Seldom have historians asked themselves why Americans would want to stay out of foreign wars. In 1940 Americans knew that the last time the subject came up was during the 1916 election, when President Woodrow Wilson vowed to keep America out of World War I. He won the election and the following year persuaded Congress to enter what he claimed was “the war to end all wars” so he could “make the world safe for democracy.” Instead the peace treaty triggered the bitter nationalist reaction that generated political support for Adolf Hitler’s totalitarian movement. Clearly those who wanted America to enter foreign wars were utterly unable to anticipate the horrifying consequences. Thus in 1940-41 many Americans wanted nothing to do with the wars in Europe and Asia.

FDR figured that if he could provoke the Japanese to attack the United States, the American public would support a declaration of war against Japan. Since Japan was allied with Germany, a war with Japan would bring America into the war against Germany. FDR was anxious to help his beleaguered British friends, even though most Americans wanted to remain at peace.

Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits of Infamy is a suspenseful detective story of that behind-the-scenes political scheming. The initial draft of the book was written by Percy L. Greaves, Jr., who served as chief of staff to the Republicans on the Joint Congressional Committee, which investigated Pearl Harbor in 1945-46. Greaves combed through countless documents and interviewed all the major (and many minor) figures involved. He continued to investigate for many years afterward, finding key pieces of evidence overlooked by everyone else. After he died in 1984, his wife, longtime FEE staffer Bettina Bien Greaves, spent more than two decades turning the manuscript into a monumental scholarly achievement.

Pearl Harbor is among the most provocative mysteries in American history. In Greaves’s account FDR appears as the grand puppeteer manipulating events—even when this meant sacrificing American lives. While the Japanese bombing is almost universally described as an outrageous surprise attack, the book presents considerable evidence that it wasn’t much of a surprise to FDR. Although he probably didn’t know for sure where or when the Japanese would attack, he had many reasons to expect they would, and Pearl Harbor was a good bet to be the target.

As the book documents, in January 1940 the U.S. government began blocking exports to Japan, including strategic minerals, iron, steel scrap, and petroleum products like gasoline. Since the Japanese weren’t willing to abandon their ambitions for conquest in Asia, it should not have been surprising that they would attempt to retaliate against the United States. In fact, when questioned by his wife, Eleanor, about his economic policies toward Japan, Roosevelt admitted that they were driving the two countries toward conflict.

Moreover, in 1940 American cryptographers cracked the top Japanese diplomatic code—known as “Purple”—used to transmit messages. That enabled U.S. officials to learn a great deal about what the Japanese government was planning. Much of the intrigue and suspense in the book involves the interception and decoding of Japanese diplomatic messages. The research done by Percy Greaves demolishes the idea, long cultivated by FDR’s followers, that the attack on Pearl Harbor took the President and his military advisers completely by surprise.

What had FDR and his advisers known—and when? After reading the book it seems beyond question that the administration knew late on December 6 that a Japanese attack was imminent, with Pearl Harbor a likely target, and yet no one took immediate action to warn the endangered base. The two Hawaiian commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, were scapegoated to hide the administration’s incompetence and duplicity. After rigging a hasty “investigation” that declared Kimmel and Short derelict in their duty, the military engaged in a cover-up. Evidence was tampered with. Officers were pressured to have convenient “memory lapses” under questioning from counsel for Kimmel and Short. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall (famed for the postwar Marshall Plan) comes off looking especially bad in the book’s recounting of events.

The book has two important lessons for today. One is that using duplicity to enter foreign wars is likely to backfire with terrible consequences for the ordinary people of a nation. The other is that politicians will stop at almost nothing to make themselves appear great and heroic. I recommend this book highly.

The most popular big-government programs–like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid–are going broke. These entitlements account for more than half of annual federal spending. In 2009, spending on all federal entitlements exceeded all federal tax revenue. As Cato Institute economist Richard W. Rahn explained, this means “virtually all of the other government spending programs, including defense and interest payments on the debt, will be funded by more borrowing.”

The escalation of spending for the entitlements is politically unstoppable because they’re defended by powerful interest groups that benefit from them. These and other federal programs–guarantees for home mortgages, commercial bank deposits, credit union deposits, veterans benefits, import/export deals, student loans, and private and government-employee pension benefits–involve financial commitments that currently exceed $70 trillion. In addition, more than $12 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt is outstanding, much of which is held by Chinese and other foreign investors. Incredibly, President Barack Obama’s administration risked a trade war with China by blocking Chinese imports, a political payoff for labor unions that had supported Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, even though such action could complicate U.S. efforts to continue selling its debt.

For years, the government has spent more money than it has had. It’s constantly going deeper into debt.

In spending all this money, members of Congress commonly don’t read the bills they vote on. They keep passing more laws even though they have limited understanding of the effects of previous laws. Many laws are so complicated–over a thousand pages–that government officials themselves are among the most notorious violators. Government is bigger than anything else in our society and far more complicated than the derivatives and other toxic bank assets nobody knew how to value after the financial meltdown of 2008. Managing the federal government well is beyond the capability of any human being. It’s beyond the capability of the 535 members of Congress. It’s too big to succeed.

You Need a Form for That Form

One thing the federal government does as it gets bigger is require people to fill out more bureaucratic forms. In 1978 Congress passed the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, when it was estimated that people spent almost a billion hours a year filling out federal forms. Not surprisingly, a new federal bureaucracy–the General Services Administration’s Forms Policy and Management Team–was established just to deal with federal forms. Creating, changing, or eliminating a form requires that somebody fill out a two-page SF152 form with 27 questions. For those who might have difficulty filling out the form, the government produced a 23-page booklet explaining how. Unfortunately, things don’t seem to have been going well with the Forms Policy and Management Team. Now it’s estimated that people spend about ten billion hours a year filling out some 8,000 different federal forms. Both political parties are responsible for the colossal waste of time that could have been used to create more growth and jobs. Republicans reportedly have excelled at multiplying the number of defense-related forms. Democrats have excelled at forms related to social spending. Obama’s so-called stimulus bill authorized bureaucrats to churn out still more forms in an effort to determine where all the money went.

Taxing Forms

Perhaps the most aggravating forms have to do with taxes. The tax code has become hideously complex, a consequence of trying to extract trillions of dollars for social and military spending and trying to do good through thousands of different tax breaks. Lindy L. Paull, who served as chief of staff for the Joint Committee on Taxation, told the Senate Finance Committee: “The Internal Revenue Code consists of nearly 1.4 million words and includes 693 separate sections that impact individual taxpayers. The Treasury Department has issued some 20,000 pages of regulations containing over 8 million words. Individual taxpayers who file an annual Form 1040 must deal with its 79 lines, 144 pages of instructions and 11 schedules totaling 443 lines plus instructions to go with them. There are 19 separate worksheets embedded in the Form 1040 instructions, and the possibility of filing numerous other forms, depending on the circumstances.”

The U.S. Treasury has estimated that individuals, employers, and nonprofits spend more than six billion hours a year dealing with their taxes. This is the equivalent of full-time work by 2.8 million people–more people than are employed in the auto-manufacturing, petroleum-refining, electric-power generation, computer-hardware, computer-software, pharmaceutical, medical-devices, steel, and chemical industries combined. In addition to the cost of this time is the money spent for tax-planning and tax-accounting services, not counting the taxes themselves. All this is a stupendous waste of resources that would be better spent adding value to the economy.

Bloated Mass of Contradictions

Big government is a bloated mass of contradictions that often have unexpected, harmful consequences. Politicians scold citizens for consuming too much sugar, but the government provides subsidies for producing high-fructose corn syrup that’s widely used in sodas, cookies, and other sweets. Government subsidizes farmers for growing crops and no crops at all. Government subsidizes homeownership and restricts the number of homes that can be built. Officials criticize business executives who take on too much debt, but government encourages debt by providing tax deductions for interest (but not for equity capital), and of course the government itself is deeper in debt than anybody else. Officials complain that companies invest so much money overseas, but the government imposes a 35 percent tax on earnings brought back to the United States. Officials bemoan our dependence on foreign oil, while restricting U.S. oil drilling. Businesses can be prosecuted for “predatory price cutting” if they charge too little, “price gouging” if they charge too much, and “price fixing” if they charge the same as their competitors. By providing billions of dollars of federal aid for attending college, the government subsidizes demand, which has had the effect of making college more expensive and more difficult to pay for than it otherwise would be. Officials promote the virtues of small, high-mileage cars, and they enforce laws that make it almost impossible to produce such cars profitably in the United States. There are laws that make it more difficult for employers to hire people and laws that provide income for the unemployed. Officials encourage more couples to get married, but there are higher taxes on married people than on single people, providing incentives not to get married. Officials say they want more doctors while enforcing laws that limit the number of students who can enter medical schools. Government probably does more than anyone else to cause health care inflation by channeling about a trillion dollars a year into that sector, enabling people to bid up prices–and then the government tries to limit health care price increases with rationing, such as excluding more treatments from Medicare.

Mismanaging the Economy

Politicians expanded the power of the federal government to watch over the economy, but this has backfired badly. President Woodrow Wilson and Congress established the Federal Reserve System to prevent economic catastrophes. After inflating, misguided Fed officials tried to limit what they viewed as excesses of the Roaring Twenties stock market boom, but they overplayed their hand and triggered the 1929 crash. Not realizing what they had done, they presided over a severe monetary contraction, a major cause of the Great Depression. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the 1935 Banking Act to centralize power at the Fed, and officials there soon stumbled again, doing much to bring on the depression within a depression of 1938. In 2002 Ben S. Bernanke, a governor of the Federal Reserve Board before becoming chairman, acknowledged the Fed’s role in the Great Depression: “We did it. We’re very sorry. We won’t do it again.”

Unfortunately, in the early years of this decade, Fed officials stumbled yet again. They promoted an easy money policy that had the effect of subsidizing borrowing. The apparent intention was to make sure the economy fully recovered from the dot-com crash of 2000, but in the process they encouraged individuals and businesses to load up on debt, contributing to the bubble that burst in 2008.

Nobody has a crystal ball, certainly not Fed officials. They’re always trying to make sense of conflicting and incomplete data. Naturally they focus on avoiding the mistakes made the last time around. They can’t be sure what the effects of their policies will be in the future because it takes many months for them to play out through a large and complex economy. By the time Fed officials realize they have accelerated monetary expansion for too long, they’re tempted to hit the brakes too hard, jolting the economy with a more severe recession. Fed officials are human and bound to make errors. Their vast power means that when errors occur they will harm not just a city or state or region. They will harm the entire country and beyond. Disastrous errors are an unavoidable risk of big government, which turns out to be a principal source of instability in our economy.

Government: Bad Business

We have been told that only government has enough resources to make our economy work, but it’s too big to succeed. There’s long experience with government-run businesses that don’t work. They cannot control costs. When President Richard Nixon launched the government-run Amtrak passenger railroad system in 1970, he promised it would be profitable. Since then, however, it has hit taxpayers with 40 consecutive years (and counting) of losses amid soaring costs. Perhaps the most notorious government-run enterprise is the U.S. Postal Service, with its bloated workforce of some 800,000 unionized employees, declining mail volume, slower service, rising postal rates, annual losses in the billions, and some $15 billion of debt.

Defense Department weapons development programs often run more than 70 percent over budget. The Government Accountability Office reported that the Defense Department “is not receiving expected returns on its investment in weapon systems. Our analysis does not show any improvements in acquisition outcomes as programs continue to experience increased costs and delays.”

New York City’s government-run betting parlors gross nearly $1 billion a year but lose money and are more than $40 million in debt. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called it “the world’s only bookie that loses money.” Burdened by costly contracts with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the Washington State Liquor Control Board has struggled to avoid losses by enforcing a state-run liquor store monopoly that extorts above-market prices for booze–”price-gouging,” as the practice is known. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, which also enforces a state monopoly, has found it necessary to pay a consulting firm $173,000 to give its sullen employees smiling lessons.

Letting the Poachers Run the Zoo

One has to wonder about Obama as he struggles for more power over the economy, since the government has had trouble running a zoo. Donald K. Nichols, a pathologist at the National Zoological Park in Washington, reported that “because of incompetence in management and veterinary medicine, the operations of the National Zoo have been in such a state of disarray that it has led to poor animal care, animal suffering, and even animal deaths.”

Again and again hopes for big government turn out to be illusions. Reuters reported, “Within weeks of taking office, Obama rode to the rescue of homeowners resigned to financial ruin. Eight months later, the plan is plagued by delays and red tape. Just 17 percent of eligible borrowers have had their loans modified and monthly payments cut.” Obama promoted the Cash for Clunkers program that promised to repay auto dealers who gave consumers $4,500 for their trade-ins, but the federal government proved to be a notoriously slow payer, making it harder for cash-squeezed dealers to survive. Car sales dropped after the program ended.  And of course Obama promoted government-run health insurance for all, even though government-run medical facilities have been rocked by scandals. Veterans have had to wait as long as 200 days for an appointment with a Veterans Administration doctor. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that mortality for heart surgery patients was significantly higher at VA hospitals than at private hospitals. In 2009 the VA notified more than 11,000 veterans in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee that they might have been exposed to HIV or hepatitis because of unsterilized equipment used for colonoscopies. Apparently VA employees sterilized equipment once a day rather than after each procedure! The result, of course, has been a flurry of lawsuits from veterans who claim they were infected by dirty equipment. In another scandal the VA agreed to a $20 million settlement because its sloppy security procedures jeopardized the confidentiality of medical records for more than 26 million veterans.

The more money government spends, the more it wastes. Politicians spend other people’s money, and it’s no secret that no one is as careful with other people’s money as he is with his own. Medicaid was started in 1965 to provide medical care for poor people, and spending skyrocketed. It reached $1 billion within a year, $6 billion in five years, and exceeds $300 billion annually now, but often the money doesn’t seem to buy very much. New York State has the most costly Medicaid program, yet a quarter of the most needy patients with chronic illnesses must wait a year to see a doctor, and two-thirds of these people end up in an emergency room. Overall, tens of billions of dollars of Medicaid funds are believed to be lost each year because of fraud that government employees seem unable or unwilling to stop. Some Medicaid doctors submit bills suggesting that they work as much as 24 hours a day. Medicaid has paid the cost of prescribing drugs for dead people. When fraud is discovered, government employees can’t be counted on to recover much. An Ohio Medicaid enforcement agency accepted $409 to settle a $500,000 overbilling case that involved an ambulance service. The same agency accepted a $155,000 settlement from speech therapy centers that had improperly billed Medicaid for $3.4 million. A Florida Medicaid enforcement agency didn’t know what happened to $133,000 in fines it claimed to have collected from various violators.

In an effort to enhance their prospects for reelection, members of Congress spend other people’s money on all kinds of crazy things that might appeal to key constituents. For instance: $1.7 million for research to find out why pigs smell; $800,000 for oyster rehabilitation in Mobile, Alabama; $7 million for Hawaiian sea turtles; $400,000 for the American Treasures Program, to save the Iowa home of cosmetics pioneer Carl Weeks; $238,000 for the Polynesian Voyaging Society; $1.9 million for the Pleasure Beach water taxi service; $4.8 million for various research projects about wood, including one on “the technology for laminated veneer lumber”; $1.35 million for the Obesity in the Military Research Program; $500,000 for the Sparta Teapot Museum; $1 million for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative; and $13.5 million for the International Fund for Ireland, which financed the World Toilet Summit. There are about 10,000 such wasteful projects in each federal budget. None of them serve the general interest.

Political power tends to corrupt. As long as trillions of dollars flow through the federal government every year, corruption will flow like the mighty Amazon. There are some 35,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, and the Washington Post reports that “half the former members of Congress are lobbyists.” Entertainment industry lobbyist Hilary Rosen spoke candidly about influence peddling: “When I gave $1,000 or $2,000 to a lawmaker, I wanted him to listen to my business proposition. And when I helped organize an event that raised $50,000 or $100,000, you bet I expected their vote. Why else do it? Members of Congress are consumed with raising money for their re-elections (or if they have a safe seat, they raise money to give to colleagues to increase their internal power). Anyone, including lobbyists, who lessens that anxiety, is considered a better friend than those who don’t. No lobbying reforms will change that fact.”

Duke Cunningham, a Republican congressman from California and a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, was among those who cashed in until he was caught. He accepted $2.3 million in bribes to help win more than $230 million of defense contracts for his pals.

Someday, perhaps sooner than we think, people will contemplate the wreckage of big government and wonder what ever gave anybody the idea that it could possibly be our salvation.

This new biography of Herbert Hoover is a prelude to the morality tale that Leuchtenburg has already presented—namely, the heroic New Deal narrative. According to Leuchtenburg, the 1920s were a failure, and the worst failure was Herbert Hoover. He was a “heartless” man, a “dogmatic reactionary,” “a right winger of deepest dye” who preached “minimalist” government. Hoover wouldn’t spend enough money on relief because of his unwarranted “faith in voluntarism.”

Yet Leuchtenburg provides evidence aplenty that Hoover wasn’t quite the laissez-faire champion he has been made out to be. While criticizing Hoover for wanting to balance the federal budget, Leuchtenburg acknowledges that Hoover “was running a historic deficit—nearly a billion dollars.” Leuchtenburg mentions how Hoover’s Grain Stabilization Corporation tried to help farmers by purchasing agricultural commodities at above-market prices, only to find that farmers responded by producing more. Overwhelmed with unwanted surpluses, the Corporation dumped these commodities on the market, driving farm prices even lower than they had been before. Furthermore, Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation bailed out banks, railroads, insurance companies, and building and loan associations, but still the depression deepened. In 1932 Hoover signed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, giving labor unions immunity from antitrust laws, private lawsuits for damages, and injunctions from federal courts, which enabled union bosses to push aggressively for monopoly bargaining power and forced dues.

I would agree with Leuchtenburg that two of Hoover’s biggest blunders were signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 and tax hikes in 1932. The problem is that it’s impossible to square all of this federal activism with the notion that Hoover believed in “minimalist” government.

Nor does Leuchtenburg comment on the striking similarity between the policies of his demon Hoover and his hero FDR. Hoover and FDR both raised taxes. Both spent money on public works that didn’t provide many jobs for unskilled people. Hoover signed the trade-stifling tariff. FDR effectively embraced it; he never spent any of his formidable political capital trying to repeal it, which he might have been able to do soon after he was sworn in, when a desperate nation was at his feet waiting for leadership and inspiration. Powerful protectionist interest groups would have opposed FDR, but he had an appealing personality and formidable communications skills, and was a political genius. I think he could have exploited the deep resentment against Hoover to eliminate his monstrous tariffs and taxes, providing a much-needed stimulus for the economy. Apparently, he was content with Hoover’s anti-trade policy.

FDR, like Hoover, spent much effort trying to prop up wages and prices. This prevented markets from fully adjusting to the severe contraction. Maintaining above-market prices discouraged consumers from buying, and above-market wages discouraged employers from hiring. Also, like Hoover, FDR expanded the power of labor bosses (especially with the 1935 National Labor Relations Act). Unemployment dragged on under Hoover, and it dragged on even longer under FDR—until 1940, when the government began mobilizing for World War II and conscripting young men.

These striking similarities create more than a few problems for the heroic New Deal narrative. If Hoover was bad and FDR was good, then why did FDR adopt Hoover’s major policies? If Hoover’s policies were a reason that high unemployment dragged on for three years of his presidency, then why weren’t FDR’s policies a reason that high unemployment dragged on for seven years of his presidency? If Hoover is viewed as having failed to get America out of the Great Depression, why shouldn’t FDR similarly be viewed as having failed to get America out of it? The main difference between Hoover and FDR might be that FDR went on to win World War II, and probably many people ignore or forgive his depression-era bungling because of that.

The key to Hoover’s and FDR’s failures during the Great Depression was their “progressive” ideas. Both men grew up on those ideas and took them to heart when they served in Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration. The depressing thing about this book is that instead of debunking the myth that Hoover and FDR were philosophical opponents, it attempts to keep it alive.

Yet promoters of big government have long recognized TR as one of their own.

Biographer Frank Freidel wrote that “While at Groton [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] first fell under the spell of his remote cousin Theodore Roosevelt. . . . Theodore Roosevelt believed in using to the utmost the constitutional power of the president. . . . This strong use of government was for the most part appealing to Franklin.” During the Great Depression, FDR promoted “a program emphasizing national planning in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.” Freidel noted that “in words reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR declared ‘the duty rests upon the Government to restrict incomes by very high taxes.’”

Historian Eric F. Goldman said that Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously launched huge domestic entitlement spending programs and escalated the undeclared Vietnam War, admired “the hyperactive White House of Theodore Roosevelt.” LBJ reportedly remarked, “Whenever I pictured Teddy Roosevelt, I saw him running or riding, always moving, his fists clenched, his eyes glaring, speaking out.”

Richard M. Nixon, who dramatically expanded federal regulation of the economy, liked Theodore Roosevelt “because of his great dynamic drive and ability to mobilize a young country.”

In recent years, influential Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and John McCain have gushed with admiration for TR.

For starters, TR reinterpreted the Constitution to permit a vast expansion of executive power. “Congress, he felt, must obey the president,” noted biographer Henry Pringle. Roosevelt wanted the Supreme Court to obey him too. TR ushered in the practice of ruling by executive order, bypassing the congressional process. From Lincoln to TR’s predecessor William McKinley, there were 158 executive orders. TR, during his seven years in office, issued 1,007. He ranks third, behind fellow “progressives” Woodrow Wilson (1,791) and Franklin Roosevelt (3,723) in that category.

Unintended Consequences of Foreign Wars

Theodore Roosevelt, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, believed that “we should regard with contempt and loathing the Americans . . . crying on behalf of peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace.” He warned against “the Menace of Peace.”

When, in 1892, there was a dispute with Chile, he urged an invasion. As a lieutenant-colonel with his Rough Riders, on a ship bound for Cuba, he wrote Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: “You must get Manila and Hawaii; you must prevent any talk of peace until we get Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well as secure the independence of Cuba.”

TR relished the prospect of war with Canada. In 1895, he wrote Lodge: “I don’t care whether our sea coast cities are bombarded or not, we would take Canada.” In a letter to his brother-in-law Will Cowles, Roosevelt said that the U.S. army would “have to employ a lot of men just as green as I am for the conquest of Canada.”

As president, Roosevelt reversed the traditional U. S. foreign policy of refraining from intervention in the affairs of other nations. Intervention had been the exception, but he began to make it the rule.

TR promoted a big navy not to defend the country from a specific threat—since there wasn’t any threat—but to be a tool for an expansionist foreign policy. “The primary concern of Roosevelt and his fellow-expansionists,” observed historian Howard K. Beale, “was power and prestige and the naval strength that would bring power and prestige.”

TR’s most controversial intervention involved the seizure of the Isthmus of Panama, which had belonged to Colombia. He resolved to build a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans so the U.S. navy could be more easily mobilized in either ocean. Historian David McCullough observed that “Roosevelt’s haste, his refusal—his inability—to see the Colombian position on the treaty as anything other than a ‘holdup,’ were tragically mistaken and inexcusable.” Is it prudent to have a U.S. president who seizes foreign territory when convenient?

TR’s other interventions—in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua—were small by later standards, aimed mainly at helping European investors collect debts from deadbeat Latin American dictators so that European governments wouldn’t establish a military presence in the Western Hemisphere. But his aggressive advocacy of intervention undoubtedly made his successors feel more comfortable about entering foreign wars, which have killed Americans when the United States wasn’t under attack, triggered nationalist reactions that supported dictators, and multiplied the number of foreign enemies, complicating efforts to maintain our national security.

TR’s “Conservation” Subsidies

Roosevelt backed schemes that helped western-state politicians gain more clout. State-subsidized irrigation projects before TR aimed at attracting farmers who would try to grow crops in western deserts, but all these projects lost money. Roosevelt thought this experience didn’t apply to him, and in the name of “reclamation” he decided that the federal government should promote desert farming.

Hence the Reclamation Act of 1902. Every western senator and congressman scrambled to get on board for a subsidized reclamation project. Nevada Senator Francis Newlands, for example, was particularly anxious about his state’s declining population. To secure political backing, reclamation projects had to be spread around, and many locations didn’t make any sense. They guaranteed losses.

TR’s subsidized reclamation brought widespread financial ruin. Farmers who had no prior experience with irrigation overwatered their crops, their irrigation systems became clogged with silt, and they obligated themselves to pay for more acreage than they could handle. Many farmers quit, taxpayers were socked to cover the losses, and desert populations declined.

And despite TR’s reputation as a foe of private monopolies, he approved unfair government practices that squeezed out private dam builders and helped the Bureau of Reclamation gain a dam-building monopoly. The Bureau of Reclamation became a vast federal bureaucracy with some 600 dams and reservoirs in 17 western states.

It led to waste on a colossal scale. More water has been lost due to evaporation from reservoirs in hot deserts than has been needed for human consumption in major western cities. It has been estimated that every year perhaps a million acre-feet of water—enough to supply Los Angeles—are lost, seeping into Lake Powell’s canyon walls and evaporating in the desert sun.

Big-Government Bungling

Theodore Roosevelt challenged the prevailing American view that land-use decisions are best made by private individuals who have a stake in improving the value of their property. He throttled the privatization of land that had been going on for more than a century. In 1905 TR transferred millions of acres of government land from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture and established the U. S. Forest Service to manage it.

It’s because he substantially limited privatization that today national forests account for about 20 percent of the land in the 11 westernmost states of the lower 48. Altogether, the federal government controls about a third of the land in the United States.

The rationale for “national forests” was that America supposedly faced a “timber famine.” Gifford Pinchot, first head of the Forest Service, warned that America would run out of timber within 20 years. TR claimed that selfish private individuals were squandering America’s resources and only public-spirited federal bureaucrats could be counted on to manage them. Despite Pinchot’s claims about “scientific” forestry, the “timber famine” never happened.

Nor did Pinchot actually conserve much. Cattlemen overgrazed their herds on national forest lands precisely because it was common property. In effect, nobody owned it. If one person’s herds didn’t eat all the grass, somebody else’s herds would get it, so the incentive was to consume as much as possible. Similarly, nobody had an incentive to maintain the value of common property because the benefits might go to someone else.

TR enforced the “best” conservation policies throughout the country. Fire was considered bad for forests, so the Forest Service fought fires everywhere, and Smokey the Bear became famous. By suppressing fire for decades, deadwood built up and trees grew more densely. Moreover, Forest Service officials, in their alleged wisdom, ordered less logging, which accelerated the buildup of combustibles in national forests. Increasingly, instead of having many smaller fires to deal with, they faced huge conflagrations, which are harder to fight and more destructive.

Roosevelt used federal power to establish five national parks as well as 51 wildlife refuges and 150 national forests, yet they all seem to have suffered from inadequate maintenance at one time or another. For example, since TR thought parks were for big game, park rangers slaughtered wolves, cougars, and other predators. Soaring elk populations consumed so much vegetation that beavers disappeared. Park rangers closed garbage dumps where bears feasted, and as a result starving bears raided campgrounds. They were slaughtered, too. Parks have been polluted by poorly maintained sewage systems because their gate receipts went to Washington and they had difficulty competing with bigger government programs for funding. Hope Babcock, former general counsel of the National Audubon Society, lamented TR’s legacy: “Few would assert that the historical institutional paradigm for managing the nation’s public lands has protected the natural resource values of those lands.”

“Trust-Busting” That Suppressed Competition

The rationale for antitrust laws and TR’s “trust busting” was the idea that, left alone, a free market tends to develop monopolies and government intervention is required to maintain competition. There was more than a little hypocrisy in this since TR supported high tariffs, which helped politically connected business interests by suppressing competition and in the process ripped off American consumers far more than any monopoly. In fact, it had been said that the “tariff is the mother of the trusts.”

Nevertheless, Roosevelt demonized businessmen as “malefactors of great wealth,” a phrase later used by his cousin during his anti-business crusades. TR’s attorney general, Philander Knox, filed lawsuits to break up private companies, starting in 1902 with Northern Securities (a railroad holding company). The most famous antitrust lawsuits resulted in the breakup of American Tobacco Company and the Standard Oil Company in 1911, after Roosevelt left office.

Yet for more than two decades output had been expanding and prices had been falling in the American economy—the opposite of what one would expect with a lot of monopolies. Despite Roosevelt’s allegations about railroad monopolies (which were largely built with government subsidies), in the previous half-century railroad mileage in the United States had expanded more than 250-fold to 258,784 miles, and railroad rates were falling. Cheaper railroad rates undermined local monopolies by giving people the choice of buying economically priced goods from far away. Regardless, TR signed the Hepburn and Elkins acts, which strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s power to control competition by regulating railroad rates.

Historian Gabriel Kolko observed, “The dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this [twentieth] century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible competitive trends under control.” (Kolko went on to establish that the progressive “reforms of the early twentieth century were backed by big business as a way to restrain competition and protect market share.”)

Mounting evidence shows that monopolies are rare in free markets, as changing consumer tastes, changing business conditions, new technologies, and new competitors both foreign and domestic (when free) relentlessly challenge established companies. With very few exceptions, monopolies have persisted only when government has enforced barriers to entry that prevent new or old companies from competing in a market. Licenses, monopoly franchises, and trade restrictions are among the most common government-enforced barriers to entry.

Alarmed at the increasing size of major industrial corporations (which were often helped by tariffs and other kinds of privileges), many people didn’t seem to realize that markets were expanding even faster—corporations were increasingly serving national and international markets. John D. Rockefeller earned his fortune refining kerosene from western Pennsylvania oil, but rivals discovered oil fields in Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and California as well as overseas. New products like Thomas Edison’s electric lights attracted customers away from kerosene lamps, and Henry Ford’s cheap Model T cars needed gasoline, a petroleum product that enabled new oil companies to establish themselves. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil thrived because it was a low-cost competitor, investing in cost-cutting technology, yet so intense was the competition that its market share declined. There would have been more competition had TR focused on lowering tariffs and repealing corporate privileges, and refrained from attacking big discounters like Standard Oil.

It’s past time to evaluate Theodore Roosevelt and other progressives not according to their personalities and speeches, but according to their actions and consequences.

Moreover, as power is centralized, those further down the chain of command, who are nominally responsible for maintaining government assets, have less and less authority to do so. Since nobody really owns government assets, nobody has a personal stake in protecting their value. Consider a few cases.

Why Can’t Government Maintain New Orleans’s Levees?

The nearly half-million people of New Orleans wanted to live in their big bowl below sea level, and they entrusted politicians with the job of maintaining more than 125 miles of levees. These large walls, typically made of earth and/or stone, surrounded the city to keep out water from the Mississippi River (to the south and southeast of the city), Lake Borgne (to the east), Lake Pontchartrain (to the north), and various canals. Since water continuously leaked into the city, there were floodwalls, about 200 floodgates, plus pumps and drainage canals for additional protection.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. It crossed Florida on Thursday, August 25, 2005, as a Category 1 (weakest category) hurricane, then gathered strength as it reached the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wind velocities accelerated, and by Sunday, August 28, Katrina was a Category 5. It weakened somewhat to a Category 4 when it made landfall east of New Orleans the next day, with winds of up to 145 miles per hour. We all know what happened next.

But why did it happen? There seemed to be problems almost everywhere in New Orleans’s levee system. Dr. Peter Nicholson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Hawaii, headed a study of the levee failures on behalf of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He reported, “We found literally dozens of breaches throughout the many miles of levee system. A number of different failure mechanisms were observed.” Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, criticized the design and suggested that inadequate construction could also be an issue. Forensic teams that studied these levees generally agreed with the assessment.

Who was responsible for the failure of the levees?

They needed maintenance because everything needs maintenance and because each year the city was sinking about an inch deeper into the Mississippi River mud. Although New Orleans politicians’ most important job was public safety and the levees obviously affected public safety, politicians seemed to believe doing maintenance work–which would probably go unseen–wouldn’t serve their personal interests (especially getting reelected).

The state had established the New Orleans District Levee Board in 1890 to be responsible for maintaining the levees around the city. But the board members, a majority of whom are appointed by Louisiana’s governor, pursued their interests by expanding their power, gaining jurisdiction to develop properties around the levees. Board members spent time on such matters as licensing a casino, leasing space to a karate club, and operating an airport and marinas. The Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee reported, “A review of the levee-district board minutes of recent years revealed that the board and its various committees spent more time discussing its business operations than it did the flood-control system it was responsible for operating and maintaining.”

James P. Huey, who had been on the board for 13 years and served as its president for nine years, blamed the state legislature. He claimed that the board had to generate money from those time-consuming extraneous businesses because the state legislature had cut the board’s revenue in half. So even though members of the board knew that a levee in New Orleans East was three feet below its design height–which would affect its ability to withstand a storm surge and therefore jeopardized the people in the city–they didn’t get it fixed because they were squabbling about who would pay for it. The Army Corps of Engineers refused. The board wrote letters to their members of Congress asking Washington for money, but they were busy with other things. And the Flood Control Act, which Congress passed in 1965, sent a clear signal that the federal government would bail out people who wanted to live in flood-prone areas like New Orleans.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers handled design and construction of the levees, as it handled flood-control projects throughout the United States. But its budget consisted almost entirely of “earmarks,” assuring that appropriations would be spread around congressional districts. That gave incumbents something to brag about during their election campaigns. The problem was that spending a lot more money on New Orleans flood protection wasn’t the top priority for the state’s politicians. J. Bennett Johnston Jr., for example, when he was a Louisiana senator, secured appropriations for four new dams on the Red River between Mississippi and Shreveport, costing $2 billion.

Bottom line: Nobody in the city, state, or federal governments wanted responsibility for maintaining the levees.

Why Can’t Government Maintain Public Housing?

Because poor people tend to live in poor housing, many people thought it would be a good idea for government to build housing. This started during the New Deal and accelerated after World War II as the federal government subsidized municipalities. Public housing projects were given names–like Cochran Gardens, Maplewood Court, Henry Horner Homes, and Rockwell Gardens–that suggested they might be charming.

A guiding principle of the time was that housing projects should be massive. In part this reflected the influence of the Swiss-born architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris–later known as Le Corbusier–who urged during the 1920s that people be concentrated in big buildings consisting of cell-block apartments. The buildings were set pieces, surrounded by empty parks and separated from their neighborhoods. Bigness became a kind of architectural cult, embraced by Soviet mass murderer Joseph Stalin and others during the mid-twentieth century. Like so many Soviet buildings, U.S. housing projects tended to be big and ugly.

Consider the experience of the Chicago Housing Authority, the third-largest public-housing bureaucracy in the United States. It built a four-mile stretch of housing projects. Just one of them, the Robert Taylor Homes, included a couple dozen 16-story buildings containing 4,400 units altogether. It was reportedly the world’s largest housing project.

These monstrosities quickly deteriorated. “The buildings in its enormous family developments are literally crumbling,” reported housing analyst Susan J. Popkin in 2000. “They are relatively old; most construction occurred during the 1950s and early 1960s. The original materials were cheap and have not held up well over time. Further, the buildings are poorly designed, with exterior hallways and elevators that have proven extremely difficult to maintain.” The government couldn’t begin to take care of this development. Popkin went on, giving a litany of problems familiar to many residents of “the projects” across the country:

Because the hallways of the high-rises are covered with metal grates, the buildings look like prisons. Many apartments (and some entire buildings) are boarded up because their major systems–plumbing, heating, electrical–have failed. The grounds and hallways are often filled with refuse and reek of human waste. The buildings are infested with vermin, including rats, mice, roaches, and even feral cats. Lights in interior hallways, elevators, and stairwells are vandalized regularly, leaving these areas dark twenty-four hours a day. The buildings’ exteriors, halls, and stairwells are often covered with graffiti or, in the better-maintained developments, the evidence of the janitors’ attempts to paint over the mess.

Without constant vigilance it is nearly impossible to keep the units clean. In addition to the dirt that blows in from outdoors, it is not uncommon to see apartment walls literally crawling with roaches. Most apartments also have serious maintenance problems, owing to years of neglect and failed structural systems. For example, in some units, it is impossible to turn off the hot water in the bathrooms, so the walls now have severe moisture damage.

Despite spending millions of dollars on law enforcement in the housing projects, neither the federal government nor the city have been able to maintain public safety. Maintenance people were afraid to enter the housing projects, which contributed to their deterioration.

During the 1980s real estate developer Vincent Lane became chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority and ordered police to “sweep” through public housing projects, ejecting people who weren’t legitimate residents. But the American Civil Liberties Union challenged these sweeps, and evidently they were discontinued. Moreover, they were expensive–about $175,000 per building–and Lane became embroiled in conflict-of-interest scandals involving security service contracts. The Chicago Housing Authority had trouble securing enough funding for its operations, and by the 1990s it had ceased making major repairs.

The next short step was to demolish the disastrous housing projects. The last tower came down in 2007. The city of Chicago began building townhouses, some of which were sold to middle-income private buyers, while others were reserved for former tenants in the projects. Applicants were screened in an effort to avoid drug users or those with criminal records. But construction is likely to proceed slowly and accommodate a fraction of the people who had lived in the projects.

Perhaps the most notorious of all housing projects was Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, winner of a number of architectural awards and praise in Architectural Forum. Pruitt-Igoe included 33 11-story buildings on 57 acres in DeSoto-Carr, a poor section of the city. There were 2,870 apartments.

The project was finished in 1956. “Only a few years later,” reported Alexander von Hoffman of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, “disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. The St. Louis Housing Authority spent $5 million trying to fix the problems but failed.” In 1972, three of the 16-year-old Pruitt-Igoe buildings were demolished. The following year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development agreed Pruitt-Igoe was hopeless, and the rest of it came down.

Similar public housing projects across the country were just as wretched. Joseph Petrone, a former maintenance supervisor with the Philadelphia Housing Authority, recalled: “I’d go to work at Schuylkill Falls [a PHA project] with a .38-caliber revolver in my belt and a big stick in my hand. The stick was for the German shepherds people kept tied to their doorknobs. The halls were covered with trash because the dogs would tear up the trash bags. We’d find bodies in the elevator shafts; the kids would play there, get stuck, and fall or get crushed.” The government was incapable of maintaining anything it built.

Why Can’t Government Maintain National Parks?

More than a century ago, “Progressives” promoted the idea that only government could be trusted to take care of natural wonders like Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Things have worked out rather differently. Apparently when politicians began considering the idea of national parks, nobody thought much about maintenance. For example, Congress was assured Yellowstone wouldn’t cost Washington anything once the initial roads and buildings were constructed. In 1916 Stephen Mather, who managed the national parks, reported, “The revenues of several parks might be sufficient to cover the costs of their administration and protection and Congress should only be requested to appropriate funds for their improvement.”

Over the years, presidents have bragged about how much they added to the National Park Service. Now it includes some 6,000 historic structures, 8,500 monuments, 2,000 bridges and tunnels, 4,300 employee housing units, and 27,000 campground sites, as well as docks, parking areas, and other assets. But it wasn’t until 2002 that the National Park Service began to assess their condition.

Since the federal government “owns” the national parks, their funding depends on Washington politics. The prevailing policy has been that most revenue generated in the parks goes to Washington. As a consequence, the parks have had to lobby politicians for appropriations. But over the years the biggest increases in federal spending have involved wars and social programs. The National Park Service has had a hard time competing for funds with the likes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. It’s a small pig at the trough. There has been a big backlog of deferred National Park Service maintenance jobs that lacked funding. Roads are sometimes hazardous because of potholes. Visitor facilities are falling apart. Historic structures are in jeopardy. Sewage systems have broken, causing pollution.

Why Should Government Start Something It Can’t Maintain?

Government cannot be counted on to maintain anything well because there’s no political glory in maintenance. Those who sign major laws, who launch new government programs, and who cut the ribbons for new government buildings can brag about their exploits during reelection campaigns. But politicians don’t seem to gain any credit with voters when they maintain programs that somebody else started. In many cases, like adding more cement to New Orleans levees, maintenance work is invisible.

Since taxpayer money is wasted when it’s spent on projects that subsequently suffer from inadequate maintenance, and often much harm is done, government should be limited to projects it might be able to maintain. If this means government ends up doing little, so be it.

During 1933, Roosevelt’s first year in office, GDP increased about 17 percent. What would have accounted for that?

Not FDR’s 1933 decision to seize privately owned gold and devalue the dollar from $20 per ounce of gold to $35. This increased the value of gold held by the U.S. Treasury and entitled it to print an additional $3 billion of greenbacks. The Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) authorized the Treasury to print $3 billion more. Nonetheless, the total amount of currency held by the public didn’t increase until 1934. The Fed wasn’t very active during this period.

The most sweeping pieces of legislation passed in 1933—the climax of the Hundred Days—were the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, but both promoted contraction, not expansion. The NIRA authorized FDR to establish cartels fixing wages, prices, and output. The AAA aimed to reduce agricultural acreage.

Recovery Preceded Policy

It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover. The economy had recovered from previous panics, crashes, and depressions without a big-government program. Undoubtedly FDR’s sunny personality and formidable communications skills helped give people confidence they could achieve a turnaround.

From 1933 to 1937 GDP increased about 60 percent. This was the biggest GDP expansion of the New Deal—and it occurred without federal spending and deficits that would qualify as Keynesian stimulus. Krugman wrote, “[T]he New Deal didn’t pursue Keynesian policies. . . . [F]iscal policy was only modestly expansionary.” Other economists, such as Price V. Fishback, agree that New Deal budget deficits probably didn’t contribute to recovery—Fishback calls FDR’s deficits “tiny.”

Since the NIRA and AAA promoted contraction, the Supreme Court gave the economy a boost in 1935 by striking them down. Ironically, FDR viewed the anti-New Deal justices as the “Four Horsemen of Reaction.”

Raising Labor Costs

It has often been said that the depression-within-a-depression of 1938 happened because FDR foolishly cut federal budget deficits, but that couldn’t have been the case since the dramatic 1933–1937 expansion occurred without meaningful deficit stimulus. Other factors help explain that depression, starting with the newly centralized Federal Reserve Board’s decision in July 1936 to increase minimum required bank reserves 50 percent and its decision in January 1937 to increase bank reserves another 33.3 percent. Suddenly, less money was available for lending, and interest rates went up—a double whammy for employers. The Social Security excise tax on payroll began to be collected in 1937, making it more expensive for employers to hire people. The undistributed profits tax became a big issue in 1937. The Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act in 1937, setting off the rapid unionization of mass-production industries, which led to an 11 percent increase in wage costs during that depression year—and a resulting surge in unemployment.

The problem with the New Deal wasn’t expansion. The problem was the persistence of high unemployment despite expansion. Many economists point to New Deal laws such as the NIRA, the Wagner Act, and the Social Security payroll tax (there weren’t yet any Social Security benefits), which made it more expensive for employers to hire people. Whenever anything becomes more expensive, there’s likely to be less demand for it.

Uncertain Tax Environment

In addition, the succession of New Deal tax increases—1933, 1934, 1935, and 1936—reduced private funds available for hiring. And the constant tax changes made it hard for investors to estimate their potential risks and returns, so they remained on the sidelines. Investors, like everybody else, need predictable rules. No wonder investment was at historic lows during the 1930s. Without investment it was very difficult to create new jobs.

When FDR came into office he had Congress and the nation at his feet. He was hailed as a conquering hero. With his rhetorical acumen and political genius, he might have begun by forming coalitions to undo his predecessor Herbert Hoover’s biggest disasters: the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff that throttled trade and the 1932 revenue act that doubled many taxes. Ending rather than embracing Hoover’s disasters would have been change that people could believe in! If, furthermore, FDR had avoided his own misguided policies, the expansion probably would have been more robust, and without the blunders of 1937, it might have lasted longer—and most important, it would have enabled the private sector to create millions more jobs.

One important reason was the development of common law principles and precedents independent of a ruler. Edward Coke (pronounced “Cook”) was more responsible for this than anybody else. Murray N. Rothbard called him a “great early seventeenth century liberal.” Winston S. Churchill observed that “His knowledge of the Common Law was unique.” Historian George Macaulay Trevelyan considered him “one of the most important champions of our liberties.” F.A. Hayek referred to him as “the great fountain of Whig principles.”

Coke had a gift for expressing common law principles in unforgettable ways. “The common law,” he wrote, “is the best and most common birth-right that the subject hath for the safeguard and defense, not merely of his goods, lands and revenues, but of his wife and children, his body, fame and life. . . . No man ecclesiastical or temporal shall be examined upon secret thoughts of his heart. . . . the house of an Englishman is to him as his castle.”

As a lawyer and judge, Coke worked with arguments based on precedents, which one might think would mean that if he couldn’t cite precedents he didn’t have a case. But he was the best at discovering precedents for liberty. If at times he claimed that precedents went back farther and proved more than they actually did, he was almost always right about fundamental principles.

His Reports and Institutes did much to give the English a coherent constitution. Even his rival Francis Bacon conceded: “Had it not been for Sir Edward Coke’s reports . . . law by this time had been almost like a ship without ballast; for that the cases of modern experience are fled from those that are judged and ruled in former times.”

Although Coke embraced conventional religious beliefs, he did much for religious toleration. As Chief Justice of common law courts, he worked to keep many cases out of ecclesiastical courts that sentenced religious dissenters to be tortured, imprisoned, or burned. He appointed Puritan ministers to the churches he owned. He hired an independent-minded secretary named Roger Williams, who went on to establish Rhode Island as a sanctuary for religious toleration. At Coke’s death, his personal library included major Puritan writings of the previous half century.

Coke was more than a jurist; he deserves much credit for the emergence of representative government. Under Queen Elizabeth I, Parliament was a cipher for the monarch. Members of Parliament lacked the ideological vision as well as practical experience to provide effective opposition or leadership. In 1621, 1624, 1625, and 1628, Parliament spearheaded attacks against the ministers of James I and Charles I. Parliament articulated constitutional principles and took initiative in formulating policy. Coke certainly wasn’t the only important figure in these parliaments, but he framed the issues, served on more parliamentary committees, delivered more committee reports and speeches than anybody else. He did much to secure the principle that ministers must be accountable for their actions—a critic remarked that Coke “would die if he could not help ruin a great man every seven years.” His ideas helped inspire the revolution which, two decades later, toppled Charles I.

“Coke’s great influence both in the Commons and in Parliament as a whole is easily explained,” according to Wesleyan University historian Stephen D. White. “His extensive governmental experience both in and out of Parliament and his formidable legal reputation naturally brought him respect from other members. He had held many high offices in both central and local government. . . . He had participated in every meeting of Parliament since 1589, had served as Speaker of the Commons in 1593, and was an expert on parliamentary precedents and procedure. And his published writings and his years as a judge and legal officer of the crown had established his reputation as the most eminent legal authority of the era.”

Coke has had an enormous influence in America. Coke’s principal legacy: the independence of the judiciary and the principle that judges may overturn statutes which are contrary to the Constitution.

An Imposing, Difficult Man

Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen noted that “Coke stood out above a crowd, a noticeably handsome man, tall, big-boned, inclined to spareness. His face was oval and a trifle long; between mustache and pointed short beard the lower lip showed full and red. Dark hair, cut even with the ears, had as yet no trace of gray but had begun to recede at the temples, accentuating the height of his forehead. Coke’s eyebrows were heavy and smooth, his complexion somewhat swarthy; there were few lines to his face. His eyes, large, dark, and brilliant, bore the watchful look of a man ambitious and self-contained.”

Coke, to be sure, was often a difficult character. “Pedant, bigot, and brute as he was,” historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote in his essay on Bacon, “he had qualities which bore a strong, though a very disagreeable resemblance to some of the highest virtues which a public man can possess. . . . He behaved with gross rudeness to his juniors at the bar, and with execrable cruelty to prisoners on trial for their lives. But he stood up manfully against the King and the King’s favourites. No man of that age appeared to so little advantage when he was opposed to an inferior, and was in the wrong. But, on the other hand, it is but fair to admit that no man of that age made so creditable a figure when he was opposed to a superior, and happened to be in the right.”

Edward Coke was born with law in his blood, February 1, 1552, in Mileham, Norfolk, England. His father, Robert Coke, was a lawyer practicing in London and Norfolk. His mother, Winifred Knightley, was the daughter of an attorney.

After attending the Norwich Free Grammar School for seven years, Coke entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and was four years there. Destined for a legal career, he began studying at Clifford’s Inn in 1571 and the next year transferred to Inner Temple. These were guilds where young men went to acquire knowledge of common law that would be needed for professional practice. Common law was the law applying to everyone. It included Saxon legal customs, standard commercial practices for resolving disputes, parliamentary statutes, judicial decisions and, yes, some royal decrees. In addition, there were treatises going back several hundred years, written by respected judges like Henry Bracton, Anthony Fitzherbert, John Fortesque, John Glanville, and Thomas Littleton. Students of the common law had to learn “law French,” the language of common law pleadings, and Latin, the language in which medieval court records were kept. Coke began a lifelong practice of arising at 3:00 A.M. so that he could gain several hours for learning more about law before the day began.

Coke started practicing law in 1578. He spent a lot of time in Coventry, Essex, Norwich, and London, and he always had a notebook which he filled with his observations about courtroom proceedings. He was to continue recording his observations for more than four decades—they became the basis of the published works that secured his reputation.

When Coke was 30, he married 17-year-old Bridget Paston, who descended from a wealthy Suffolk family and came with a dowry of \P30,000. He developed ties with Lord Burghley, a councilor to Queen Elizabeth. After a succession of minor positions, he was appointed Solicitor General by Queen Elizabeth in 1592. She named him speaker of the House of Commons the following year, and in 1594 chose him over Francis Bacon to be attorney general.

Francis Bacon

Bacon and Coke were to be rivals for nearly three decades. Bacon, nine years younger than Coke, was the son of an Elizabethan courtier, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Bacon’s father died before he could buy his son an estate, so he had to work for a living. He learned law at Gray’s Inn, then pulled political strings and got elected to Parliament in 1584. He urged religious toleration for loyal citizens, but otherwise he was a thoroughgoing government man. As a consequence, he acquired estates and secretaries, including Thomas Hobbes, who later distinguished himself as a theoretician for political absolutism.

In his lucid essays (first edition, 1597), Bacon expressed admiration for Machiavelli’s political writings and declared that governments shouldn’t be judged by the moral standards that apply to ordinary people. Bacon made clear his distrust of Parliament and his belief in political absolutism. He approved of war because it promoted a strong state.

Coke, meanwhile, prospered as a vigorous defender of royal prerogative and enforced laws against religious dissenters. His wife died, and he soon remarried Lady Elizabeth Hatton, granddaughter of Lord Burghley and niece of Robert Cecil, the most influential minister of Queen Elizabeth and, for a while, of her successor, James I. This second marriage was rocky, but it brought him even more property.

Coke, unlike Bacon, was critical of patents of monopoly which the government had issued since 1552 to generate revenue. The patents were issued for mechanical inventions, chemical processes, and other things. There were many complaints because patents of monopoly benefited a few individuals at the expense of everybody else. Coke handled some of the most important cases against monopolists. As he explained, “it appeareth that a man’s trade is accounted his life, because it maintaineth his life; and therefore the Monopolist that taketh a man’s trade, taketh away his life.”

England had the lowest taxes in Europe, but toward the end of her reign Elizabeth needed more revenue. After the Spanish Armada was smashed in 1588, Spain built more ships for another possible attack on England, requiring new English defenses. Elizabeth was at war with France, too. Bacon recognized the danger of taxation. In 1593, he remarked: “wee breed discontentment in the people and in a cause of Jopardie her Majesties saftie must consist more in the love of her people then in their welthe.”

The Ascension of James I

Elizabeth died on March 24, 1603, and was succeeded by the 37-year-old James VI of Scotland, who became James I of “Great Britain”—he revived the name from early medieval times. Elizabeth, he soon discovered, left a pile of debts. “My lord treasurer,” wrote one official in September 1603, “is much disquieted how to find money to supply the King’s necessities.” This official found “all means shut up of yielding any relief.” London bankers twice refused to loan the government any more money, claiming they had suffered big losses because of the plague, but Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin reported: “ill-will is also suspected as the cause.”

A monarch was supposed to pay the cost of maintaining his palace and retainers with hereditary income, while Parliament financed national defense and wars. But James asked Parliament—taxpayers—to help cover his extravagant royal household expenses.

The king’s personal habits made his political problems worse. “James was a loutish savage,” wrote historian Paul Johnson. “When hunting, he liked to plunge his bandy legs into the stag’s bowels. . . . He delighted in getting the young court ladies drunk, and seeing them collapse in vomit at his feet. He would sit there, laughing. . . . Everything James did, and everything he omitted to do, was certain to evoke protest.”

Attorney General Coke made his reputation as a tough prosecutor in three sensational trials. First came the Earl of Essex, an adventurer who had blundered in Ireland, disobeyed Elizabeth’s orders, and burst into her private quarters (1601); Walter Raleigh, who allegedly plotted against James (1603); and Guy Fawkes and his fellow Catholic conspirators who dug a tunnel for 35 barrels of gunpowder under Westminster Palace, which they hoped to blow up when the King and royal family gathered for the opening of Parliament (1605). Coke caused quite a stir as he repeatedly underscored key points, displayed his eloquent Latin, picturesque English, and formidable knowledge of legal precedents.

Bacon and Coke were at each other’s throats. Parliament turned down James’s request for more revenue, and he attempted an “end run” around Parliament by doubling tariffs, an idea backed by Bacon. James’s “New Impositions” meant that imports were subject to the delay and expense of being inspected twice. John Bates, an importer of Venetian currants, tried to evade the “New Impositions” and was brought before the Court of the Exchequer. It ruled that tariff policy was the king’s jurisdiction, not Parliament’s. The House of Commons named a commission to look into the matter. Coke was the point man. He insisted the king’s jurisdiction was to protect England against foreign enemies, but the “New Impositions” were for revenue, and Parliament’s approval was required.

“It is odd, indeed,” noted biographers Hastings Lyon and Herman Block, “that Bacon, the philosopher, should have failed to apprehend what Coke, the legist, apparently did see: namely, that if the enforced loans, benevolences and monopolies were permitted, the King would have a nearly complete system of extra-Parliamentary taxation, and Parliament would soon become an unnecessary assembly, with a consequent corruption of the State into tyranny.”

Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas

In June 1606 James appointed him Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, which mostly handled private actions between citizens. This was a position where Coke would have to do the king’s bidding or be dismissed. The “New Impositions” didn’t generate enough revenue, and soon James issued a writ which forced people in England’s seaports to equip his fleet. (Elizabeth had issued such a writ but there was more political support for it because she faced the Spanish Armada.) Coke authored the “Protestations from the House of Commons,” which declared, in part, that “from the time of Magna Carta the liberties, franchises, privileges and jurisdiction of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England.” This outraged James.

Coke clashed with the king on fundamental issues. “The state of monarchy,” James maintained, “is the supremest thing upon earth. For Kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods . . . for they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth.” James, like Elizabeth, considered judges to be agents of the crown. They certainly weren’t supposed to render independent decisions.

English common law was a murky field, and Coke made the most of it when countering the king. Judicial decisions weren’t systematically based on precedents, because it was difficult to determine what the precedents were. “Argument from decided cases, though frequent and persuasive,” noted English constitutional law scholar Charles M. Gray, “did not dominate courtroom dialogue. Prior decisions were sometimes followed by judges who professed not to agree with them, but they were sometimes rejected for reason or simply ignored.”

On November 13, 1608, there was an epic confrontation between James and Coke. James described judges as “shadows and ministers.” Coke replied that “the King in his own person cannot adjudge any case . . . but that this ought to be determined and adjudged in some Court of Justice, according to the law and Custom of England.”

James countered “that he thought the law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason as well as the Judges.” Coke: “God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science and great endowments of Nature. But his Majesty was not learned in the Laws of his Realm of England; and Causes which concern the Life, or Inheritance, or Goods, or Fortunes of his Subjects are not to be decided by natural Reason but by the artificial Reason and Judgment of Law, which requires long Study and Experience before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it.”

James was outraged, as one observer reported: “his Majestie fell into that high indignation as the like was never knowne in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike [Coke].”

Meanwhile, Coke labored to share his knowledge of common law. He had begun issuing an annual Report on cases in 1600, and he continued until 1616. The prefaces were in English, texts in “law French,” and pleadings in Latin. “Anything that could be gleaned in Westminster, London Guildhall or the circuit courts in the counties he set down in his own form and fashion, adding comment, aside, comparison,” noted biographer Bowen. “No law reports had hitherto been half so comprehensive; Coke must have lived and walked and sat and talked with notebook in hand. At once the books became—as Blackstone indicated in 1765—an intrinsic authority in the courts of justice.”

Bacon, whom James had named Solicitor General in 1607, considered the king legibus solutus—above the law. Lord High Chancellor Ellesmere, the highest judicial official, declared Rex est lex loquens—“the king is the law.”

Bacon advised James, in Peacham’s Case, to try influencing court decisions by presenting judges with the allegations in a case and asking their opinion before trial. Edmund Peacham was a Puritan minister who criticized a bishop’s religious intolerance, for which he was brought before the High Commission. As Bacon reported to the king, “Upon these interrogatories, Peacham was examined before torture, in torture, between torture, and after torture; nothing could be drawn from him, he still persisting in his obstinate and inexcusable denials and former answers.” Coke wouldn’t cooperate with Bacon, saying that “taking of opinion is not according to the custom of this realm.” Coke considered it unfair to present judges with allegations when neither a defendant nor defense counsel were present for cross-examination. Bacon told James that Coke’s “over-confidence, doth always subject things to a great deal of chance.” Peacham died in prison.

In Bonham’s Case, Coke ruled that the common law stood above Parliament. The case involved Dr. Thomas Bonham, jailed for practicing medicine without a certificate issued by the Royal College of Physicians. He filed suit for false imprisonment. Coke observed that according to the Royal College’s statute of incorporation, it pocketed half the fines from violators like Bonham. This, he noted, meant the Royal College was both a party and judge in every action. Citing a common law principle, Aliquis non debet esse judex in propria causa [Nobody should be judge in his own cause], Coke ruled: “in many cases the common law will control acts of Parliament and some times adjudge them to be utterly void; For when an Act of Parliament is against common right and reason, or repugnant, or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it and adjudge such Act to be void.” This was the most controversial decision he ever rendered.

James asserted his power by issuing proclamations that he insisted had the force of law. In September 1610, Coke presented his view of these proclamations to the Privy Council, which had the responsibility of advising the king on executive, judicial, and financial business and seeing that the king’s will was done. “All indictments,” he observed, “conclude with the words, Against the law and custom of England, Contra legem et consuetudinem Angliae; or against laws and statutes, Contra leges et statuta. But I never heard an indictment to conclude, Contra regiam proclamationem; against the king’s proclamation.” Coke went on to review the legal history of royal proclamations. Accordingly, the Privy Council resolved “That the King by his proclamation cannot create any offense which was not an offence before, for then he may alter the law of the land by his proclamation in a high point; for if he may create an offence where none is, upon that ensues fine and imprisonment. Also the law of England is divided into three Parts: Common Law, Statute Law, and Custom; but the King’s Proclamation is none of them.”

Coke issued “prohibitions” aimed at curbing the power of ecclesiastical courts, especially the High Commission, which imprisoned individuals for preaching Nonconformist doctrines. A prohibition ordered the ecclesiastical courts not to proceed with a case if there was any reason it might belong in a common law court. Coke defended his prohibitions by showing how they had long been issued by common law courts. Moreover, he explained how, during the past 60 years, the High Commission had expanded its power beyond what had been specified in any statute.

James called Parliament in 1610 because he needed money, but Members drew up a Petition of Grievances. Among the principles at stake: “there is none which they have accounted more dear and precious than this, to be guided and governed by the certain rule of law, which giveth to the head and the members that which of right belongeth to them, and not by any uncertain and arbitrary form of government.”

James took offense: “We are an old and experienced king, needing no such lessons.” Coke rose to defend the Petition: “I never spake but mine own conscience. The privileges of this House is the nurse and life of all our laws, the subject’s best inheritance. If my sovereign will not allow my inheritance, I must fly to Magna Carta and entreat explanation of his Majesty. Magna Carta is called Charta libertatis quia liberos facit. . . . The Charter of Liberty because it maketh freeman. When the King says he cannot allow our liberties of right, this strikes at the root. We serve here for thousands and ten thousands.”

James fumed, “The House of Commons is a body without a head. The members give their opinions in a disorderly manner. At their meetings nothing is heard but cries, shouts, and confusion. I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence. I am a stranger, and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.”

James dissolved Parliament the following year, and Coke stood alone against the king. He issued two rulings that limited the discretionary power of the High Commission. James snapped that the rulings were “of a nature extraordinary and showing more the perverseness of [Coke's] spirit than any other prohibitions.” James summoned Coke and several like-minded judges to explain themselves. Coke endured a three-day interrogation.

Chief Justice of the King’s Bench

In 1613, Bacon had an idea for taming Coke: promote him to Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, which handled criminal as well as civil actions; and promise him a seat on the 12-member Privy Council. “Coke will thereupon turn obsequious,” Bacon assured James. Coke became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in October, but Bacon and James were in for a surprise.

Conflict developed when James granted two income properties to the Bishop of Coventry. The grant was contested by two men who claimed the property was theirs—this became known as the Case of Commendams (which meant the bishop could collect the income while having somebody else perform whatever services might be required). Coke and his fellow judges were about to conduct a hearing on the dispute when James ordered them not to proceed, because his prerogative was at issue. Coke countered that “The stay required by your Majesty was a delay of justice and therefore contrary to law and the Judges’ oath.” Bacon, who had become Attorney General and a member of the Privy Council, denounced Coke, for behaving improperly. James stepped up the pressure. The judges relented, except for Coke who, a court reporter noted, told the king “That when the case should be, he would do that should be fit for a Judge to do.” Coke was dismissed as Chief Justice.

“Coke had not striven in vain,” noted historian George Macaulay Trevelyan. “He had enlisted the professional pride of the students of the common law against the rival systems of law specially favoured by the Crown in the Star Chamber, the admiralty and the Ecclesiastical Courts. He had turned the minds of the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court, who watched him from afar with fear and reverence, to contemplate a new idea of the constitutional function and of the political affinities of their profession, which they were destined in their generation to develop in a hundred ways, as counsel for England gone to law with her King.”

Coke was so desperate to regain a high position that he pressured his 14-year-old daughter, Frances, to marry John Villiers, the impotent older brother of James’s most influential adviser, George Villiers (later the Duke of Buckingham). Bacon filed a complaint against Coke for riotous behavior. This was surely the low point of Coke’s career. Although he didn’t get back his judgeship, he regained his position on the Privy Council. Apparently, the king and Buckingham still hoped that showing him some favor would undermine his independent spirit. Bacon was subsequently appointed Lord High Chancellor, which made him the highest-ranking person outside the royal family.

James summoned Parliament, which met on January 13, 1621, the first time in seven years. James again needed money, and Members intended to negotiate about their grievances.

Among other things, Parliament was intent on limiting royal power by rooting out corruption. The top target was Buckingham, who had gained considerable influence with the king. After he had sent Walter Raleigh to attnd he was summoned before the House of Lords. He apologized for his brothers who had taken bribes and avoided prosecution by sheer political clout. The House of Commons turned to drafting a bill which would curb monopolies.

Bacon’s Downfall

The House of Commons then formed a Committee for Inquiring into Abuses in the Courts of Justice. A trail of dubious payments led to Bacon’s door. Coke soon emerged as the leading inquisitor. The inquiry against Bacon led eventually to the charge of bribery.

Coke objected to James’s proposal that a special commission should investigate the charges, because it couldn’t be counted on to recommend prosecution. Accordingly, Parliament began impeachment proceedings for the first time in 160 years. It reported a growing list of bribes. Since the bribes had been delivered in the presence of his servants, Bacon didn’t mount a defense. “Condemn and censure me,” he wrote the House of Lords—thereby offending the House of Commons.

He was impeached, dismissed as Lord High Chancellor, fined £40,000, imprisoned in the Tower of London, then banished from London and the law courts. The historian Lord Acton later remarked, “the Commons, guided by the most famous English lawyer, Coke, struck down Bacon, and deprived the Stuarts of the ablest counsellor they ever had. Impeachment and responsibility of ministers remained.”

Coke Imprisoned

On December 18, James dissolved Parliament, and soon afterwards Coke was summoned to appear before the Privy Council. “You have forgotten the duty of a servant, the duty of a Councilor of State and the duty of a subject,” he was told. Guards escorted him to a damp, bitter-cold, urine-soaked cell in the Tower of London. Denied access to books, he wrote Latin verses with pieces of coal. He was interrogated by the President of the Privy Council who reported: “I charge you therefore with treason. I have heard you, Sir Edward, affirm that by law he is a traitor who goes about to withdraw subjects’ hearts from their King.” But after seven months of going through Coke’s personal papers and investigating his affairs, crown officials concluded they couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He was released. No charges were ever filed.

The Parliament of 1624 came on the heels of a four-year business depression, and there were a lot of complaints about monopolies. Coke led the attack against monopolies over wool, brick-making, glass-making, salmon fishing, and the transcribing of wills.

James died on March 27, 1625. He had achieved a long period of peace which enabled the English to prosper. But he left a debt of over \P200,000. His 24-year-old son became King Charles I, and right away he began spending money at a reckless pace. Then, as Buckingham had arranged, he married the 15-year-old French Catholic princess, Henriette Marie, who came with an 800,000-crown dowry; the idea here was that if there wasn’t going to be a marriage to promote peace with Spain, then there should be a marriage to help secure an ally against Spain if needed.

The wedding took place at Notre Dame de Paris, and Charles was represented by a stand-in, the Duc de Chevreuse, because of the risk of Charles falling in the hands of a foreign power. Buckingham himself escorted the new queen back to England, biographer John Bowle reported, with “fifteen lords, twenty-four ‘knights of great worth’, and far too many pages.” Henriette Marie was accompanied by her servants—a bishop and 28 priests.

Thirty Years War

Charles summoned Parliament in May 1625 and faced mounting skepticism. For openers, Members were distracted because several thousand people a week were dying from plague in London. Buckingham had approved military adventures against France and Spain which were fiascos, convincing many Members of Parliament that the previous subsidy they approved was a mistake. Buckingham proposed more military adventures, one to attack Spain and another to save the Protestant Elector of Palatine—which meant becoming embroiled in the conflict that would become known as the Thirty Years War. Parliament voted for two small subsidies and authorized Charles to spend customs revenue only for a year. Charles was in trouble because the Lord Treasurer reported the government didn’t have any money or credit left. Assuming Parliament would give him what he needed, Charles had drawn from his own resources to pay \P136,000 for a subsidy to Denmark, wages for British soldiers serving in the Low Countries, and food and ammunition for the British navy. “By the grace of God,” Charles remarked, “I will carry on the war if I risk my crown.” He dissolved Parliament.

Short of money, Charles resorted to conscription. The government rounded up as many able-bodied men as they could find around the port towns. Reportedly many men paid bribes to avoid being conscripted. The government didn’t spend money on army barracks, so it forced thousands of private individuals to feed and house the recruits. This, of course, provoked widespread resentment, and the result was martial law. The first adventure, against Spain, was a fiasco which Charles and Buckingham tried to cover up, and by the end of the year Charles pawned some of his jewelry and silverware for more money.

Charles summoned Parliament again. In an effort to undermine resistance, he appointed his half-dozen most troublesome opponents, including Coke, as sheriffs, which kept them out of parliamentary proceedings for at least a year. But this enabled a formidable orator, John Eliot, to step forward as a leader. Though he had befriended Buckingham as a young man, he witnessed the return of wretched British soldiers from one of Buckingham’s disastrous expeditions against Spain, and he resolved to bring down the Duke. Eliot declared that Parliament wasn’t a tool of the king and that Members were morally obligated to follow their conscience. He urged that Buckingham be impeached.

Asked for further subsidy, Members of the House of Commons began impeachment proceedings against Buckingham. Charles responded by ordering Eliot and another outspoken Member, Dudley Diges, imprisoned in the Tower of London. But the Commons charged Buckingham anyway, for failing to suppress piracy in the English Channel, for choosing incompetent leaders of the Spanish expedition, for taking bribes and for scheming with Catholics. On June 12, 1627, Charles dissolved his second Parliament, saving Buckingham’s skin.

“At the back of the Parliamentary movement in all its expressions lay a deep fear,” explained Winston S. Churchill. “Everywhere in Europe they saw the monarchies becoming more autocratic. The States-General, which had met in Paris in 1614, had not been summoned again; it was not indeed to be summoned until the clash of 1789. The rise of standing armies, composed of men drilled in firearms and supported by trains of artillery, had stripped alike the nobles and the common people of their means of independent resistance. Rough as the times had been in the earlier centuries, ‘bills and bows’ were a final resource which few kings had cared to challenge. But now on the Parliamentary side force as yet was lacking.”

Needing money, Charles resorted to high-handed revenue-raising measures, and on March 27, 1628, Charles summoned Parliament for the third time.

Parliament was aboil over squandered money, conscription, billeting of soldiers in private homes, forced loans. Citing common law precedents, Coke maintained that “the King cannot order any man arrested, because there is no remedy against him.” Coke insisted people could be legitimately imprisoned only upon the order of a judge. On March 21, 1628, Coke presented a bill which specified that no one could be imprisoned more than three months without being brought to trial. The House of Commons approved resolutions saying that nobody should be imprisoned unless the government cited the alleged crimes, and the writ of habeas corpus must not be denied.

The House of Commons approved the subsidies that Charles asked for, provided he would agree to respect the liberties of Englishmen. Charles resisted, and the House of Lords was reluctant to break with him. The Lords eventually approved a declaration that the Magna Carta remained in force and that the king must not infringe on “any of his loyal people in the property of their goods or liberty of their person.” But then the Lords hedged, suggesting that “as touching his majesty’s royal prerogative intrinsical to his sovereignty and entrusted to him from God . . . in the case, for the security of his Majesty’s Royal person, the common safety of his people, or the peaceable government of his kingdom, his Majesty shall find just cause, for reason of State, to imprison or restrain any man’s persons, his Majesty would graciously declare that within a convenient time, he shall and will express the cause of the commitment or restraint, either general or special.”

Coke thundered: “Is the confirmation of the Great Charter a matter of grace? What are just liberties? Who were the best of his Majesty’s predecessors? We see what advantage they have that are learned in the law in penning articles above them that are not, how wise soever. What is intrinsical prerogative? It is a word, we find not much in the law. Intrinsical prerogative is not bounded by any law, or by any law qualified. Admit this intrinsical prerogative, and all our laws are out. This intrinsical prerogative it appears is entrusted to the king by God. It is jure divino [divine law]. No law can take it away. His majesty can commit when he pleases.”

When the king continued to resist, Coke proposed on May 8 that Parliament adopt a Petition of Right for the king’s agreement on “1. The personal liberty of the subject. 2. His propriety in his goods. 3. Unbilletting of soldiers. And 4. Silencing of martial law in time of peace.”

Charles dispatched a letter to the Lords, saying he must be able to imprison people without filing specific charges. For 18 days, the Lords tried to figure out how they could draft something agreeable both to Charles and the Commons. Then Coke rose in the Commons and spoke: “Let us palliate no longer. If we do, God will not prosper us. I think the Duke of Buckingham is the cause of all our miseries, and till the King be informed thereof, we shall never go on with honor or sit with honor here. That man is the grievance of grievances. Let us set down the cause of all our disasters and they will reflect on him.”

On June 8, Charles met both Houses of Parliament at 4:00 in the afternoon. Then he signified the words of approval which gave a bill the force of law: “Soit droict fait comme est desire.”

“We reach here,” wrote Churchill, “amid much confusion, the main foundation of English freedom. The right of the Executive Government to imprison a man, high or low, for reasons of State was denied; and that denial, made good in painful struggles, constitutes the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land. Trial by jury of equals, only for offenses known to the law, if maintained, makes the difference between bond and free.”

Coke’s Greatest Work

Coke retired to Stoke House in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, just west of London, where he completed his life work.

Scholars traditionally wrote commentaries on established authorities, and that’s how Coke proceeded with his greatest work. He prepared commentaries on Thomas Littleton’s Treatise on Tenures, a fifteenth-century text about land law. “The ornament of the common law,” Coke called it, “the most perfect and absolute work that ever was written in any human science, and as free from error as any book that I have known to be written of any human learning.” Coke covered about 500 years of English property law.

His health declined in 1634. On June 9, he asked for a pen and paper to affirm his religious faith. While he lay dying, the government—“by order of his Majesty’s Privy Council”—issued a warrant to search his house for documents which might threaten the monarchy. Police took manuscripts for his Institutes and for two unpublished volumes of Reports. Coke died at Stoke House on Wednesday, September 3, 1634, around 11 P.M. A month later, he was buried in the church graveyard at Tittleshall, about six miles southwest of Fakenham, Norfolk, next to his first wife.

Charles trashed Coke’s principles. He did everything he pledged not to do in the Petition of Right, and he refused to call another Parliament for 11 years. But the principles had taken root. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, it arranged for publication of the Institutes because they “contain many monuments of the subject’s liberties.”

The Second Part of the Institutes appeared in 1642. In this commentary on Magna Carta and almost 40 other charters and statutes, Coke distilled the views he had promoted throughout his public life. He believed individual liberty was best protected by “due process of the common law.” He asserted that “Generally all monopolies are against this great charter, because they are against the liberty and freedome of the subject, and against the law of the land.” He affirmed that “The interpretation of all statutes concerning the clergy, being parcell of the lawes of the realme, do belong to the judges of the common law.”

The Third and Fourth Parts of the Institutes were published in 1644. The Third Part covered a variety of crimes. Coke defined a crime, explained the penalties, and covered the legal history of it.

The Fourth Part developed his familiar themes about the role of Parliament.

Coke urged his successors in the common law: “And you, honorable and revered judges and justices, that do or shall sit in the high tribunals or seats of justice, fear not to do right to all, and to deliver your opinions justly according to the laws; for fear is nothing but a betraying of the succors which reason should afford; and if you shall sincerely execute justice, be assured of three things: first, though some will malign you, yet God will give you his blessing; secondly, that though thereby you may offend great men and favorites, yet you shall have the favourable kindness of the Almighty, and be his favorite; and lastly, that in so doing, against all scandalous complaints and pragmatic devices against you God will defend you as with a shield.”

Coke inspired freedom fighters in England and the American colonies. When Roger Williams established Rhode Island, he reflected in 1652: “how many thousand times since I had the honorable and precious remembrance of his person, and the life, the writings, the speeches, and the example of that glorious light. And I may truly say, that besides my natural inclination to study and activity, his example, instruction, and encouragement have spurred me on to a more than ordinary, industrious, and patient course in my whole course hitherto.”

By the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688), long-standing English grievances had been resolved. The monarchy had a Protestant succession. There was a considerable degree of religious toleration. People were protected from arbitrary search and seizure. They couldn’t be held in prison unless formal charges were filed, alleging violation of a law. Above all, the power of the monarch was limited by Parliament which had achieved supremacy. Ironically, this meant judges couldn’t overturn an act of Parliament. Judges could only rule that the government exceeded the powers granted by a statute—a situation which continues to this day.

The American Founders learned constitutional principles from Coke. Thomas Jefferson remarked that “Coke Lyttleton was the universal elementary book of law students and a sounder Whig never wrote nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of . . . British liberties.” Patrick Henry, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John Jay, Daniel Webster, and many other influential Americans read Coke. Joseph Story, who became a Jeffersonian Supreme Court Justice, wrote: “When I had completed the reading of the most formidable work, I felt that I breathed a purer air and that I had acquired a new power.”

American constitutional historian Bernard Schwartz observed that “The influence of Coke may be seen at all of the key stages in the development of the conflict between the Colonies and the mother country.”

Especially since the Constitution was ratified, an independent judiciary and judicial review have become bedrock principles of American law. While judges have made plenty of bad decisions, at least they have the power to strike down unconstitutional statutes, and sometimes they do. This is a big advance from the era when judges were everywhere intimidated into doing what a ruler wanted. Eloquent testimony to the vision, courage, and devotion of Edward Coke.

The French thinker Benjamin Constant was, according to respected Oxford University scholar Isaiah Berlin, “the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy.” Constant’s most important contribution: he recognized that “the main problem . . . [is] how much authority should be placed in any set of hands. For unlimited authority in anybody’s grasp was bound, he believed, sooner or later, to destroy somebody.”

Constant described the dynamic of collectivism that would become a scourge during the twentieth century. For instance: “the primitive conquerors were satisfied with outward submission; they did not inquire into the private lives or local customs of their victims . . . the conquerors of today are resolved to gaze over the level surface of their empire and to encounter no deviation from uniformity . . . local interests and traditions contain a germ of resistance, which a centralized authority tolerates unwillingly and attempts to eradicate at the first opportunity. It finds the isolated individual easier to deal with; without effort it crushes him beneath its mighty weight.”

He denounced war, “the greatest offense that a government today can commit. It destroys every social guarantee without compensation; it jeopardizes every form of liberty; it injures every interest; it upsets every security; it weighs upon every fortune. It combines and legitimizes every kind of internal and external tyranny.”

Constant believed the key issue is to keep political power out of private life. “For forty years,” he reflected, “I have defended the same principle: freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics—and by freedom I mean the triumph of the individual both over an authority that would wish to govern by despotic means and over the masses who claim the right to make a minority subservient to a majority. . . . The majority has the right to oblige the minority to respect public order, but everything which does not disturb public order, everything which is purely personal such as our opinions, everything which, in giving expression to opinions, does no harm to others either by provoking physical violence or opposing contrary opinions, everything which, in industry, allows a rival industry to flourish freely—all this is something individual that cannot legitimately be surrendered to the power of the state.”

Constant made some spectacular flip-flops, he had tangled love affairs, and he ran up big gambling debts, so he was an easy target for criticism. These things, noted intellectual historian Biancamaria Fontana, “were all distinctive marks of a traditional aristocratic education. Though they may strike the modern reader as adventurous and romantic, there was nothing especially odd or unusual about them. What was truly eccentric about Constant’s life was . . . the unsettling extent of his cosmopolitanism.” He moved easily among intellectuals in France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Britain, as well as his native Switzerland. He absorbed the ideas of Baron de Montesquieu about law and the ideas of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say about markets. He was a friend of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. In the French Chamber of Deputies, Constant championed civil liberties with the legendary Lafayette.

Victor Hugo believed that Constant was “one of those rare men, who furbish, polish, and sharpen the general ideas of their times.” Said Lafayette: “Endowed with one of the most extensive and varied esprits which has ever existed . . . the master of all the languages and literatures of Europe, he united to the highest degree sagacity . . . and the faculty, especially attributable to the French school, of making clear abstract ideas.”

Constant was an eyeful. “His appearance was striking,” noted biographer J. Christopher Herold, “tall and gangling, in his late twenties; a pale, freckled face surmounted by a shock of flamboyant red hair, braided at the nape and held up by a small comb; a nervous tic; red-rimmed myopic [blue] eyes; ironic mouth; a long, finely curved nose; long torso, poor posture, slightly pot-bellied, long-legged, wearing a long flapping riding coat—a decidedly gauche, unhandsome, yet interesting and attractive figure of a man, certainly somebody altogether out of the ordinary.”

By his fifties, Constant had become a familiar figure as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, the French elected legislative body where he was an outstanding champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Baron de Loeve-Veimars recalled Constant “dressed in his gold-embroidered deputy’s uniform so as to be ready to address the House from the tribune where it was obligatory to wear this formal dress. His hair was blond and turning white, and on his head he wore an old round hat. He carried under his arm a coat, books, manuscripts, printer’s proofs, a copy of the budget and his crutch. Once he had got rid of all these impedimenta and was seated on his bench, on the far left, he began to write and send off an unbelievable quantity of letters and notes to people . . . answered the questions of all those crowding around him.”

According to historian Paul Thureau-Dangin, “At first sight one would never have said that he had the usual qualities necessary to make an orator. He seldom improvised without having a pen in his hand; but his pen had the quickness of speech, and sometimes he wrote out his reply in full while still listening to the harangue he was to refute. He normally read his speeches from little pieces of paper which he was constantly obliged to put in order. . . .

“With his clever rather than highly coloured speeches, subtle rather than powerful in their delivery, he showed great skill in argument, rare presence of mind, he had a way of saying everything, despite legal restrictions, so that even the most intolerant audience understood what he was implying, and he was nimble enough to slip through his opponent’s fingers and to stand up for himself even in the tightest corner.”

Beginnings

As Constant began the story of his life, he wrote that “I was born on 25 October 1767, in Lausanne, Switzerland, the son of Henriette de Chandieu, who was from a formerly French family which had taken refuge in the Pays de Vaud for religious reasons, and Juste Constant de Rebecque, a colonel in a Swiss regiment in the service of Holland. My mother died as a result of giving birth, a week after I was born.”

He had a succession of tutors and read eight to ten hours a day. After trying to get him admitted to Oxford University (he was too young), Juste sent him to the University of Erlangen (Bavaria), where he began learning German and became addicted to gambling. Then he transferred to the University of Edinburgh where faculty included such distinguished friends of liberty as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart. Constant mainly studied history and Greek. After two years, he went to Paris and studied with the intellectual Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard—his friends included Scottish philosopher David Hume, English playwright David Garrick, English novelist Lawrence Sterne, French mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet, and Lafayette. Before Constant was 18, he had learned to get along in three languages, and he was exposed to the ideas of brilliant thinkers.

In May 1789 he married Baroness Wilhelmina von Cramm, lady-in-waiting for the Duchess of Brunswick, but she didn’t share his intellectual curiosity, and they were divorced.

Constant watched the French Revolution as it lurched from constitutionalism to Jacobin Terror. “I am currently busy reading and refuting Burke’s book against the French levellers,” he wrote a friend. “This famous book contains as many absurdities as it does lines, and thus it is highly successful in all English and German circles. He defends the nobility, the exclusions of the sectaires, the establishment of a dominant religion, and other things of this nature. . . . I believe, as you do, that what we are witnessing is fundamentally knavery and fury. But I prefer the knavery and fury which overthrow citadels, destroy titles and similar follies, and place all religions on an equal footing, to those which seek to preserve and hallow these wretched monstrosities. . . .”

Madame de Staël

On September 18, 1794, Constant met Germaine de Stael on a road between Nyon and Coppet, Switzerland. She was the 28-year-old daughter of Suzanne Curchod, former lover of historian Edward Gibbon, and Jacques Necker, a Geneva banker who had served as the last finance minister under French King Louis XVI and had lent him some 2 million francs. She was married off to Eric-Magnus de Stael, impecunious Swedish aristocrat who became ambassador to France. He got some of her money, and she got better connections at the French court. Madame de Stael emerged as the most influential woman in Europe—brilliant, bold, vain, and sensuous.

She launched a fabled salon that attracted the leading lights of French life, including Condorcet and Lafayette. As Constant described his impressions of her: “I have seldom seen such a combination of astounding and attractive qualities; so much brilliance coupled with so much good sense; such expansive, positive kindness; such immense generosity; such gentle and sustained politeness in society; such charm and simplicity; such absence of all restraint within the circle of her intimates.” Constant particularly admired her for operating a remarkable network to help friends escape from the French Reign of Terror.

One of Madame de Stael’s friends, Jean Lambert Tallien, launched the political attack on Maximilien Robespierre that brought his overthrow and execution in July of 1794, ending the Reign of Terror. Almost a year later, May 25, 1795, Constant and Stael ventured to Paris and witnessed the ruins of revolution amidst runaway inflation. They found many neighborhoods deserted. All around they saw signs saying that properties which the government had confiscated were for sale. Impoverished aristocrats held tag sales on the streets, offering their clothing, furniture, draperies, statues, anything that might fetch money for food. “The capital of the world,” according to Stael’s friend Henri Meister, “looks like an immense junk shop.”

On September 23, 1795, the ruling Convention approved the third constitution since the Revolution began. This one established an executive consisting of a five-person Directory and a two-chamber legislature. The franchise was limited to those of substantial means. Members of the Convention wanted to retain their power, so they proposed a law which would require that two-thirds of the new legislature come from the Convention. Constant launched his political career by writing three articles opposing the proposed law, published in the June 24, 25, and 26 issues of Nouvelles Politiques—a newspaper edited by his former tutor Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard. He and Stael were accused of being dangerous counterrevolutionaries, and they left Paris.

Napoleon’s Ascent

Stael’s friend Paul Barras, a member of the Directory, turned his mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, over to an unemployed military commander named Napoleon Bonaparte. During the Revolution, Napoleon had emerged as a Jacobin and, after the government declared war against Britain and Holland in February 1793, then against Spain the following month, the country was soon surrounded by enemies. Napoleon demonstrated his resourcefulness by driving British and Spanish forces out of Toulon, about 40 miles east of Marseilles on the Mediterranean. This throttled royalist hopes of inciting an anti-Jacobin rebellion throughout southern France. In December 1793, amidst the Reign of Terror, the Convention named Napoleon a brigadier general. When royalist forces threatened to crush the Convention, Barras summoned Napoleon, and on October 5, 1795, he unleashed his artillery.

In April 1796, Napoleon struck at the Sardinian army and crushed it. By boldly throwing himself into battle when his subordinates got bogged down, Napoleon captured Milan, the financial and cultural capital of Lombardy—and his awed men began calling him “Le Petit Caporal” (“the Little Corporal”). At Castiglione, Napoleon faced an Austrian army that had grown until it was three times bigger than his own forces, but he took some 15,000 Austrian prisoners. Outnumbered by another Austrian army at Lodi and Rivoli, Napoleon won again as he killed some 30,000 Austrian soldiers. He set up administration of his spoils—about half of Italy—then returned triumphant to Paris.

On September 4, 1797 (known as 18 Fructidor on the revolutionary calendar), Napoleon helped Barras seize power, expelled Directors who wanted to restore the Bourbon monarchy, suppressed royalist newspapers, and deported 165 dissidents to French Guiana. Horrified at the prospect of seeing the Bourbons back in power, Constant praised Barras.

Napoleon thirsted for military glory, so he sailed for Egypt, which he hoped to capture and thereby cut off Britain from its Indian empire. The campaign was a disaster, and Napoleon was lucky to escape back to France—without his army or his fleet.

France was a mess. There was unrest because of high taxes, forced loans, military conscription, and the seizure of gold, silver, and works of art. Poor people resented greedy government officials who seized their crops and their sons. There were price controls, chronic shortages, and endless lines for the simplest things like bread. Armed gangs terrorized merchants and travelers. In once-prosperous Lyons, an estimated 13,000 out of 15,000 shopkeepers had been driven out of business. Directors responded by ordering dissidents arrested, suppressing newspapers, and deporting editors. French forces were driven out of Germany and Italy. Napoleon’s stunning gains had been lost. On November 9, 1799 (18 Brumaire), Napoleon decided it was time for him to seize power, and Constant and Stael supported him as a lesser evil than Jacobins or Bourbons.

Napoleon established a facade of representative government. There was a Tribunate whose members received a 15,000-franc salary and were expected not to cause any trouble. Constant was appointed a Tribune, but in his first address, January 5, 1800, he presented a case for freedom of speech. He denounced Napoleon’s demand to have himself named Consul for Life, which took place August 2, 1802. This meant gaining absolute power and suppressing civil liberties. “These intellectuals are like vermin in my clothes,” Napoleon remarked, “I shall shake them off.” Constant was dismissed. “He put himself into opposition, thinking I would pay a high price for his co-operation,” Napoleon recalled later. “He should have known that I do not buy my enemies; I stamp on them.”

Exile

Madame de Stael fled with Constant to Coppet, her family estate near Geneva. Then they traveled to Weimar, Germany, where he worked on a history of religion. He got to know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).

After the death of her father, Jacques Necker, Madame de Stael turned for consolation to Constant, but he yearned to be free of her dominating influence. “Never have I met a woman who is so incessantly exacting,” he noted in his diary. “One’s whole life (every minute, every hour, every year) must be at her disposal. When she gets into one of her rages, then it is a tumult of all the earthquakes and typhoons rolled into one. We must part . . . it is my sole chance for a peaceful life.” During their years together, she wrote about French and German romanticism, but Constant’s important political writings came after their romance ended in 1808.

He had already been at work two years on his autobiographical novel, Adolphe. It chronicled the doomed on-again, off-again affair between aimless Adolphe and a Polish woman named Ellenore. For years, Constant held public readings of the evolving story, which almost everybody assumed to be about himself and Madame de Stael. The novel wasn’t published until 1816. By then, Constant had married Charlotte von Hardenberg, who offered him the closest thing to domestic harmony he would ever know.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had emerged as a world-class monster. As historian Paul Johnson wrote, Napoleon “created the first modern police state, and he exported it. Austria, Prussia, and Russia all learned from the methods of Joseph Fouche, Bonaparte’s minister of police, from 1799 to 1814. . . . Over 2 million people died as direct consequence of Bonaparte’s campaigns, many more through poverty and disease and undernourishment. Countless villages had been burned in the paths of the advancing and retreating armies. Almost every capital in Europe had been occupied—some, like Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and Madrid, more than once. Moscow had been put to the torch. . . . The wars set back the economic life of much of Europe for a generation. They made men behave like beasts, and worse.”

In late November 1813, Constant started writing a pamphlet, De l’esprit de conquete et de l’usurpation, which developed a sophisticated, new vision of liberty. He focused not on politics, which had preoccupied the leading thinkers for decades, but on private life. He insisted that commerce was the standard-bearer of civilization and peace. The Hanover edition appeared on January 30, 1814. This was followed by a London edition (March), and two Paris editions (April, July).

Constant offered historical perspective, writing that “what we now call civil liberty was unknown to the majority of the ancient peoples. All the Greek republics, with the exception of Athens, subjected individuals to an almost unlimited social jurisdiction. The same subjection of the individual characterized the great centuries of Rome; the citizen had in a way made himself the slave of the nation of which he formed a part. He submitted himself entirely to the decisions of the sovereign, of the legislator; he acknowledged the latter’s right to watch over his actions and to constrain his will.”

Constant observed how tyrants demand conformity. “The love of power,” he wrote, “soon discovered what immense advantages symmetry could procure for it. While patriotism exists only by a vivid attachment to the interests, the ways of life, the customs of some locality, our so-called patriots have declared war on all of these. They have dried up this natural source of patriotism and have sought to replace it by a factitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea stripped of all that can engage the imagination and speak to the memory.”

Napoleon Deposed

The British and their allies entered Paris on March 31, 1814. On April 6, the Senate, whose members were nominated by Napoleon and given the power of overthrowing laws considered unconstitutional, voted to depose him. He found sanctuary on the island of Elba, between Corsica and western Italy. At the same time, the Senate assigned some respected liberals like the economist Destutt de Tracy (1754-1835) to help draft a new constitution. It soon became clear that the British favored the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy as the best bet for peace—the Bourbon heir Comte de Provence, Louis XVIII, had been an exile in Britain.

Upon his return to France, Louis XVIII set aside the Senate’s draft constitution, and in May 1814 he issued the Declaration de Saint-Ouen promising toleration and yet another constitution. The resulting Charte—presented as a gift from the king—assured religious toleration and equality before the law. It affirmed the abolition of feudal fees and church tithes. It accepted the Code Napoleon. There was an ambiguous commitment to freedom of the press. It specified that private property which had been seized during the Revolution wouldn’t be taken away from those who had acquired it during subsequent decades. There would be a two-chamber legislature: the king would name members of the House of Peers, and voters would elect members of the Chamber of Deputies. Louis XVIII acknowledged the inevitability of some constitutional limitations on government power, but he certainly didn’t intend to introduce British-style parliamentary government to France.

Ultra-royalists, led by the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, considered the king a sellout for accepting so many changes from the Revolution and Napoleonic era. They denounced Louis XVIII as a “crowned Jacobin” and “King Voltaire.” As the first French political party, the Ultras demanded that royalists take over the administrative bureaucracies Napoleon had established. They wanted royalists who had fled the Revolution either to get their property back or be compensated. They urged that dissidents be suppressed. When the king cut back the army, the Ultras exploited bitterness among former soldiers who needed money. And the Ultras fanned resentment against the continued Allied occupation of France and interference in French affairs. Ultras gained respectability from the intellectual counterrevolution against liberalism.

Constant responded to the Ultras by writing pamphlets that helped educate French people about parliamentary government for the first time. For instance, in Les Reflexions sur les Constitutions (Reflections on Constitutions and the Necessary Guarantees), he insisted that the king must be politically neutral as in Britain, ministers must be responsible for government policy, and there should be an unpaid, elected legislature. He asserted the primacy of civil liberties, including trial by jury and freedom of the press. When government censors suppressed this pamphlet, Constant wrote another, De la liberté des brochures, des pamphlets et des journaux (The Freedom of Pamphlets and Newspapers).

Napoleon’s Return

On March 1, 1815, Napoleon escaped from Elba and landed on the Cap d’Antibes, near Cannes, with about 800,000 gold francs and 1,100 soldiers. As they marched north toward Paris, more soldiers joined them.

Although Constant had loathed the Bourbons, he gave Louis XVIII credit for acknowledging some liberal principles, and he wrote an attack on Napoleon, published in Journal de Paris on March 11. He followed this with a March 19 attack in Journal des débats: “Napoleon has not promised clemency. . . . He is Attila, he is Genghis Khan, but more terrible and more odious because the resources of civilization are his to use. I have sought liberty in all its forms; I have seen the king ally himself with the nation.” Constant added what would prove to be embarrassing hyperbole: “those who love liberty, will prefer to die upon the steps of a throne by which that liberty is safeguarded and assured.”

The next day, Napoleon entered Paris with his Polish Hussars, and Constant went into hiding at Angers, about 150 miles southwest of Paris. When he heard that Napoleon had declared a general amnesty, he met Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte at the Palais Royal and provided assurances of his cooperation. Joseph Bonaparte claimed that Napoleon learned his lesson and would support constitutional government. The emperor would purportedly need the help of respected liberals like Constant, and, accordingly, he was ushered into the Tuileries palace for a face-to-face meeting with Napoleon on April 14. “I need the support of the nation,” Napoleon told Constant. “In return, the nation will ask for liberty; she shall have it.”

Constant’s friends like Lafayette hooted at the idea of Napoleon as a born-again liberal. Constant countered: “I did not for one moment believe in the sudden conversion of a man who for so long had exercised so absolute an authority. . . . I wanted to find out for myself what we could still hope for, whether his bitter experiences had in any manner altered his mind.”

Constant adapted the constitution which had been accepted by Louis XVIII, and on April 24 Napoleon accepted a modified version. To avoid public debate, Napoleon presented it as a mere addition to existing laws—Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de l’Empire. There were many features which reflected Constant’s views, but the Acte Additionnel stressed monarchy much more than Constant would have liked. The Acte Additionnel, known as La Benjamine, was approved in a plebiscite and proclaimed June 1.

Principles of Politics

Constant had been working on Principes de politique (Principles of Politics), and it was published in May as an analysis of constitutional principles. “The citizens possess individual rights independently of all social and political authority,” he wrote, “and any authority which violates these rights becomes illegitimate. The rights of the citizens are individual freedom, religious freedom, freedom of opinion, which includes the freedom to express oneself openly, the enjoyment of property, a guarantee against all arbitrary power. No authority can call these rights into question without destroying its own credentials.”

Ultras demanded power to enforce virtuous behavior, but Constant warned that “Arbitrary power destroys morality, for there can be no morality without security; there are no gentle affections without the certainty that the objects of these affections rest safe under the shield of their innocence.”

Constant challenged the doctrine that unlimited power was acceptable as long as it was exercised in the name of popular sovereignty: “When sovereignty is unlimited, there is no means of sheltering individuals from governments. It is in vain that you pretend to submit governments to the general will. It is always they who dictate the content of this will, and all your precautions become illusory.”

He reaffirmed the urgency of limiting government power: “You may divide powers as much as you like; if the total of those powers is unlimited, those divided powers need only form a coalition, and there will be no remedy for despotism. What matters to us is not that our rights should not be violated by one power without the approval of another, but rather that any violation should be equally forbidden to all powers alike.”

But before anything could come of the new constitution, the Prussian general Marshal Blucher and the British Duke of Wellington gathered 213,000 British, Prussian, Dutch, and Belgian soldiers and on June 18, 1815, routed Napoleon at Waterloo, near Brussels. Napoleon demanded dictatorial power, but Lafayette, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, demanded Napoleon’s abdication. He was banished to a shabby, pink six-room house (shared with his top officers and families) on St. Helena, a British-controlled volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean about 1,140 miles west of South Africa, where he was to die six years later. Allied armies entered Paris on July 7, and the following day Louis XVIII was again installed at the Tuileries palace.

Constant offered an apology to Louis XVIII, and the king let him stay in France. Constant settled down with his wife, Charlotte. (Madame de Stael died of a stroke in Paris, July 17, 1817, at 51.) While trying to jump over a garden wall, he injured his hip, and for the rest of his life he needed crutches to get around.

Ultra-royalists gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, and they did everything they could to undermine Louis XVIII. They made divorce illegal, imposed restrictions on publishing and established the Cours Prévotales, a court to deal with defendants accused of treason. People were arbitrarily arrested, jailed for weeks without being brought to trial, then hit with long prison sentences. The Allies feared that such policies might trigger a new revolution, and they urged Louis XVIII to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, which he did.

In 1817, the liberal-leaning Minister Elie Décazes pushed through an extension of the voting franchise to every Frenchman over 30 who paid more than 300 francs of taxes—about 88,000 out of an estimated 30 million people. Constant and Lafayette were elected from Sarthe, a district in central France. They emerged as leaders of the new Liberal party. By 1819, a new law granted more freedom of the press.

Political debates intensified. Ultras promoted their views through newspapers like Quotidienne and Drapeau Blanc. Moderates had the Journal des Débats. Constant edited Minerve Francaise, and there was Constitutionnel, another liberal newspaper.

Constant defied laws against seditious speech and writing—court decisions couldn’t be appealed, and sentences were carried out within 24 hours. He produced dozens of newspaper articles and pamphlets, and he delivered hundreds of speeches. Nobody was as steadfast a champion of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. He went on to launch a campaign against the African slave trade. He kept attacking slavery for years through articles, speeches, and debates.

Constant hailed commerce which “inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities. This intervention is almost always—and I do not know why I say almost—this intervention is indeed always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.”

On December 22, 1824, Louis XVIII died, and he was succeeded by his Ultra-royalist brother, the Comte d’Artois, who became Charles X. He pushed for a succession of laws to imprison people found guilty of offending Catholic clergymen; to give Catholic clergy the power to appoint all teachers in primary school and to control secondary schools; and to make it illegal for anybody to publicly question the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Constant, elected to the Chamber of Deputies from a Paris district, led the opposition.

Constant’s health deteriorated seriously during 1830. His legs became swollen. He experienced paralysis in his feet, tongue, and other parts of his body. He was confined to his house at 17 rue d’Anjou, Paris. He told a friend: “I have been unable to sustain an hour’s conversation.”

On May 7, the king dissolved the Chamber of Deputies and called new elections, but Liberals won 274 of the 417 seats. On July 25, the king dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies, which hadn’t yet met, and announced a tougher censorship policy aimed at suppressing political pamphlets—nothing under 25 pages could be published without prior approval of censors. Journalists spurred by Louis Adolph Thiers issued a call for resistance, and the next day merchants closed their shops throughout Paris. There were riots July 28 and 29 in which some 2,000 people were killed. The king had dispatched 40,000 of his best soldiers to achieve colonial glory in Algiers, so he was caught unprepared.

Lafayette wrote Constant: “A game is being played here in which our heads are all at stake. Bring yours!” He got out of bed but soon encountered barricades that blocked many of the streets in Paris. When he finally made it to the Chamber of Deputies, they resolved to depose the king and name as the successor the Duc d’Orléans who, though related to the Bourbons, had fought as a republican during the French Revolution. Constant was among those who secured his agreement to honor the fundamental protections specified in the Charte of 1814. Soon afterward Charles X abdicated.

Constant died on December 8, 1830, with his wife, Charlotte, at his side. He was 63. There was a funeral service December 12 at a Protestant church on rue Saint Antoine. As his coffin was brought to the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise, people waved the tricolor flags of the Liberal Party. Lafayette told the crowd: “Love of liberty, and the need of serving her, always ruled his conduct. To say this is a justice due him, over his grave, by a friend who, less trusting and temperate than he, was nevertheless the confidant of his most intimate thoughts.”

And there was this letter to Constant’s wife, Charlotte, signed by 13 people in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe: “How could we forget the Honourable Deputy who by his efforts did so much to abolish, at least in part, the revolting ill-treatment of which we were the victims. . . . The entire family of coloured peoples dares to hope that in your justifiable grief you will deign to accept the expression of the regrets which his loss inspires in us—the loss of a man who was always the staunchest supporter of our rights.”

Constant’s most influential ideological successor was Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). “The last generation in France,” Tocqueville wrote, “showed how a people might organize a stupendous tyranny in the community at the very time when they were baffling the authority of the nobility and braving the power of kings. . . . When I feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know who oppresses me; and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke, because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men . . . unlimited power is in itself a bad and dangerous thing.”

Although the French liberal journalist Edward Laboulaye brought out an edition of Constant’s works in 1861, collectivism was coming into fashion, and Constant was remembered as an author of French romantic literature (mainly Adolphe). This view continues in some quarters—a 1993 biography of Constant, by French literature professor Dennis Wood, belittles his political philosophy. Elizabeth Schermerhorn’s 1924 biography remains the best in English.

But twentieth-century government horrors have brought recognition that Constant had fantastic insight. Political theorists F.A. Hayek and Isaiah Berlin helped revive interest in Constant’s political writings during the 1950s, and there was a new Paris edition of his works in 1957. In 1980, the Institut Benjamin Constant got started in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the first English-language assessment of Constant’s political contributions was published—Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism by Brown University political science professor Guy H. Dodge. Cambridge University Press published the first English translation of Constant’s major political writings in 1988. New documents have come to light, and since 1993 the prestigious German publisher Max Niemeyer Verlag has issued the first three of a projected 40 volumes of Constant’s publications, memoirs, and correspondence. Let us hope that more people will discover the genius of this great thinker for liberty.

Cornell University historian Stanley Idzerda remarked, “Lafayette knew only one cause during his long lifetime: human liberty. As a young man he risked his life in war and revolution for that cause. In middle age, living under the barely concealed dictatorship of Napoleon, a regime he detested, he recalled how he had been wounded, denounced, condemned to death, despised, imprisoned, beggared, and exiled—all in the service of human liberty. Poor, powerless, and with no prospects at that time, Lafayette asked, ‘How have I loved liberty? With the enthusiasm of religion, with the rapture of love, with the conviction of geometry: that is how I have always loved liberty.’”

Lafayette was the principal author of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. “There exist certain natural rights inherent in every society of which not only one nation but all the nations together could not justly deprive an individual,” he insisted. He maintained these rights aren’t “subject to the condition of nationality,” and they include “freedom of conscience and opinions, judicial guarantees, the right to come and go.” He promoted free trade. He fought for religious toleration and freedom of the press. When the French government harassed immigrants, he sheltered many in his own house. He spent a lot of his own money to help free slaves in French colonies.

He did more than anybody else to link friends of liberty everywhere. He was in touch with Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, and James Fenimore Cooper, among other Americans. He was a friend of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Germaine de Stael, Benjamin Constant, and Horace Say in France. He corresponded with Charles James Fox in Britain and Simón Bolvar, who helped secure the independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Lafayette encouraged Italian liberals, Spanish constitutionalists, and Greek and Polish freedom fighters.

Lafayette stood out in a crowd. He was tall and bony with green eyes. “Pale, lanky, red-haired, with a pointed nose and receding forehead,” added biographer Vincent Cronin, “he looked less like an officer than a wading bird. Nor was he a shining courtier, being slow to speak and awkward.”

From the beginning, though, Lafayette impressed people. His cousin, the Marquis de Bouille recalled, “I found the young La Fayette remarkably well informed for his age, astonishingly forward in reason and reasoning, and extraordinary for his reflections, his wisdom, his moderation, his cool head and his discernment.”

Washington saluted Lafayette’s abilities as a strategist and commander: “He possesses uncommon military talents, is of quick and sound judgment, persevering, and enterprizing without rashness, and besides these, he is of a very conciliating temper and perfectly sober, which are qualities that rarely combine in the same person.”

Jefferson, representing American interests in Paris, offered this candid assessment to Madison: “The Marquis de La Fayette is a most valuable auxiliary to me. His zeal is unbounded, & his weight with those in power, great. His education having been merely military, commerce was an unknown field to him. But his good sense enabling him to comprehend perfectly whatever is explained to him, his agency has been very efficacious. He has a great deal of sound genius, and is well remarked by the King, & rising in popularity. He has nothing against him, but the suspicion of republican principles. I think he will one day be of the ministry. His foible is, a canine appetite for popularity and fame; but he will get above this.” Jefferson told Lafayette: “according to the ideas of our country, we do not permit ourselves to speak even truths, when they may have the air of flattery. I content myself, therefore, with saying once and for all, that I love you, your wife and children.”

The respected Lafayette scholar Louis Gottschalk wrote that “For most of the last fifty years of his long life, he was the outstanding champion in Europe of freedom—freedom for all men, everywhere.”

Early Life

Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was born September 6, 1757, in Chateau de Chavaniac, Auvergne, in south-central France. His father was Michel Louis Christophe Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, Colonel of the French Grenadiers. He descended from a long line of warrior-aristocrats, one of whom fought with Joan of Arc against the English. Lafayette’s mother was Marie-Louise-Julie de la Riviere, whose family had money.

Lafayette’s tutors stressed Catholic doctrine and the battlefield exploits of his ancestors, but he did acquire some proficiency in the classics. “I was very good in Latin,” he recalled. “I wasn’t made to take Greek, which annoyed me. I spent four years at the College [de Plessis]. My essays were quite outstanding.” One of his early heroes was Vercingétorix, who had defended Gaul against Julius Caesar.

When he was two, his father was killed by a British cannon ball at the battle of Minden (about 40 miles west of Hannover, Germany) during the Seven Years War, and he became the Marquis de La Fayette (as he spelled it before the French Revolution). His mother pulled strings to find a place at Versailles, where the king held court. She died in April 1770, and his grandfather, the Marquis de la Riviere, died soon afterward, leaving Lafayette an inheritance which assured him of a sizeable annual income of around 120,000 livres.

At 15, he met 14-year-old Marie Adrienne Francoise de Noailles (known as Adrienne) and fell in love. The wealth and power of the Noailles family were rivaled only by the royal house of Bourbon. They married about a year later, on April 11, 1774. According to biographer André Maurois, she had “large, brooding eyes and an air of alert intelligence.” Her aunt the Comtesse de Tesse, remarked that Adrienne rooted her views in “the Catechism and the Rights of Man.”

Lafayette became impatient with positions in the Noailles cavalry, and he didn’t see a future for himself at the royal court. He heard insurgent Americans were looking for French recruits, so he called on Silas Deane, a Connecticut merchant who was representing the Continental Congress. He wanted to volunteer at his own expense. He told Deane: “it is when danger threatens that I wish to share your fortune.”

Lafayette bought a little two-gun merchant ship named La Victoire and set sail for America on April 20, 1777. It was an anxious voyage, because the ship would have been easy prey for a faster, better-armed British privateer. But Lafayette was lucky, and after 54 days at sea, he arrived at the Bay of Georgetown, South Carolina. He sailed on to Charleston. He spent a month traveling to Philadelphia, mostly on horseback.

The Americans gave him the brush-off because previous French volunteers had proven to be a troublesome lot. But General George Washington was in desperate straits. There were only about 11,000 men in his army, they were poorly equipped, and they were being chased by British General William Howe. Moreover, Benjamin Franklin, whom Lafayette had met in Paris, sent letters asking Washington to serve as a “discreet friend” to Lafayette, “to advise him if necessary with a friendly affection.” Franklin was confident that a generous reception for Lafayette would make the French more willing to help America.

Lafayette and Washington

Lafayette first met Washington during a dinner at Philadelphia’s City Tavern, July 31, 1777. He welcomed Lafayette as the American forces began moving to evade an attack by British General Charles Cornwallis. They were overrun at Brandywine, Pennsylvania, and Lafayette was wounded in the leg. Then Washington’s forces suffered serious losses fighting British General William Howe around Philadelphia.

Lafayette shared the hardships at Valley Forge in 1777-1778. “It is here,” he explained to his wife, “that the American army will spend the winter in little huts which are scarcely more cheerful than a cell. . . . Everything tells me to leave, but honor bids me stay, and really, when you understand in detail the circumstances I am in, which the army is in, as is my friend who commands it, and the whole American cause, you will forgive me, my dear heart, you will even pardon me, and I dare almost say that you will congratulate me.”

Washington’s enemies tried to lure Lafayette into schemes that would undermine Washington’s command, but Lafayette asserted his loyalty. He wrote Washington: “I am bound to your destiny, I shall follow it and will serve you with my sword and with all my faculties.” Washington replied: “I am well aware that you are quite incapable of entertaining plans whose success depends upon lies and that your spirit is too high to stoop to seek a reputation by ignoble means and by intrigue.” He became Washington’s information officer.

On May 18, 1778, Washington directed Lafayette to lead a force up between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers and disrupt British communications with Philadelphia. He displayed tactical genius by cleverly ambushing several British detachments, then maneuvering his men back through British lines. The British pulled their soldiers out of Philadelphia and headed for New York, and Washington asked Lafayette to pursue them and inflict as much damage as possible. Working with General Charles Lee, who turned out to be incompetent, Lafayette was nearly routed by the British at Monmouth, New Jersey.

He decided to see how he could help the cause by returning to France and leading French forces against the British. He bid farewell to Washington, boarded L’Alliance in Boston, and sailed on January 11, 1779, bearing a letter from Washington to Benjamin Franklin. At Lafayette’s suggestion France would send ships and soldiers to America. Of course, Lafayette would have loved to command the force, but he was only 22, and there were others with considerable seniority.

Lafayette versus the British

Lafayette proved himself extraordinarily resourceful at harassing the British—and escaping from them. One engagement with about 2,500 British soldiers at Petersburg, Virginia, was marked by the death of General William Phillips—the same man who, as an artillery officer 22 years before, had ordered the cannon fire that blew Lafayette’s father to bits.

Traitor General Benedict Arnold took over Phillips’s command, and he was to be joined by General Charles Cornwallis, marching up from South Carolina, and by General Henry Clinton, coming down from New York.

Cornwallis’s primary mission was to cut off the South from the North, destroy its arsenals, and, if possible, capture Lafayette, who had built up a force of about 3,500, including a 40-man cavalry and six artillery pieces—about half the total force led by Cornwallis. Lafayette retreated as Cornwallis advanced. He was careful to avoid being outflanked by always staying on higher ground north and west of Cornwallis. His men found myriad ways to cross the rivers of tidewater Virginia and harass Cornwallis from positions that were hard to assault.

Cornwallis approached Fredericksburg, then withdrew toward Williamsburg, and Lafayette followed. Hundreds of “Mad Anthony” Wayne’s Pennsylvanians met Lafayette at the banks of the North Anna River. He was joined by General Daniel Morgan’s riflemen and by skilled horsemen from Virginia and Maryland. Lafayette’s forces grew almost as large as those of Cornwallis. The British commander dispatched troops to destroy Lafayette’s military supplies stored at Albemarle Old Court House, but Lafayette led his forces through backwoods trails and thwarted the British.

War’s End

On May 31, 1781, Washington wrote Lafayette saying that at last he and Rochambeau agreed to attack Clinton in New York. This, Washington believed, would force the British to withdraw forces from Virginia. Washington told Lafayette he could head north if he still wished, providing he could find a capable leader for his forces. The British intercepted Washington’s message, and Clinton concluded that he was more vulnerable than Cornwallis. He ordered Cornwallis to establish a defensive position and send some of his forces to New York. Lafayette followed Cornwallis every step of the way, often through night maneuvers that eluded British detection. Two of his subordinates subsequently marched into a British trap, and a reported 139 Americans were killed, and Lafayette spurred his horse through the gunfire to rally his troops. It was a defeat, but Cornwallis withdrew as he dispatched forces to New York, and he planned on leaving Virginia for Charleston. Lafayette regained Williamsburg.

His forces dwindled to about 1,500 as men went home and tended their fields, but he kept tabs on Cornwallis. Lafayette feared he would miss the most important action. He wrote Washington asking for an assignment in New York. Meanwhile, Clinton ordered Cornwallis to maintain a presence on the Chesapeake Bay—a staging area for attacks on Philadelphia—by occupying Yorktown.

On July 31, Washington ordered Lafayette to rebuild his forces as fast as possible and make the cavalry strong. He knew what that meant: keep Cornwallis bottled up on the peninsula where Yorktown stood. A subsequent dispatch confirmed that Admiral Francois-Joseph-Paul, Comte de Grasse, was sailing to Yorktown from French possessions in the Caribbean. And Washington and Rochambeau were on the way!

Lafayette amassed provisions. He beefed up his intelligence about British maneuvers. He repositioned his forces. He begged Virginia governor Thomas Nelson for help: “We have not 2000 militia fit to bring into the field. We are destitute of ammunition, and the army living from hand to mouth and unable to follow the enemy. So that on the arrival of the Spanish, French and American forces, I may be reduced to the cruel necessity to announce that I have not, that it was not in my power to stop the enemy.”

On August 30, Admiral de Grasse’s fleet—six frigates and 28 battleships, with 15,000 sailors and 3,100 marines on board—reached Yorktown. These ships could prevent Cornwallis from escaping by water, and they could help bring American and French soldiers to the scene more quickly. Soon Lafayette commanded over 5,500 regular troops, and there were another 3,000 militiamen. Cornwallis’s 8,800 English, Hessian, and provincial troops were outnumbered by the time Washington and Rochambeau arrived on September 9.

“Through his own good luck and the bad judgment of Generals Clinton and Cornwallis had won for him much of his success,” wrote historian Louis Gottschalk, “less perseverance or more rashness might easily have led to the annihilation of the force which he had commanded. If Cornwallis now faced the prospect of surrender, it was in large part because Lafayette had persisted where others might have given up or had been cautious where others, yielding to an alluring temptation, might have proved too bold.”

The siege of Yorktown began on October 6, 1781. Lafayette was in the thick of the action, leading the capture of British positions. Cornwallis was almost out of food and ammunition, and about a quarter of his men were ill. He surrendered at noon, October 19. British soldiers marched between lines of American and French soldiers as a band played a melody called “The World Turned Upside Down.” When the British tried to slight the Americans by looking only at the French, Lafayette ordered his drum-major to start playing “Yankee Doodle” as the British handed over their weapons and returned to Yorktown under militia guard. Historian Gottschalk observed: “No other person (except perhaps De Grasse) had contributed so much or so directly to the capture of one of England’s finest armies as had the young general fresh from the ‘Society’ of Paris.”

Continuing Efforts for Liberty

Back in France, after the war, Lafayette suggested that he and Washington launch a joint venture against slavery: “permit me to propose a plan to you which might become greatly beneficial to the Black Part of Mankind. Let us unite in purchasing a small estate where we may try the experiment to free the Negroes, and use them only as tenants—such an example as yours might render it a general practice, and if we succeed in America, I will cheerfully devote a part of my time to render the method fascionable [sic] in the West Indias. If it be a wild scheme, I had rather be mad that way, than to be thought wise on the other track.” Washington replied that he would welcome such an opportunity.

Lafayette arrived in New York on August 4, 1784. Two weeks later, he was at Mount Vernon at Washington’s invitation. He spent 11 days there, then visited other American friends and by November he was back with Washington. They traveled together to Annapolis. They bid farewell on December 1. Washington wrote Lafayette, “I felt all that love, respect and attachment for you, with which length of years, close connexion and your merits have inspired me. I often asked myself, as our carriages distended, whether that was the last sight I should have of you. And tho’ I wished to say no, my fears answered yes.” Lafayette and Washington never saw each other again.

Lafayette worked tirelessly for liberty. He promoted freer trade between France and the United States. “There now exist in this kingdom many obstacles to trade which I hope, by little and little, will be eradicated. . . . I think my present duty is, and it ever shall be my rule, to do that in which I hope to serve the United States.”

Lafayette became a charter member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks. He was an honorary member of the New York Manumission Society and the British Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1785, Lafayette and his wife spent 125,000 livres to buy two plantations in Cayenne, French Guiana. These came with 48 black slaves who were subsequently emancipated and given some land with which to start providing their own livelihood. The aim was to show how emancipation could be handled successfully.

Revolution in France

The slavery issue was soon overtaken by revolution. The French government had incurred enormous debts during the Seven Years War with Britain, and the situation worsened when the government gave substantial aid to the American struggle against Britain. Half the annual budget went to serve the debt, another quarter was spent on the armed forces, and the royal court at Versailles was a costly drain.

The weak-willed Louis XVI had caved in to special interests, dismissing his finance minister, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who, during his brief tenure (1774-1776), had cut government spending, abolished monopolies, abolished internal trade restrictions, and abolished forced labor. For a while, Turgot’s successor, Jacques Necker, had covered soaring deficits with borrowing, but this had about reached its limit, and government spending cuts couldn’t be delayed any further. Thousands of people, long dependent on government checks, were desperate. Moreover, inefficient, high-cost producers shut down as consumers gained the choice of spending their money on less expensive goods from Britain and elsewhere. Unemployment in Paris soared to an estimated 50 percent.

Louis XVI intensified demands that the Parlement of Paris approve new taxes. They countered that approval must come from the Estates-General, an assembly of clergy, nobles, and taxpayers (known as the “Third Estate”), which hadn’t met in a century and a half. The nobles who dominated the parliament figured they would dominate a new Estates-General, which is what Louis XVI was afraid of.

In 1787, the king nominated 143 lawyers, judges, and other influential people to the Assembly of Notables, and Lafayette was among them. Although this Assembly could only advise the king, Lafayette hoped that it might persuade the king to limit his absolute power. When that failed, he became a vocal member of the opposition. He constantly spoke out against taxation—and in favor of liberty. After Louis XVI insisted on new taxes, Lafayette declared: “The oriental despotism of the regime enfuriates me.” Lafayette called for a national assembly.

On July 5, 1788, Louis XVI agreed that the following May he would summon the Estates-General. Representatives would have to be elected and an agenda drawn up. Clergy, nobles, and taxpayers had met and voted separately, which meant that the tax-exempt clergy and nobles would always outweigh the Third Estate. This included taxpaying lawyers, bankers, merchants, artisans, and peasants who didn’t want to be forever dominated. The king acceded to demands that the Third Estate have as many representatives as clergy and nobles combined.

The Estates-General convened at Versailles in May 1789. The 47 representatives of the Third Estate declared themselves to be a National Assembly and boycotted the proceedings, demanding that clergy, nobles, and commoners deliberate together and vote individually. Nobles insisted that the king close the hall where the Third Estate met. He did, they continued their deliberations on an indoor tennis court, and Lafayette was there. They swore what became known as the Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20, 1789, to remain in session until they had drafted a constitution for France.

On July 14, 1789, Lafayette was having lunch with the Duke d’Orléans, a rival of Louis XVI, when he heard the distant sound of cannon. He found out that the Bastille, a medieval prison, had been seized by some 800 angry people. Almost a hundred attackers were killed, and the 49-year-old administrator of the Bastille was beheaded by a cook with a butcher’s knife. The Bastille held only seven prisoners at the time, but it had come to symbolize the corrupt regime. Its fall to commoners launched the French Revolution.

A disgruntled lawyer named Maximilien Robespierre described it with what would become his bywords, “punish,” “terror,” and “victim.” He was a leader of the Jacobins, who got their name because they began meeting in a hall which once belonged to Jacobin monks. Generally well-to-do, the Jacobins promoted egalitarian doctrines with force and violence.

The Declaration of Rights

Lafayette believed if anything good was to be accomplished, the aims of the revolution must be spelled out in a way that would win the hearts of people. Accordingly, for months he had been drafting what became the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Lafayette was inspired by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and his draft reflected his view that the primary threat to liberty was royal absolutism. He affirmed the right of the individual to “assure his property, liberty, honor, and his life.” He advocated separation of powers, limited taxation, and freedom of speech. He carefully specified how the constitution could be revised. In January 1789 he gave this draft to Jefferson, who praised it and sent along a copy to James Madison, then contemplating a Bill of Rights for America.

As the National Assembly debated the Declaration between July 11 and August 26, more members became convinced the primary threat to liberty was mob violence rather than royal absolutism, and they insisted on somewhat more conservative language. The final draft stressed obedience to law. It was more specific on freedom of thought. It specified freedom of religion. It emphasized the importance of secure private property. It didn’t say anything about amending the constitution. Despite these differences, the final version was based more on Lafayette’s draft than any other—almost all of his first five paragraphs were incorporated into the final version. While less eloquent than the immortal opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on August 27, offered a more fully developed vision of liberty.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen appeared in thousands of broadsheets, pamphlets, and books. It was read in public places.

As for specific constitutional arrangements, Lafayette believed that a separation of powers was essential. He favored a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Representatives, a lower house (short terms) that could initiate legislation, and the Senate, an upper house (six-year terms) that could exercise a “suspensive” veto on legislation, preventing enactment for perhaps a year. Similarly, he thought that legislative power should be subject to check by a king with a suspensive veto, preventing enactment through two elections—unless overridden by a two-thirds vote in the Chamber of Representatives.

But there was a bitter split in the National Assembly over checks and balances. Lafayette asked his friend Jefferson to host a dinner for eight National Assembly leaders, but despite the Virginian’s benevolent influence, the split remained as deep as ever. On September 10, the Assembly voted 490 to 89 for a legislature with a single chamber. It supported a suspensive veto for the king, giving Lafayette a partial victory.

Citizen militias formed throughout France, and they came together as the National Guard, which served the National Assembly. Lafayette was appointed commander of the Paris National Guard. “The National Assembly,” he declared, “recognizes with pleasure that all France owes the Constitution which is going to ensure her happiness to the great efforts for public liberty just made by the Parisians.” Soldiers throughout Paris swore allegiance to Lafayette, which seemed to give him more power than the king. Lafayette used his power mainly to save people from being murdered by mobs.

In the National Assembly, Lafayette was pushing for reforms. He introduced a measure for abolishing aristocratic privileges, and it passed on August 4. He proposed major reforms of criminal justice—accused persons must be provided with legal counsel, they must have access to all documents in their case, they must be able to confront witnesses, and trials must be public.

During the night of June 20, 1791, Louis XVI secretly made his “flight to Varennes,” near the Belgian frontier, an attempt at rallying royalists and, if necessary, joining the Austrian army mobilized against the Revolution. Lafayette awakened his house guest, Rights of Man author Thomas Paine, and exclaimed: “The birds have flown away!” Outraged, since he had assured people that the king agreed to stay put, he signed the first order in French history for the arrest of a king, and he brought the humiliated royal family back to Paris.

On September 14, 1791, Louis XVI abandoned royal absolutism as he signed the Constitution.

This wasn’t good enough for fanatics who were gaining more influence every day. Mob violence became endemic. Lafayette was branded an enemy of the nation who must be guillotined. On August 17, 1792, he was dismissed from the National Guard, an almost certain prelude to execution. Lafayette headed for the Belgian border, on his way to Holland. By fleeing the country, according to a 1792 decree, he forfeited all his properties.

Imprisonment

Lafayette was detained in Rochefort, Belgium, which was controlled by the Austrian Emperor Francois II. Although Austria welcomed French royalist émigrés, Lafayette was considered a dangerous revolutionary. He was sent off to Wesel in western Germany, where he was placed in solitary confinement in a dark, damp, moldy, rat-infested dungeon. After about a year, the Prussian government agreed to serve as jailer for enemies of Austria, and Lafayette was transferred east to a fortress at Magdeburg, about 75 miles from Berlin—another dungeon. By January 1794, he had been transferred further east, a 12-day journey through bitter-cold weather to yet another dungeon at Neisse, near the Polish frontier.

The Prussians decided that Austria should jail its own enemies, and in the spring, Lafayette was transferred to Olmutz, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). Lafayette was stripped of virtually all possessions except a few books, including, ironically, a copy of Thomas Paine’s radical Common Sense.

He wrote a friend that “Liberty is the constant subject of my solitary meditations. . . . It is what one of my friends once called my ‘holy madness.’ And whether some miracle releases me from here, or whether I testify upon the scaffold, ‘liberty, equality’ will be my final words. Here, I can fight against the tyrants only for my soul and my body.” He expressed concern “that the Blacks who cultivate it [his estate in Cayenne] still keep their liberty.”

Meanwhile, during the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794, when Robespierre ordered some 60 executions a day, 40,000 altogether, Adrienne Lafayette’s mother, grandmother, and sister had been guillotined, and Adrienne had been imprisoned in Brioude and Paris. She was released thanks, in part, to efforts by American diplomat James Monroe, who had also helped free Thomas Paine from a French prison. Adrienne arranged for 14-year-old George Washington Lafayette to find a safe haven in America. He bore her letter to George Washington that said “I send you my son.”

Adrienne worked singlemindedly to see Lafayette. As Lafayette descendant and scholar Réné de Chambrun explained, “Lafayette had not spoken to a human being and had been completely isolated from the outside world for nearly one year, when suddenly, on October 15, 1795, the door of his narrow cell was thrown open.” In came Lafayette’s wife and two daughters. It was the most “dramatic instant of his life.”

Prison conditions took their toll on Adrienne. She developed fevers, her arms became swollen, and there were open sores on her legs. When she asked to visit a physician in Vienna, she was told that if she left she could never return. She stayed, and her health worsened.

George Washington wrote a confidential letter to Francois II, pleading for their freedom and offering the United States as a sanctuary. In the British parliament, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan championed Lafayette.

Freedom

The October 17, 1797, Treaty of Campo-Formio stipulated, among other things, that Lafayette and his wife would be released. They went to Holstein, a province of Denmark that wasn’t likely to become embroiled in war between France and England. On Christmas Day 1798, George Washington wrote his last letter to Lafayette, expressing relief that his friend was free.

Finally in November 1799, Napoleon agreed they could return. Most of their properties had been confiscated and sold during the French Revolution. They were left with La Grange, an abandoned fifteenth-century castle about 35 miles east of Paris. Jefferson pleaded with Lafayette to make America his home. But Lafayette was convinced that if he left France, Napoleon would never let him return.

Réné le Chambrun emphasized that “Madame Lafayette’s greatest concern was to find the hidden ditch where the beheaded bodies of her grandmother, mother, and sister Louise lay with the other victims of the Terror. With her sister . . . they one day found the dreaded hole. They were too poor to buy the surrounding land, so they raised a subscription among the victims’ kin. They built a chapel on the site of the one the Revolution had destroyed at Picpus.”

Despite all he had suffered, Lafayette remained defiant. In 1802, Napoleon wanted to be named a consul for life, but Lafayette expressed his opposition. “The French people have too well known their rights to have forgotten them,” he declared.

In 1807, Adrienne suffered the same painful symptoms she had in prison. By October, she developed a fever and went into a delerium. Her family gathered around. On Christmas Eve, she put her arm around Lafayette’s neck and whispered, “Je suis toute a vous” (“I am all yours”). She groped for his fingers, squeezed them, and was gone.

Lafayette, Réné le Chambrun explained, “seldom left La Grange, where he led a farmer’s life.” He improved fertilization techniques. He introduced American corn to France. He planted apple and pear orchards, and he did a good business selling cider. He introduced new breeds of cattle, hogs, and sheep. He did well enough that he paid off debts and achieved some financial security.

Every day he arose at five in the morning, Chambrun reported, and “remained in bed for two hours writing friends of liberty all over the world: Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese, North and South Americans . . . and, alone on his knees, holding in his hand a small portrait of Adrienne and a lock of her hair, he would spend a quarter of an hour in meditative devotion.”

Lafayette’s Return to Public Life

After Napoleon’s downfall in 1814, Lafayette returned to public life. He visited Germaine de Stael, who, after a decade of exile, had revived her influential liberal salon. He protested as Napoleon’s successor, Louis XVIII, affirmed the divine right of kings and issued one decree after another. He lashed out at aristocrats scrambling back into power.

When Napoleon attempted his comeback, claiming a conversion to liberalism, the supposedly nave Lafayette declared, “I see no sign of his doing so.” The intellectual Benjamin Constant, who had bet on Napoleon’s conversion to liberal principles, told Lafayette: “You are my conscience!” Constant persuaded Lafayette to seek election for the Chamber of Deputies. He became a deputy from the department of Seine-et-Marne.

Defeated at Waterloo, Napoleon demanded dictatorial power. Lafayette rose in the Chamber of Deputies. “When for the first time in long years,” he declared, “I raise a voice that the old friends of liberty will still recognize, I feel called upon, Messieurs, to speak to you of the dangers confronting the nation, which you alone, just now, have the power to save. . . . This is the moment for us to rally round the old tricolour standard, the standard of ’89, the standard of liberty, of equality and public order; it is that alone which we have to defend against pretensions abroad and assaults at home.” He proposed five resolutions that, among other things, asserted the supremacy of parliamentary government.

Napoleon, still the most feared military commander in Europe, was furious. Lafayette urged his fellow deputies to join him in telling the Emperor that “after all that has happened, his abdication has become necessary to save the nation.” Napoleon abdicated.

Lafayette withdrew from politics, but he remained an inspiration to friends of liberty everywhere. When fanatical royalists began to terrorize much of France, friends encouraged Lafayette to seek office again. In 1818, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies from Sarthe. He started a group called Friends of the Liberty of the Press, and he pleaded for toleration. He urged that people “return to the national, constitutional and peaceable path—the path of good will. We have so many public and personal interests to conserve, so many common sorrows to deplore, so many private qualities to recognize in one another, when they are not denatured by the partisan spirit.”

In 1823, Lafayette accepted President James Monroe’s invitation for a farewell tour of America. He declined Monroe’s offer to send a warship for him and instead traveled aboard the ordinary packet ship Cadmus. He arrived on August 15, 1824, and was greeted by some 30,000 people. An estimated 50,000 cheered Lafayette as he rode a wagon drawn by four white horses to New York’s City Hall. People threw flowers at him. Mothers brought their children for his blessing. Some 6,000 people attended a ball in his honor. He began a 13-month tour through all 24 states.

“I see you are to visit York-Town,” Jefferson wrote Lafayette in Boston, “my spirit will be there with you; but I am too enfeebled by old age to make the journey. . . . Our village of Charlottesville insists upon receiving you, and would have claimed you as its guest, if in the neighborhood of Monticello you could be anybody’s guest but mine . . . God bless and keep you; may He permit me to see you again and to embrace you.”

Lafayette commended Americans for what they had accomplished: “In the United States the sovereignty of the people, reacquired by a glorious and spotless Revolution, universally acknowledged, guaranteed not only by a constitution . . . but by legal procedures which are always within the scope of the public will. It is also exercised by free, general, and frequent elections. . . . Ten million people, without a monarchy, without a court, without an aristocracy, without trade-guilds, without unnecessary or unpopular taxes, without a state police, a constabulary, or any disorder, have acquired the highest degree of freedom, security, prosperity, and happiness, which human civilization could have imagined.”

At Bunker Hill, Massachusetts, the orator Daniel Webster declared: “Heaven saw fit to ordain, that the electric spark of liberty should be conducted through you, from the New World to the Old.” Lafayette entered Philadelphia, escorted by four wagons carrying about 160 Revolutionary War veterans. He stopped at the Brandywine battlefield where he had been wounded. He returned to Yorktown, which was still in ruins. Big crowds welcomed him everywhere—for instance, 10,000 in Newburgh (New York), 50,000 in Baltimore, and 70,000 in Boston. He was cheered in Richmond, Columbia, Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, Montgomery, Mobile, New Orleans, Natchez, St. Louis, Nashville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and Albany. He appeared at Catholic churches, Protestant churches, and Masonic lodge gatherings. He attended receptions open to everybody, and he publicly welcomed blacks and Indians who came. Lafayette descended to the vault of George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon. There was a reception at the University of Virginia. He saw John Adams in Quincy, Massachusetts, and James Madison in Montpelier, Virginia.

And Lafayette reached Monticello. “The Marquis got out of his barouche and limped as fast as he could toward the house,” explained biographer Brand Whitlock. “Between the white columns of the portico appeared a tall, spare figure of a man stooped with age, wearing the swallow-tailcoat, the long waistcoat and the high stock of another epoch; he had cut off his queue, and his thin white locks hung about his hollow temples and lean cheeks; he tottered down the steps, and came towards him.

“‘Ah, Jefferson!’ cried Lafayette.

“The two old men broke into a shuffling run.

“‘Ah, Lafayette!’ cried Jefferson.

“No need for eloquence now! They burst into tears and fell into each other’s arms.”

Sometime later, Lafayette’s secretary Auguste Levasseur described an awesome sight in Charlottesville: “the Nation’s Guest, seated at the patriotic banquet between Jefferson and Madison.” On September 7, Lafayette went down the Potomac River on the steamboat Mount Vernon, boarded the frigate Brandywine, and sailed back to France.

Lafayette began spending winter months at 6 rue d’Anjou, Paris, and there held Tuesday evening receptions that attracted liberals from America and Europe. The American author James Fenimore Cooper reported that the gatherings “are exceedingly well attended.” Benjamin Constant and Alexander von Humboldt attended, as did members of the Chamber of Deputies. Historian Lloyd Kramer noted that “Lafayette’s soirees in Paris, like his long conversations with guests at La Grange, thus facilitated contact between different generations in much the same way as they contributed to new connections between politicians and writers or between his French friends and foreigners.”

Meanwhile, in 1824, Charles X had become king of France and reasserted the power of church and throne. The Roman Catholic Church regained control over French schools, and anyone convicted of committing a sacrilege in a church building could be put to death. In 1830, the Chamber of Deputies voted “no confidence” in the ministry, the king called for new elections, and voters supported the king’s outspoken opponents. On July 26, 1830, the king issued four decrees that dissolved the new Chamber of Deputies, suppressed freedom of the press, restricted the voting franchise of merchants and bankers and announced new elections based on the restricted franchise.

The day after the decrees were announced, Paris erupted in revolt. People barricaded the streets July 27, 28, and 29. The army refused to shoot at the rebels. Some wanted a democratic republic, while others wanted stronger constitutional limitations on the monarchy, and still others were mainly concerned about job security.

The 73-year-old Lafayette declared that the regime of Charles X was politically finished and that it was time for a new government. “Make a revolution,” he urged. “Without it, we shall have made nothing but a riot.” As in 1789, he was asked to head the National Guard, and he accepted, but he declined suggestions that he become president of a French republic. While Paris seemed to favor a republic, most people in the provinces feared violent upheaval and wanted a constitutional monarchy. Lafayette concluded that “what the French people need today is a popular throne surrounded by republican institutions, but altogether republican.” He believed the top priority for liberty was to preserve the authority of the Chamber of Deputies.

He proposed that the Duke d’Orléans become king. The duke was related to the Bourbon dynasty, had been in the republican army during the French Revolution, and he agreed to observe constitutional limitations on royal power. Accordingly, the Chamber of Deputies offered him the throne on August 7, and he became Louis-Philippe, “the bourgeois king.” He proved to be an adroit public relations man—displaying the revolutionary tricolor flag, calling himself “king of the French” (rather than king of France), dressing in austere dark suits instead of opulent robes. Louis-Philippe made the Chamber of Peers an elected rather than hereditary body, and the voting franchise was doubled to include about 200,000 business people who possessed some property.

Lafayette defended individuals jailed for political offenses. He opposed capital punishment. He denounced slavery. He supported insurgents in Belgium. He was a champion of Polish freedom, and—defying government restrictions on refugees—he hid Polish patriots like Antoine Ostrowski and Joachim Lelewell at his La Grange estate.

In early February 1834, Lafayette reported pain and fatigue, perhaps triggered by prolonged exposure to bitter cold air. He had pneumonia. His children stayed with him. At about 4 o’clock in the morning, May 20, 1834, Lafayette pressed to his lips a medallion with a picture of Adrienne and took his last breath. He was 77. The funeral service was at the Church of the Assumption, Paris. Tens of thousands of people turned out to see 3,000 National Guards accompany Lafayette’s coffin to the humble Picpus cemetery, where he would join Adrienne and so many guillotined victims of the French Revolution. Lafayette was laid to rest in American soil he had brought back on the Brandywine.

Lafayette was idolized during the nineteenth century, especially in the United States. His portrait seemed to be everywhere—American Friends of Lafayette has over a thousand historic portraits of him. Dozens of American towns, counties, and schools were named after him. “Pronounce him one of the first men of his age,” John Quincy Adams proclaimed in his tribute, “and you have not done him justice.”

But most twentieth-century historians—especially French—debunked Lafayette as a vain, immature, mediocre, doctrinaire simpleton. Many conservatives, including his descendants, viewed him as a traitor to his class. Lafayette’s grandson inherited La Grange, and he married a British woman—a Tory. She consigned Lafayette’s books, papers, and other personal possessions to the third-floor attic of the northwest tower, a space which Lafayette had called the “Couloir des Polonais” (“hiding place of free Poles”). The next two generations maintained the Tory ambiance of the place.

Happily, there has come a renewed appreciation for Lafayette. Réné le Chambrun, descended from Lafayette’s daughter Virginie, acquired La Grange in 1955 and explored the northwest tower attic. He and his wife discovered a treasure of letters and mementoes.

Historian Lloyd Kramer recalled the revelation he experienced when he helped edit Cornell University’s vast collection of Lafayette letters, gathered from Lafayette’s birthplace at the Chateau de Chavaniac: “I soon came to realize the historical value of reading ‘primary sources’ and to believe that Lafayette’s life had been far more varied and complex than the ironic, historical narratives suggested.”

Even a tart-tongued biographer like Olivier Bernier acknowledged that “whatever his limitations, it is to Lafayette’s glory that the one idea he seized on was that of liberty. Nothing can replace the right to speak, think, organize, and govern freely: from this all benefits derive. With his vanity, his obstinacy, his self-satisfaction, his thirst for popularity, Lafayette never lost sight of that all-desirable principle. For that, he deserved the gratitude of his contemporaries and the esteem of later generations. In a world where liberty is in very short supply, there are worse heroes than a man who never stopped worshipping freedom.” So the one thing Lafayette’s critics concede is the most important of all. He still stands tall as the great hero of two worlds.

As regional administrator and later comptroller-general of France, a nation which had succumbed to absolute monarchy, he took giant steps for liberty. He spoke out for religious toleration. He granted freedom of expression. He gave people freedom to pursue the work of their choice. He cut government spending. He opposed inflation and made a case for gold. He abolished some onerous taxes and trade restrictions. He abolished monopoly privileges. He abolished forced labor.

Turgot was respected by leading thinkers for liberty, including the Baron de Montesquieu, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Benjamin Franklin. Referring to Turgot, Adam Smith wrote that I had the happiness of his acquaintance, and, I flattered myself, even of his friendship and esteem. After meeting Turgot in 1760, Voltaire told a friend: I have scarcely ever seen a man more lovable or better informed. Jean Baptiste Say, who inspired so many French libertarians during the nineteenth century, declared, There are hardly any works which can yield to the journalist and to the statesman an ampler harvest of facts and of instruction than may be found in the writings of Turgot. Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, a French champion of laissez faire and founder of the American industrial family, paid his friend Thomas Jefferson the supreme compliment by calling him the American Turgot.

Turgot displayed remarkable vision. For instance, he predicted the American Revolution in 1750, more than two decades before George Washington and Benjamin Franklin saw it coming. In 1778, Turgot warned Americans that slavery is incompatible with a good political constitution. He warned that Americans had more to fear from civil war than foreign enemies. He predicted that Americans are bound to become great, not by war but by culture. Turgot warned French King Louis XVI that unless taxes and government spending were cut, there would be a revolution which might cost him his head. Turgot warned about the dangers of fiat paper money, and when it was resorted to during the French Revolution, the result was ruinous runaway inflation and a military coup. Turgot showed how people could make the transition from absolutism to self-government.

Although few of Turgot’s writings were published in his lifetime, he was ablaze with ideas for liberty. Turgot was much too able a man to write anything insignificant, observed intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter. Commenting on his most important work, a slim volume, Schumpeter noted that it contains a theory of barter, price, and money that, so far as it goes, is almost faultless . . . comprehensive vision of all the essential facts and their interrelations plus excellence of formulation.

Early Life

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot was born in Paris on May 10, 1727, the third and youngest son of Michel tienne Turgot and Madeleine Francoise Martineau. His father was a government official who helped build the Paris sewage system. An awkward child, Turgot didn’t seem to get along with his mother, who reportedly cherished fine manners above all. The family, which had Norman roots, lived comfortably.

Early on, Turgot acquired a love for learning. He attended the College du Plessis where he discovered the theories of English physicist Isaac Newton. It was traditional for the youngest son to become a priest, and accordingly Turgot enrolled at the Saint-Sulpice seminary, where he earned his bachelor of theology and became known as Abbé de Brucourt. He then enrolled at the Sorbonne.

A fellow student named Morellet remarked that The remembrance of Turgot is sweet to all who have known him personally. Already his mind announced all the qualities it afterwards unfolded of sagacity, penetration, and profoundness. He had the simplicity of a child, yet it was compatible with a kind of dignity. Despite a striking physical appearance, Turgot was shy around women. He never married.

Turgot learned English, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Latin. He translated into French works by Caesar, Homer, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Virgil, and other classical authors, as well as writings by eighteenth-century authors like Joseph Addison, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope. He translated David Hume’s essay On the Jealousy of Trade.

Turgot’s first writing on economics was an April 7, 1749, letter to his friend Abbé de Cice. He attacked the doctrines of the Scottish financier John Law, who moved to France and in 1716 began promoting what became a disastrous inflation. Defending gold, Turgot wrote: It is ridiculous to say that metallic money is only a sign of value, the credit of which is founded on the stamp of the king. This stamp is only to certify the weight and the title. Even in its relation to commodities the metal uncoined is of the same price as that coined, the marked value is simply a denomination. This is what Law seems to have been ignorant of in establishing his bank.

It is then as merchandise that coined money is (not the sign) but the common measure of other merchandise, and that not by an arbitrary convention, founded on the glamour of that metal, but because, being fit to be employed in different shapes as merchandise, and having on account of this property a saleable value, a little increased by the use made of it as money and being besides suitable of reduction to a given standard and of being equally divided, we always know the value of it. Gold obtains its price from its rarity.

While at the Sorbonne, in December 1750, Turgot wrote a Latin dissertation (On the successive advances of the Human Mind) which provided an early view of human progress.

Turgot hailed American optimism: Let us turn our eyes away from those sad sights, let us cast them on the immense plains of the interior of America. . . . The soil, hitherto uncultivated, is made fruitful by industrious hands. Laws faithfully observed maintain henceforth tranquillity in these favoured regions. The ravages of war are there unknown. Equality has banished from them poverty and luxury, and preserves there, with liberty, virtue and simplicity of manners; our arts will spread themselves there without our vices. Happy peoples!

By this time, Turgot had second thoughts about entering the priesthood. He confided to his friend Du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) that it is impossible for me to give myself up, all my life, wearing a mask. Turgot obtained his father’s permission to pursue a law career, and he left the Sorbonne.

With his obvious intelligence and learning, he met many of the leading thinkers of the day, including political philosopher Charles Louis de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius, and mathematician Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. In January 1752, Turgot secured an appointment to a minor government post, deputy councillor of the procurator-general. The following year, he was appointed—presumably after having paid a consideration—to the royal parliament, which functioned as a court. There wasn’t any elected legislative assembly.

Early Work

Turgot’s first published work, Le Conciliateur, appeared in 1754. It was a pamphlet protesting plans to renew religious persecution. As a Catholic addressing Catholics, he wrote: I know of how many wars heresies have been the source, but is not this because we have persisted in persecuting them? The man who believes earnestly believes with still more firmness if we would force him to change his belief without convincing him; he then becomes obstinate, his obstinancy kindles his zeal, his zeal inflames him; we wish to convert him, we have made of him a fanatic, a madman. Men, for their opinions, demand only liberty; if you deprive them of it, you place arms in their hand. Give them liberty, they remain quiet, as the Lutherans were at Strasburg. It is then the very unity in religion we would enforce, and not the different opinions we tolerate, that produces trouble and civil wars.

If the prisons of the Inquisition were terrible, he continued, France itself has had only too many which have echoed the cries of the oppressed conscience. If the former were unjust, why should the latter be authorized? We who condemn with horror the minister of the Church who, by torture, compelled the mind, should we give to our king the right still to subjugate it? We regard with indignation the inflictions which, in Italy and in Spain, obstruct the rights of conscience; the least reflection should prevent our feeling less for the conscience of our own citizens.

Meanwhile, Turgot had befriended Jacques Claude Marie Vincent, Marquis de Gournay (1712-1759), whom intellectual historian Joseph A. Schumpeter called one of the greatest teachers of economics who ever lived. Widely traveled throughout Europe and especially knowledgeable about English and Dutch business practices, the Marquis de Gournay was a follower of Richard Cantillon, the author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, which offered perhaps the first comprehensive view of free-market operations.

In 1748, Gournay had come into an inheritance, retired from business, and bought himself a government position as inspector of factories. Between 1753 and 1756, he invited Turgot to join him as he visited companies in Anjou, Bourgogne, Bretagne, Dauphine, Languedoc, Lyonnais, Maine, and Provence. Turgot could see that commerce was crucial. Moreover, Gournay’s free-trade principles had an impact on Turgot.

The year Gournay died, Turgot wrote his loge de Gournay [Elegy for Gournay] in which he explained why government officials couldn’t run an economy. For instance: If the Government limits the number of sellers by exclusive privileges or otherwise, it is certain that the consumer will be wronged and that the seller, made sure of selling, will compel him to buy dearly bad articles. If, on the other hand, it is the number of buyers which is diminished by the exclusion of foreigners or of certain persons, then the seller is wronged, and if the injury be carried to the point when the price cannot cover his expenses and risks, he will cease to produce the commodity, its regular supply will thus be endangered, and a famine may be the consequence. The general liberty of buying and selling is therefore the only means to insure on the one side to the seller a price sufficient to encourage production; on the other side to the consumer the best merchandise at the lowest price.

To desire that government should be obliged to prevent fraud from ever occurring would be to desire it to provide head pads for all children who might fall. To assume, by regulations, successfully to prevent all the possible malversations of this nature, is to sacrifice to a chimerical perfection the whole progress of industry.

The Physiocrats

Turgot defended economic liberty in Fondations [Foundations] and Foires et Marchés [Fairs and Markets], articles for Denis Diderot’s famous and widely influential 17-volume Encyclopédie (1751-1772). Somewhere along the line, Turgot had become familiar with the views of the Physiocrats. Economist, editor, and government official Du Pont de Nemours (1739-1817) coined the term from the Greek words physis [let nature] and kratein [rule]. His book Physiocratie appeared in 1768. The brash, bold Du Pont de Nemours became a close friend of Turgot, who was godfather to his third son and suggested the name of this boy—Eleuthere Irénée (freedom and peace)—destined to launch the family colossus, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Cie.

Physiocrat referred to ideas popularized by Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), a nobleman’s son who made himself a surgeon and bought his post as physician to King Louis XV and his influential courtesan Madame de Pompadour. Historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote that although Quesnay was a self-confident dogmatist in his works, he was in person a kindly soul, distinguished by integrity in an immoral milieu.

Quesnay attacked taxes and trade restrictions in his articles for the Encyclopédie (1756), his own little book Tableau économique (1758), and elsewhere. There will be prosperity, he insisted, if each person is free to cultivate his in fields such products as his interests, his means, and the nature of the land suggest to him.

According to historians Will and Ariel Durant, Louis XV asked Quesnay what he would do if he were king. ‘Nothing,’ answered Quesnay. ‘Who, then, would govern?’ ‘The laws’—by which the physiocrat meant the ‘laws’ inherent in the nature of man and governing supply and demand. On September 17, 1754, the king issued an edict abolishing all restrictions on trade in wheat, rye, and corn, but a subsequent crop failure led to higher prices, and there was a clamor for restoring controls. The edicts were rescinded on December 23, 1770.

The political philosophy of the Physiocrats was perhaps best expressed in the 1767 book L’ordre natural et essentiel des sociétés politiques [The Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies] by Pierre-Paul Mercier de la Riviere (1720-1793). Do you wish a society to attain the highest degree of wealth, population, and power? Trust, then, its interests to freedom, and let this be universal. By means of this liberty (which is the essential element of industry) and the desire to enjoy—stimulated by competition and enlightened by experience and example—you are guaranteed that everyone will always act for his own greatest possible advantage, and consequently will contribute with all the power of his particular interest to the general good, both to the ruler and to every member of the society.

On August 8, 1761, Turgot was appointed an intendant (chief administrator) for the provinces of Angomois, Basse-Marche, and Limousin, a region in central France later known as Limoges. As the nineteenth-century historian and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville explained, The intendant was in possession of the whole reality of Government. All the powers which the Council of State itself possessed were accumulated in his hands. Like the Council he was at once administrator and judge. He corresponded with all the Ministers, and in the province was the sole agent of all the measures of the Government.

Limoges was among the poorest regions of France. Almost all the approximately 500,000 people were peasants who lived on chestnuts, rye, and buckwheat. According to the Physiocrat Marquis de Mirabeau (1715-1789), peasants dressed in rags and lived in huts made of clay with a thatch roof, and the most prosperous Limoges farmers could afford to slaughter only one pig a year. Historian Hippolyte Taine, who gathered a tremendous amount of material on living conditions, reported that many peasants used plows which were no better than those of ancient Rome. Turgot remarked, I have seen with pain that in some parishes the curate alone has signed, because no one else could write.

Peasants in Limoges, as elsewhere, were crushed by taxes. Economic historian Florin Aftalion reported there were some 1,600 customs houses throughout France to collect traites as goods passed various points along roads and rivers. For instance, explained Cornell University scholar Andrew Dickson White, on the Loire between Orléans and Nantes, a distance of about two hundred miles, there were twenty-eight custom-houses; and that between Gray and Arles, on the rivers Saone and Rhone, a distance of about three hundred miles, the custom-houses numbered over thirty, causing long delays, and taking from twenty-five to thirty per cent in value of all the products transported.

There were a host of other taxes, including one on salt. The taille amounted to about a sixth of the income of peasants. This came on top of feudal duties and church tithes. Peasants got to keep about a fifth of their income. The taille, from which some 130,000 clergymen and 140,000 aristocrats were exempted, was based on a tax collector’s estimate of a peasant’s ability to pay, which meant appearances. Du Pont de Nemours observed: they [the peasants] did not dare to procure for themselves the number of animals necessary for good farming; they used to cultivate their fields in a poor way so as to pass as poor, which is what they eventually became; they pretended that it was too hard to pay in order to avoid having to pay too much; payments that were inevitably slow were made still slower; they took no pleasure or enjoyment in their food, housing, or dress; their days passed in deprivation and sorrow.

Turgot focused on the most obnoxious taxes, starting with the taille. It wasn’t within his power as a regional official to abolish the taille, but he did what he could. Traditionally, national government finance officials had guessed how much money they were going to spend on wars, maintaining Versailles, bureaucrats, and other things, which determined the amount of tax revenue needed. They demanded about the same portion of taxes from each district as they always had, even though there had been an economic decline in some districts, which effectively meant higher tax rates.

Turgot attributed the economic decline of Limoges to high taxes. He asked that his district’s tax quota be cut by 400,000 livres. It was cut 190,000. Year after year for the 13 years that he was an intendant in Limoges, he pleaded for tax cuts.

Turgot did have the power to abolish the corvée—forced labor—which was the most hated tax on peasants. A remnant of serfdom, this originated as a feudal obligation for peasants to perform a certain amount of labor without pay. The corvée became a demand that peasants work as much as 14 days a year on the king’s roads, breaking, carting, and shoveling stones. Often this came at the worst time, such as when peasants were busy with their harvest. Landlords, who stood to gain more from roads, contributed nothing. As might be expected, forced labor resulted in poor work, and the roads were terrible.

Turgot hired competent contractors to build and improve roads, and some 450 miles of roads were built in Limoges. He defrayed the costs with a moderate tax. Clergymen and aristocrats remained exempt, but at least peasants were free to work their land. Limoges became known as a district with superior roads—the wonder of all travellers, as Turgot biographer W. Walker Stephens put it.

Turgot did much to help improve agriculture. Because tons of grain were lost to the grain moth and corn weevil, he helped the Limoges Society of Agriculture find better storage methods. To help diversify food sources, he urged that peasants grow potatoes. As the Marquis de Condorcet observed in his biography of Turgot, The people at first regarded the potato with disdain and as beneath the dignity of the human species, and they were not reconciled to it till the intendant [Turgot] had caused it to be served at his own table, and to the first class of citizens, and had given it vogue among the fashionable and rich.

Turgot was in touch with others who embraced ideas of liberty. He dined with the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith when he visited Paris in 1765, and later Turgot helped supply Smith with books for his work on The Wealth of Nations. But as intellectual historian Peter Groenewegen has shown, Turgot had little impact on Smith’s writing, since Smith had already formed his principal views. Like the Physiocrats, both men believed in economic liberty, and unlike the Physiocrats, they recognized the importance of commerce.

In 1766 Turgot wrote an 80-page summary of his views for two Chinese students in Paris. This became Réflexions sur la Formation et la Distribution des Richesses [Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches]. It explained much about how free markets work and made a case for laissez-faire policy. Although Turgot wasn’t a Physiocrat, he shared their commitment for economic liberty. Du Pont de Nemours published Réflexions in the November and December 1769 issues of Ephémérides du Citoyen, the Physiocratic journal. But without consulting Turgot, Du Pont de Nemours made a number of changes, and Turgot wasn’t pleased.

Turgot made clear his opposition to slavery: This abominable custom of slavery has once been universal, and is still spread over the greater part of the earth.

He affirmed the importance of sound money: Thus, then, we come to the constitution of gold and silver as money and universal money, and that without any arbitrary convention among men, without the intervention of any law, but by the nature of things. They are not, as many people have imagined, signs of values; they have themselves a value. If they are susceptible of being the measure and the pledge of other values, they have this property in common with all the other articles that have a value in Commerce. They differ only because being at once more divisible, more unalterable, and more easy to transport than the other commodities, it is more convenient to employ them to measure and represent the values.

Turgot banished the ancient dogma that interest was immoral. The price of borrowed money is regulated, he wrote, like that of all other merchandise, by the balance of supply and demand: thus, when there are many borrowers who need money, the interest of money becomes higher; when there are many holders of money who offer to lend it, interest falls. It is, therefore, another mistake to suppose that the interest of money in commerce ought to be fixed by the laws of Princes.

During the famine of 1769-1772, he mortgaged his estate to get money for famine relief. He organized relief efforts financed almost entirely by voluntary contributions. French treasury officials claimed taxes were due from Turgot’s relief organization because its records weren’t written on stamped paper. He issued an ordinance suspending the stamp tax laws in Limoges. The bakers’ guild of Limoges moved to raise bread prices, and Turgot responded by suspending their monopoly privileges. He encouraged people to bring bread from other towns, and they did. He insisted that the best remedy for famine was free trade.

Turgot further defended laissez faire by writing Lettres sur le commerce des grains, seven letters to Comptroller-General Abbé Terray. Turgot warned that government is incapable of guaranteeing economic security. He declared: Government is not the master of seasons, and they should be taught that they have no right to violate the property of the agricultural labourers or the dealers in corn.

Terray was deaf to Turgot’s appeal. In December 1770, the Comptroller-General ruled that grain could be sold only in government-controlled marketplaces. Speculation was outlawed. A subsequent measure outlawed grain trading by any merchant who didn’t have a license. Grain monopolists regained their power.

Abbé Terray asked Turgot for help protecting iron smelters, and Turgot replied with a letter known as Sur la Marque des Fers [On the Mark of Iron]. The title referred to the stamp on iron indicating that it was smelted in France, part of the effort to keep out iron from other countries. I know no other means of quickening any commerce whatever than by granting to it the greatest liberty, Turgot wrote, and the freedom from all taxes, which the ill-understood interest of the Exchequer has multiplied to excess on all kinds of merchandise, and in particular on the fabrications of iron. Then, talking about how trade retaliations back fire: The truth is, that in aiming at injuring others, we injure only ourselves.

Conscription

Turgot had to deal with the consequences of military conscription. The repugnance to service in the militia, he wrote the Minister of War in January 1773, was so widespread among the people, that each drawing was the signal for the greatest disorders throughout the country, and for a kind of civil war between the peasantry; the one party seeking to escape the drawing, taking refuge in the woods, the other, with arms in hand, pursuing the fugitives, in order to capture them and subject them to the same lot with themselves. Loss of life and minor outrages were common. Depopulation of many of the parishes, with cultivation abandoned, often followed. When the time came to assemble the battalions, it was necessary for the syndics of the parishes to lead on their militia-men escorted by the horse-police, and sometimes bound with cords. Turgot let people voluntarily contribute cash to a pool for those conscripted, and many enlisted for the money.

There was much resentment against the practice of forcing local people to provide room and board for soldiers, and Turgot took action. He rented some buildings as barracks and spread the cost among all the taxpayers. Military discipline reportedly improved.

On May 10, 1774, King Louis XV died of smallpox. He was succeeded by his awkward, timid 19-year-old grandson, who became Louis XVI. His queen was the 19-year-old Marie Antoinette, a beautiful and frivolous daughter of the arrogant Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

At the time, France had the biggest government in Europe except for Russia. The French government was in desperate shape, having incurred massive debts during the Seven Years War (1756-1763) with Britain. The royal palace of Versailles was an enormous drain. On the payroll were eight architects, 47 musicians, 56 hunters, 295 cooks, 886 nobles with their wives and children, plus secretaries, couriers, physicians, and chaplains, and some 10,000 soldiers who guarded the place. Almost every week, there were two banquets, two balls, and three plays held at Versailles.

Marie Antoinette aggravated the public by her extravagance with taxpayer money. Married to an impotent king, she squandered large sums at card tables and lavished costly gifts on her court favorites. She spent hundreds of thousands of livres on dresses. Austrian ambassador Mercy d’Argentau warned her mother, Maria Theresa: Although the King has given the Queen, on various occasions, more than 100,000 écus’ worth of diamonds, and although her Majesty already has a prodigious collection, she nevertheless resolved to acquire . . . chandelier earrings from Bohmer. I did not conceal from her Majesty that under present economic conditions it would have been wiser to avoid such a tremendous expenditure, but she could not resist.

The Parlements of Paris protested taxes. This body, whose members bought their way in, was the most influential of 13 French parliaments. It had acquired the prerogative of approving royal edicts on taxes before they could go into effect. If the Parlement opposed a tax edict, there would be a lit de justice: members would meet the king in his throne room, and he would make a final decision which everyone must obey. But this proceeding was widely resented.

Louis named the 73-year-old Count de Maurepas as his chief adviser. He had held a number of official positions until 1749, when he was dismissed on suspicion of having written some lines critical of courtesan Madame de Pompadour. But Maurepas knew how to pull strings. As royal playwright and historian Jean Francois Marmontel described him, he possessed a lynx-eye to seize upon the weak or ridiculous in men, and an imperceptible art to draw them to his purposes . . . he made sport of everything, even of merit itself. Maurepas knew that with his scandalous reputation, he needed some respected figures in the government, and his wife recommended Turgot. On July 20, 1774, Turgot was nominated to a minor post, Minister of Marine.

In Limoges, as biographer Leon Say reported, the aristocrats could not forgive Turgot for having broken with traditions which had hitherto been favourable to them . . . it was not the same with the peasantry. His departure was announced publicly from the pulpit by all the curés of the province, who celebrated mass everywhere on his account. The countrymen suspended their work in order to be present, and all cried: ‘It is wisely done by the king to have taken M. Turgot, but it is very sad for us that we have lost him.’

During the few weeks that Turgot was Minister of Marine, he spoke out for taxpayers against the politically powerful French shipbuilding industry. He recommended that the government buy ships in Sweden rather than France, which would cut costs 40 percent. Turgot countered protectionist objections by observing that the Swedes drank French wines and wore French clothes.

On August 24, 1774, Louis met with Turgot and discussed the country’s economic situation. Prodded by Maurepas, the king named Turgot as Comptroller-General. Turgot recognized that the kind of spending and tax cuts he envisioned would encounter ferocious opposition, and he had to have the backing of the king, so he sought an interview.

The king promised his support, and afterward Turgot sent him this memo: I confine myself to recall to you these three words—

No Bankruptcy.

No Increase of Taxes.

No Loans.

No bankruptcy, either avowed or disguised by illegal reductions.

No increase of taxes; the reason for this being in the condition of your people, and still more, in that of your Majesty’s own generous heart.

No loans; because every loan diminishes always the free revenue and necessitates at the end of a certain time, either bankruptcy or the increase of taxes. In times of peace it is permissible to borrow only in order to liquidate old debts, or in order to redeem other loans contracted on less advantageous terms.

To meet these three points there is but one means. It is to reduce expenditure below revenue, and sufficiently below it to insure each year a saving of twenty millions, to be applied in redemption of the old debts. Without that, the first gunshot will force the State into bankruptcy.

The question will be asked incredulously, ‘On what can we retrench?’ and each one, speaking for his own department, will maintain that nearly every particular item of expense is indispensable. They will be able to allege very good reasons, but these must all yield to the absolute necessity of economy.

It is, then, of absolute necessity for your Majesty to require that the heads of all the departments should concert with the Minister of Finance. It is indispensable that he should discuss with them, in presence of your Majesty, the degree of necessity for all your proposed expenses. It is above all necessary, as soon as you, Sire, shall have decided upon the strictly necessary scale of maintenance of each department, that you prohibit the official in charge of it to order any new expenditure without having first arranged with the Treasury the means of providing for it. . . .

Turgot’s top priority was to establish freedom of the grain trade, as he had done in Limoges. On September 13, 1774, Turgot issued an edict and wrote: it shall be free to all persons whatever to carry on, as it may seem best to them, their trade in corn and flour, to sell and to buy it, in whatever places they choose throughout the kingdom.

Voltaire was incredulous: I learned that a Minister of State who was neither a lawyer nor priest had just published an edict by which, in spite of the most sacred prejudices, it was permitted to every Perigourdin to sell and buy wheat in Auvergne. . . . I saw in my canton a dozen of labourers, my brethren, who read the edict. ‘How then?’ said an old man; ‘for sixty years I have been reading these edicts which, in unintelligible language, have always stripped us of natural liberty; now here is one that restores us our liberty, and I can understand every word without difficulty. This is the first time a king reasons with his people.’

France had long penalized foreigners, and in November 1774, Turgot overturned some of the worst laws. For instance, the law which held that the property of a deceased foreigner would revert to the government. Such laws, observed Du Pont de Nemours, debarred the settling in France of a great number of clever men and industrious artists, of capitalists, and useful merchants, who would have desired nothing more than to make France the centre of their affairs, and which debarred even retired foreigners of wealth attracted by the pleasures of society and the agreeableness of the climate. Du Pont emphasized that Turgot proceeded without demanding reciprocity, since the good of its operation would be certain for France, and the evil would be but for those countries which did not imitate her.

In January 1775, Turgot suffered an attack of gout which involved inflammation and severe pain in his legs. During the next four months, he was carried in a chair to the king’s working quarters. From there, he directed a quarantine of regions devastated by cattle-plague. The king agreed to pay a third of the value of diseased animals which were slaughtered and buried, and this frustrated efforts to control government spending.

Turgot set new standards for integrity. For instance, it had long been the custom for the Farmers-General, the private firm which collected a substantial amount of tax revenue, to give the Comptroller-General about a 100,000-livre bribe upon signing a new contract. Turgot declined the bribe and abolished the practice.

Turgot worked to curtail the rapaciousness of bureaucrats. People complain also, he wrote, of the embarrassments they are thrown into by the extreme severity of the penalties, often for the slightest faults. It is indispensable to remedy this, as well as the inconveniences manufacturers suffer from the contradictions in the regulations, and to shield them from the abuse of the authority by the Bureaux of Inspection. Then issuing orders: You are not to seize anything belonging to them [workers and small manufacturers], any stuff or merchandise, on the pretext of its faultiness. You will confine yourselves to exhorting these poor artificers to make the things better, and to indicate to them the means of doing so.

On April 20, 1775, corn riots erupted in Dijon, reflecting fears that grain produced in that region might be sold elsewhere—and wouldn’t be available to relieve hunger in Dijon. Rioting quickly spread to other cities. Mobs stormed through the countryside, yelling Monopoly! and Famine! They broke into markets, demanding corn and flour for less than what merchants were charging. By May 2, mobs marched on Paris, and an estimated 8,000 people raided flour stores around Versailles. The Parlement of Paris issued a decree and posted notices urging people to petition the king for lower bread prices, and he gave in. Turgot advised the king that violence must be put down swiftly, and he was given command of a 25,000-man force which protected an orderly flow of grain to the markets. He had parliament’s notices removed. His rivals at the royal court weren’t pleased.

Between June and August 1775, Turgot issued edicts abolishing duties imposed by major towns like Beaune, Bordeaux, Dijon, and Pontoise.

Freedom of Speech

Turgot practiced freedom of speech. For instance, financier and politician Jacques Necker wrote a pamphlet Sur la Législation et le Commerce des Grains which criticized laissez-faire views and defended government restrictions on the grain trade. Turgot let it be published.

Although Turgot never challenged the legitimacy of a monarchy, he became convinced that people should prepare for self-government. Together with Du Pont de Nemours, he outlined a plan for parish assemblies, village assemblies, district assemblies, provincial assemblies, and a General Assembly. Participation would be open to those who owned land (any amount) and earned at least 600 livres per year. Individuals earning less than 600 livres of land would have fractional votes. Unfortunately, with everything else going on, this plan was never presented to the king.

The king’s coronation brought Turgot into conflict with the establishment. Traditionalists wanted the coronation at the magnificent cathedral of Rheims, and the clergy wanted the king to take the oath for intolerance, I swear . . . to exterminate, &c., entirely from my States all heretics . . . condemned by the Church. Church officials insisted, It is reserved for you to deal the last blow to Calvinism in your kingdom. Order the schismatic assemblies of the Protestants to be dispersed; exclude the sectaries without distinction from all the branches of public administration. Your Majesty will thus assure among your subjects the unity of the Catholic worship.

Because the government was deep in debt, Turgot wanted a much cheaper coronation in Paris, and he objected to the oath. He wrote a memo to the king, Sur la tolerance, saying the oath was a bad idea even if nobody seriously contemplated a murderous Inquisition. The prince who orders his subject to profess a religion he does not believe, Turgot wrote, commands a crime; the subject who obeys acts a lie, he betrays his conscience, he does an act which, he believes, God forbids. The Protestant who through self-interest or fear makes himself a Catholic, and the Catholic who by the same motives makes himself a Protestant, are both guilty of the same sin. The king decided to throw budgetary considerations to the wind and be coronated at Rheims. He agreed to the dreaded oath, but he mumbled it, and nobody could make out the words.

There seemed to be a favorable omen for Turgot when the king followed his recommendation and appointed Chrétien Lamoignon de Malesherbes as Maison du Roi (Minister of the Royal Household), a post which put him in a position to influence the king and help curb extravagance at Versailles.

The budget was a bitter battleground. At the beginning of 1775, the government had revenue of 337 million livres, but only 213 million was left after interest on the debt. The costs of government would be 235 million—hence, a deficit of 22 million livres. Turgot cut many expenses, including sinecures for idle aristocrats.

Meanwhile, Turgot had become convinced that the severity of his country’s problems required decisive action. He conceived what became known as the six edicts.

Two were of monumental importance. Turgot would abolish the jurandes—guilds—which monopolized various trades. Like modern labor unions, they enforced barriers to entry for the enrichment of members. Consequently, there were few skilled workers, and they concentrated on making luxury goods. Turgot would permit anyone, including foreigners, to enter any trade except barbering and wig-making. The reason for exceptions was that Turgot offered to compensate people for the loss of their special privileges, and because of the government’s financial situation it wasn’t possible to compensate members of these two professions.

Turgot’s second crucial edict would abolish the corvée, the practice of forcing peasants to work on roads without pay. He proposed that all property owners, the primary beneficiaries of road improvements, pay a tax which would provide money for hiring road contractors.

Turgot thought of making these explosively controversial proposals more politically palatable by presenting them with four other proposals which had more support. He proposed abolishing restrictions on the grain trade within France. He wanted to discharge officials who imposed restrictions on the operation of Parisian markets, ports, and docks. He recommended abolishing the Caisse de Poissy, a tax on the cattle and meat industry. Finally, he proposed to cut the tax on suet.

During the last several months of 1775, Louis XVI weighed the compelling case for these edicts and the firestorm of opposition they would surely provoke. Turgot suffered another attack of gout and was absent as opposition intensified. Malesherbes cautioned Turgot to go slow, but Turgot, then 48, replied: The needs of the people are enormous, and in my family, we die of gout at fifty.

Over the objections of his brothers and all of his advisers except Turgot and Males-herbes, Louis XVI endorsed the six edicts, and on February 5, 1776, he presented them to the Parlement of Paris. They resisted, and the king declared, My Parlement must respect my wishes.

The Parlement supported guilds because many of the members were red-robed lawyers, and guilds were a lucrative source of litigation. One notorious case between the guild of tailors and the guild of used-clothes dealers had dragged on for more than 250 years. Led by the Prince de Conti, who expected to lose about 50,000 livres annually if the guilds were abolished, local officials went on the attack to protect their special privileges.

As if these six edicts weren’t enough of a challenge for the establishment, Turgot presented another which would abolish laws restricting the wine trade. In Bordeaux, for instance, it was illegal to sell and drink wine from another district. Wines from Languedoc couldn’t be shipped down the Garonne River before St. Martin’s Day. Wines from Périgord, not before Christmas. Turgot declared: It is the interest of the whole kingdom we have to consider, the interests and the rights of all our subjects, who, as buyers or as sellers, have an equal right to find a market for their goods and to procure the object of their needs on the terms most advantageous to them.

Lawyers, noblemen, monopolists, clergymen—all were against Turgot. Maurepas, who had appointed Turgot, criticized him in public and maneuvered behind his back. As biographer Douglas Dakin explained, Merely by refraining from defending Turgot, and merely by confirming Louis’s growing suspicions with a word here and there, he was bound in the long run to achieve his object. For everything that came to Louis’s ears—facts endlessly distorted, fortuitous happenings which in normal times would have had little significance, the fatuous lies concocted by Turgot’s detractors—all came to assume a unity and to take on the character of incontrovertible evidence. . . . Marie Antoinette, outraged at Turgot’s efforts to sack incompetents and cut spending by the royal household, schemed against him. She had no interest in ideas. I must admit I am lazy and dissipated when it comes to serious things, she told her mother.

I cannot conceal from your Majesty, Turgot wrote the king on April 30, the deep pain I have suffered by your cruel silence towards me on Sunday last, after I had in my preceding letters described to you so distinctly my position, your Majesty’s own position, the danger that your authority and the glory of your reign were incurring, and the impossibility of my continuing to serve you unless you give me your firm and steady support. Your Majesty has not deigned to reply to me. . . . Your Majesty gives me neither assistance nor consolation. How can I believe that you any longer esteem me? Sire, I have not deserved this. . . . The king didn’t reply.

On May 12, 1776, Turgot was dismissed. He reportedly warned Louis XVI: Remember, sire, that it was weakness which brought the head of [England's King] Charles I to the block.

Voltaire expressed the feeling of many who hoped for reform. Ah, mon Dieu, what sad news I hear! he wrote three days after Turgot’s fall. France would have been too fortunate. . . . I am overwhelmed in despair. The Marquis de Condorcet wrote: Adieu! We have had a beautiful dream.

Government spending zoomed out of control. Guilds regained their monopoly power. Restrictions again throttled trade. The regime brought back forced labor.

Turgot had probably achieved as much as any human being could without organizing popular support to buck special interests. His experience revealed how fragile were reforms which depended on the goodwill of a ruler. Edicts, it turned out, were no substitute for education of the people.

Turgot moved to a house on the rue de Bourbon, Paris, and he quietly studied science, literature, and music. For Benjamin Franklin, representing American interests in Paris, he wrote Mémoire sur l’impot to explain his laissez-faire economic policy.

In one of his last surviving writings, a controversial March 22, 1778, letter to English radical minister Dr. Richard Price, Turgot expressed his support for American independence, although he didn’t think the French government could afford to provide financial help. Turgot criticized American state constitutions for establishing a strong executive—an unreasonable imitation . . . of the usages of England—rather than lodge all power in a legislature. Turgot denounced chimerical state taxes and tariffs. He urged that Americans reduce to the smallest possible number the kinds of affairs of which the Government of each State should take charge. . . . He declared that The asylum which America affords to the oppressed of all nations will console the world. The letter provoked John Adams to make his case for a separation of powers, writing the three-volume Defense of the American Constitution which wasn’t published until 1787, after Turgot’s death. Adams, prickly pear that he was, liked Turgot and described him as grave, sensible, and amiable.

Turgot suffered more attacks of gout, and after 1778 he could walk only with crutches. His situation became critical in early 1781. He died at home around 11:00 P.M., March 18, 1781. He was 53. His friends Mme. Blondel, the Duchesse d’Enville, and Du Pont de Nemours were by his side.

Having rejected Turgot’s peaceful reforms, the French government stumbled from one crisis to another. By 1788, military spending took a quarter of the budget, and half the budget was needed for payments on the national debt which had soared to 4 billion livres. There were riots against taxes. The government was broke, and the king and queen were a pitiful sight as they handed over their silverware to the royal mint. Desperate for funds, the king agreed to summon the Estates-General, an assembly of nobles, clergy, and taxpayers, which hadn’t met for one-and-a-half centuries. This became the National Assembly, to which Du Pont de Nemours had been elected. It rebelled against the nobles, and the king made the fateful decision to back the nobles. The National Assembly abolished guilds and some of the worst taxes, and it confiscated church properties. Hatred bred of oppression boiled over, as Turgot had anticipated. On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was led to a Paris guillotine and beheaded. Marie Antoinette—ridiculed as Madam Deficit—followed him to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The French people suffered through runaway inflation, the Reign of Terror, and the military takeover by Napoleon Bonaparte who plunged the country into more than a decade of war.

Turgot’s steadfast friend Du Pont de Nemours, who had been scheduled for the guillotine the very day the Reign of Terror ended and was later rescued by Madame Germaine de Stael, made sure he wouldn’t be forgotten. After emigrating to America, Du Pont de Nemours edited a nine-volume edition of Turgot’s works (1808-1811). Another French edition of Turgot’s works appeared in 1844. And there was G. Schelle’s Oeuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant (1913-1923), with many documents from the Turgot family. More than a dozen books about Turgot were published during the nineteenth century.

Turgot inspired the economist Jean-Baptiste Say who, in turn, helped inspire the resurgence of libertarian writings in Europe. Leon Say, Jean-Baptiste’s grandson, wrote in his 1887 biography of Turgot: if he failed in the eighteenth century, he has in fact dominated the century following. He founded the political economy of the nineteenth century, and, by the freedom of industry which he bequeathed to us, he has impressed on the nineteenth century the mark which will best characterize it in history. In recent years, Turgot’s most ardent admirer has been intellectual historian Murray N. Rothbard who affirmed that If we were to award a prize for ‘brilliancy’ in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.

He had a liberating vision. He told the truth. He pursued justice. He was fearless in challenging special interests who everywhere capture government power. He showed why liberty is absolutely essential if the poorest among us are to improve their lives. He displayed the courage and compassion to help set people free.