VI - The Moral Sciences

Summary

In 1774, Turgot — the same Turgot who wrote the article entitled “Expansibilité” for the Encyclopédie — became controller general of France under the new king, Louis XVI. For the first time the most important ministerial position in the kingdom was held by a friend of the philosophes. France had suffered a series of financial crises that had grown in severity throughout the century. The cause was not a general decline in prosperity but a tax system that made it impossible for the king to tax the real sources of wealth in the kingdom. The financial crisis had at its root a social crisis. The clergy, the nobility, and the parlements (traditional judicial bodies that claimed the right to approve taxes) jealously guarded their prerogatives and sought to extend their powers with little thought for the state as a whole. By 1774, France was approaching disaster. The failure of fiscal and social reform at that juncture (and Turgot did fail; he stayed in office for only twenty months) meant that special interests would prevail and that future ministers would be chosen not for their reforming skills but for their ability to borrow money. Fifteen years after Turgot began his ministry, France collapsed in a decade of revolution that eventually brought the needed reforms, but only at the expense of war within and without, and protracted political chaos.