The Days of the French Revolution Read Online Free PDF

him to be far less severe with taxes than it was feared he might have been. It was not long, however, before Calonne realized in what a perilous state the country’s finances were and that fundamental and wide-ranging reforms were essential to save them from utter collapse and to obviate the risk of the monarchy collapsing with them. He therefore drew up a detailed programme which included, together with many other less contentious measures of both economic and administrative reform, a new tax on land which was to be imposed without regard to the status of its owners and which would accordingly fall most heavily upon the privileged orders. This tax was to be a permanent one, not requiring registration for renewal by the parlements , and would enable the King’s Ministers to disregard the parlementaires ’ remonstrances which had been the baneof their previous existence. The apprehensions of the nobility and the clergy that this new tax would prove not only financially burdensome but also the first step towards the extinction of their privileged positions were exacerbated by Calonne’s further proposal that its assessment should be supervised by newly created provincial assemblies where local landowners would have votes in proportion to the amount of land they owned rather than in accordance with their social rank.
    Well aware of the opposition that his proposals aroused among both the privileged orders and the members of the parlements , who were now confirmed in their belief that a strong and favoured aristocracy was a necessary bulwark against royal absolutism, Calonne suggested that they should be submitted for approval to a special Assembly of Notables, a convention nominated by the King, of which Henri IV had been able to make successful use in the past.
    This Assembly of 144 members, including mayors and magistrates as well as nobles and prelates, met in February 1787, and Calonne, revealing the existence of an immense annual deficit, opened the proceedings with challenging words: ‘Only in the abolition of abuses lies the means to answer our need. The abuses which we must wipe out for the public good are of the widest extent, enjoy the greatest protection, have the deepest roots and the most spreading branches.’ But already the opponents of Calonne’s policies were combining to render them unworkable. Both the Comte de Provence and the King’s cousin, the Duc d’Orléans, voiced their disapproval of him. So did Loménie de Brienne, the sickly, ingratiating and scarcely less than agnostic Archbishop of Toulouse, who hoped to succeed him. So did Étienne d’Aligre, one of the leading magistrates in the Paris parlement . So did the adherents of Necker who chose to believe their hero’s assertion that France had been solvent at the time of his enforced resignation. So did the influential Archbishop of Narbonne who declared, ‘M. de Calonne wishes to bleed France to death. He is merely asking us whether to make the incision on the feet, the arms or the jugular vein.’ So did Marie Antoinette, who strongly condemned Calonne’s publication of an avertissement which, distributed free all over France as an appeal to public opinion, was condemned by a member of herHousehold as ‘a terrible diatribe against the clergy and the nobility’. Obliged to listen to these voices raised in condemnation of his Minister, the King at first supported him, then wavered, and constantly asked for advice. ‘He asked advice of everybody,’ wrote Pierre Malouet, a well-informed government official, ‘and seemed to be saying to every person he approached, “What can I do? What should be done?”’ In the end Calonne was dismissed and exiled to his estates in Lorraine, whence, threatened with proceedings against him by the Paris parlement , he fled to England, the first of the émigrés .
    Brienne replaced him; but when he presented to the Notables a shadowy version of the proposals he had formerly rejected out of hand, the