condition of a tribe of Hottentots. One, called with an exquisite irony the Tax of the Joyful Accession, had been raised when Louis the Fifteenth reached the throne of France—to topple it down the abyss. Another was the vingtième, or tax on the twentieth part of a franc, which could be doubled or trebled at the pleasure of the Government.
Apart altogether from the taxes, the peasantry were subject to tithes exacted by the Church, itself exempt from all taxation, to large fees for christening and marrying, for getting out of the misery of this world and avoiding worse misery in the next.
The clergy were on the spot to exact these dues, just as the middleman was on the spot to exact the dues for the nobles. Some of these dues and seigneurial rights are so shameful and disgusting that their very terms are unrepeatable. Even that vile age permitted many of them to lapse and become a dead letter; but the number, and the full measure of the iniquity of those that were insisted on, has never been counted, and will never be known until the Day of Judgment.{218}
What effect would hundreds of years of such oppression have on the character of the oppressed? Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals’ instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed—they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem.
What wonder that many men gave up such a task in despair; that many even good men found it easier to prophesy a Golden Age in luxurious Paris than to fight hand to hand against the awful odds of such an awful reality? Turgot was thirty-four when he went to Limoges, and forty-seven when he left it. He spent there the most vigorous years of his life; if he did not do there his most famous work, he did his noblest.
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{219} 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{220} 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............