[In this essay, Doyle considers the context and influence of Voltaire's writings on veniality, or the sale of royal offices. Doyle also traces Voltaire's political alignments and his use of the veniality debate to attack Richelieu and Montesquieu.]

‘Il faut en France,’ wrote La Bruyère in 1688, ‘beaucoup de fermeté et une grande étendue d'esprit pour se passer des charges et des emplois, et consentir ainsi à demeurer chez soi et à ne rien faire.’ Yet the leisure of the sage, he reflected, taken up as it was in tranquil thought, conversation, and reading, was also a form of work.¹ Writing certainly was, as the life of Voltaire bore witness. But his family background illustrated a corollary of La Bruyère's observation: it was difficult in France to find respectable employment that was not a charge. Voltaire's father (if indeed Arouet père was his father) was typical enough: he made his fortune as a Parisian notary. Having sold that office two years before the birth of his famous son, two years afterwards he bought the even more lucrative, more expensive, but less burdensome one of receveur des épices à la chambre des comptes.² Voltaire's maternal grandfather was greffier criminel at the parlement. When he was 15, his sister married a correcteur en la chambre des comptes, which was an ennobling office. Thus Voltaire grew up at the heart of the ‘bourgeoisie parisienne d'offices’,³ in a family mid-way on the classic route from commerce (Arouet grand-père had been a draper) to nobility. It was an ambiance permeated with the values and rewards of venality.

So was that of the school to which he was sent. At Louis-le-Grand Voltaire rubbed shoulders with the sons of far more prestigious office-holders, most of them predestined to follow their fathers or other male relatives into public offices that were at the same time the private property of their families.⁴ The years of Voltaire's schooling were also ones in which venality reached its widest extent in French history. Originating as a way for the King to borrow money from the ambitious, the sale of royal offices and the further exploitation of their buyers through a range of fiscal expedients had expanded enormously since the early sixteenth century.⁵ By 1664 it was estimated that there were at least 46,000 judicial and financial offices in the kingdom.⁶ No area of royal administration and public services was untouched by venality; and although Colbert, for whom the estimate of 1664 was made, had dreamed of eliminating or at least severely curtailing it,⁷ like so many of his plans this one was aborted by the demands of war. Hostilities against the Dutch in the 1670s brought renewed recourse to the easiest form of borrowing yet devised; and the rapacious traitants and partisans, who were one of the main butts of La Bruyère's disenchanted reflexions on the contemporary scene, proved inexhaustible in devising new means of extracting money from what Charles Loyseau had called in 1610 Frenchmen's archomania—their rage for offices.⁸ With the quarter-century of almost uninterrupted warfare that began in 1688 these expedients proliferated as never before. Well over 600 traités for the creation or exploitation of venal offices were concluded with partisans betwen 1689 and 1715,⁹ and by 1710 a capital of over 200 millions had been raised through squeezing office-holders in various ways.¹⁰ And although by 1719 the Regency government was claiming that new offices to the value of over 254 millions had been suppressed since 1711,¹¹ the net result of Louis XIV's manipulation of venality was a marked increase on the 1664 total of offices. Half a century later, in the year of Voltaire's death, it was estimated at 51,000, and might well have been higher. It represented a capital debt of almost 585 millions.¹²

Venality, therefore, remained a central feature of French society and institutions throughout Voltaire's lifetime. It was also one remarkably unchallenged, considering its obvious disadvantages.¹³ As far back as Plato and Aristotle the sale of public offices had been condemned as setting a higher value on wealth than on virtue. The sale of judicial offices had been bitterly criticized in France throughout the whole period of its expansion, as likely to lead to the sale of justice itself, and to allow moneyed incompetents to sit in judgement over their fellows. But by the eighteenth century such criticism was not much heard. Not a single work appears to have been entirely devoted to the subject; and the handful of writers who did discuss it tended to do so only tangentially. It is true that hardly any of them defended it, but then practices so well-established scarcely needed defending. Above all, was it even worth discussing something that everybody recognized there was no prospect of ever eliminating? The capital invested in offices was equivalent to about a year of the king's gross revenues,¹⁴ too much to even dream of paying back. Although it was the source of almost all the disorders in the administration of justice, reflected Chancellor d'Aguesseau in 1727, to abolish venality was impossible.¹⁵ It was an abuse, but an ineradicable one.

This was the burden of Voltaire's first public comments on the matter. Since leaving school and renouncing the family name, he had had little to do with the world of venality as he pursued a literary career. He was proud of avoiding it. As he boasted to his friend d'Argenson in 1739:

Comme j'avais peu de bien quand j'entray dans le monde, j'eus l'insolence de penser que j'aurois eü une charge comme un autre, s'il avoit fallu l'acquérir par le travail et par la bonne volonté. Je me jettay du cote des baux arts qui portent toujours avec eux un certain air d'avilissement attendu qu'ils ne donnent point d'exemption, et qu'ils ne font point un homme conseiller du roy en ses conseils. On est maître des requêtes avec de l'argent, mais avec de l'argent on ne fait pas un poème épique; et j'en fis un.¹⁶

But when, in the mid 1740s, he began to achieve official recognition, he found that even the rewards of merit had a price. If the patronage of the king's mistress procured for the newly appointed Historiographer Royal the further post of Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the end of 1746, this latter post was a venal one. Voltaire later boasted of being allowed to sell it for 53,000 livres in 1749, but neglected to record what he had had to pay for it in the first place.¹⁷ There was no sign of self-disgust over this foray into the venal labyrinth: rather, a certain pride at the profit realized. Thus it is no surprise to find compromise with the world as it is the theme of one of Voltaire's earliest contes, written at precisely this time.

Published in the first collected edition of his works in 1748, Le monde comme il va is the story of Babouc, a stranger in Persepolis—a thinly-veiled Paris. At first he is horrified by the absurd customs he finds there. They include young sons of rich fathers buying the right to dispense justice like some piece of land. It seems obvious to him that the sale of verdicts must follow. Nor is he convinced when a young soldier who has bought a command vaunts the virtues of paying to be shot at. Surely, Babouc tells a man of letters, judges should be recruited from mature and experienced jurisconsults rather than raw youths. If young men can command successful armies, comes the reply, there is no reason why they should not prove to be successful magistrates, too. And later, in court, Babouc observes that while mature and learned advocates haver and equivocate, young judges reach swift and fair conclusions based on reason rather than on book learning. ‘Babouc conclut qu'il y avait souvent de très bonnes choses dans les abus’, for after all, ‘si tout n'est pas bien, tout est passable.’

Tolerant resignation was also the tone of remarks on venality in the Siècle de Louis XIV, published in 1751 after almost twenty years of drafts and polishing. The financial affaires extraordinaires of the great king's last years (and Voltaire's own adolescence) were described less in a spirit of censure on a government that had created so many ridiculous and superfluous offices, than in a spirit of amusement at the vain folly of those who had bought them for the tax-exemptions they conferred. No doubts were left that in principle venality was bad. We smile today at such things, says the historian, but at the time men wept. And Colbert, earlier, comes in for rare criticism for allowing the extension in the 1670s of what he had set out intending to abolish forever, venal expedients which burdened future ages for short term gains. By 1708, however, Colbert's nephew Desmaretz recognized that he ‘ne put guérir un mal que tout rendait incurable.’¹⁸

The true error was to have introduced it in the first place. Elsewhere Voltaire blamed François I for that—the usual culprit—and sometimes Louis XII.¹⁹ But if circumstances made the evil incurable, there was at least no excuse for claiming it had advantages. Accordingly as he grew older, and his view of the world darkened, Voltaire devoted increasing efforts to attacking those who found saving virtues in the sale of offices. Only two important writers in his time attempted to do so, but he took issue with them both. One of them he also believed to be an impostor.

This was the author of the Testament Politique of Cardinal Richelieu, first published in 1688. Its authenticity was much contested right from the start, but Voltaire only appears to have become interested in the question in the late 1730s, as he began to reflect seriously on the history of the previous century.²⁰ Chapter 4 of the Testament was a sustained defence of the venality and heredity of offices, but Voltaire's first doubts about its authenticity, expressed in Conseils à un Journaliste (1737) made no mention of that. Only in 1739 did it come to seem one more reason for believing that the Testament could not be by a minister who earlier in his career had been a vocal critic of the sale of offices. What concentrated his mind on this aspect was his reading of d'Argenson's manuscript Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France, where venality was identified as the central defect of French, government, and one of which Richelieu could never have approved.²¹ Voltaire thanked his old friend for adding a further reason for doubting the Testament's authenticity, and delighted in his condemnation of a ‘malheureuse invention qui a ôté l'émulation aux citoyens, et qui a privé les rois de la plus belle prérogative du trône.’²² It is true that the defence of venality was not among the reasons given for doubting the Testament's authenticity in the first major piece which he devoted to the subject, in 1749;²³ nor is the matter raised in what has since been recognized as the definitive refutation of Voltaire's doubts by Foncemagne, the next year.²⁴ But when in 1764 a new edition of the Testament appeared, together with further observations by Foncemagne, Voltaire returned to the charge with new arguments. ‘Je ne sais,’ he wrote in the Doutes Nouveaux sur le Testament attribué au Cardinal de Richelieu ‘s'il est bien vraisemblable qu'un grand ministre ait conseillé de perpétuer l'abus de la vénalité des charges: la France est le seul pays souillé de cet opprobre.’ Everywhere else in Europe, he noted, magistrates were chosen from the bar: and even in Turkey, Persia and China it was not possible to buy the right to judge men as if it were a meadow or field. No minister could have advised the retention of a ‘trafic honteux contre lequel l'univers entier réclame.’ Even those who had bought judicial offices in France would surely have preferred to have been elected.²⁵ The sharpening of tone is audible: this was the Voltaire of the 1760s, optimistic illusions all gone, anxious to crush the world's infamies; many of which, in that decade, he found to be perpetrated by the venal magistracy of the parlements.

The other defender of venality with whom he took issue was Montesquieu, who, in a few brief lines of Book V of De L'Esprit des Lois, argued that venality was good in monarchies ‘parce qu'elle fait faire, comme un métier de famille, ce qu'on ne voudrait pas entreprendre pour la vertu.’²⁶ If offices were not publicly sold, courtiers would sell them privately; and in any case, industry would be stimulated if advancement came only from wealth. These arguments, which seem to have owed a good deal in their turn to Richelieu's Testament, predictably outraged Voltaire. He had never liked Montesquieu, or his sprawling, unpolished masterpiece; and in the eighth part of Questions sur l'Encyclopédie he expressed incredulity that an expedient born of François I's financial improvidence could ever be thought good.²⁷ If it was so good, why had no other country adopted it? ‘le monstre est né de la prodigalité d'un roi devenu indigent, et de la vanité de quelques bourgeois dont les pères avaient de l'argent. On a toujours attaqué cet infâme abus par des cris impuissans, parce qu'il eût falu rembourser les offices qu'on avait vendu.’ To sell justice, and the right to dispense it, was sacrilegiously vile; and so, ‘Plaignons Montesquieu d'avoir déshonoré son ouvrage par de tels paradoxes. Mais pardonnons-lui. Son oncle avait acheté une charge de président en province, et il la lui laissa. On retrouve l'homme partout. Nul de nous n'est sans faiblesse.’

Montesquieu had been dead sixteen years when these strictures appeared; but his arguments about the nature of monarchy were never more urgent than in 1771, as Chancellor Maupeou launched his attack on the parlements, which Montesquieu had identified as one of the vital intermediary powers which prevented monarchy from degenerating into despotism. In this confrontation Voltaire, alone among the philosophes, unequivocally took the chancellor's side.²⁸ In the causes célèbres which he had espoused in the 1760s—Calas, Sirven, La Barre, Lally—the forces of cruelty, fanaticism and intolerance had always been embodied in the parlements, proud corporations made invulnerable by the tenure derived from venality. These cases occurred during years of deteriorating relations between the king and his sovereign courts, and Voltaire made little secret of his sympathy with the royal side.²⁹ Only action by the king, he believed, could reform the complex of abuses which they stood for. Awareness of his attitude seems to have brought encouragement from the newly-appointed Chancellor Maupeou to write against the parlements and their pretensions.³⁰ The result, in 1769, was the Histoire du Parlement de Paris. Ostensibly (from the title page) by an Abbé de Big …, its authorship was an open secret from the start,³¹ and its sentiments towards its subject came as no surprise. The parlement was allowed some merit for its long resistance to the claims of the Church, and its support for the king at crucial moments, as in the reign of Henry IV, but its long record of excessive political ambition and judicial savagery was left to speak for itself; and in chapter XVI the basis of its members' tenure was unequivocally condemned. François I's chancellor Duprat had ‘prostituted’ the magistracy when he had auctioned twenty new offices of counsellor, but from this shameful start, which the parlement had at first tried to resist, venality had rapidly spread throughout the judiciary. ‘Un impôt également réparti, et dont les corps de ville et les financiers même auraient avancé les deniers, eût été plus raisonnable et plus utile; mais le ministère comptait sur l'empressement des bourgeois, dont la vanité achèterait à l'envi ces nouvelles charges’. Venality was also condemned as one source of the troubles of the Fronde.³²

As first published, the Histoire ended with the savage execution of Damiens, who had stabbed Louis XV, in 1757. Only the dramatic events of the next few years led Voltaire to add two new chapters to later editions.³³ But 1769 also saw the publication of a new edition of the Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, which had grown out of earlier prolongations of Louis XIV. It contained a long chapter on the laws, largely inspired by Voltaire's reading of Beccaria, but ending with a resounding condemnation of the venality so speciously defended in the Testament (which he persisted in believing to be the work of the abbé Bourzeis). ‘En vain d'autres auteurs, plus courtisans que citoyens, et plus inspirés par l'intérêt personnel que par l'amour de la patrie,³⁴ ont ils suivi les traces de l'abbé de Bourzeys; une preuve que cette vente est un abus, c'est qu'elle ne fut produite que par un autre abus, par la dissipation des finances de l'Etat. C'est une simonie beaucoup plus funeste que la vente des bénéfices de l'Eglise: car si un ecclésiastique isolé achète un bénéfice simple, il n'en résulte ni bien ni mal pour la patrie, dans laquelle il n'a nulle juridiction, il n'est comptable à personne; mais la magistrature a l'honneur, la fortune et la vie des hommes entre ses mains. Nous cherchons dans ce siècle à tout perfectionner, cherchons donc à perfectionner les lois.’

The reforms of Maupeou in 1771 seemed to present an ideal opportunity for such improvement. For all the stormy exchanges between the king and his parlements throughout the 1760s, Maupeou's attack on the sovereign courts was not premeditated, and the radical form it eventually took developed out of the crisis itself.³⁵ But from the start of the confrontation Voltaire, as he told d'Alembert and Richelieu on 21 December 1770, was pleased to see the murderers of La Barre humiliated.³⁶ His pleasure grew over the spring of 1771 as Maupeou, unable to conciliate or cow the parlement of Paris, embarked on a radical restructuring of the upper judiciary. Most of the members of the parlement were dismissed, and their offices confiscated, although compensation was promised. They were replaced by salaried nominees, who were forbidden to charge litigants the traditional fees (épices). At the same time the vast jurisdiction of the parlement was broken up and redistributed among a number of superior councils, staffed and operating on the same terms. Maupeou even encouraged hopes of a total recodification of the law. Voltaire was overwhelmed at the promise of it all. ‘Je vous avoue,’ he wrote to Florian on 1 April,³⁷ ‘que je bats des mains, quand je vois que la justice n'est plus vénale, que des citoyens ne sont plus trainés des cachots d'Angoulême aux cachots de la Conciergerie … Je le dis hautement, ce reglement me parait le plus beau qui ait été fait depuis la fondation de la monarchie; et je pense qu'il faut être ennemi de l'Etat et de soi-même pour ne pas sentir ce bienfait.’

It is clear that ending the sale of offices was only one of several reasons why Voltaire supported the chancellor's policies, and perhaps not the most important. It certainlyy did not figure largely in the arguments of the eight pamphlets he wrote in favour of the reforms between March and May 1771. As early as the end of January he had sent Maupeou indirect evidence of his support,³⁸ and the chancellor can only have welcomed his satirizing the constitutional doctrines of the parlements,³⁹ his response to Malesherbes' great remonstrances agains his policies on behalf of the Cour des Aides,⁴⁰ and a number of other fleeting though anonymous interventions. But the sale of offices was attacked far more specifically in revised editions of earlier works published during the years of Maupeou's ministry, and in ongoing serial publications such as Questions sur l'Encyclopédie. The entry ‘Loix, Esprit des Loix’, of 1771, cited above, was one. The next year, in the ninth part, came an entry specifically on venality. Beginning with yet another attack on the authenticity of Richelieu's Testament Politique, it argued that Maupeou had at last given the lie to the strongest argument there advanced in favour of venality—that the system was simply too expensive to buy out.

Ainsi, non seulement cet abus paraissait à tout le monde irréformable, mais utile; on était si accoûtumé à cet opprobre, qu'on ne le sentait pas; il semblait éternel; un seul homme en peu de mois l'a su anéantir.

Répétons donc qu'on peut tout faire, tout corriger; que le grand défaut de presque tous ceux qui gouvernent, est de n'avoir que des demi-volontés et des demi-moyens.⁴¹

This was to attribute too much to Maupeou. Only in the parlements and certain other courts suppressed in his reforms was venality abolished: perhaps 3,500 venal offices out of over 50,000. The salaries of the new nonvenal magistracy, and the free justice that resulted, were paid for by earmarked tax increases. Maupeou's colleague at the finance ministry, indeed, the abbé Terray, introduced a range of measures in 1771 which positively extended venality in some areas and taxed it more ruthlessly at every level. So far from diminishing it, the aim was to make it pay better. As most of the other philosophes saw, in fact, Maupeou's reforms were largely cosmetic.⁴² What they saw in him was a friend of the Jesuits, Mme Dubarry's sycophant, and a supporter of stricter censorship. His attack on the sovereign courts had swept away the only legal safeguards enjoyed by the king's subjects, and turned that king into a despot. In this perspective, venality, insofar as it reinforced the independence of the judiciary, had been a positive bulwark of liberty: as Diderot put it, an evil, but a necessary one.⁴³

Voltaire never recognized any of this. Even though Maupeou, once his system established itself, showed himself indifferent to a number of causes espoused by Voltaire,⁴⁴ and forbade the publication of new parts of the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie in France, and even though no official support was received for securing a performance for his last, sycophantic play, Les Lois de Minos, in Paris, much less for the long-coveted permission to return to the city of his birth, Voltaire nevertheless remained a champion of the judicial reforms until they were abrogated by a new king in 1774. This time he took no public stance on the changes, although privately he lamented the restoration of the old parlement of Paris, its swollen jurisdiction, and the fact that it was to be rebarbouillé by venality of offices.⁴⁵ But when, the next year, he brought out a further edition of the Histoire du Parlement, there was a new final chapter justifying the work of Maupeou by a recital of the ‘étonnante anarchie’ and judicial cruelties that had marked the 1760s, and of the utility of two reforms that the chancellor had introduced. One was the diminution of the ‘ruinous’ size of the parlement's jurisdiction. The other was the ending of venality, ‘honteux et dispendieux à la fois … vénalité qui avait introduit la forte taxation des épices.’ The new parlement ‘serait payé par le roi, sans acheter ses places, et sans rien exiger des plaideurs … l'opprobre de la vénalité, dont François 1^er et le chancelier Duprat avaient malheureusement souillé la France, fut lavé par Louis XV et par les soins du chancelier de Maupeou.’ After that, few could doubt the real meaning of the terse praise for Louis XVI's restoration of the old order with which the chapter concluded.

And Voltaire continued to rail against venality until the end. 1777 saw the publication of his Commentaire sur quelques maximes de l'Esprit des Lois, in which, after a little grudging initial praise for Montesquieu, he proceeded to challenge some of his central principles. The passage on venality was inevitably targeted, although most of Voltaire's remarks were nearly word for word the same as those in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie. Montesquieu's contention that a vice like venality could be a virtue in a monarchy was unworthy of him. ‘Pourquoi cet étrange abus ne fut-il introduit qu'au bout de onze cents années?’ And appropriately, he combined these last comments on one of his secular aversions with a jibe at the Church: ‘On a toujours attaqué cet abus par des cris impuissans, parce qu'il eût fallu rembourser les offices qu'on avait vendus. Il eut mieux valu mille fois, dit un sage jurisconsulte, vendre les trésors de tous les couvens et l'argenterie de toutes les églises que de vendre la justice.’

It seemed an implicit suggestion that venality could be bought out with the confiscated wealth of the Church—and that is how it was eventually done. Only eleven years after Voltaire died venality was abolished, and free justice proclaimed, by the National Assembly on the night of 4 August 1789. Office-holders were promised reimbursement of their investment, and this obligation was recognized as part of the national debt. By the end of the year the Assembly had confiscated the lands of the Church as a means of paying off that debt.⁴⁶

No doubt the writings of Voltaire played their part in sowing the seeds of these developments, but not in any directly demonstrable sense. He was merely the most famous of a myriad of writers who attacked the Church and the ways of the established judicial system, and thereby helped to undermine respect for both. And in the case of venality he was saying nothing new. The arguments he used were as old as venality itself. The first evidence for its existence came from the protests of medieval estates against the sale of judicial offices,⁴⁷ and they had been much reiterated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The importance of Voltaire's contribution lay not in the novelty of what he said, but in the fact that he was saying it. He scarcely mentioned the matter publicly until he was a writer of international standing. And when he did address it, most often he did so in order to refute authoritative figures who advanced new defences of the indefensible. Richelieu's authority was much more effectively challenged when it was Voltaire who declared that it was not Richelieu's at all; Montesquieu's when his fellow academician claimed his judgement had been warped by self-interest. Here Voltaire lent his prestige to the silent common sense of his compatriots, whose disapproval of venality came out loud and clear when they had the opportunity to voice an opinion in the cahiers of 1789.⁴⁸

Yet the venality condemned by Voltaire made up only one small part of the system, and until the 1760s he had condemned it with no great vehemence. On the venality amid which he had grown up, and in which he had himself briefly dabbled in the 1740s, he remained silent. His fiercest attacks were concentrated almost entirely on the venal tenure of magistrates who, in the course of the 1760s, he had come to hate and despise for other reasons. It is clear from his private correspondence that he supported Maupeou largely because he had struck down the murderers of La Barre and Lally. The chancellor's other reforms, including the curtailing of venality, merely confirmed how right it was to support such a minister. Fundamentally, however, they were side issues.

They were side issues for Maupeou, too, although the cruelty and obscurantism of the magistracy were of no concern to him. Reform of the judiciary was merely a screen to give respectability to his own political ambition. Once firmly established, he did not pursue it; nothing came of the vaunted law-code which so excited Voltaire, and outside the parlements venality was left untouched, though not untaxed. But meanwhile all restraints on despotism, of which venal tenure was one, had been swept aside. The other philosophes saw this, and found their doyen's support for the chancellor an embarrassment. In his obsession with avenging injustice, the patriarch of Ferney seemed to have forgotten about protecting liberty. Babouc no longer recognized that some abuses could be very good things. Most opinion, however, did so; and until the threat of despotism was banished in 1789, the memory of Maupeou's reforms helped to prop up the very venality which Voltaire had praised them so highly for trying to abolish.

Notes

1. Les Caractères, ‘Du mérite personnel’.

2. R. Pomeau, D'Arouet à Voltaire 1694-1734 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 16, 28, 30.

3. Ibid. p. 16.

4. See F. Bluche, Les Magistrats du Parlement de Paris au XVIII^e siecle 1715-1770 (Besançon, 1960), pp. 245-46; and T. Besterman, Voltaire (London, 1969), pp. 38-39. [Hereafter: Besterman, Voltaire]

5. The standard account of these early stages is R. Mousnier, La vénalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris, 2nd edition, 1971). (Hereafter: La Vénalité]

6. P. Véron de Forbonnais, Recherches et Considérations sur les finances de France, 2 vols (Basle, 1758), I, p. 329. [Hereafter: Recherches]

7. P. Clément (ed.), Lettres, Instructions et Mémoires de Colbert, 7 vols (Paris, 1861-82), II, p. 127, VI, pp. 247-48.

8. C. Loyseau, Cinq Livres du droit des offices (Châteaudun, 1610), p. 290.

9. Calculated from BN MS Fr. 11103, ‘Mémoire des Affaires Extraordinaires des Finances faites depuis 1687 Jusqu'en 1705’ and MS Fr. 11107, ‘Recueil des Affaires Extraordinaires de Finances depuis et compris l'année 1706 jusqu'au [sic] présente année 1715’.

10. Forbonnais, Recherches, II, p. 395.

11. Etat Général des Dettes de l'Etat à la mort du feu Roy Louis XIV … (Paris, 1720), p. 25.

12. BN MS Fr. 11140, ‘Mémoire sur l'etat actuel des offices, tant casuels qu'à survivance’. Another version, different in detail and dated 1779, in MS Fr. 14084.

13. See W. Doyle, ‘4 August 1789: the intellectual background to the abolition of venality of offices’. Australian Journal of French Studies (1992), pp. 230-40. [Hereafter: ‘4 August 1789’]

14. Necker estimated them in 1785 at precisely the same amount, 585 millions: see A Treatise on the Finances of France, in three volumes by Mr. Necker (London, 1785), I, p. 37.

15. M. Pardessus (ed.), Œuvres complètes du Chancelier d'Aguesseau, 16 vols (Paris, 1819), XIII, p. 224. See too P. Combe, Memoire inédit du Chancelier Daguesseau sur la Réformation de la justice (Valence, 1928), p. 11.

16. D2035. 21 juin 1739.

17. Besterman, Voltaire (1969), pp. 278-79; Autobiography, ibid., p. 562.

18. Le Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. XXX.

19. Essai sur les Mœurs, ch. CXIV; Histoire du Parlement de Paris, ch. XVI.

20. See the preface to the standard edition of the Testament by L. André (Paris, 1947), pp. 50-51.

21. Considérations sur le gouvernement ancien et présent de la France (Amsterdam, 1764), p. 155ff. Manuscript copies had circulated for almost thirty years before this posthumous publication.

22. Letter cited above, n. 16. See also the Autobiography in Besterman, Voltaire (1969), p. 565.

23. Des Mensonges imprimés, et du Testament Politique du Cardinal de Richelieu.

24. Lettre sur le Testament Politique du Cardinal Richelieu (Paris, 1750). See too André, pp. 51-52.

25. As d'Argenson, whose Considérations were printed at last in that same year, recommended, p. 215.

26. Ch. XIX.

27. (1771.) Article ‘Loix, Esprit des Loix’.

28. See F. Diaz, Filosofia e Politica nel settecento francese (Turin, 1962), ch. VI.

29. See P. Gay, Voltaire's Politics. The Poet as Realist (Princeton, 1959), ch. VII.

30. Gay, Voltaire's Politics, p. 317; see too Beuchot's introduction to his edition of the Histoire, 1829.

31. See Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, IV, 25 juin 1769.

32. Ch. LV.

33. See p. 109.

34. Presumably this meant Montesquieu.

35. See W. Doyle, ‘The Parlements of France and the breakdown of the Old Regime’. French Historical Studies, VI (1970), pp. 415-58.

36. D12114 and D12115.

37. D12333.

38. D12231 to Marin, 27 jan. 1771. See too D. Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution. A study in the history of Libertarianism. France, 1770-1774 (Baton Rouge, La, 1985), p. 148. [Hereafter: Maupeou Revolution]

39. Très humbles et très respectueuses remontrances d'un Grenier à Sel, M.xxviii,401-4. See too David Hudson, ‘In defense of reform: French government propaganda during the Maupeou crisis’, French Historical Studies, VIII, (1973), pp. 67-68.

40. Réponse aux remontrances de la Cour des Aides par un membre des nouvelles cours souveraines, M.xxviii, 385-88.

41. Much of this passage was incorporated into later editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique.

42. See Diaz, Filosofia, pp. 458-65; Echeverria, Maupeou Revolution, chs 8 and 9; and J. Lough, The Philosophes and post-revolutionary France (Oxford, 1982), pp. 20-23.

43. ‘Observations sur le Nakaz’, no. XVIII, in P. Vernière (ed.), Diderot: Œuvres politiques (Paris, 1963), p. 363.

44. Echeverria, Maupeou Revolution, pp. 151-52.

45. D13863, to d'Hornoy, 5 sept. 1774.

46. The most accessible account currently available of this process is in P. Dawson, Provincial Magistrates and revolutionary politics in France, 1789-1795 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), ch. VI.

47. Mousnier, La Vénalité, pp. 13-24.

48. Doyle, ‘4 August 1789’, pp. 234-36. But Voltaire's influence can be seen in other ways. Among the Eloges de Montesquieu submitted in an essay competition set by the Academy of Bordeaux in the 1780s, several cited Voltaire's criticism to show that even Montesquieu's judgement could sometimes be flawed. Bibliothèque de la Ville de Bordeaux, MS 828 (XCVI and SCVII). One of the authors was Bertrand Barère, the future revolutionary.