The Turgot Collection

CHAPTER 17

Local Government and National Education

Introduction to the Memorial to the King “sur les Municipalités”

ire,—In order to judge whether it be expedient to establish municipalities in France in the cantons where they do not exist, and whether we should improve or should modify those that already exist, and how we should constitute those which we may believe to be necessary, there is no need for us to go back to the origin of municipal administrations, to make an historical relation of the vicissitudes which they have undergone, nor even to enter with much detail on the different forms they assume today. We have been too much in the habit, when dealing with seriously urgent questions, of deciding what is to be done by the examination into, and by the example of, what our ancestors have done in times which we ourselves confess to have been times of ignorance and barbarism. This method is only fit to lead justice astray through the multiplicity of facts presented to us as authorities. It tends to disgust rulers with their most important functions when they are told that in order to acquit themselves with effect and with honor it is necessary to be prodigiously learned. All that is necessary is to thoroughly understand and to correctly weigh the rights and the interests of men. These rights and these interests are not very numerous, so that the science which embraces them, being founded on the principles of justice which every one of us carries in his heart, has a great degree of certitude without having any great complexity. It does not exact a very deep study, and is not beyond the powers of any straightforward man.

The rights of men gathered in society are not founded on their history as men, but in, their nature. There can be no reason to perpetuate establishments which were made without reason. The kings, your Majesty’s predecessors, pronounced, in the circumstances in which they found themselves, laws which they judged to be expedient. They were sometimes wrong. They were often led by the ignorance of their age, and still oftener their views were obstructed by the very powerful self-interests of parties whom they were not strong enough to conquer, and with whom they judged it wiser to compromise. There is nothing in that to subject you to retain the ordinances your ancestors made or the institutions they supported, when you come to recognize that a change is now just, useful, and possible. None of your courts, the most accustomed to make complaints, would venture to contest your Majesty’s right, in order to reform abuses, to a legislative power as extensive as that of the princes who created or permitted the abuses we now deplore. The greatest of all powers is a pure and enlightened conscience in those to whom Providence has entrusted authority, shown in their governing for the good of all. So long as your Majesty does not stray beyond the lines of justice, you may regard yourself as an absolute legislator, and may depend on your well-affected subjects for the execution of your decrees.

Your nation is large, it is necessary to have some confidence in the means of well governing it, and for this end it is necessary to know its situation, its needs, its possibilities, and these even in some detail. This will be much more useful than the history of past positions. But it is a knowledge to which your Majesty cannot hope to arrive in the present state of things, a knowledge which your ministers cannot furnish, or the intendants themselves, and which the sub-delegates appointed by the intendants can gather only very imperfectly, owing to the limited duties confided to their care. Hence arise in the assessment and division of the taxes, in the means of levying them and in the administration connected with them, an infinity of errors which excite as many murmurs, and which, bearing most upon the lower classes of people, contribute so effectively to keep their condition unhappy….

The cause of the evil, Sire, lies in the fact that your nation has no constitution. It is a society composed of different orders ill-united, and of a people the members of which have between them very few social ties, where consequently each is concerned almost exclusively with his own private interest, since there is no opportunity for anyone to fulfil his social duties, or even to know what his relations are to his fellow-citizens; so that in this continual war of individual pretensions and violations, reason and enlightenment bearing upon the circumstances have no regulating effect. Your Majesty is obliged to decide everything by yourself or by your mandatories. The issue of your special orders is waited for before the public good can be served, before the rights of others can be respected, sometimes even before one’s own rights can be exercised. You are compelled to decree upon everything (and very often through private importunities), while you would govern as God does, by general laws, if the integrant parts of your empire had a regular organisation and had recognized connections.

Your kingdom is composed of provinces; these provinces of cantons or of arrondissements, which are named, according to the provinces, bailliages, élections, sénéchaussées, or some such other name. These arrondissements are formed of a certain number of villages and towns. These towns and villages are inhabited by families. These families are composed of individuals who have many duties to fulfil toward each other and toward society, duties founded on the benefits which they have received in the past from these others, and which they every day continue to receive. But the individuals are very ill-instructed upon the duties in the family, and they are not instructed at all upon the duties that bind them to the State. The families themselves scarcely know that they belong to the State of which they form part; they are ignorant by what title. They regard the exercise of authority in requiring contributions to serve to maintain public order as merely the law of the stronger party, to which there is no other reason to yield than the powerlessness to resist it, and which one ought to elude whenever the means can be found. Hence everyone seeks to deceive you and to escape his social obligations. His income is concealed, and can be discovered very imperfectly by a sort of inquisition, in which, we might say, your Majesty is at war with your own people, and in this kind of war no one has any interest in taking part with the Government; the man doing so would be regarded with an evil eye. There is no public spirit, because there is no point of common interest visible and recognized. The villages and the towns, the members of which are thus disunited, have no connection between themselves in the arrondissements to which they are attributed. They cannot come to an arrangement for any of the public works which are necessary. The different districts are in the same case, and the provinces themselves find themselves in the same toward the kingdom.

In order to dissipate this spirit of disunion (by which the work of your adminstrators and of your Majesty is ten times multiplied, and which necessarily and increasingly diminishes your power), in order to substitute for it a spirit of order and of union, by which the strength and the resources of your nation may concur toward the common good, we must devise a plan which shall link, one to the other, all the parts of the kingdom by an education which we must see to be nowhere neglected, by a common interest made clearly evident. The individuals must be attached to their families; the families to the village or town to which they belong; the towns and the villages to the arrondissement in which they are comprised; the arrondissements to the provinces of which they form part; finally, the provinces to the State.

The first and the most important of all the institutions which I believe to be necessary, the one most fit to immortalize your Majesty’s reign, to have the most influence over the whole extent of the kingdom, is, Sire, the formation of a Council of National Education, under whose direction will be placed the academies, the universities, the colleges, and all the smaller schools. The backbone of a nation is its morality; the first basis of morality is the instruction imbibed from the time of childhood on all the duties of man in society. It is astonishing that this science is so little advanced. There are schemes and establishments for forming geometers, physicians, painters. There is not one devised for forming citizens.

It would be the duty of one of the Councils to get composed a series of classic books, according to a regular plan, so that one would lead on to another, and that the study of the duties of the citizen, member of a family and of the State, might be the foundation of all other studies, which would be graduated in the order of utility they have for the State.

The Council of National Education should supervise the whole machinery of education. It should endeavor to render all literary bodies really useful. The efforts of these at present tend only to form savants, men of intellect and of taste; those who cannot arrive at this eminence remain abandoned and come to nothing. A new system of education which can only be established by the authority of your Majesty, seconded by a well-chosen council, would conduce to form in all the classes of society men virtuous and useful, just souls, pure hearts, zealous citizens. Those among them whom time could and would give themselves specially to science and literature, being drawn away from frivolous things by the importance of the principles instilled into them during their early education, would display in their subsequent work a character more manly and more coherent. Taste itself would gain by this, and so would the national moral tone; it would become less frivolous and more elevated, and would above all be more concerned with things praiseworthy.

There is at present only one kind of instruction possessing any uniformity—that is religious instruction. But religious instruction is particularly limited to things of heaven. Your kingdom, Sire, is of this world, and it is with the conduct due from your subjects toward each other and toward the State that your Majesty is bound to concern yourself. Without placing any obstacle in the way of instructions whose object is higher, and which already have their regulation and their ministers, I can propose nothing to you more advantageous for your people, more fit to maintain peace and good order, to give activity to all useful works, to make your authority to be cherished, to attach to you each day more and more the affections of your subjects, than to give to all of them an instruction which opens their mind to the obligations they have to society and to your power that protects them, the duty which these obligations impose, the self-interest that all have to fulfil these duties, for the public good and for their own. This moral and social instruction requires books made for the purpose, by competition, selected with great care. It requires a schoolmaster in each parish who will teach these books to the children, with the arts of reading, writing, counting, weighing, and with the principles of mechanics. A higher instruction, embracing progressively the knowledge necessary to citizens from whom the State requires more scientific training, would be given in the colleges.

If your Majesty approves of this scheme, I will place before you the details of it in a special memorial. I venture to promise that in ten years your people will not be ungrateful for it, and that by their enlightenment, their higher moral life, their sincere zeal for your service and for that of the nation, your people will stand above all other peoples. The children who are now of ten years will then find themselves men of twenty, prepared for the State, attached to our country, submitting, not by fear but by reason, to authority; assisting their fellow-citizens, accustomed to recognize and to respect justice, which is the permanent foundation of societies. Such men would fulfil all the duties toward their families which Nature lays upon them, and would form in time families which would well conduct themselves in the village to which they would belong.

But in order to interest existing families in the public good and your Majesty’s service, it is not necessary to wait for the fruits appearing of this good education. There is nothing to prevent our employing families, such as they are, toward the constitution of regular villages, which would be something quite different from the present mere assemblage of houses, and cottages, and of inhabitants not less passive.

[Turgot then proceeds to develop in great detail his scheme of the representative bodies for the villages, the towns, the arrondissements, and the provinces, and he concludes with another appeal to the king’s heart, picturing in enthusiasm the future fruits of the beneficent policy suggested.]

The civic education which the Council of Education would promote through the whole extent of the kingdom, the appropriate books it would introduce and direct to be taught, would contribute still more to form an instructed and virtuous people. There would be sown in the heart of the young the principles of humanity, of justice, of benevolence, of love for the State; these principles, finding their application as the young advanced in age, would grow more and more. In time your Majesty would have a people renovated, and the first of peoples. Instead of corruption, meanness, intrigue, and greed, which are found everywhere, we should find virtue, disinterestedness, honor, and zeal. It would be common to be a man of probity. Your kingdom, connected in all its parts, each part acting as a support to the rest, would appear to be (and indeed would be) increased in its strength beyond measure. Your kingdom would flourish each day as a fertile garden. Europe would regard you with admiration and respect, and your loving people with a felt devotion.

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Written 1775.