"I fear
opposition from the Parliament," he said to the king. "Fear nothing,"
replied the king warmly, "I will stand by you;" and, passing over the
objections of the best politician amongst his ministers, he yielded to M.
de Maurepas, who yielded to public opinion. On the 12th of November,
1774, the old Parliament was formally restored.

The king appeared at the bed of justice; the princes, the dukes, and the
peers were present; the magistrates were introduced. "The king my
grandfather," said Louis XVI., "compelled by your resistance to his
repeated orders, did what the maintenance of his authority and the
obligation of rendering justice to his people required of his wisdom.
Today I recall you to functions which you never ought to have given up.
Appreciate all the value of my bounties, and do not forget them." At the
same time the keeper of the seals read out an edict which subjected the
restored Parliament to the same jurisdiction which had controlled the
Maupeou Parliament. The latter had been sent to Versailles to form a
grand council there.

Stern words are but a sorry cloak for feeble actions: the restored
magistrates grumbled at the narrow limits imposed upon their authority;
the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Chartres, the Prince of Conti supported
their complaints; it was in vain that the king for some time met them
with refusals; threats soon gave place to concessions; and the
parliaments everywhere reconstituted, enfeebled in the eyes of public
opinion, but more than ever obstinate and Fronde-like, found themselves
free to harass, without doing any good, the march of an administration
becoming every day more difficult. "Your Parliament may make
barricades," Lord Chesterfield had remarked contemptuously to
Montesquieu, "it will never raise barriers."

M. Turgot, meanwhile, was continuing his labors, preparing a project for
equitable redistribution of the talliage and his grand system of a
graduated scale (_hierarchie_) of municipal assemblies, commencing with
the parish, to culminate in a general meeting of delegates from each
province; he threatened, in the course of his reforms, the privileges of
the noblesse and of the clergy, and gave his mind anxiously to the
instruction of the people, whose condition and welfare he wanted to
simultaneously elevate and augment; already there was a buzz of murmurs
against him, confined as yet to the courtiers, when the dearness of bread
and the distress which ensued