Chapter IV - The Response to Liberalization: Theory and Practice

Summary

The explosion of joy and gratitude that followed the promulgation of the liberal measures seemed to confirm the royal claims. The May Declaration elated the Journal économique. In it the editors rediscovered the prince whose proud sobriquet had once been “the well-beloved”: they hailed “the august monarch that heaven gave for master to this great kingdom” and characterized him as “so justly cherished by all his people.” They regarded the declaration as a genuine triumph but they esteemed it more for what it portended than for what it actually was likely to achieve. It was “a first step,” the “forerunner” of an “unlimited” freedom which the king would not deny the nation. La Chalotais, the Procurator General of the Rennes Parlement, asked the councillors to view the Declaration not “as a simple law of interior police but as a Blessing of the Monarch,” as one of those momentous acts which provide for “the happiness of peoples.” More than the measure itself, it was the certainty that it “will undoubtedly be followed by a complete and general liberty to export” that enraptured the Breton magistrate.

The eagerly awaited July Edict, despite its limitations, generated a wave of exultation. While the laboureurs shed happy “tears” in the fields, the effusions of the journalists were no less lachrymose: “At last we see the dawn of the beautiful day for agriculture for which we have sighed for so long.” In the Toulouse area, proprietors, parlementaires and local administrators celebrated the victory. “The liberty to export our grain … has become an immutable law which will render dear the memory of the prince who issued it and the citizen-minister who inspired it,” declared a representative of the Toulouse Chamber of Commerce. La Chalotais, whom the Correspondance Littéraire considered to be the only magistrate in the kingdom with “the ideas and the tone of a statesman,” judged the edict to be “in conformity with the wish of the Nation which provoked it, with that of the Estates of the provinces, with experience which is the mistress of man, with the sentiment of Henry the Great and the illustrious Sully, with the opinion of all those who examined this question in an unprejudiced and disinterested manner.” Henceforth there would be no reason to fear either dearths, or “what was almost as terrifying,” the superabundance of harvests.