The Days of the French Revolution Read Free Page A

Maurepas, a former Minister who had been appointed Secretary for the Navy at the age of fourteen but who, having offended Madame de Pompadour, had been dismissed from office and had spent the past twenty-five years on his country estate. With the guidance of Maurepas, and of Maurepas’s intimate friend and confessor, the Abbé Joseph Alphonse de Véri, Louis had gradually and nervously replaced his grandfather’s Ministers with others more efficient and honest, including Anne-Robert Turgot, Baron de Laune, whom in 1774 he appointed Controller General of Finances. He had also decided to recall the parlements including the ancient Paris parlement .
    This parlement , quite unlike the Parliament which had developed across the Channel, was one of thirteen appeal courts which had assumed the right of registering laws, principally royal edicts connected with taxation, but which aspired to the right of veto as well as of registration. Its jurisdiction covered about ten million people in northern France and since its influence was so much greater than the other provincial parlements , which were inclined to follow its lead in remonstrating against edicts its members disliked, it was usually referred to simply as parlement . Its members were far from being representative of the people as a whole. Their predecessors had beengranted hereditary nobility in the reign of Louis XIV in 1644, and the principal offices had come to be held by some of the most renowned and wealthy dynasties in France. Proposals for the admission of commoners were always strongly resisted.
    In the past, when parlement had proved recalcitrant, the Crown had enforced its will by a special session known as a lit de justice, * or had exiled the members from Paris in the hope, usually justified, that the damage to their legal business in Paris would induce them to give way to the royal will. In 1771 parlement had been exiled to Troyes; and two other provincial parlements , those of Rouen and Douai, had been suppressed.
    There had been a public outcry against Louis XV’s action as, although parlement was far more concerned with its own interests than with those of the nation at large, it had come to be regarded in the people’s mind, largely as a result of its own propaganda, as their champion; and it did, indeed, do quite as much to promote and publicize liberal political theories as the philosophes . Louis XVI was aware of this and would have been well advised in the interests of the monarchy to curb its powers as his predecessors, with varying success, had repeatedly attempted to do. But he chose instead to follow the advice of Maurepas who argued that he must listen to public opinion and follow it; that a monarch who recalled parlement would be ‘considered a friend of the people’. ‘I should like to be loved,’ he had once declared and had since reiterated this ambition. And so, although he had known he would be making difficulties for himself by doing so, he had recalled the exiled parlement from Troyes. On 12 November 1774 he had driven to the Palais de Justice in Paris where the reconvened members had knelt before him in their red robes; then, rising to their feet, they had listened quietly to the King as he had assured them that they could rely upon his protection so long as they did not challenge his authority.
    With the recall of the parlements and the appointment of fresh Ministers, the people began to hope that a new age might bedawning. In Paris a placard bearing the legend ‘ Resurrexit ’ was hung around the statue of that revered monarch, Henri IV, and portraits of the new King who, it was believed, was prepared to follow the example of his popular predecessor, were displayed in shop windows. ‘All the nation shouts in chorus,’ Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, the mathematician and philosopher, reported to Frederick the Great, ‘“A better day dawns upon us”…The priests alone make sound apart, murmuring softly.’ But this approval did not