202 Chapter IX
lement of Paris. These events are related in a later chapter. They were a continua-
tion of that conflict between the monarchy and the constituted bodies of which
the crisis of the 1760’s has already been described. In any case Turgot, from his
own experience, was convinced that special bodies, orders, or classes having rights
or interests peculiar to themselves were very bad, and that good government and
good policy must represent the nation as a whole in an undifferentiated way.
Franklin may have told him the same thing, and certainly a reading of Price would
strengthen his belief that the British Parliament in no sense represented the Brit-
ish nation.
Turgot, therefore, in his letter to Price, written in March 1778, declared himself
disappointed by the new American constitutions because they carried over too
many English ideas. “Instead of bringing all the authorities into one, that of the
nation,” he observed, “they have established different bodies, a house of representa-
tives, a council, a governor, because England has a house of commons, a house of
lords, and a king.”^44 The word “bodies,” it must be understood, suggested those
corporate and privileged intermediate powers lauded by Montesquieu in the pre-
ceding generation, but which Turgot and other reformers found invariably op-
posed to change. The word “nation,” in the language of the day, signified a political
community considered without regard to bodies, ranks, or classes.
Turgot vehemently disapproved of the separation of powers, or balance of “bod-
ies,” in the American governments. He was so afraid of creating a special group
consciousness that he even objected to the exclusion of clergymen from American
legislatures; a group of men thus singled out, he feared, would develop separate
interests as a “body.” He believed that each American state should have a one-
chamber legislature, no upper house, and a carefully restrained executive. In short,
he preferred in certain respects the constitution of Pennsylvania, of which his
friend Franklin was supposed to be the author. It is not that Turgot was much of a
democrat; he criticized the constitutions for not sufficiently attending to the only
“natural” distinction among men, the difference between those who owned and did
not own land. He also thought, as a physiocrat, that the constitutions should have
denied the right of government to regulate commerce, and in general should have
clearly restricted the role of government to a bare minimum.
After Turgot’s death Dr. Price published his letter, in 1785. John Adams im-
mediately refuted it in three volumes. He had already made his influence felt in
another way. In 1782, during the peace negotiations, he had met the Abbé Mably
in Paris. He found him “polite, good- humored, and sensible,” and when he was
president years later he still affectionately remembered him as his old friend.^45
Mably in 1782 was an elderly philosopher who had been writing on political ques-
tions for over forty years. He now published, as his last book, some observations on
44 John Adams, Work s, IV, 279. Turgot’s letter may also be found in his Oeuvres (Paris, 1912–
1923), and in its place of first publication, at the end of R. Price, Observations on the Importance of the
American Revolution and the Means of Making It a Benefit to the World (London, 1785).
45 For Adams’ favorable opinion of Mably, which lasted throughout his life, see his Work s, I, 350
(1782); I, 354 and 360 (1783); VIII, 554 (1797). Adams’ polite request to Mably in 1782 to have his
views on the American Revolution produced a rumor in France that Mably was desired by the United
States to act as a kind of official expert or consultant on government; see Adams, Work s, V, 491–96.