At such a crisis destiny decreed that M. de Calonne should be put forward to fill the vacancy,—a man of indisputable genius, “before all things, for borrowing.”
“Hope radiates from his face, persuasion hangs on his tongue. For all straits he has present remedy, and will make the world roll on wheels before him.”
In the “Diamond Necklace,” Dumas has given us a faithful picture of Calonne and his method of exploiting his financial genius. His grandiloquent, “Madame, if it is but difficult, it is done; if it is impossible, it shall be done,” seems hardly to stamp him as the man for the place at that critical period, however great may have been the felicity of the Œil-de-Bœuf under the temporary plenty which resulted from the policy of “borrowing at any price.”
It would be hard to exaggerate the effect upon the growing aspirations of the French people after the unfamiliar something which they came to call “liberty,” of the result of the struggle in America, in which the cause of the colonists was so powerfully supported by the little band of Frenchmen of whom Lafayette was the most prominent and the most notable. He returned to France in 1783, to be dubbed in some quarters “Scipio Americanus.”
The scandalous affair of the necklace was, as we have heretofore seen, seized upon by the enemies of the queen as a weapon with which to assail her reputation, although her absolute innocence of any guilty connection with it is now beyond doubt. The results of this unfortunate episode—the “immense rumor and conjecture from all mankind,” coupled with the slanderous charges made by Madame Lamotte in a letter from London after her escape from the Salpétrière—went far towards creating the unreasoning hatred of the “Austrian woman,” which she herself did so little to assuage when the clouds became blacker than night, and began to emit the thunder and lightning of the Revolution.
In the spring of 1787, Calonne, his borrowing powers being at an end, conceived the idea of convoking the “Notables”—an expedient unheard of for one hundred and sixty years—to sanction his new plan of taxation. They met on the 22d of February, 1787, one hundred and thirty-seven of them, “men of the sword, men of the robe, peers, dignified clergy, parliamentary presidents,” with seven princes of the blood to preside over the seven bureaux,—”a round gross in all.” They would have none of Calonne or his plans; and he was dismissed in April, after which the “Notables” sat until May 25, “treating of all manner of public things,” and then first were the States-General mentioned.
Calonne was succeeded by Cardinal Loménie de Brienne,—a dissolute, worthless sexagenarian, who devised various tax-edicts, stamp-taxes, and the like, all of which the Parliament of Paris refused to register. The expedient of a Bed of Justice was resorted to, and resulted in the most ominous of all portents: for the first time in history the Parliament refused to obey the royal “Je veux” (I wish it.) They were exiled for a month,—August to September, 1787,—and returned upon conditions.
In the spring of 1788, Loménie’s great scheme of dismissing the parliaments altogether, and substituting a more subservient “Plenary Court” was detected before it was ripe, and denounced to the Parliament of Paris, which body, upon remonstrating, was again exiled (May). An attempt thereafter to raise supplies by royal edict simply, led to the rebellion of all the provincial parliaments, the public expressing its approval more noisily than ever. On August 8 appeared a royal edict to the effect that the States-General should be convoked for May following; it was followed by another edict, that treasury payments should thenceforth be made three-fifths in cash and two-fifths in paper,—a virtual confession that the treasury was insolvent. Thereupon Loménie was incontinently dismissed, and Necker recalled from Switzerland to become the “Savior of France.”
A second convocation of the “Notables” (November 6 to December 12, 1788) undertook to decide how the States should be held: whether the three estates should meet as one deliberative body, or as three, or two; and, most important of all, what should be the relative force, in voting, of the Third Estate, or Commonalty. They separated without settling any of the points in question.