The Aristocratic Resurgence 337
counteroffensive, in which they acted as spokesmen for the nobility as a whole, for
nobility as an institution necessary to society itself.
Indeed, if everything was abolished together in 1789 it was because everything
had been defended together at least as early as 1776. If the special rights of class,
province, town, and gild went up in a common conflagration in the night of Au-
gust 4, it was because the defenders of these rights had long been throwing them
into a common pile. If revolutionaries had a “system,” so did their opponents. If
small things in 1789 could make a man cry “aristocrat,” small things in the past
had made the parlements cry “prerogatives of birth and estate.” The years after
1776 saw a hardening of this kind of rigidity.
Turgot was dismissed in 1776. The party favoring intervention in the American
troubles, led by Vergennes, was against him, since for financial reasons he opposed
embroilment with England. Courtiers and tax farmers regarded him as a menace,
but it was the Parlement of Paris that mainly put an end to him and to his pro-
gram. He left office convinced of the pernicious influence of special corps within
the state, organized corporate “bodies” having interests different from those of the
“nation.” We have already noted his letter of 1778 to Richard Price on the new
American constitutions, and the ensuing constitutional discussion in France in the
1780’s, in which followers of Turgot expressed their repugnance to balances and
counterchecks, and their preference for a single assembly acting with the sovereign
authority of the nation considered as a homogeneous whole.
Turgot was followed by Necker, who tried to finance the American war mainly
by loans, as Pitt was to finance the French war of 1793. Too discreet to risk new
taxes, Necker attempted to increase the yield of those already existing, and hence
undertook, like many of his predecessors, and like ministers of other Continental
monarchies, to get new tax rolls in which the appraisal of land for taxation should
be brought more nearly up to true values. The Parlement of Paris strenuously ob-
jected. It even declared, in 1778, that existing valuations must stand so long as
taxes were not authorized by taxpayers in some kind of parliamentary body.^9 It
may be again observed that in England, under parliamentary rule, taxable land
values had not changed since 1692, and that though Parliament might occasion-
ally raise the rate of the land tax, most British revenue came from indirect taxes
paid by the general population.
Necker accomplished very little, and was followed by Calonne.^10 Up to now no
one had ever had a clear idea of French government finances. Accounting methods
were sporadic; numerous unrelated estimates of expense had been made, but not
combined in a budget, nor projected in terms of a year or any set period of time. It
was Calonne who really discovered the deficit. He concluded that it was annual
and recurring, and that it had existed all through the century, but had been greatly
increased by the American war. It had apparently risen from about 37,000,000
livres a year in 1776 to about 110,000,000 a year in 1786. The debt had risen to
over four billions.
9 Ibid., 395–413.
10 On Calonne see A. Goodwin, “Calonne, the Assembly of Notables and the Origins of the
Révolte Nobiliaire,” English Historical Review (1946), 202–34, 329–77; P. Jolly, Calonne (Paris, 1949);
G. Lefebvre, Coming of the French Revolution (Eng. trans., Princeton, 1947), 21–37.