Critical Miscellanies, Vol. II

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Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley

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Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) Turgot
Author: John Morley
Release Date: October 3, 2007 [EBook #22865]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
by
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
Essay 2: Turgot

London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED New York: The MacMillan Company 1905

TURGOT.
I. PAGE
Birth and family descent 41
His youth at the Sorbonne 47
Intellectual training 52
His college friends: Morellet, and Loménie de Brienne 54
Turgot refused to become an ecclesiastic 56
His revolt against dominant sophisms of the time 60
Letter to Buffon 61
Precocity of his intellect 65
Letter to Madame de Graffigny 65
Illustrates the influence of Locke 69
Views on marriage 72
On the controversy opened by Rousseau 72
Turgot's power of grave suspense 76
II.
First Discourse at the Sorbonne 78
Analysis of its contents 80
Criticisms upon it 86
It is one-sided 87
And not truly historic 88
Fails to distinguish doctrine from organisation 89
Omits the Christianity of the East 90
And economic conditions 92
The contemporary position of the Church in Europe 93
III.
Second Discourse at the Sorbonne 96
Its pregnant thesis of social causation 97
Compared with the thesis of Bossuet 99
And of Montesquieu 100
Analysis of the Second Discourse 102
Characteristic of Turgot's idea of Progress 106
Its limitation 108
Great merit of the Discourse, that it recognises ordered succession 110
IV.
Turgot appointed Intendant of the Limousin 111
Functions of an Intendant 112
Account of the Limousin 114
Turgot's passion for good government 118
He attempts to deal with the Taille 119
The road Corvée 121
Turgot's endeavours to enlighten opinion 126
Military service 129
" transport 131
The collection of taxes 132
Turgot's private benevolence 133
Introduces the potato 134
Founds an academy 135
Encourages manufacturing industry 136
Enlightened views on Usury 137
Has to deal with a scarcity 138
His plans 139
Instructive facts connected with this famine 142
Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth 149
V.
Turgot made Controller-General 150
His reforms 151
Their reception 153
His unpopularity 156
Difficulties with the king 157
His dismissal 158
His pursuits in retirement 159
Conclusion 162

TURGOT.
I.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on the 10th of May 1727. He died in 1781. His life covered rather more than half a century, extending, if we may put it a little roughly, over the middle fifty years of the eighteenth century. This middle period marks the exact date of the decisive and immediate preparation for the Revolution. At its beginning neither the intellectual nor the social elements of the great disruption had distinctly appeared, or commenced their fermentation. At its close their work was completed, and we may count the months thence until the overthrow of every institution in France. It was between 1727 and 1781 that the true revolution took place. The events from '89 were only finishing strokes, the final explosion of a fabric under which every yard had been mined, by the long endeavour for half a century of an army of destroyers deliberate and involuntary, direct and oblique, such as the world has never at any other time beheld.
In 1727 Voltaire was returning from his exile in England, to open the long campaign, of which he was from that time forth to the close of his days the brilliant and indomitable captain. He died in 1778, bright, resolute, humane, energetic, to the last. Thus Turgot's life was almost exactly contemporary with the pregnant era of Voltaire's activity. In the same spring in which Turgot died, Maurepas too came to his end, and Necker was dismissed. The last event was the signal at which the floods of the deluge fairly began to rise, and the revolutionary tide to swell.
It will be observed, moreover, that Turgot was born half a generation after the first race of the speculative revolutionists. Rousseau, Diderot, Helvétius, Condillac, D'Alembert, as well as the foreign Hume, so much the greatest of the whole band of innovators, because penetrating so much nearer to the depths, all came into the world which they were to confuse so unspeakably, in the half dozen years between 1711 and 1717. Turgot was of later stock and comes midway between these fathers of the new church, between Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, and the generation of its fiery practical apostles, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Robespierre.[1] The only other illustrious European of this decade was Adam Smith, who was born in 1723, and between whose labours and some of the most remarkable of Turgot's there was so much community. We cannot tell how far the gulf between Turgot and the earlier band was fixed by the accident that he did not belong to their generation in point of time. The accident is in itself only