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Updated: May 19, 2025
We may say, in fine, that if this first public composition of Turgot's is extremely imperfect, it was better to exaggerate the services of Christianity, alike as an internal faith and as a peculiar form of social organisation, than to describe Gregory the Great and Innocent, Hildebrand and Bernard, as artful and vulgar tyrants, and Aquinas and Roger Bacon as the products of a purely barbarous, stationary, and dark age.
Profoundly shocked at the irreligious tendencies of the philosophers, the court was, nevertheless, aweary of the theoricians and of their essays in reform; it welcomed the new ministers with delight; without fuss, and as if by a natural recurrence to ancient usage, the edict relative to forced labor was suspended, the anxieties of the noblesse and of the clergy subsided; the peasantry knew nothing yet of M. Turgot's fall, but they soon found out that the evils from which they had imagined they were delivered continued to press upon them with all their weight.
Those who thus spoke were almost all partisans of M. Turgot's system of administration: they were Mirabeau the father, Doctor Quesnay, Abbe Bandeau, and Abbe Nicoli, charge d'affaires to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and as enthusiastic an admirer of the maxims of the innovators as his Sovereign. My father sincerely respected the purity of intention of these politicians.
The absence of all reference to one half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable quality which belongs to all his other writings.
This great change, however, this return of the leaders of the Christian society upon the original conceptions of the Christian faith, did not come to pass in Turgot's time. He watched the struggle of the Church for the maintenance of its temporal privilege and honour, and for the continued protection by secular power of its spiritual supremacy. The outcome of the struggle was later.
Nor was this the most levelling of Turgot's arguments. He pointed out that though originally the exemption from taxation, which the nobility enjoyed, might have been defended on the ground that the nobles were bound to yield military service without pay, such service had long ceased to be performed, while on the contrary titles could be bought for money.
Turgot's dictum, however, obtains no more than to this extent: The cantonal testamentary laws almost invariably prescribe division of property among all the children as in the code Napoleon, which prevails in French Switzerland, and which permits the testator to dispose of only a third of his property, the rest being divided among all the heirs.
C. A. Young, Manual of Astronomy, p. 571, and Prof. Condorcet's biography of his master is one of the noblest works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.
In a letter written at the end of 1775, Mercy reports to the empress that some of Turgot's economical reforms had produced real discontent among those "qui trouvent leur intérêt dans le désordre," which they had vented in scandalous and seditious writings. Many songs of that character had come out, some of which were attributed to Beaumarchais, "le roi et la reine n'y ont point été respectés."
When Rousseau had returned to France, and was in danger of arrest, Hume was most urgent in entreating Turgot to use his influence with the government to protect the wretched wanderer, and Turgot's answer shows both how sincere this humane interposition was, and how practically serviceable. Meanwhile there ensued a horrible fray in print. Pamphlets appeared in Paris and London in a cloud.
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