The propsed plan of Municipalities embodied this democratic spirit. It would take the people into the confidence of the King and make them his junior, though subordinate, partners in the management of public affairs. The new Constitution would make two improvements on the existing French system: first, it would remedy the evils of excessive centralization that constituted the characteristic feature of the ancien regime; and secondly, it would substitute a simple and uniform administrative system for the complicated and confusing institutions that actually existed in the various provinces. Under the new scheme, the localities would take care of matters that directly interested themselves——such as the distribution of tax payment, public works, roads, poor relief, famine relief, etc. The central government would be relieved of the minute and irksome duties that it at present had to perform, and necessarily performed poorly.
In the second place, the Municipalities would displace the irregular and confusing political institutions of the various provinces. Under the ancien regime, France was divided into thirty-two provinces, whose boundaries conformed, in general, to the great feudal estates of the Middle Ages and were, therefore, very irregular and inconvenient. Partly for this reason and partly on account of the desire to curb the feudality that had been brought under royal control, the country was later divided into thirty-five Generalites or Intendances, governed by thirty-four Intendants, Toulouse and Montpellier being combined under one head. Between the provinces and the Intendances there was a hopeless over-lapping of territory; almost every province had two or more Intendants exercising jurisdiction within its borders. Originally financial agents of the crown, the Intendants gradually became absolute governors as the powers of the King increased. The nobility were naturally hostile to them, and, though they were powerless to resist these royal officials, they were still strong enough to harass and annoy them.
Besides this overlapping of province and Intendance, there was the difference between the pays d'elections and pays d'etats. In the former the King, through his officials, collected the taxes directly. But in the pays d'etats the old Estates were still functioning; they received their apportionment from the Controller General, taxed themselves in their own way, and paid the Royal Treasury a lump sum.
Now, Turgot proposed to substitute a uniform administrative system for this existing one of confusion and variation. The difference between the pays d'elections and the pays d'etats was to be abolished. The antagonism of the nobility would be appeased by giving them a part in the new government, in common with all other landowners. The one point that Turgot did not make clear was whether by "province" he meant the old feudal province or the Intendance. It seems he meant the latter, despite the use of the more ancient term.
This scheme of Municipalities was meant to be the crowning measure of Turgot's program of reform. All his previous administrative and economic reforms may be said to be preparatory to the launching of the Municipalities. The reforms culminating in the Six Edicts simply served to clear the ground; they were to sweep away privilege, to abolish inefficiency, and corruption, to give everybody the freedom to which he as a man was entitled. All this was for the purpose of making France a Constitutional Monarchy, with the Municipalities Plan as the Constitution.
The far-reaching import of the Municipalities scheme can be seen in another and perhaps far more revolutionary innovation in connection with it, namely, a contemplated system of public education, independent of the clergy and provided by the State for the purpose of teaching everybody "les obligations qu'il a à la société et au pouvoir qui les protégé, les devoirs que ces obligations lui imposent, l'intérêt qu'il aà les remplir pour le bien du public et pour le sien propre." (the obligations he has to society and to the powers that protect them, the duties that these obligations impose on him, the interest he has in fulfilling them for the good of the public and for his own.)
This is a complete plan of a reformation and reorganization of the Kingdom. The King, however, was still to have absolute executive authority, not checked by any other branch of government. The Municipalities were to be simply advisory bodies in regard to the King. But with regard to the localities and within their sphere of competency they were to be executive councils. The privilegies as such were given no place in the system; they were simply regarded as landowners. This scheme constituted in effect a social revolution. But the absolute power of the King, in theory at least, was left intact. He was simply given a whole host of new servants represented in the new Municipalities. If carried out, the scheme would undoubtedly be a revolution, social, political, and economic. But it would be a peaceful and almost silent revolution. Turgot, however, was not given time even to make a preliminary try of it. He prepared it in 1775; in fact he was so busy that Du Pont de Nemours had to prepare it for him. But in the next year he was dismissed.
It was typical of the man that Turgot gave reasons for his scheme in a preamble. He said that he wanted to create a public spirit in the French nation, the absence of which at that time was due to the lack of a constitution. The members of the nation had few or no ties with one another. None of them knew his duties or his legal relations with his fellows. On every occasion men waited for special orders from the King. The people, with no responsibility and therefore unable to identify themselves with the State, naturally considered themselves, so to say, at war with the State, and sought to escape taxation and all other public duties. To change this negative attitude institutions must be created, by means of which the greater part of the things that were to be done would be done by the people voluntarily. Turgot's plan was to attach individuals to their families, families to their village or town, towns and villages to the arrondissements, arrondissements to the provinces, and provinces to the State, thus making the national a well-coor-dinated, sensitive, and responsive organism, with each individual fully conscious of its place in and responsibility to the whole. To accomplish this, however, would imply an enlightened people and, therefore, public education. Turgot provided a practicable but revolutionary scheme of popular instruction.
The scheme provided for a hierarchy of assemblies, ranging from the village and town assemblies, through the district and provincial bodies, and culminating in a Central National Assembly. At the bottom of the scale was the Village Municipality. The village was defined by Turgot as a community "compose d'un certain nombre de familles qui possedent les maisons qui le forment et les terres qui en dependent." (composed of a certain number of families who own the houses that make it up and the land that depends on them.) For convenience sake, each rural parish was to be regarded as a village. The village Municipality or Assembly should concern itself with:
- The apportionment of the taxes;
- The public works and the cross-roads;
- The superintendence of the poor and their relief;
- The relations of the commune with the neighboring villages and with the arrondissement as to the public works, and the transmission of the wishes of the commune in this respect to the proper authority. Incidentally the public works of the commune would serve to give employment to the poor during the dull season.
Among other things, this scheme would do away with the tax collector who, being alien to the village people, was naturally both inefficient and oppressive, tending to make the people antagonistic to the State of which the tax collector was the symbol. The village, taking care of its own taxation, would be both just and efficient. The village would no longer be in contact with an official from the outside. They would have a mayor of their own, appointed by themselves from among their own number.
The franchise was evolved from the Physiocratic principle that the soil alone is productive. Owners of land were to vote in proportion to their estates; in other words, it was the earth, not the man, that was represented. So, in a sense, this may be called a transformation, instead of the abolition, of the feudal principle, which was based primarily on land. But rights imply obligations; the landowners were to pay the taxes. The landless and propertyless should not be enfranchised, for they were too susceptible to corruption. Only those who possessed real estate were a part of the community and were interested in its welfare. The rest, generally artisans, were birds of passage who were travelling from one community to the next all the time and were therefore, quite naturally, not interested in the wellbeing of any one of them. But the landowners, so Turgot, or more exactly, in this particular, Du Pont, argued, were bound to their place of habitation by their land, for weal or woe, and therefore were always interested in the welfare of the village.
But not all the proprietors of land were to have an equal amount of franchise right. Turgot estimated that only land producing 600 livres a year would be able to support a family and entitle the family head to the Roman title of Pater familias. Such family heads alone should be full members in the village assembly. The rest of the folk, having to look for means of subsistence from somewhere else, could not have an undivided interest in the welfare of the village and, therefore, should not have the full franchise. 300-livre family head was only a half-citizen, for he would have to look for the other 300 livres of income from the crafts, industry, and commerce, what the Physiocrats regarded as non-productive labor. Thus the 100-livre man was, as it were, only one-sixth of a citizen, and so on. These part citizens could combine themselves and send deputies as full members to represent them in the Village Assembly. Thus two half-members might send one deputy, or four quarter-members might do likewise.
At the same time and under the same principle, people with more than 600 livres of annual income from land should have more than one voice in the assembly. Thus a 1,200-livre man should have two votes in the village meeting, the 100-louis man four votes, and so on. This would be only just, for the 100-louis man had four times more to lose than the ordinary citizen if the village affairs should go out of gear and he therefore had four times the usual interest to make the village prosperous and well managed.
By the same logic, people owning land in more than one parish should have a voice in the affairs of all the parishes where his property might happen to be situated. Just as the King of France was at the same time King of Navarre, Count of Provence, etc., so might a private citizen be a member of two or more parish assemblies. There was no danger, said Turgot, that such plural voting, and plural representation, would lead to the oppression of the poor by the rich, for the affairs on which the assemblies have a right to deliverate were all affairs in which rich and poor had a common though unequal interest. Incidentally, this plural franchise, besides its fundamental justness, had the added advantage of appealing to the vanity and ambition of the rich and dissuading them from concealing the real amount of their riches and escaping part of the taxes.
Turgot found in his scheme many advantages. Not only would it free the State and its agents of a vexatious and hateful duty——tax collection, but it assured a best, equitable, efficient, and unoppressive distribution in the assessment of taxes, for the taxes would be founded on an exact rating of the fortunes of the citizens, made by the interested parties among themselves, mutually controlling themselves. Once the taxes were collected and disposed of, what was left could be used for local improvement, in which business the spirit of initiative would develop, leading to both material prosperity and public solidarity. At Turgot's time, the people were allowed no initiative of any kind; the State did their thinking for them. But the village Assembly, if established, would allow the peasants to make local assessments for local purposes and, interested in village welfare, they would naturally construct roads and bridges to facilitate travel and eliminate waste of both time and energy, human and animal alike. At the same time such works would give the poor useful employment, thus diminishing the demand for gratuitous charity, which Turgot regarded, and rightly, as always degrading and to be tolerated only as a temporary emergency measure.
The Nobility and the Clergy, as landed proprietors, were to take part in the Municipalities as any other land-owner. They were to have no special privilege, because they were only participating as landowners, not as Nobles and Clerics. The idea behind this plan is democratic, in the sense that Turgot expected that the Commoners of the country, united in bodies in which the seigneurs and ecclesiastics would have a vote and be elected representatives only as proprietors or the equals of the lowest land holding Commoner, would obtain defenders more enlightened and more influential to support their interests than the syndics of parishes. Further, the erstwhile disorganized rural masses would be enabled to strive against the corporations of the towns and to defend themselves against the ecclesiastics, the nobles, the gens de justice, and all the rest of their oppressors.
The Village Municipality was to elect three officials a mayor or president, who was to state the object of deliberation and to record the votes; a recorder, who was to keep the register and the accounts of the parish; and a deputy to represent the parish in the District or arrondissement assembly.
Besides the village assemblies, analogous and parallel institutions should be created in the towns to replace the existing municipalities——petty and selfish republics, with strong local patriotism, isolated both from each other and from the State, tyrannical to the villages around them as well as to their own industrial and commercial laborers. Now, this spirit of disorder and particularism was to be replaced by one of peace and union. Here the same principle (which, however, is not Physiocratic orthodoxy) was to be applied as in the case of the village, namely, only interested persons were to have the franchise. Just as the village was made of landholdings, so the town was an aggregation of houses. So in the town the owners of houses were to vote in proportion to the value of their holdings, for only the householders were and could be interested in the prosperity of a town. Merchants with floating capital could easily leave one town for another and a more profitable one, while the householder could not move and would have to bear the depreciation of rentage if town affairs were not properly managed and town prosperity diminished or totally vanished.
In the town the householder of 18,000 livres per year was to be a full citizen. Evaluation was made on the basis not of the house, but of the land on which the house was built. The argument here is rather curious: as the buildings were not permanent, lasting at most a century, they could not very well be made the basis of evaluation. Only the land surface, permanent and unchanging throughout eternity, could serve this purpose admirably. The qualification in the town was made thirty times higher than in the village, because land value was much higher here and because, further, Turgot did not want to have a too numerous and therefore tumultuous assembly. He estimated that there were at most forty people in Paris who owned each one of them a piece of land worth 18,000 livres. So in the case of most cities, almost all the householders would be fractional citizens. In general, according to Turgot's estimation, twenty-five houses would have one repre sentative in the assembly.
In the small towns where there was only one parish the Assembly would be about the same as in the village. The membership would be very small, and when the delegates met they could elect a mayor and a sheriff, responsible to the electorate in their actions and expenditures.
But in larger towns where there were more than one parish or quarter, then each parish or quarter might elect one or two officials. Or, each parish might elect a number of electors, and the electors of all the parishes would then constitute an electoral college, with the duty of electing the municipal officials for the whole town.
But for such metropolitan cities as Paris and Lyon, Turgot suggested that a magistrate of police, as a unifying force, should be appointed by and responsible to the King. In such centers it might also be advisable for each parish to have its own officials and its own poor relief.
The Physiocratic character of the village and urban municipalities is noticeable. Only landowners and householders were enfranchised, in proportion to the amount of their property. While Turgot accepted this and thought the unequal franchise only just, he did not like Du Pont's idea of leaving the propertyless out entirely. Further, he thought the municipalities might be profitably given more functions. Unfortunately, Du Pont, in his letter to the Journal de Paris, 1787, did not give any specific information as to Turgot's exact proposals. We do not know what more powers he would give to the local assemblies, nor do we know how the propertyless were to participate. Since the propertied were ranked according to wealth, it is hardly likely that the propertyless would all be given an equal status. Perhaps they would be admitted and ranked in proportion to their movable wealth. As rights imply obligations, these new members would presumably have to pay taxes, which would mean that their personal effects would be assessed. Such an abandoning of the whole single-tax idea of the Physiocrats, however, is a radical step that Turgot nowhere else suggested.
The general aim of the village and urban Municipalities was to educate the people to be good men and perfect citizens, to live amicably with their neighbors. But these are not enough. Above the local assemblies there were to be Assemblies of the Second Degree or District Assemblies, municipalites des elections, D made up of one deputy each from the village and town assemblies. These superior bodies, district as well as provincial, were to serve the purpose of establishing a link between the King and his nation that would make it possible for the remotest corners of the country to approach the King without difficulty, make the conditions of the various districts known to him, facilitate the execution of his orders and, by lessening the chances of mistakes and blunders, make the royal authority more respected and more loved throughout the realm.
As the District Municipality represented communities, not persons, each municipality of the first degree, be it a one-parish village or a metropolitan city, was to send only one deputy. However, as an act of deference rather than for any practical and necessary purpose, the provincial capitals might be allowed to send two deputies, while Paris might send four. But in the District Assembly the deputies were not to be of the same dignity; their rank was to be determined by the number of votes that they represented.
In the first meeting the District Assembly was to elect a president, a recorder, and finally a deputy for the superior assembly of the province. The term of office for all three was to be one year. As it would be enough for the District Assembly to meet only once a year, for eight days, or at most twice, for twelve days altogether, the three District officials would be responsible most of the time for facilitating communication between the various village or urban municipalities and between the municipalities of different degrees.
The first function of the District meeting was to determine the ranks of the various members. Precedence was to be given to the deputy representing the largest number of votes, for the number of votes indicated the strength and the revenue of a parish or town. The member representing the weakest and poorest parish would rank lowest. The rest of the members would be arranged between these two according to the principle of strict equity. This rather delicate and complicated task was to be accomplished by each member depositing with the recorder a duplicate copy of the parish or town register. There was no danger of fraud, thought Turgot, for fraud would mean a un-amimous decision on the part of the Village or Town Assembly to deceive their neighboring parishes——an extremely unlikely occurrence.
After this process of ranking the members, the assembly was to decide the amount of taxes that each member was to contribute for the entire district, depending upon the relative amount of wealth of each. This, of course, was only a simply matter of arithmetical computation. Such preliminaries over, members might then propose the construction of public works, which were to be accepted or rejected by the assembly by plurality vote. If the proposed measure concerned the whole province in which the District was situated, then the assembly was to decide whether its deputy was to refer it to the provincial assembly.
Finally, the assembly should vote assistance to parishes afflicted by the scourges of Nature, such as hailstorm, flood, fire, etc. The deputy of the afflicted parish or town might propose a measure of relief, and the proposal was to be decided by plurality vote. But in the discussions and voting the member who had made the proposal could not take any part, for he was now not a judge, but only a humble supplicant, petitioning for mercy and relief. If the damage should happen to be so great as to be beyond the relief capacity of the district, then the assembly might decide to ask for the assistance of the provincial assembly.
The session of the district assembly was to last eight days, during which time the parishes or towns should pay for the expenses of their respective deputies. As the business of a district was very simple, eight days was, or at least should be, quite enough for its transaction. If the deputies were incompetent or quarrelsome and prolonged the meeting beyond the eight-day limit, then they had only themselves to blame and should pay their own way for the luxury of the extra day or days of the session.
The final meeting of the session should be devoted to the election of the deputy to the provincial assembly. He was given instructions as to what he was to do and propose in the higher assembly. A duplicate of the registers of the member——parishes of the district assembly was also put in his hands, to be carried with him to the provincial assembly.
The district municipalities should be under the jurisdiction, in turn, of provincial municipalities, composed of deputies appointed by the district assemblies. These assemblies of the third degree were to look after the public works and common interests of the province and to succor the calamities that exceeded the powers of the districts. In the provincial assembly the members were also ranked, in this case according to the number of parishes that formed the district of which a particular member was deputy. In general this would serve as a pretty accurate index of the population and economic status of a district. But in special instances, the number of individual voters was also to be taken into consideration.
If a proposed public measure concerned more than one province, or if some calamity should occur that was beyond the capacity of the province to ameliorate, then the deputy of the province, elected by the provincial assembly, was to put the question before the National Assembly.
The provincial assembly was to have two sessions a year. In the first session, to last three weeks, the ranking of the members, public works and measures of relief were to form the program. The deputy to the National Assembly was also to be elected during this first session. After the session of the National Assembly and when the deputy of the province had returned, then the provincial assembly was to have its second session, to last eight days, when it would portion out the taxes to be paid by each member-district. During both sessions the expenses of the deputies were to be defrayed by their respective constituencies.
Finally, above all these minor assemblies there was to stand the Grand Municipality, the Royal Municipality, or the General Municipality of the Realm. Each provincial assembly was to send one deputy to this Grand Assembly. The duties of this supreme body were to distribute the assessment of taxes among the provinces (with the provincial registers as a basis), to decide upon public works of general interest, to relieve provinces visited by unusual misfortunes, and to engage in enterprises that the penury of a province did not permit it to perform.
In this highest body of the hierarchy the ministers should have a seat and voice. The monarch, at his good pleasure, might attend it and take an active part in it. At the opening of the session the King was to give notice, either in person or through the minister of finance, of the sums he would need for national expenses, and of the necessary and desirable public works. The assembly was a liberty to add such other works or expenses as it might desire, but it could not refuse any of the King's demands. However, the assembly might express its wishes and opinions on any and whatever subject. The session was to last six weeks, with expenses paid by the provincial constituencies.
Through the National Assembly, the King would get a complete and reliable cadastre or register of the survey of lands. Every member in the vilage assembly having declared his or his constituency's landholdings, it practically meant that every inch of cultivated land in France had been declared and put on the register. Both on account of the honor involved and the mutual checking among the members who all intimately knew each other and each other's conditions, there could hardly be the possibility of any false declaration. A copy of this village register would be carried to the District Assembly by the village delegate. The District Assembly would collect all the local registers and make a duplicate copy for the District delegate to bring with him to the Provincial Assembly. Similarly, the Provincial delegates would carry the Provincial registers to the National Assembly, which would have before its eyes a complete record of the real estate of the country, from which the strength and weakness of a Province could be immediately known and the apportionment of the national taxes would be based on this exact knowledge. In a similar way, the Provincial Assembly would apportion the taxes among the component Districts, and the District Assembly the component villages and towns. And these local bodies would determine the taxes that each individual citizen was to pay. The systematic logicality of the procedure is comparable only to its incredible simplicity. But it would have to be tried in order to determine whether it could work.
The most notable feature of this grand scheme of Municipalities is its provision of mutual assistance on a national but graduated scale. A man who found himself out of work or visited by misfortune should apply to his friends and relatives for assistance. Only when these had done all that was possible might they apply to the public, i.e., the village or town municipality, which, in turn, might call upon the district assembly, and so on till the National Assembly was reached and appealed to as a last resort. In other words, Turgot would create ties in the form of municipalities of various degrees to link the nation into a unified whole. Thus Turgot was the author, the first conceiver, of the idea of a nation animated everywhere by a uniform impulse, with public life awakened and with a mutual assistance that would serve to preserve in the poor the dignity of the man and the citizen, for what the scheme proposed was not charity, but mutual help, collectively given. Such a scheme, undoubtedly, would give rise to a true solidarity and social fraternity. Further, the scheme in its broader aspects was a combination of federalism and unity, thus avoiding the bureaucratic concentration which was stifling and which to a certain extent still stifles France. Under the ancien regime the people enjoyed no right of self-government. Administration, finance, justice, all were in the hands of the sub-delegates of the Intendant, the tax-collectors, and to a certain extent the local nobility. Practically all orders came directly or indirectly out of Paris or Versailles. Such an excessive centralization of authority made for inefficiency in administration and apathy on the part of the people. There was unity, but it was unity at a heavy cost. It was more a dead and deadening uniformity than unity. Turgot would like to preserve this unitary character, but he proposed to give life to the apathetic people by a graduated system of federation. The people of a village or town were to fraternize in the local assembly; a number of local assemblies were to federate, through delegates, into a District Assembly; the District Assemblies would be federated into the Provincial Assembly, until finally the whole hierarchy culminated in the National Assembly. The uniformity of the system throughout the country and the National Assembly would serve to preserve all the good points of the centralized unity under the ancien regime, while the federative character and free spirit pervading the whole new administrative organism would develop initiative and a common sentiment of brotherhood among the entire people. The communes were at once independent in their private affairs and firmly allied to the State in an ascending scale with respect to common public interests. The government, relieved of unnecessary administrative details, would have the time and energy to take long and broad views and put forth wise legislation.
If this was the most notable feature of the scheme, then the absence of any mention of the power of deliberation was its most surprizing omission. None of the assemblies, not even the National Assembly, had the power of legislation, the right of remonstrance or of opposition. They might make proposals which, however, the King might accept or reject as he saw fit. In fact, the King might act independently, totally ignoring the proposals on the part of the National Assembly. Turgot believed in a unitary State. He expressed his idea rather whimsically by saying that these assemblies:
Auraient tous les avantages des assemblées des états et n'auraient aucun de leurs inconvenients, ni la confusion, ni les intrigues, ni l'esprit de corps, ni les animosités et les préjugés d'ordre à ordre. (Would have all the advantages of state assemblies and none of their inconveniences, neither the confusion, nor the intrigues, nor the esprit de corps, nor the animosities and prejudices from one order to another.)
In a word, they were the elective councils, chosen by varying degrees of balloting, invested with administrative attributes without any right of participating in the functions of the Central Government. The purpose of Turgot was to give France a constitution that, on the one hand, would permit the public will to manifest itself in an effective manner and, at the same time, would still assemble in the hands of the King all power, so that the nation could be both centrally and efficiently directed and controlled.
By this semi-democratic scheme of municipalities the royal authority was by no means constrained; it only became enlightened, buiged by reason and benevolence, but by right still as Absolute as ever. The King would still be the supreme legislator and supreme executive. In legislation he had neither rival nor partner. In administration, he had the Municipalities as assistants; but they by no means detracted the King of any of his executive authority. Turgot did not believe in the principle of the balance of powers, despite the eloquent pleading of Montesquieu. When the newly independent American States accepted the thesis of the Esprit des Lois, Turgot wrote to Dr. Price and called it a slavish imitation of the English system:
Je vois, dans le plus grand nombre, l'imitation sans objet des usages de l'Angleterre. Au lieu de ramener toutes les autorités à une seule, celle de la nation, l'on établit des corps differents, un corps de representants, un conseil, un gouverneur, parce que 1'Angleterre a une Chambre des Communes, une Chambre haute et un roi. On s'oc-cupe à balancer ces differents pouvoirs: comme si cet équilibre de forces, qu'on a pu croire necessaire pour balancer 1'énorme prépondérance de la royauté, pouvait etre de quelque usage dans les républiques fondées sur l'égalité de tous les citoyens; et comme si tout ce qui établit differents corps n'était pas une source de divisions! (I see, in the vast majority, the aimless imitation of English customs. Instead of reducing all authorities to a single one, that of the nation, different bodies are established——a body of representatives, a council, a governor——because England has a House of Commons, an upper house, and a king. People occupy themselves with balancing these different powers, as if this balance of forces, which one might consider necessary to counter the enormous predominance of the monarchy, could be of any use in republics founded on the equality of all citizens; and as if everything that establishes different bodies were not a source of divisions!）
From this strong declaration of principle, it is clear why Turgot never proposed to call the States General, but substituted the Municipalities for them. If he did not want legislative obstruction of the royal authority, no more did he like judicial meddling. He was in hearty support of the dismissal of the Parlements in 1771 and accepted a position in the new and obedient Parlements. Of course, the old Parlements' obscurantism was sufficient ground for Turgot's opposition to them. But another reason for Turgot's attitude can be found in his inclination toward centralization of authority. So in commenting on the dismissal of the Parlements, he said:
la négative absolue qu'ils voudraient s' arroger dans le Gouvernement est une chose absurd en ellememe et avec laquelle aucun gouvernement ne peut subsister.（The absolute negative that they would like to arrogate to themselves in the Government is an absurd thing in itself and one with which no government can endure.）
It is obvious why Turgot opposed the recall of these Parlements, 1774. And, as Du Pont remarked in 1787, Turgot would have liked to create a hierarchy of courts paralleling the Municipalities, thus checking if not automatically obliterating the Parlements. Unfortunately, Du Pont failed to enlighten us with Turgot's exact proposals on this subject.
Such were the main features and the general character of the Constitution that Turgot would give to France for the mutual benefit of the nation and the monarchy. Now, where did he get his ideas? He certainly had not copied them from anybody, for nobody before or during his time had any notion of such a scheme of government. Turgot, well-read man and encyclopedist that he was, must have studied the constitutions of various European states, especially England. He must have read The Spirit of Laws and Locke's Treatise on Civil Government. But his reaction to these books was entirely negative, so far as the central theme of the balance of power is concerned. While the spirit pervading the scheme, the spirit of Enlightened Despotism, was neither new nor unique, the mechanism or machinery was certainly a piece of creative work, perhaps Turgot's only piece of such work besides his rather original philosophy of history. It has its shortcomings, notably its Physiocratic bias. But it must be noted that in so far as Turgot gave the urban districts an equal status with the rural, he was violating the central dogma of Physiocratic orthodoxy. The scheme as a whole was one that might have been tried with advantage. Its success would of course have been extremely problematical. Even supposing that it could have been successfully launched (which was very unlikely in view of the well-known attitude of Privilege), the nobility and the clergy would perhaps have wrecked it before it could have had a fair trial.