Overture to Revolution: The 1787 Assembly of Notables and the Crisis of France's Old Regime (review)

Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, controlleûr-général des finances to Louis XVI from November 1783 to April 1787, provides the structuring centre to John Hardman's high political account of the Assembly of Notables of 1787. Calonne offers more than an optic through which the political stakes of the Assembly can be viewed; the Assembly was his project, its limitations were to some extent derived from the manner in which he called it into being, and he personified the reform project entertained and eventually rejected by it. Events were moved by Calonne and moved around him. The analytic narrative centred on him reveals the patterns in the complexity of the period. Hardman argues that Calonne recognized the opportunity offered by the fiscal difficulties of the mid-1780s to implement the reform package crystallized by Turgot in the early years of Louis's reign. Financial urgency would allow him to persuade Louis XVI to overcome his desire to carry all elements of the regime, even the most conservative, with any reform measure. In particular it would allow Calonne to call an assembly with enough authority to refashion the tax base of the regime, reform the legal system, and institute provincial assemblies without being stymied by the necessity for negotiations with the Parlements. Provincial assemblies would have the added benefit of undermining the pays d'états and simplifying political control of the country. Hardman argues that Calonne's programme was coherent and consistent with the 'French' mode of institutional reform with constitutional continuity, in contrast to the 'Anglo-Genevan' project of constitutional reform and the introduction of a representative element to the government, exemplified by Necker. One of the pleasures of this book is the compelling manner in which different elements of the analysis interact. Calonne's mastery of court politics, and the king's lack of control of his own ministry, allowed Calonne to manoeuvre the Assembly into being. The same institutional politics were deployed by the garde des sceaux Miromesnil to resist Calonne's plans, so the reforms presented to the bureaux of the Assembly for consideration were not accepted as the king's but as the minister's. The members of Miromesnil's following among the parlementaires, alongside the partisans of Necker, not to mention the queen's friends, formed a majority in the Assembly and could only have been faced down by resolute use of his authority by the king, which he was incapable of doing. The stalemate provoked Calonne to widen the field of political battle. By publishing the deliberations of the Assembly, he sought to portray the critics of his reform project as self-interested defenders of privilege. Hardman embraces the essence of Calonne's analysis. Privilege, he argues, was the only basis on which such a heterogeneous alliance could be held together even if it could not offer any basis for a viable alternative politics for the monarchy. Anyone who has been baffled by the political incompetence of the monarchy and the difficulty it confronted in mastering the crisis of the late 1780s will have their confusion dissolved by this detailed and compelling book.