EVERYTHING happened as the financiers had arranged . The American Colonists obtained their independence thanks, in large measure, to French help ; France obtained very little ; George III was humiliated, lost his popularity, end began to show signs of having lost his reason as well . America, France, and England emerged from the struggle staggering under the weight of a load of debt which promised to keep all three in chains to the bankers for generations . So far as America and England were concerned there was nothing more to be said . But in France the case was different . Louis XVI, in spite of having dismissed Turgot, had not abandoned his plans . And he was able to offset his sorry financial plight with the satisfaction felt by his people at the spectacle of England's humiliation .
That spectacle had aroused the greatest enthusiasm from the moment of France's entry into the war in 1778 . The King was entitled to congratulate himself that he had not erred in contending that glory was essential to the upholding of his authority . But just as he began to adopt a firmer tone, his new Finance Minister, Necker, sprang a surprise on him . Without asking his King's consent, this man published a statement of his King's accounts, private as well as public, under the insolent title of Compte Rendu . The object was to show that, under Necker's thrifty stewardship, the King's income was fully adequate to meet the King's expenses--and that, consequently, there was no need to make the privileged classes contribute a penny of taxation . The inference was that France's financial troubles were due, not to the policy of the financiers in sending money out of the country, nor to the exemptions from taxation granted to the Church and the nobles, but solely to the extravagance of the King himself .
In fact, Necker had falsified his accounts to show a balance when, actually, there was a deficit . This was not discovered till later . The appearance of Compte Rendu caused a tremendous outburst of excitement, and gave delight to clergy and nobles as well as financiers . The people of Paris, now falling under the influence of Necker's paid writers and agitators (he kept a Press of his own), hailed this false balance sheet as a revelation from heaven and bared their teeth against the King, who, whatever his mistakes, had no wish except to do them good . Louis began to see that Turgot had told him the truth when he wrote in reference to one of the ministers who had helped Necker to compass his fall :
"He does not see that, after having isolated me, after having prejudiced your Majesty against me, and having compelled me to leave you, the whole storm directed now against me, will come in time to burst upon himself and that he will end in failure, dragging with him, in his fall, your authority ."
Turgot died in the year Compte Rendu was published ; it was too late to summon again that stout heart . The King dismissed Necker and banished him to his estate of Saint-Ouen, twenty miles from Paris . The capital began to snarl against the palace; thousands of citizens wore green cockades, green being the colour of the banker's livery . Necker, in his retirement, began to write a history of religion, but his fiends in Paris carried on his work by means of a vigorous propaganda, the object of which was to suggest that the American War of Independence was a revolt of free men against the tyranny of a King . All that the banker's hirelings wrote and spoke against George III of England applied with equal force to Louis XVI of France . The free men of the City of Paris were duly edified, and when the young Marquis de Lafayette came back from America made a hero of him . Lafayette announced himself a Liberal, adopted airs of patronage towards the King and Queen, and spoke without ceasing of my friend Washington . King Louis began to see that the glory of the American adventure had been filched away from him .
The cost of the adventure, on the contrary, was fixed upon his shoulders . He was quickly made aware that his dismissal of Necker had roused against him the wrath of the world's bankers . He found himself unable to borrow, and tried to revert to Turgot's plan for a tax on the privileged classes . The roar of execration which greeted this project showed how effective had been Necker's propaganda . It was no longer the King's minister who was attacked, it was the King . What, cried the clergy and nobles, the parlements and financiers, is France to be sacrificed to the wild extravagance of Versailles ? Did not the excellent M. Necker show that the revenue was large enough to pay all the necessary expenses? The King shrank before the blast . In a kind of despair he heard all the privileged asserting what they called their rights in tones of menace . The great lords laid heavy hands on the countryside; the army was purged of plebeian officers; the Church asserted her right of ordering the civil estate of all Frenchmen .
Sectionalism, in short, tore the nation asunder as it had been torn asunder during the Middle Ages . Monarchy, stripped of prestige and penniless, was compelled to look on . Every attempt which the King made to raise a fresh loan was met, by the bankers, with blank refusal . They had him firmly in their clutches and were in no mood to allow him to escape . Despair descended on Versailles; but the darkness in the King's mind possessed, in addition, a tragic quality because he was utterly alone . Even his wife was out of sympathy with him; his brothers were frankly hostile . These could not see, as he saw, that the root-cause of all their troubles was the breakdown of the system of service occasioned by the feebleness of the King's power .
Louis was not a brilliant man; his mind moved slowly . But the operations of his mind were just and temperate . He realized the religious devotion of his people and the immerse love of country surging in their hearts; he felt their attachment to the sacred soil; he knew their patience and courage in adversity . He knew, too, how swift was the movement of the French mind . If he could show his people a Kingship animated by a lofty patriotism, old and yet new, unhampered by privilege and inspired only by the service of God, they would belong to him once more . It would be possible then to purge the Church of the scandals which were repelling honest men and to raise up again the sense of reverence even in instructed minds . Like his ancestor Louis XIV, he willed a liberal-minded Monarchy in association with a liberal-minded Church; unlike Louis XIV, he lacked the means to make his vision effective .
In his extremity he sent his wretched minister Calonne to address the parlement of Paris and the Assembly of the notablesbodies consisting wholly of privileged persons and therefore implacably hostile . Calonne was to urge that a tax on land had become an urgent necessity and to point out that Necker's statement of the royal accounts was false as well as insolent . The minister discharged his task; he was met in both instances with a contemptuous refusal to listen to his proposals .
But Necker felt himself wounded by the plain and true statement that he was a liar . He composed hastily a Mémoire jusficatif and sent it to the King . Louis forbade him to publish it . He disobeyed . The King banished him to a distance of one hundred miles from Paris . The banker's friends saw to it that he was presented to the public as a holy martyr in the cause of French liberty . Once again there were demonstrations in his favour in Paris . His daughter Germaine, recently married to the Baron de Staël-Holstein, the Swedish Ambassador in France, rushed of to Versailles to pour out her grievance to the Queen, who, however, received her coldly and refused to interfere . Madame de Staël, from that moment, vowed hostility to the Royal Family . She held her father in such adoration that she was unable to see the smallest fault in anything which he said or did . She kept open house at the Swedish Embassy in the Rue du Bac, and entertained there all the people who were opposed to the Kingnobles, churchmen, financiers, philosophers, journalists, and wits . The King's half-uncle, de Narbonne, an illegitimate son of Louis XV, was already one of her lovers; Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun, was another . These gay fellows looked forward to the day when Louis would be compelled to come hat in hand to the banker, whose daughter's favours they enjoyed, and when they, in consequence, would gather up the reins of government .
The King, meanwhile, found a new Finance Minister in the person of Lomenie de Brienne, Cardinal Archbishop of Tours . Brienne was sent to address the parlement and the Notables, but met with no better success than his predecessor . The King found himself at the end of his resources . In these critical circum-stances he tried to act alone . He exiled the parlement from Paris and imposed his land tax . Nobody paid it . Worse still, this assembly of persons privileged to pay no taxes while the poor were bowed to the earth by the burdens placed on them became heroes of the Parisian mob . It says much for the skill with which Necker conducted his propaganda that it succeeded in convincing thousands of good citizens that the harpies who were devouring their vitals were their best friends and that the King, who was trying to make these harpies disgorge, was a tyrant and a spendthrift .
Louis was now defeated; he had but a few thousand pounds in his coffers and no prospect of receiving any more . In bitter humiliation he sent for Necker . Instantlyin a single daythe funds increased in value by thirty per cent . Necker recalled the parlement, and it was greeted by the Parisians with showers of roses . The banker told the King that he must forthwith summon the States General, the Parliament of the Nation .
Louis was not averse from that step, for he felt that he had nothing to fear from Frenchmen, once his ideas were made known to them . But he reckoned without his Necker . It was no part of the banker's plan to allow the King to reestablish relations with the people . On the contrary, he proposed that the States General should be wholly subservient to himself, should take its orders from him, and should set up at once a constitutional Monarchy on the English pattern with himself as Chief Minister . The State General consisted of three houses, the Clergy, the Nobles, and the Tiers État . These Estates sat separately and voted as bodies, so that if any two of them were agreed the third was bereft of power .
Now that he was in supreme command, Necker troubled no longer to keep up the pretence that the King's income was sufficient for his expenditure . Thanks to the huge burden of debt incurred in the American War, the Budget, on the contrary, was hopelessly unbalanced, and a large part of the debt belonged to Necker himself and his friends . The project of the tax on land, therefore, found favour, suddenly, with the man who had been its most bitter opponent . To the consternation of his friends, the Clergy and Nobles, Necker informed the Assembly of Notables that the land tax must be collected . They drove him forth as hey had driven forth Calonne and Lomenie de Brienne before him .
Next day they woke up to find that this was no longer the helpless King of France with whom they had to deal, but a master who knew how to exact obedience . Suddenly the newspapers which had made heroes of these privileged persons changed their tune . The Notables were called robbers of the poor and drones in the hive . The mob put away its roses and doubled its fists . When Necker appeared before the parlement of Paris he was met with cringing submission . By all means let his Majesty take such steps as seemed good to him . The banker returned to Versailles and suggested to the King that, as the population of France had doubled since the last meeting of the States General, more than 160 years before, the number of members of the Tiers État or Commons, ought likewise to be increased . The King agreed . Necker congratulated himself that everything was perfectly in train .
For he saw that the huge body of Commons would not submit to being outvoted by the combined Clergy and Nobles . The Commons would inevitably demand voting by head instead of voting by Chamber . They would thus acquire the same dominating position as the Commons of England . Most of Necker's friends were likely to be found in the Commons' house .