Germaine de Staël

Kings and Queens

GERMAINE NECKER was as plain as her mother was pretty.  She had a sallow complexion, blunt, heavy features and prominent teeth ;  but her black eyes could kindle like coals.  She amused herself in her nursery by making kings and queens out of twisted bits of paper.

The game had something to recommend it.  Four years before Germaine was born, a Swiss named Jean Jacques Rousseau had published a small book called Du Contrat Social* in which it was argued not, as is usually said, that man is virtuous by nature, but that man, though unspeakably wicked and depraved by nature, can be made virtuous by the State, that is to say by himself multiplied indefinitely.  This was good news to a world whose material conditions were growing worse every day and whose inhabitants had been robbed by the philosophers of all hope of improvement whether in time or eternity.  Like a patient who hears, after his doctors have condemned him, of a miraculously endowed physician, men and women demanded eagerly to know more about the new means of salvation.  Of what nature was Jean Jacques Rousseau’s state, and how could it be gotten ?  The answer was that each must give up his liberty to all so that all might guarantee the liberty, the happiness and the spiritual progress of each.  Every man to be not his brother’s keeper only but his brother’s king and priest as well.  This doctrine presented existing kings and priests, as it presented eighteenth-century philosophers, in a bad light.  Kings and priests, it implied, were arrogating to themselves functions which belonged to humanity as a whole and which only humanity as a whole could fulfil.

There was plenty of contemporary evidence in support of it ;  for example, the palace of Versailles with its 10,000 pensioners, Madame de Pompadour and her war, King Louis and his unconscionable behaviour, the higher clergy, some of whom were not even willing to agree with Voltaire that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, the tax-gatherers who robbed industry to pay vice, the prisons full of honest men.

All France, in short, like little Germaine Necker, was busy making kings and queens according to heart’s desire.  That exercise comforted the pangs of hunger for lost faith, lost glory, lost territory, lost trade.  It relieved the bitterness of spoliation, and the hopelessness of bankruptcy.  But human nature is not so easily changed.  If France, in despair at her eclipse by England, lost her head over Du Contrat Social, Frenchmen remained as determined as ever to get what they could in a hard world.  The philosophers, busy with their satires and invectives against Church and Court, had never been averse from warming themselves at the fire they sought to extinguish.  It was the same with the masters of money.  The angrier they grew with Versailles, the more passionately they, and their wives and daughters, longed to go there.

This was Necker’s position.  Since he had been appointed a director of the expiring Compagnie des Indes, he had multiplied his fortune tenfold and was become one of the richest men in Europe.  The company died in 1770 at the hands of the victorious English, and the “John Company” reigned in its stead.  India, except for a few isolated settlements, had passed to her new proprietors, but France could boast two fresh acquisitions, both of them big with destiny, namely, Lorraine, which she had seized, and the island of Corsica, which she had bought.  These were King Louis XV’s last gifts to his people.  He died of small-pox in 1774, mourned by his unmarried daughters, by Madame du Barry, Madame de Pompadour’s successor, and by nobody else.  Louis XVI, his grandson, took over the bankrupt estate.

The new king was a young man aged twenty years who was afraid of women and most of all of his wife, the Archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria, daughter of Maria Theresa.  His fear was based on a physical infirmity which prevented him, until he had been cured by operation, from performing his duties as a husband, and which, even then, remained as a distressful memory.  Louis had a shrewd judgment and understood very well what was wrong with France.  In spite of the opposition of his wife and his mother-in-law, he broke the alliance with Austria which had cost France her glory.  This step won him the enthusiasm of Paris and of the whole French middle-class.  He followed it up with another equally wise move.  In the year after his accession, the English colonists in America rebelled against their Mother Country.  He gave them secret help, preparatory to becoming their open ally.  It was a bid, if not for the lost Empire at least for new markets, because the English, in accordance with usage, had excluded other nations from trade with their colonies.  England, accustomed to treat France with contempt, reacted with extreme sensitiveness and claimed the right to search ships at sea.

Louis was guided by his foreign minister, Vergennes, whose sole object was to weaken England and so regain what had been lost by Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV.  Vergennes contrived to counter the attempts of the British Government to make trouble for France in Europe, and he opposed successfully the wish of the Emperor Joseph II, Marie Antoinette’s brother,** to add Bavaria to his possessions.  The result was a renewal of the old friendship between France and the German peoples on the Rhine and in consequence a free hand against England.  Vergennes and his King, with the help of American agents, succeeded in uniting nearly the whole of Europe against England.

But all this cost money, and the till was empty.  Louis at the beginning of his reign had taken steps to reform the finances.  On the advice of his old teacher and friend Maurepas, who was now his chief adviser, he had called Turgot to the Treasury.  This was a Norman, forty-seven years of age, of a family which had established itself in Paris and grown prosperous in trade, a man of great imagination, scientific mind and liberal culture, with the courage of a lion, a skipper’s temper, and no manners at all.  Turgot understood what was wrong with the King’s finances, but he did not understand what was wrong with France.  It was impossible to convince him that the chief cause of the lack of money and the general uneasiness was England’s command of the seas and of the lands beyond them, and he opposed, on grounds of expense, the King’s purpose of entering the American War of Independence.  Louis, in spite of this opposition, continued to send help to the Americans and pushed on the building of warships.  So acutely, indeed, did the King feel the need of a strong navy that he refused to buy the famous diamond necklace for the Queen on the ground that the price asked would give France a new man o’ war.

Turgot’s reading of the situation was entirely different from his master’s.  The Norman was under the influence of the philosophers, and believed that France’s troubles were due to her political system.  He wished to see the King assert himself, put the nobles and clergy in their place and reform the whole system of taxation.  Only thus, he believed, could France become strong enough to attack England.  “ Want of glory,” said the King, “has ruined us”;  “Want of reform,” said the Minister, “has cost us our glory.”  The King agreed that reforms were necessary, but insisted that they could only be accomplished in an atmosphere of victory.  He was ready, none the less, to carry out immediately such reforms as might be achieved without great disturbance.  The speculations in grain, most of which were financed by Necker, were bringing cruel hardships on the poor in every part of France.  Turgot proposed, as a means of relief, abolition of the bread taxes.  Opposition was immediate and strong.  Necker published a denunciation of the minister, entitled :  Essai sur la Législation et le Commerce des Grains.  Though the taxes had gone, the price of bread was forced up and riots, which had obviously been carefully organised in advance, broke out in various districts.  The effect was to frighten investors and make it more difficult for the King to borrow money.  Louis supported Turgot with admirable firmness.  The riots were suppressed.

But the moral was plain.  If the King indulged in reform on anything approaching a big scale, he would be unable to borrow money and would be forced to abandon his struggle with England.  As soon as the bread riots were quelled, Necker hurried to London.  He took his wife and daughter (Germaine was nine) with him on this business trip.  Madame Necker, as usual, gathered philosophers and journalists about her while her husband was busy with business men and politicians.  Necker found the British Government uneasy about King Louis’ flirtation with the American rebels.  Was France really going to make common cause with these fellows ?  If so, where was the money coming from to carry on a war with England ?  The Swiss was initiated into the methods of English administration and shown how quickly and infallibly public opinion, as informed by the Press, reacted on credit.  He experienced so lively an enthusiasm that he continued to talk about the matter till the end of his life.  In return, he hinted that if France knew how Versailles spent money, there would be less money for Versailles to spend.  Necker was strongly opposed to the entry of France into the American War.  His visit to England convinced him that this and many other undesirable events might be prevented if the Parisian newspapers were as free to express their opinions as were the newspapers of London.  A further idea which he carried away with him and in due course imparted to his daughter was that the English Constitution was without fault—an impression of the political situation in this country at the beginning of the American War of Independence which must be regarded as singular.

The return of the Neckers from London occurred at a moment critical for King Louis.  Turgot, encouraged by his success against the bread rioters, had just produced a policy of reform designed to change the face of France.  The man was a physiocrat ;  that is to say, he believed that land is the only real security and ought, in consequence, to bear the whole burden of taxation.  He proposed to put this belief into immediate operation.  Since the Church owned one-third of the land in France, on which it paid no taxes at all, and the nobility owned most of the remainder, on which it paid the merest trifle, it was obvious that this was inviting trouble.  But the sturdy Norman was not afraid.  So little, indeed, that his plan actually included the withdrawal from the powerful trade corporations and guilds of the rights they possessed to hamper commerce in their own interests and a scheme for setting up active local authorities all over the country to replace the obsolete “parlements.”  Turgot, in short, wished to abolish overnight that feudal system which had existed in France and Europe for a thousand years.  Everybody with anything to lose felt himself threatened.  For the last time Paris stood shoulder to shoulder with Versailles ;  noblemen and bishops, the Queen herself, joined with financiers and merchants and lawyers in implacable opposition.  Lovely Madame de Polignac, to whom Marie Antoinette could refuse nothing, stretched out her little hands in supplication to Necker who grasped them with rapture.  Only the King sympathised with his minister, and the King was about to declare war on England.

Louis, greatly loyal, exerted himself to make it clear that he was in no position to challenge simultaneously every powerful interest in his realm, and urged Turgot to modify his proposals.  Turgot refused.  The reformer emerged at a bound from the treasurer’s skin, and the King got a lecture, in his minister’s most aggressive style, on the folly of petticoat government and the infamous character of financiers in general and Swiss financiers in particular.  These two men faced one another and knew one another honest.  But Louis was determined to follow his policy.  They parted.  On the advice of Maurepas, who argued that it was only from the financiers that they could now hope to get money, Necker was called to replace Turgot at Versailles.

¹ The idea that Rousseau believed in the essential goodness of human nature is widely prevalent.  It was proclaimed recently, again, by the Dean of St. Paul’s.  Rousseau saw no hope for human nature except in Society and by means of education.  See Emile and Du Contrat Social (edition of C.E. Vaughan, Manchester University Press, Introduction).

² Maria Thérèse died in 178o.