The Political Evolution of the Old Regime, 1715–89 359Old Regime reached the levels of 1772–74. The decade
between 1777 and 1786 saw five harvests in which
the average farmer lost money, plus two other poor
harvests.
The reign of Louis XVI did show signs of hope, as a
result of a reforming ministry led by the minister of fi-
nance, Robert Turgot, and the interior, Chrétien
Malesherbes. Malesherbes was a liberal who had de-
fended the publication of the Encyclopédie.Turgot was
a minor aristocrat who had reached high office in a
typical way for a venal society: He bought his position
for 100,000 livres. He was also a free-thinker and a
leader of the enlightened economic school of the Phys-
iocrats, whose doctrines he explained in the Encyclopédie.
In a series of decrees known as the Six Edicts (1776),
Turgot and Malesherbes laid the basis for economic re-
covery. The edicts abolished the monopoly of the
guilds to stimulate economic competition. They abol-
ished the burden of the corvéeon peasants and replaced
it with a tax on all landowners. And they eliminated
most internal tariffs on the grain trade to bring down
the price of bread. At the same time, Turgot cut gov-
ernment spending, especially in the portion of the bud-
get devoted to royal pensions and the royal court.
The reforms of 1774–76 made many enemies. The
opposition of the parlements, pressure from powerful
guilds, and intrigues at court brought down Turgot in
1776 and Malesherbes followed him. The Parlement of
Paris, for example, claimed that the Six Edicts “imperil
the constitution.” The magistrates carried the day:
Guild monopolies, the corvée,and internal tariffs were all
restored. Another capable minister of finance, a Swiss-
born, Protestant financier named Jacques Necker, suc-
ceeded Turgot. Necker had made a fortune as a banker
during the Seven Years’ War. His home was one of the
most influential centers of the Enlightenment, where
his wife, Suzanne (a prominent writer and the daughter
of a Swiss pastor), and their daughter, Germaine (later
famous as the Baroness de Staël, also a distinguished
writer), directed a brilliant salon. Necker lived at the
center of a network of financial, political, and intellec-
tual leaders, and they shaped a series of enlightened re-
forms during his ministry from 1778 to 1781. He
drafted a royal decree abolishing the limited form of
serfdom that survived in France, although it applied
only to royal lands. It condemned serfdom in principle
and urged aristocrats to follow the king’s lead; it did not
force abolition in respect for the principle of private
property. Few aristocrats followed the king, so serfdom
lingered in France, especially in eastern France, where
the parlement—most of whose members owned serfs—
refused to register the royal decree.
The successors of Turgot and Necker as ministers
of finance during the 1780s were utterly unable to
break the logjam by which the aristocracy blocked
meaningful tax reform. Charles de Calonne, a courtier
and less able financier, skirted the edges of bankruptcy
by continually increasing the debt. He, too, concluded
that a new tax was essential and proposed a land tax, to
be paid by aristocrats and the church as well as com-
moners. To win aristocratic support, an Assembly of
Notables (a body of uncertain constitutional basis) was
called in 1787; the assembly failed to agree upon any-
thing except opposition to Calonne’s tax. This led to
Calonne’s ouster and yet another minister of finance,
who sought even bigger loans, asked the parlements to
approve new taxes, and met yet another rejection.
The consequence of the aristocratic rejection of
new taxes was that the French national debt reached
100 percent of the budget in 1789. A second conse-
quence was that the aristocracy forced Louis XVI to call
elections for the Estates General. The Parlement of Be-
sançon had proposed that solution in 1783 and others
had adopted the idea. Louis resisted, trying instead his
grandfather’s idea of abolishing the parlements in 1788.
He finally conceded defeat, however, and agreed to a
meeting of the Estates General in May 1789—which
led directly to the French Revolution.The Habsburg Empire in the Age
of Maria Theresa
In contrast to Britain, where Parliament had broken the
power of the king, or to France, where the resurgent
aristocracy was restricting the power of the king, in
Austria the Habsburg family still held nearly absolute
power during the eighteenth century. The political evo-
lution in Austria—known as enlightened despotism—
showed how monarchy could respond to new
problems.
The Habsburg Empire dominated Germanic central
Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, dwarfing
its rivals in size, population, and military might. Prussia
numbered only 1.6 million persons and Bavaria 2.0 mil-
lion; the Habsburg lands held 11.0 million. In the first
decades of the century, Habsburg armies under the
skillful command of Prince Eugene of Savoy had fought
well in the War of the Spanish Succession, and the
peace treaties of 1714 gave the Habsburgs the Austrian
Netherlands (Belgium) and Lombardy. Wars with the
Ottoman Empire at the end of the seventeenth century
had acquired the Kingdom of Hungary, including vast