“The years between 1758 and 1764 saw a last attempt by the traditional organs of censorship to prevent open discussion of matters of state, whether religious, administrative, or financial. Attempts to suppress the Encyclopédie, the works of Rousseau, and other speculative writings were part of this pattern. So was a royal declaration of 1764 prohibiting public sale of any works relating to the finances or administration of the State. But the line could not be held; and indeed government ministers themselves came increasingly to feel that it was perhaps better for the public to be well informed than uninformed. They even turned to courting opinion for themselves. Preambles to royal edicts grew longer and longer. Unwelcome remonstrances from the parlements were not only quashed, they were refuted. When Maupeou remodelled the parlements, he hired a team of writers to praise and defend what he was doing. But, mused an anxious and well placed observer, ‘each step makes matters worse. Somebody writes, another replies … everybody will want to analyse the constitution of the state; tempers will be lost. Issues are being raised which nobody would have dared think of … the knowledge the peoples are acquiring must, a little sooner or a little later, bring about revolutions.'[…]”
“Nothing did more to fuel this surge of public discussion than the Seven Years War. Undertaken with no clear aims, in alliance with Austria, a traditional enemy of centuries’ standing, it led to humiliating defeats on land and sea at what seemed like enormous economic cost. Taxes and state borrowing had soared, but there was nothing to show for such efforts. In these circumstances an inquest began which spared no aspect of French society or institutions, and was encouraged at a certain level by the government itself. In 1763, unprecedentedly, it even asked the parlements to make proposals for economic and fiscal reform—which produced nothing very constructive, unwisely flattered their pretensions, and left them aggrieved when, ignoring their suggestions, ministers turned in preference to the untried theories of a group calling themselves by the new and unfamiliar name of ‘Economists’.”
