74 Chapter IV
qualifications, without regard to financial or family considerations. The overgrown
area within which the Parlement of Paris had had jurisdiction, embracing most of
the interior of France, was broken up among a number of high courts, so that less
travel was necessary to obtain judicial settlements. At the same time overlapping
jurisdictions among courts in the city of Paris, the source of infinite confusion,
expense, and delay, were clarified and redefined. The new system answered to de-
mands that had been made sporadically for generations, and anticipated the de-
finitive reforms carried out a generation later.
With the old parlements and their obstructive tactics done away with, the Abbé
Terray launched a systematic and carefully thought out fiscal reform, aimed at a
more equitable distribution of the tax burden, without regard to social class, and
levied in proportion to real income. He thus resumed the program of the tax de-
crees of 1763 which parlementary resistance had rendered abortive. He made
progress in getting modern and realistic valuations of landed income, and increased
the yield of the vingtième by about one- half in those parts of the country where he
could get reassessments made. He met with furious opposition, and though his
private instructions to the intendants were full of wise and moderate counsels, he
was denounced publicly all over France as a robber, an extortionist, and a minion
of despotism. So great was the outburst from parlementary pamphleteers, and later
from outraged authors of memoirs (it was mostly the upper classes who wrote
memoirs), that Terray has in fact enjoyed a rather poor historical press ever since,
though he is a hero for M. Marion, the great authority on the financial history of
France.^11
The reforming efforts of Louis XV, coming at the end of a long and unre-
spected reign, failed to capture the public imagination. The new courts were deri-
sively called Maupeou parlements, and the tax reforms were considered no better
than banditry. Not only were the few hundred families that had monopolized the
old parlements now relegated, and hence disgruntled. The legal profession as a
whole disapproved. It was hard to find men for the new positions. Public opinion,
such as it was, opposed the change. It was in vain that a few writers, like the aging
Voltaire, exposed the pretensions of the old parlements and heartily endorsed the
new. It was in vain that a pamphleteer, perhaps hired by the government, declared
that only despots or feudal lords combined judicial and legislative powers, which
enlightened monarchs separated and balanced, and that if the old parlements
were to triumph France would become a “republic” under “a monstrous hereditary
aristocracy.”^12
The very limits of noble loyalty were strained. One excited aristocrat declared
that France must be “de- Bourbonized.”^13 The self- interest of the nobility in the
matter is apparent. Why the country as a whole should have agreed with the aris-
tocracy is not so clear, yet is after all understandable. The old Louis XV had lost all
prestige. He was even widely hated. The government simply was not trusted. And
11 M. Marion, Histoire financière de la France (Paris, 1914), I, 266–72; id., Dictionnaire, 558.
12 Réflexions d ’un citoyen sur l ’edit de 1770, (n.p., 1770), 9. Voltaire wrote his Histoire du Parlement
de Paris on this occasion. Egret, op. cit., 272 ff., finds that in Dauphiny the old parlement had become
so unpopular that there was much support for the Maupeou reforms.
13 Quoted by H. Carré, La noblesse de France (Paris, 1920), 233.