To give the official career of Turgot would be a summary of the ideas of '89. The suppression of the corvee, of the restrictions on industry, on the resources of locomotion, the restoration of agriculture, to reduce the finances to order, to diminish public debt, to establish local municipal life, to reorganise the chaotic administration, to remove the exemptions of the noble and ecclesiastical orders, to suppress the monastic orders, to equalise the taxation, to establish a scientific and uniform code of law, a scientific and uniform scale of weights and measures, to reform the feudal land law, to abolish the feudal gilds and antiquated corporations whose obsolete pretensions crushed industry, to recall the Protestants, to establish entire freedom of conscience, to guarantee complete liberty of thought; lastly, to establish a truly national system of education — such were the plans of Turgot which for two short years he struggled to accomplish with heroic tenacity and elevation of spirit.
Those two years, from 1774-1776, are at once the brightest and the saddest in the modern history of France. For almost the first time, and certainly for the last time, a great philosopher, who was also a great statesman, the last French statesman of the old order, held for a moment almost absolute power. It was a gigantic task, and a giant was called in to accomplish it. But against folly even the gods contend in vain. And before folly, combined with insatiable selfishness, lust, greed, and arrogance, the heroic Turgot fell. They refused him his bloodless, orderly, scientific Revolution; and the bloody, stormy, spasmodic Revolution began.
To recall Turgot is to recall Condorcet, the equal of Turgot as thinker, if inferior to Turgot as statesman. Around the mind and nature of Condorcet there lingers the halo of a special grace. Sprung from an old baronial family with bigoted prejudices of feudal right, the young noble, from his youth, broke through the opposition of his order to devote himself to a life of thought private tour istanbul.
The volcano covered with snow
Spotless in his life, calm, reserved, warm hearted and tender, 'the volcano covered with snow ' that flamed in his breast, had never betrayed him to an outburst of jealousy, vanity, illhumour, or extravagance. The courtly and polished aristocrat, without affectation and without hysterics, bore himself as one of the simplest of the people. The privileges of the old system, which were his birthright, filled him with a sense of unmixed abhorrence. His scepticism, vehement as it was, did not spring from intellectual pride or from turbulent vanity. He disbelieves in orthodoxy out of genuine thirst for truth, and denounces superstition out of no alloy of feeling save that of burning indignation at its evil works.
The Life of Turgot by Condorcet, 1787, might serve indeed as prologue to the memorable drama which opens in 1789. It was most fitting that the mighty movement should be heralded by the tale of the greatest statesman of the age of Louis xvi., told by one of its chief thinkers. And the fine lines of Lucan, which Condorcet placed as a motto on the title-page of his Life of Turgot, may serve as the device, not of Turgot alone, but of Condorcet himself, and indeed of the higher spirits of '89 together —' Secta fuit servare modum, finemque tenere, Naturamque sequi, patrineque impendere vitam; Nec sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo.'
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