Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot

French politician

• Born: May 10, 1727
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: March 18, 1781
• Place of death: Paris, France

Turgot was perhaps the most important reform-minded minister to serve the French monarchy in the last generation before the French Revolution. Best known as an economic theorist, he championed the laissez-faire precepts of the “classical” economic school and strove to remove obsolete or artificial barriers to the free flow of trade.

Early Life

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (ahn-roh-behr-zhahk tewr-goh) was born into a famous family that had served the kings of France in various high bureaucratic posts since the sixteenth century. The history of the family, which may have been Scandinavian in origin, goes back further, at least to Norman times (eleventh century). Turgot’s father, who managed the family estate in Normandy, was Michel Étienne Turgot, himself the son of a royal intendant (tax collector and financial agent). Michel Étienne held the office of “provost of the market sellers of Paris,” a title that included a wide variety of functions. As city planner, he was responsible for many major improvements, including the great Paris sewer system on the Right Bank of the Seine River and the construction of a number of famous monuments. The elder Turgot married a noblewoman of high status. All of their sons became famous, one as a magistrate, another as a military officer who also pursued scientific interests in botany, and the youngest, Anne-Robert-Jacques, as a highly placed royal administrator equally interested in philosophical and theoretical economic questions.

The young Turgot’s earliest education was at the Collège Duplessis in Paris, then at the Collège de Bourgogne. While at the latter institution, he became particularly interested in the work of two great English thinkers who would influence his future: Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. The French intellectual traditions represented by Montesquieu and his near contemporary Voltaire were also important to Turgot at this early age. Somewhat unexpectedly, Turgot entered the theological seminary of Saint Sulpice in 1743, when he was sixteen years old. After a few years he went on (in 1749) to the Annexe de la Sorbonne, which then served as the theological faculty of the University of Paris. Then, equally unexpectedly, in 1751 he decided to abandon his preparation for an ecclesiastical career, entering the service of the French high administration at the age of twenty-four.

Life’s Work

Turgot’s first appointment was to a magisterial position in the Parlement (high court) of Paris, which was constituted by and, to a certain degree, for the noble peers of France. Specifically, his post between 1753 and 1761 was that of “master of requests.” Turgot’s service in this high judicial body came at a very critical time, since this period was characterized by a number of preliminary clashes between the French crown and the nobility. These would eventually be considered among the first tensions that led to the French Revolution.

In this early stage of his official career, Turgot frequented many intellectual and literary salons in and around the city of Paris. He devoted particular attention to the doctrines of the Économistes (more commonly referred to as Physiocrats), at that time led by François Quesnay. The Physiocrats argued that the source of all wealth is to be found in land and its products, and supported the then emergent economic philosophy of laissez-faire, laissez-passer (literally, “let it alone, permit it,” in reverence to government’s approach to commerce). As a member of the recognized intellectual circles who gave the mid-eighteenth century its reputation for enlightenment, Turgot contributed to the famous Encyclopédie: Ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (1751-1772; Encyclopedia, 1965), edited by Denis Diderot. His earliest outline of his own economic and social reform ideas came in 1759 in the form of an elegy, the “Éloge de Gournay,” dedicated to a deceased friend whose ideas on the subject had influenced his thinking.

Soon thereafter (in 1761), an important change in Turgot’s administrative career came when he was appointed to the intendance of Limoges. When appointed, he called the change a misfortune, first because of his pending isolation from Paris and also because he was about to come face to face with the disturbing reality of France’s fiscal and financial affairs. During the years of his service in Limoges (1761-1774), Turgot gained recognition both for the many basic reforms he instituted in the name of King Louis XV and for his published writings on economic questions. These included his Mémoire sur les mines et carrières (1764; memoir on mines and quarries), Valeurs et monnaies (1769; on value and money), and Lettres sur la liberté du commerce des grains (1770; letters on the corn trade). Perhaps Turgot’s most celebrated work, however, was his Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (1766; Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth, 1793). It was reputedly written to provide an explanation of the workings of European economic forces to foreigners (Chinese) visiting in France. Its influence and longevity as a model of eighteenth century classical economic thought, however, went far beyond this presumed goal.

When Louis XV died in 1774, his successor, Louis XVI, apparently immediately recognized Turgot’s extraordinary capacities and insights. After appointing him very briefly to the post of minister of the navy, the king called Turgot to the high royal position of controller general of finance. Before accepting this post, Turgot met with the king to discuss what he considered to be the major reform issues of the day. While in the controller general’s position (from 1774 to 1776), Turgot prepared and passed the so-called Six Edicts that, it was hoped, would save France from its deepening financial and economic crisis. These decrees, promulgated early in 1776, may be summarized in two categories: four edicts involving the abolition of minor administrative or fiscal institutions, which Turgot identified as obstacles to improved economic conditions, and two edicts that aimed at much more substantial institutional changes. The first category suppressed certain types of antiquated controls over grain trade in Paris, equally antiquated bureaucratic offices connected with ports and market operations, special taxes on livestock sales, and the outmoded systems of taxing and selling suet and tallow to the chandler industry. Much more significant, when one considers the connections between Turgot’s reform priorities and the inevitable drift toward revolution in France, was one edict suppressing the corvée (conscription, among the peasants, of unpaid labor for public projects or service to the privileged classes) and another edict abolishing the majority of France’s restrictive craft guilds.

Turgot insisted that the removal of artifical controls in trade and commerce would be absolutely necessary for the recovery of France’s badly declining levels of productivity. The implications of this argument certainly went far beyond the areas affected by the Six Edicts; they potentially aimed at all forms of privilege hampering free economic flow, including many outmoded prerogatives of the nobility and the clergy. This helps explain the unpopularity of Turgot’s reform program among those sectors of privileged French society who refused to see what was likely to happen if the status quo remained. Pressures brought to bear on Louis XVI by these refractory elements led to Turgot’s removal from office in 1776 and his decision to retire to pursue his own intellectual and writing interests. In March of 1781, some seven and one-half years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Turgot died in retirement.

Significance

The life of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot illustrates at least two essential points about the nature of French society and politics in the prerevolutionary period. First, Turgot is an example, certainly not a totally isolated one, of a representative of France’s privileged noble class who demonstrated serious concern for reforming a number of obsolete institutions that were part of the ancien régime. In some cases (four out of the famous Six Edicts of 1776, for example), what Turgot identified as obsolete had little or no direct bearing on particular vested class interests. Many changes he supported were practical in nature, designed to facilitate an expansion in the volume of a variety of seemingly minor commercial exchanges—something that would eventually benefit almost all elements of French society. In other cases, practical reforms, although they could be justified as promising general benefits in the long run, had immediate implications for specific interest groups. His recommendation that the corvée, or free-labor levy, be abolished obviously struck out at very privileged elements, mainly noble and royal. The hostility of the upper class to such reforms is therefore understandable and fits what one might call standard stereotypes of reactionism in prerevolutionary France.

As Turgot stands out as an example of an enlightened conscience within the ranks of the noble class, other societal elements who opposed other categories of reform that he supported illustrate a second point that should be kept in mind about the variety of causes and contradictions behind the eventual revolution. Widespread opposition to abolition of the craft guilds—institutions that mainly affected the vested interests of the middle class of prerevolutionary France—points out that resistance to changes in the obsolete feudal system was not limited to the upper, privileged classes. Wherever change appeared to menace specific interests in the short run, the logic of longer-term benefits was rejected in prerevolutionary France. This was obvious in the case of the nobility, the Church, and the king. It was less obvious in the cases of less easily identifiable elements, including merchants, craftsmen, and even peasants. Turgot’s gift of insight enabled him to see the multidimensional implications of these obstacles, but a variety of vested-interest groups thwarted his endeavor to represent the commonweal.

Bibliography

Cobban, Alfred. Old Régime and Revolution, 1715-1799. Vol. 1 in A History of Modern France. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1957. This volume is the first in a three-volume general history written by one of the most respected British historians of France. Its value for the study of Turgot’s life is mainly for its coverage of the general sweep of French history throughout the eighteenth century, and especially for its comparisons between several different high ministers of the French crown, both before and after Turgot’s brief term of office under Louis XVI.

Dakin, Douglas. Turgot and the Ancien Régime in France. London: Methuen, 1939. This may be the most thorough and scholarly biographical study of Turgot in English. Dakin based his writings on Turgot’s own works as well as on a number of contemporary French documents and published periodicals.

Groenewegen, Peter. Eighteenth-Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria, and Smith and Their Contemporaries. New York: Routledge, 2002. A collection of essays by Groenewegen, a scholar specializing in eighteenth century economic history. Among other topics, the essays discuss the economic theories of Turgot, Adam Smith, and François Quesnay.

Hill, Malcolm. Statesman of the Enlightenment: The Life of Anne-Robert Turgot. London: Othila Press, 1999. Biography describing Turgot’s life and thought. Hill argues that Turgot’s radical tax reform proposals addressed citizens’ concerns; had the proposals been adopted, there might not have been a revolution in 1791.

Lodge, Eleanor C. Sully, Colbert, and Turgot: A Chapter in French Economic History. Reprint. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970. This collection of three biographies provides a very useful complement to Frank Manuel’s work. First, all three of these figures were high ministers of state, and Lodge’s emphasis is on the significance of their contributions as government figures. Second, her three figures represent three different periods in French history: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Each biography, including Turgot’s, is placed within a general historical framework written for the general reader rather than the specialist.

Manuel, Frank E. The Prophets of Paris. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Manuel chose Turgot as one of six major intellectual figures of France, both under the ancien régime and in the post-revolutionary period. Because his objective is to compare Turgot’s contributions with those of other French thinkers (for example the comte de Saint-Simon, the Marquis de Condorcet, Charles Fourier, and Auguste Comte), the emphasis here is on ideas, not on Turgot’s actual achievements as an administrator.

Shepherd, Robert P. Turgot and the Six Edicts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1903. This is a specialized study of Turgot’s famous 1776 plan for reforming key elements in France’s administrative and fiscal system. Although the author enters into the details of each edict and its potential ramifications for the French economy, the work is only sparsely documented by contemporary historians’ standards.