"Each individual is the only competent judge of the most advantageous use of his lands and of his labor."
It was 1774, and decades of expensive and ill-advised government
ventures left the regime of Louis the XVI fiscally overstretched and teetering,
once again, on the edge of bankruptcy. Thus was the situation when Anne Robert
Jacques Turgot, the baron de l' Aulne, was appointed France's Minister of Finance.
A.R.J. Turgot was born in Paris to a distinguished Norman
family which had long served as important royal officials. He earned honors
first at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice, and then at the great theological faculty
of the University of Paris, the Sorbonne. He was expected to enter the clergy,
but instead felt he was called to government service. And although he had wide-ranging
intellectual interests in history, theology, literature, philology, and the
natural sciences, he is now best known for his brief but brilliant career in
economics.
Turgot's free-market approach was firmly rooted in his theological
education and flowed from his faith in God. He initiated reforms intended to
deregulate agriculture and industry, encourage free trade and open borders,
and establish fairer labor practices. He thought that eliminating such restrictions
on the economy would usher in an era of such unprecedented prosperity that the
regime's fiscal problems would evaporate.
Turgot's finance revolution failed. In spite of his political
and economic liberalism, he ended up implementing his reforms too hastily and
too harshly, which evoked cries of dissent from the aristocracy. He was advised
to implement his reforms more slowly and carefully, but a sense of impending
doom for both the regime and his own life — “In our family we die at fifty,”
he had said-had spurred him on to reckless, and in some cases despotic, policy-making.
Turgot was dismissed by the king in 1776. His forebodings were fulfilled; he
died in 1781 at fifty-four years of age nearly on the eve of that most illiberal
revolution that would consume the regime he tried so hard to rescue.
