Turgot's Six Edicts and Reform Programme
Turgot spent twenty months trying to reform the French economy and was destroyed by the people who benefited from it as it was. Louis XVI appointed him controller-general in August 1774 and accepted his conditions: no bankruptcy, no new taxes, no borrowing, which left only cutting expenditure and removing the obstacles to production. His first measure, in September 1774, freed the internal grain trade, which economists had been recommending for twenty years and which meant that grain could move from surplus provinces to deficit ones without licences. It coincided with a poor harvest. Prices rose, and in the spring of 1775 the Flour War produced riots in some 300 places, granaries broken open and prices fixed by crowds; two men were hanged and the policy held. The Six Edicts of January 1776 went further. They abolished the corvée, the forced labour on the royal roads that fell on peasants alone, and replaced it with a tax on landowners including the nobility and the clergy; they suppressed the guilds, opening trades to anyone; and they abolished a number of sinecures. The parlement of Paris refused to register them, arguing that the nobility's exemption was a fundamental law of the kingdom. The king forced registration in a lit de justice and dismissed him four months later under pressure from the court and the queen. Everything in the edicts was enacted after 1789 by other means. His letter to the king on being dismissed is worth reading beside what happened afterwards. He warned that a monarch who could not resist a court would find that weakness answered by something considerably worse, and named Charles I of England as the example.
- Year: 1774 CE
- Category: Political
