Inflation, Price Controls, and Collectivism During the French Revolution

From FEE.org:

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in their wake.

The political economy of the French Revolution is a tragic example of this. Before the revolution of 1789, royal France was a textbook example of mercantilism. Nothing was produced or sold, imported or exported, without government approval and regulation.

Government Extravagance and Fiscal Ruin

While the French king’s government regulated economic affairs, the royal court consumed the national wealth. Louis XVI’s personal military guard numbered 9,050 soldiers; his civilian household numbered around 4,000—30 servants were required to serve the king his dinner, four of whom had the task of filling his glass with water or wine. He also had at his service 128 musicians, 75 religious officials, 48 doctors, and 198 persons to care for his body.*

To pay for this extravagance and the numerous other expenses of the Court, as well as the foreign adventures financed by the King (such as the financial help extended to the American colonists during their war of independence from the British), the King had to rely on a peculiar tax system in which large segments of the entire population – primarily the nobility and the clergy – were exempt from all taxation, with the “lower classes” bearing the brunt of the burden.

One of the most hated of the taxes was the levy on salt. Every head of a household was required to purchase annually seven pounds of salt for each member of his family at a price fixed by the government; if he failed to consume all the salt purchased during the previous year and, therefore, attempted to buy less than the quota in the new year he was charged a special fine by the State. The punishments for smuggling and selling salt on the black market were stiff and inhumane.

As we saw, in a previous article, when Louis XVI assumed the throne in 1774, government expenditures were 399.2 million livres, with tax receipts only about 372 million livres, leaving a deficit of 27.2 million livres, or about 7 percent of spending. Loans and monetary expansion that year and in future years made up the difference.

In an attempt to put the government’s finances in order, in July 1774 the king appointed a brilliant economist, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, to serve as finance minister. Turgot did all in his power to curb government spending and regulation. But every proposed reform increased the opposition from privileged groups, and the king finally dismissed him in May 1776.

Those who followed Turgot as controller-general of the French government’s finances lacked his vision or his integrity. The fiscal crisis merely grew worse and worse. As Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) summarized it in his study of The French Revolution (1837):

“Be it ‘want of fiscal genius,’ or some far other want, there is the palpablest discrepancy between Revenue and Expenditure; a Deficit of the Revenue . . . This is the stern problem: hopeless seemingly as squaring the circle. Controller Joly de Fleury, who succeeded [Jacque] Necker, could do nothing with it; nothing but propose loans, which were tardily filled up; impose new taxes, unproductive of money; productive of clamor and discontent.

“As little could Controller d’Ormesson do, or even less; for if Joly maintained himself beyond a year and a day, d’Ormesson reckons only by the months . . . “Fatal paralysis invades the social movement; clouds of blindness or of blackness envelop us; we are breaking down then, into the black horrors of NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY?”

It was the chaos of the king’s finances that finally resulted in the Estates-General’s being called into session in early 1789, followed by the beginning of the French Revolution with the fall of the Bastille in Paris in July 1789. But the new revolutionary authorities were as extravagant in their spending as the king. Vast amounts were spent on public works to create jobs, and 17 million livres ($3.4 million) were given to the people of Paris in food subsidies.

The Ideology of the Total State over the Individual

During the Jacobin Republic of 1792–1794, a swarm of regulators spread across France imposing price ceilings and intruding into every corner of people’s lives; they imposed death sentences, confiscated wealth and property, and sent men, women, and children to prison and slave labor. In the name of the war effort, after revolutionary France came into conflict with many of its neighbors, all industries in any way related to national defense or foreign trade were placed under the direct control of the state; prices, production, and distribution of all goods by private enterprises were under government command. A huge bureaucracy emerged to manage all this, and that bureaucracy swallowed up increasing portions of the nation’s wealth.

This all followed naturally from the premises of the Jacobin mind, which under the shadow of Rousseau’s notion of the “general will” argued that the state had the duty to impose a common purpose on everyone. The individual was nothing; the state was everything. The individual became the abstraction, and the state the reality. Those who did not see the “general will” would be taught; those who resisted the teaching would be commanded; and those who resisted the commands would perish, because only “enemies of the people” would oppose the collectivist Truth.

The French Revolutionist Bertrand Barere (1755-1841) declared in 1793:

“The Republic must penetrate the souls of citizens through all the senses . . . Some owe [France] her industry, others their fortunes, some their advice, others their arms; all owe her their blood. Thus, then, all French people of both sexes and of all ages are called upon by patriotism to defend liberty . . .

Let everyone take his post in the national and military movement that is in preparation. The youth will fight; the married men will forge arms, transport baggage and artillery, and provide subsistence; women will work at the soldier’s clothing, make tents, and become nurses in the hospitals for the wounded; the children will make lint out of linen; and the old men, again performing the mission they had among the ancients, will be carried to the public squares, there to enflame the courage of the young warriors and propagate the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.”

All laws, customs, habits, modes of commerce, thought and language were to be uniform and the same for all. Not even the family had autonomous existence; and children? They belonged to the State. Said Barere:

“The principles that ought to guide parents are that children belong to the general family of the Republic, before they belong to particular families. The spirit of private lives must disappear when the great family calls. You are born for the Republic, and not for the pride and the despotism of families.”

Here was the birth of modern national collectivism and allegiance and obedience to the “people’s” State. In January 1793, when a messenger was sent to inform the revolutionary French forces in the east of the country, who were facing the invading armies of anti-revolutionary foreign monarchs, that the French king had been executed, one of the French officers asked, “For whom shall we fight from now on,” if not the king? The reply was, “For the nation, for the Republic.”  [read more]

So, with the kingship the people were oppressed. After the king was dethroned the people were still oppressed. So, what changed? Other than the system of gov’t of course.

*It’s good to be king.