III. 1775. CHAP. changes; his immediate projects were much more practical. They were the abolition of corvées, or the burden of upholding the roads throughout the kingdom; the suppression of the most oppressive of the feudal rights; the imposition of the land-tax called the vingtième on the nobles and clergy; the formation of a general and equitable cadastre, or valuation of heritable property, to be the basis of all territorial imposts; the entire liberty of conscience and recall of the Protestants; the suppression of the greater part of the monasteries; the redemption of the feudal services, with a just regard to the rights of the present holders. He proposed further, to frame one civil code for the whole kingdom; to establish a uniformity of weights and measures; to suppress local privileges and corporations; to ameliorate the condition of the working curés; to establish a system of general instruction; to form a magnificent system for interior communication by land and water; to effect great econoCondorcet, mies in the collection of several of the taxes, of which got, 62, 96. nearly a half was intercepted in its progress towards the Biog. Univ. exchequer; to render thought and the press as free as industry; to call philosophers and men of letters to conLab. ii. 41, tribute their mite towards the enlightening of government; iii. 135, 138; and to prepare the people, by the use of provincial assemand ii. 344, blies, for the exercise of the powers of sovereign legislation in the States-general.1 1 xlvii. 74. Turgot, Lac. v. 25. 15,27. Soul. 348. 34. It may readily be conceived what a ferment of visions Transports and hopes in one class of society, and of terror and of the phi hatred in another, the fact of ministers holding such losophers in Paris at appointment of St Ger main. his adminis- sentiments being at the head of affairs must have raised tration; and in France. The philosophers were in transports; they beheld in near prospect, not only the adoption of their principles by government, but, what was to them still more material, the communication of the influence and emoluments of office to themselves. The aristocracy of mind was to supplant that of the sword. The clergy and nobles speedily took the alarm. Already M. Turgot III. 1775. had excited the jealousy of the church, not merely by CHAP. his known connexion with the infidel philosophers of the capital, and the incessant eulogies with which they loaded him, but by a variety of edicts on the ceremonial parts of religion, which, though not important in themselves, were justly deemed material, as indicating how the wind set in high quarters. * It had, in consequence, become the general opinion in the capital, though erroneously, as it afterwards appeared, that the King had been weaned by Turgot and Malesherbes from his early prejudices, and that he had adopted their deistical views. of religion. The noblesse entertained the most rancorous feelings towards a minister whose integrity was proof against their seductions, while his austerity threatened to abridge their privileges, and abolish a large part of their emoluments at court. Matters were in this combustible state when the former war-minister, the Marshal de Muy, died; and, on the suggestion of Turgot, COUNT Oct. 26, This change ST GERMAIN was appointed in his room. was attended with the most important consequences, and Droz, i deserves particular attention, for it is intimately con- Soul. ii. nected with the causes which, in the last crisis, paralysed iii. 2, 5. the government and overturned the throne.1 1775. 183, 185. 327, 349; Count St This able and intrepid, but bizarre and intractable 35. man, was born near Lons-le-Saulnier, on the 16th April History of 1707, so that when called to the ministry he was already Germain. sixty-eight years of age. Descended of an old and noble but decayed family, he was educated by the Jesuits, and at first intended for the church; but his ardent disposition soon broke through their trammels, and he entered first the provincial militia, and then the regular dragoons. His energetic temperament led him, as France was at * He authorised the general sale of meat during Lent, hitherto monopolised by the Hôtel Dieu; altered the mode of travelling of the messageries, so as to enable them to travel during mass; suggested the coronation of the King at Paris, instead of in the cathedral of Rheims; proposed alterations in the coronation oath, of which the clergy disapproved, and with reason insisted on the omission of the inhuman clause which bound the monarch to exterminate heretics. See Biog. Univ., xlvii. 75, (TURGOT.) СНАР. 1775. peace, into the service of the Elector Palatine in Germany, and in 1738 he signalised his valour in the campaign of the Emperor against the Turks. France having, subsequent to this, declared war against Austria, he engaged in the service of its ally, the Elector of Bavaria, where his talents led to his rapid promotion. He was on the point of entering the Prussian service, but, deterred by the rigours of its discipline, he applied to Marshal Saxe, who procured for him employment in his own country. He served in the campaigns of Flanders from 1746 to 1748, and afterwards with distinction in the Seven Years' War, where he mainly contributed to save the wreck of the French army after the rout of Rosbach, and to cover the retreat from Minden. His temperament, however, was too ardent to permit of his continuing long in any service without quarrels; he was too little of a courtier to be a favourite at Versailles ;* and, deeming himself ill used by the Duc de Broglie, his general, he threw up his command, and withdrew to Denmark, where he was appointed war-minister and commander-in-chief. After some years spent with great distinction in that country, he retired to Alsace, where he was living in retirement, when the bankruptcy of the banker whom he had trusted suddenly deprived him of his whole fortune. Sensible of his merit and services, the German regiments in the employment of France subscribed, and requested him to accept, a pension of 16,000 francs (£640) yearly; the war-minister, De Muy, forbade this, but settled on him a pension of 10,000 francs (£400) a-year on the part of the crown. St Germain lived * Madame Pompadour used to call him the "Mauvais Sujet." His decision of character, the greatest element in military, as in all other greatness, strongly appeared when Louis XV. in 1760, proposed to attach him as mentor to the Prince of Condé a system well known in the French and Austrian service, where rank obtained command at a time when necessity called for ability. "Sire," replied he, "I know but of two things in war-to command and to obey as to a council, I know nothing of it."-DROZ, i. 185; and Biographie Universelle, xxxix. 583. III. 1775. happy on this pension, in retirement, writing his CHAP. memoirs, cultivating his little domain with his own hands, and supporting his reverses with dignity, when, without the slightest communication with government, or application on his part, he received an intimation. from Versailles that he had been appointed minister-at- 1 Droz, i. He was busy, like Cincinnatus, planting a fruit- 186, 189. tree in his garden when the courier with his nomination xxxix. 581, arrived, and as he had no servant, a neighbouring Germain.) peasant got ready his horse to convey him to the 58. nearest post.1* war. Biog. Univ. 585, (Saint Soul. iii. 30, 36. the reforms which were The principal motive which led Turgot and Maurepas to suggest St Germain's appointment to the King, was in Nature of order that he might carry through, with unflinching in the army rigour, the reductions in the expense of the army, espe- called for. cially of the household troops, which the distressed state of the finances had now rendered indispensable. They found him an ardent reformer; and his general plan for the remodelling of the troops was well conceived; but in many subordinate particulars he violently shocked the national feelings, and undid the bonds which united the soldiers of all ranks to the sovereign. The great evils were the prodigious number of officers on full or half-pay in proportion to that of common soldiers, and the promotion of young men to important military employments who had no acquaintance whatever with the duties of their profession. These abuses, the consequence of the * Count St Germain's appointment, which, from the singular and romantic circumstances attending it, made a great noise at the time, was owing to the esteem in which he was held by the Abbé Dubois, an intimate friend of Malesherbes, and brother to an officer who had long been an aide-de-camp of the Count's. The Abbé Dubois suggested him to Malesherbes as an officer every way qualified to carry through the great reforms which Turgot meditated in the army, and for which he seemed better adapted than any of the high noblesse. This led to a memoir on the reforms in the army, which he had submitted to Maurepas on receiving his pension, being looked at; and as it pleased Louis and Turgot, he received the appointment.-DROZ, Vie de Louis XVI., i. 188, 189. The French army in 1776 consisted in all of 217,000 men; and there were 60,000 officers on full or half-pay. By the regulations, 17th April 1772, each regiment of cavalry consisted of 480 men, of whom no less than 146 were III. 1775. CHAP. army being considered the mere appanage of the nobility, not the patrimony and safeguard of the state, at once burdened the treasury and weakened the service. They were to be regarded as the principal causes of the long train of disasters which in recent wars had tarnished the 1 Droz, i. 190, 191. xxxix. 585. Soul. iii. 61, 72. 37. Changes which he glory of the French arms. St Germain applied the caustic with a firm hand to the gangrened limb; but he pushed it too far, and inflicted a deep, and, as it proved, an irremediable wound on the healthy part of the system.1 The obvious way to have remedied the abuse of supernumerary officers would have been, to have allowed the introduced. existing holders of the commissions to have enjoyed them during their lives, but prevented their being filled up afterwards. Instead of that, St Germain commenced his reforms by an immediate sweeping reduction in the household troops; the object, it is true, of excessive and prodigal favour to the higher branches of the aristocracy, but ennobled by the recollection of historic names and deeds of fame, and forming an essential part of the military force of the country. The mousquetaires gris, the mousquetaires noirs, and the grenadiers à cheval, of the Maison du Roi were suppressed and he was meditating still further reductions when the vehement resistance of the nobles, at the head of the menaced corps, obliged him to desist. He endeavoured to accomplish officers, or non-commissioned officers, being nearly one officer to every three privates. In the glorious days of the French army under Turenne, a company was commanded only by a captain, lieutenant, and sub-lieutenant or ensign. It was during the calamitous last years of the reign of Louis XIV. that the prodigious multiplication of officers began-a system which at once afforded an immediate relief to the treasury, by the sale of the commissions, and gratified the nobility by their obtaining the salaries attached to them. When the pay of such a vast accumulation of officers came to prove a serious drain upon the exchequer, the only resource was to replenish its coffers by the creation and sale of additional military offices; and this of course soon aggravated the evil, and threw the finances of the army into inextricable confusion. When Count St Germain was made minister-at-war, every regiment was burdened with a train of useless supernumerary officers for whom we have no corresponding words in the English language, or in the military vocabulary of Napoleon, viz., "des colonels propriétaires, des colonels commandans, des colonels en second, des colonels en troisième, des colonels non commissionnés, des colonels à la suite des régimens, et des colonels attachés à l'armée." The same abuses |