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opinion fostered by his formidably clever and inextinguishably romantic wife who held sway over a literary salon in their smart house in the Rue de Cléry – that Necker was a financial genius. It was an opinion with which he himself would not have quarrelled. Silent, ponderous and ruminative, with half-closed eyes in a pallid, yellowish face, he seemed to be constantly lost in thought. If any man could bring order to France’s economy, it was maintained, surely it was he. After all, he had made a fortune for himself as a banker in Paris; and a self-made millionaire could scarcely be other than an improvement on the noble Finance Ministers of the past.
    At first all appeared to go satisfactorily. The King and his new Minister got on well together, even though Necker’s silences when broken tended to be succeeded by economic speculations, prognostications and lectures of inordinate length. His cuts in Household expenditure at Versailles naturally aroused resentment at Court, where his vanity soon aroused as much antagonism as Turgot’s high-handedness and where he made a particular enemy of the Comte de Provence whose request for over a million livres , which he claimed was due from his father’s estate, was rejected. Yet it was generally agreed that these reductions of expenditure at Court were not only necessary but inevitable.
    When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle , the traites , the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes –were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres –rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy. Necker thought that he had the answer to this problem: arguing that the limits of taxable capacity had already been passed, he proposed to raise the money required by borrowing, on the dubious assumption that a swollen public debt would not place an insupportable burden on the country’s finances. He offered generous rates of interest and in order to attract investors published his Compte Rendu au Roi sur les finances de la Nation , a grossly optimistic and complacent document which transformed an actual deficit of 46,000,000 livres into a fictitious surplus of 10,000,000. Although the public at large, having no means of checking Necker’s figures, accepted his pamphlet with satisfaction and bought thirty thousand copies of it within a week, its fraudulence was immediately noticed by most of the King’s other Ministers. ‘It’s about as true as it is modest,’ Maurepas commented when asked what he thought of it. A few weeks later, after a confidential memorandum written by him for the King’s consideration and proposing a limitation of the parlement’s fiscal powers had been copied and distributed by his enemy, the Comte de Provence, Necker felt his position so undermined that he demanded admittance to the Council of Ministers. The King refused, and Necker resigned.
    Necker was succeeded as Director-General of Finance by Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, a cheerful, amiable, red-haired man of forty-seven who had been an intendant of Flanders. A collector of pictures and the proud possessor of no less than ten Titians, Calonne had a far more pleasant and easy manner than either Turgot or Necker and was well liked at Court. He became an even more welcome figure there when, soon after entering office, he raised further loans which allowed