France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 8

and so forth
([OE]uv. ii. 504). Any student, uncommitted to a theory, who examines
in close detail the wise aims and just and conservative methods of
Turgot, and the circumstances of his utter rout after a short experiment
of twenty months of power, will rise from that deplorable episode with
the conviction that a pacific renovation of France, an orderly
readjustment of her institutions, was hopelessly impossible. 'Si on avait
été sage!' those cry who consider the Revolution as a futile mutiny. If
people had only been prudent, all would have been accomplished that
has been accomplished since, and without the sanguinary memories,
the constant interpolations of despotism, the waste of generous lives
and noble purpose. And this is true. But then prudence itself was
impossible. The court and the courtiers were smitten through the
working of long tradition by judicial blindness. If Lewis XVI. had been
a Frederick, or Marie Antoinette had been a Catherine of Russia, or the
nobles had even been stout-hearted gentlemen like our Cavaliers, the
great transformation might then have been gradually effected without
disorder. But they were none of these, and it was their characters that
made the fate and doom of the situation. As for the court, Vergennes
used an expression which suggests the very keyword of the situation.
He had been ambassador in Turkey, and was fond of declaring that he
had learnt in the seraglio how to brave the storms of Versailles.
Versailles was like Stamboul or Teheran, oriental in etiquette, oriental
in destruction of wealth and capital, oriental in antipathy to a reforming
grand vizier. It was the Queen, as we now know by incontestable
evidence, who persuaded the King to dismiss Turgot, merely to satisfy

some contemptible personal resentments of herself and her creatures.[3]
And it was not in Turgot's case only that this ineptitude wrought
mischief. In June 1789 Necker was overruled in the wisest elements of
his policy and sent into exile by the violent intervention of the same
court faction, headed by the same Queen, who had procured the
dismissal of Turgot thirteen years earlier. And it was one long tale
throughout, from the first hour of the reign down to those last hours at
the Tuileries in August 1792; one long tale of intrigue, perversity, and
wilful incorrigible infatuation.
[3] Cor. entre Marie Thérèse et le Comte Mercy-Argenteau, vol. iii.
Nor was the Queen only to blame. Turgot, says an impartial
eye-witness--Creutz, the Swedish ambassador--is a mark for the most
formidable league possible, composed of all the great people in the
kingdom, all the parliaments, all the finance, all the women of the court,
and all the bigots. It was morally impossible that the reforms of any
Turgot could have been acquiesced in by that emasculated caste, who
showed their quality a few years after his dismissal by flying across the
frontier at the first breath of personal danger. 'When the gentlemen
rejoiced so boisterously over the fall of Turgot, their applause was
blind; on that day they threw away, and in a manner that was
irreparable, the opportunity that was offered them of being born again
to political life, and changing the state-candlestick of the royal
household for the influence of a preponderant class. The nobility,
defeated on the field of feudal privilege, would have risen again by the
influence of an assembly where they would have taken the foremost
place; by defending the interests of all, by becoming in their turn the
ally of the third estate, which had hitherto fought on the side of the
kings, they would have repaired the unbroken succession of defeats that
had been inflicted on them since Lewis the Fat.'[4] It would be easy to
name half a dozen patricians like the Duke d'Ayen, of exceptional
public spirit and capacity, but a proud order cannot at the first exigency
of a crisis change its traditional front, and abandon the maxims of
centuries in a day. As has been said more than once, the oriental policy
of the crown towards the nobles had the inevitable effect of cutting
them off from all opportunity of acquiring in experience those habits of

political wisdom which have saved the territorial aristocracy of our
own country. The English nobles in the eighteenth century had become,
what they mostly are now, men of business; agriculturists at least as
much as politicians; land agents of a very dignified kind, with very
large incomes. Sully designed to raise a working agricultural
artistocracy, and Colbert to raise a working commercial aristocracy.
But the statesman cannot create or mould a social order at will. Perhaps
one reason why the English aristocracy became a truly agricultural
body in the eighteenth century was the circumstance that many of the
great landowning magnates were Tories, and remained sulking on their
estates rather