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Updated: June 29, 2025
Very soon Calonne and the Notables had embarked on a contest that gradually became heated, until finally Calonne appealed from the Notables to the public by printing and circulating his proposals. The Notables replied by a protest, and declared that the real reform was economy and that the Controleur should place before them proper accounts.
He pointed first at my head, then at Bodard's with a malicious gesture which consisted in turning to each of us two fingers of his hand while he kept the others doubled up. My first impulse was to rise and say something rousing to Calonne; then I paused, first, because I thought of a trick I could play the statesman, and secondly, because Beaumarchais caught me familiarly by the hand.
In 1787, the late director-general asked leave to appear before the Assembly of notables to refute the statements of M. de Calonne; permission was refused. "I am satisfied with your services," the king sent word to him, "and I command you to keep silence." A pamphlet, without any title, was however sent to the notables.
Whereupon a new expedient once more astonishes the world, unheard of these hundred and sixty years Convocation of the Notables. A round gross of notables, meeting in February, 1787; all privileged persons. A deficit so enormous! Mismanagement, profusion, is too clear; peculation itself is hinted at. Calonne flies, storm-driven, over the horizon.
"I had certainly done nothing to deserve a confidence so extraordinary," said M. de Machault to his friends. He set out again for his estate at Arnonville, more anxious than ever about the future. If the first steps of M. de Calonne dismayed men of foresight and of experience in affairs, the public was charmed with them, no less than the courtiers.
Monsieur was received with acclamations; but D'Artois, who belonged to the unpopular Calonne party, was hissed and jostled by the crowd. Alarmed, he ordered his guard to close about him. "I was standing in one of the apartments through which he had to pass," says Paine, "and could not avoid reflecting how wretched is the condition of a disrespected man."
The Queen did not sufficiently conceal the dissatisfaction she felt at having been unable to prevent the appointment of M. de Calonne; she even one day went so far as to say at the Duchess's, in the midst of the partisans and protectors of that minister, that the finances of France passed alternately from the hands of an honest man without talent into those of a skilful knave.
Listen, then, with your good heart for all France knows the good heart of Monsieur de Calonne to the intercession of a woman for three of her dying, neglected, and miserable fellow-men." "They have a fair and powerful advocate," he said, smiling agreeably. Calonne no longer resisted her appeal, but wrote the necessary order.
There the people could see for the first time how much the taille and the salt tax actually took from them, and how much the king spent on himself and his favorites. Necker was soon followed by Calonne, who may be said to have precipitated the momentous reform which constitutes the French Revolution.
"Through the private correspondence which was carried on between this country and England, after I had left it, I was informed that M. de Calonne, whom the Queen never liked, and who was called to the administration against her will which he knew, and consequently became one of her secret enemies in the affair of the necklace was discovered to have been actively employed against Her Majesty in the work published in London by Lamotte.
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