ution began, men
like Jourdan and Kleber, Ney and Augereau, and a host of other future
marshals and generals had been dismissed from the army, or were eating
out their hearts as petty officers with no hope of advancement. Local
privileges and inequalities were as intolerable as personal. There were
privileged provinces and those administered arbitrarily by the Crown,
there were a multiplicity of internal tariffs, and endless municipal
franchises and monopolies, so much so that economists estimated that,
through artificial restraints, one-quarter of the soil of France lay
waste. Turgot, in his edict on the grain trade, explained that kings in
the past by ordinance, or the police without royal authority, had
compiled a body "of legislation equivalent to a prohibition of bringing
grain into Paris," and this condition was universal. One province might
be starving and another oppressed with abundance.

Meanwhile, under the stimulant of applied science, centralization went
on resistlessly, and the cost of administration is proportionate to
centralization. To bear the burden of a centralized government taxes
must be equal and movement free, but here was a rapidly centralizing
nation, the essence of whose organism was that taxes should be unequal
and that movement should be restricted.

As the third quarter of the eighteenth century closed with the death of
Louis XV, all intelligent French administrators recognized the dilemma;
either relief must be given, or France must become insolvent, and
revolution supervene upon insolvency. But for the aristocracy revolution
had no terrors, for they believed that they could crush revolution as
their class had done for a thousand years.

Robert Turgot was born in 1727, of a respectable family. His father
educated him for the Church, but lack of faith caused him to prefer the
magistracy, and on the death of his father he obtained a small place in
the Court of Parliament. Afterward he became a Master of Requests, and
served for seven years in that judicial position, before he was made
Intendant of the Province of Limousin. Even thus early in life Turgot
showed political sagacity. In an address at the Sorbonne he supported
the thesis that "well-timed reform alone averts revolution."
Distinguishing himself as Intendant, on the death of Louis XV the King
called Turgot to the Council of State, and in August, 1774, Turgot
became Minister of Finance. He came in pledged to reform, and by
January