Jacques Necker

Jacques Necker (born September 30, 1732, Geneva—died April 9, 1804, Coppet, Switzerland) was a Swiss banker and director general of finance (1771–81, 1788–89, 1789–90) under Louis XVI of France. He was overpraised in his lifetime for his somewhat dubious skill with public finances and unduly deprecated by historians for his alleged vacillation and lack of statesmanship in the opening phases of the French Revolution.

Early career

Necker was the younger son of Charles-Frédéric Necker, a lawyer from Küstrin in the Electorate of Brandenburg who had become a citizen of the Genevan republic in January 1726. At age 16, Jacques Necker became a clerk in the bank of a friend of his father, and in 1750 he was transferred to the bank’s headquarters in Paris. In 1762 Necker was promoted to the position of junior partner. As a result of adroit speculation in the public funds and in the grain trade during the Seven Years’ War, Necker became a prominent and wealthy banker. In 1764 he married Suzanne Curchod, the cultivated and talented daughter of a former Vaudois pastor (among her earlier suitors had been the historian Edward Gibbon). She encouraged him to embark on a public career. Geneva appointed him its resident minister in Paris in 1768; he also became a director of the French East India Company. In 1772, at his wife’s suggestion, Necker transferred his banking responsibilities to his brother Louis. He then acquired a reputation as a writer on financial topics with a eulogy written in memory of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s great finance minister, and with an attack (1775) on the current free-trade policy in corn. Though he was a foreigner and a Protestant, Necker was placed in virtual control of French finances, as director of the royal treasury, on October 22, 1776, and was appointed director general of the finances on June 29, 1777.

First ministry

In his first ministry, Necker made several cautious experiments in social and administrative reform. He abolished mortmain (possession of lands by a corporation) on the royal domains in August 1779, reduced the numbers of the general tax farmers from 60 to 40, and established “provincial assemblies” for Berry and for Haute-Guyenne with administrative powers in which the Third Estate (the commons) had as many representatives as the clergy and the nobility combined and voting was by head (1778–79). The first and the last of these experiments met with opposition from the privileged orders and were not extended, as had been hoped, to the country as a whole. Necker’s principal mistake, however, was his misguided attempt to finance French participation in the American Revolution without recourse to additional taxation. In trying to raise the necessary loans, Necker published in 1781 his celebrated Compte rendu au Roi (“Report to the King”), claiming a surplus of 10,000,000 livres in the hope of concealing an actual deficit of 46,000,000. The opposition of the leading minister, Jean-Frédéric Phelypeaux, comte de Maurepas, and the hostility of the queen, Marie-Antoinette, forced Necker to resign on May 19, 1781. He retired to Saint-Ouen, where he wrote his De l’administration des finances de la France (1784; A Treatise on the Administration of Finances in France, 1785) to justify his policy.

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Outbreak of revolution

After both Charles-Alexandre de Calonne and Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne had failed to solve the financial problems for which Necker was at least partially responsible, Necker himself was recalled as finance minister on August 26, 1788. France was now on the verge of bankruptcy, in spite of the aristocracy’s agreement to surrender its immunity from taxation. In the face of the financial crisis it was decided to summon a meeting of the Estates-General (the representatives of the clergy, nobility, and commons), which was to set in motion the French Revolution. As the decision to summon the Estates-General for 1789 had already been taken, Necker’s main preoccupation lay in the field of politics rather than in finance, though he was too complacent in assuming that the surrender of the fiscal immunities of the nobility would remove his financial anxieties. In preparing for the meeting of the Estates-General, Necker had to steer a difficult course between the claims of the Third Estate for double representation, which were conceded by the royal council on his recommendation in December 1788, and the insistence of the privileged classes on the traditional method of debate, order by order. He has often been blamed for not having clearly laid down the government’s proposals for political as well as financial reform in his opening speech to the Estates-General on May 5, 1789. He did, however, propose a reasoned program of social and constitutional reforms that was overlooked in the struggle over procedure. This struggle might have been avoided if Necker’s suggestion for conciliation had been adopted. His program of liberal concessions to the National Assembly (formed between June 10 and June 17) was drastically modified by the court reactionaries just before the “royal session” of June 23, 1789. His objective was a limited constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature on the English model. His dismissal, on July 11, 1789, an overt sign of court reaction, did much to provoke the disturbances in Paris that culminated in the storming of the Bastille. Having retired to Switzerland, he received the summons to return to office on July 20, 1789.

In his third ministry Necker struggled ineffectively with the rapidly mounting deficit and was overshadowed by Talleyrand and the comte de Mirabeau, who dictated revolutionary finance at that stage. Necker’s chief weakness as a politician was his vanity and his anxiety to preserve his popularity at all costs. After his final resignation (September 18, 1790), he lived in retirement until his death in 1804.