Michel Gaudin
Martin-Michel-Charles Gaudin, Duke of Gaeta (born January 19, 1756 in Saint-Denis , † November 5, 1841 in Gennevilliers near Paris ), was France's finance minister under Napoleon Bonaparte and played in the first few years after the coup d'état in the 18th century. Brumaire VIII played a crucial role in the reorganization of the French financial system.
Gaudin, who had already been a tax officer during the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution , held ministerial office from that day from 1799 to 1814 and again for the Hundred Days . After the Second Restoration of the Bourbons , he was initially a member of the Chamber of Deputies and from 1820 to 1834 head of the Banque de France , the French state bank he co-founded.
biography
Career during the Ancien Régime and the Revolution
Gaudin was born as the son of the lawyer Charles Gaudin and his wife Louise-Suzanne, née Ragot, in Saint-Denis near Paris. His father was - like his maternal grandfather - a lawyer at the royal court in Paris, the so-called Parlement de Paris . After training at the Collège Louis-le-Grand , Gaudin joined the French financial administration in 1773. Four years later - at the age of 21 - he was promoted to the head of the Département des impositions , a department responsible for direct taxes on waist and capitation .
To reorganize the French financial system, the Trésorerie nationale was founded in 1791 , the treasury, which was responsible for the administration of state revenue. Because of his merits, Gaudin was appointed to one of the six chief commissioners of this financial authority that same year. In the course of this activity he came into conflict with the welfare committee several times . It was thanks to his relationships with the influential Pierre Joseph Cambon that his life did not end on the guillotine. He himself saved 48 innocent officers from execution during the reign of terror . As so-called Receveurs-généraux de finances in the Ancien Régime, they were charged with collecting direct taxes.
In June 1795, Gaudin applied for his discharge from civil service, retired to his estate in Vic-sur-Aisne near Soissons , where he devoted himself to economic studies. In November of the same year he was proposed by the Board of Directors for the office of Finance Minister. However, he declined for health reasons. He also resisted all further pressure from the directorate, which was in dire financial straits. In May 1797 he turned down the offer to work again as commissioner of the Trésorerie nationale , just as he turned down the office of General Commissioner of the Trésorerie in July 1798 . In April 1798 he had accepted the position of head of the postal and communications services alone. A year later, in May 1799, Sieyès was elected to the board of directors in place of Reubell . When Sieyès immediately made a new attempt to win Gaudin as finance minister, the latter refused - according to his own statements - on the grounds that "where there are neither finances nor the means to procure them, a minister is useless" .
Minister of Finance under Bonaparte
Gaudin's unyielding attitude changed abruptly when Napoleon took office . Just one day after the coup d'état of 18th Brumaire VIII on November 9th, 1799, Gaudin was summoned to Sieyès, who in the meantime - alongside Bonaparte and Ducos - was at the head of the consular government . Sieyès asked him again to take over the Treasury. Gaudin describes the conversation that followed with Napoleon as follows in his memoirs:
«Vous avez longtemps travaillé dans les finances? - Counterpart 20 ans, général! - Nous avons grand besoin de votre secours et j'y compte. Allons, prêtez serment, nous sommes pressés. »
“ I was told that you worked in finance for a long time?” - “For twenty years, General!” - “We urgently need your help and I am counting on it. Now! Take your oath, we're in a hurry. "
On the evening of the 19th Brumaire (November 10th) Gaudin swore his oath and carried out the official business of the Minister of Finance from 1799 to April 1, 1814 and then - during the Hundred Days - again from March 20 to June 22, 1815.
The financial management during the time of the consulate and the First French Empire was divided into two parts since 1802. While François Barbé-Marbois and, since 1806, his successor Nicolas-François Mollien , were responsible for the expenditure side in their function as Ministre du trésor public , Gaudin was responsible for the income side as finance minister. When Gaudin took office, Gaudin found himself in an almost hopeless situation: the four years of the Board of Directors had led to a massive drop in tax revenue, which was offset by a large sum of overdue salaries to civil servants and members of the army. This and the partially contradicting budgetary measures undertaken in the course of the ten years since the beginning of the revolution made a fundamental reorganization of the financial system necessary.
The law of the 3rd frimaire of the year VIII (November 24, 1799) regulated the collection of direct taxes by creating a clear hierarchy. At the lowest level were the tax collectors , so-called percepteurs , followed by the receveur particulier at the level of the arrondissements and the receveur général at the department level . In order to ensure fair taxation of property, the daunting task of creating the cadastre, a land register in which the property rights, size and value of all lands in France were entered, was begun . Under Napoleon's government, the state budget was based less on direct than on indirect taxes such as stamp, tobacco and alcohol taxes. Together with the customs revenue, which had risen sharply in the wake of the continental blockade, they formed the state's most important source of finance and in 1813 they accounted for almost one and a half times the direct tax revenue. The collection of all these taxes was closely monitored; For this purpose, in 1804 a superintendent of all tax revenues (régie des droits réunis) was set up, which was entrusted to the "Anakreon des Fiskus" Français de Nantes . The law of September 16, 1807 also set up a court of auditors (cour des comptes) as the central control authority, so that Gaudin was finally able to state with satisfaction that the state was henceforth "ready to collect any tax that might come" .
To revive the credit system, Gaudin created a fund for debt repayment on November 29, 1799, the caisse de garantie et d'amortissement , which he entrusted to his friend and later Minister of the Treasury, Mollien . The task of this fund was on the one hand to reimburse contested tax revenues and on the other - what was even more important - to reduce the national debt by buying back government bonds. In addition, the current account, founded in 1796, was converted into the Banque de France on the 24th Plûviose of the year VIII (February 13, 1800) , whose primary function was to provide entrepreneurs with loans at reasonable interest rates. In addition to these measures, a currency reform established a fixed ratio between silver and gold at a ratio of 1: 15.5. The " Franc germinal " created in March 1803 , a coin with a silver content of five grams, achieved a better exchange rate than the pound sterling in 1811 and was to remain stable until the beginning of the First World War in 1914.
_Duc_de_Ga%C3%ABte.svg)
In 1808, Napoleon raised Gaudin to the rank of comte de l'Empire in thanks for his achievements and on August 15, 1809, awarded him the title of Duke of Gaeta . A number of lucrative endowments have been added to these titles over the years: in the Kingdom of Westphalia and the Electorate of Hanover (1808), in the Kingdom of Naples (1809), on the Canal du Loing , an important French trade route in Burgundy (1810), in Illyria and in the Stura and Arno departments (1812).
Gaudin remained in office until the first restoration and Napoleon's exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba . In 1814 he belonged to a small group of faithful who accompanied the Empress Marie-Louise to Blois . After Napoleon returned to France on March 1, 1815, he reappointed Gaudin as Minister of Finance on March 21, and on June 2, 1815 - shortly before the start of his campaign in Belgium - appointed him Peer of France . After his renewed abdication and exile on the island of St. Helena , Napoleon said in retrospect of Gaudin: “The Minister Gaudin did everything in his power to end the abuse of a vicious regime and the principles of credit and credit within a few days To restore moderation with honor. "
During the Second Restoration and the July Monarchy
Shortly after the end of the episode of the Hundred Days , Gaudin was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Aisne department on August 22, 1815 , where he remained until 1819. In his speeches during this time he defended Napoleon's policy and his own management of state finances time and again. Unlike other ascendants of the First Empire, he also refused to occupy the seat he was entitled to in the French upper house , the Chambre des Pairs .
In 1820 Gaudin accepted King Louis XVIII's offer . who made him director of the Banque de France . He held this position until 1834 and published his first two-volume memoir under the title Mémoires, souvenirs, opinions et écrits du duc de Gaëte during his tenure in 1826 , to which he published an expansion volume in 1834 entitled Supplément aux mémoires et souvenirs de M Gaudin duc de Gaëte followed. With the exception of a few passages, these memoirs deal with the affairs of his ministry and almost exclusively revolve around questions of finance. Valynseele, one of his biographers, comments that it seems as if Gaudin did not notice much of the things that were going on outside of his ministry.
Contrary to Napoleon's pressure, Gaudin had not married for a long time. It was not until April 1822, at the age of 66, that he married Anna Summaripa, born in 1775 on the Greek island of Naxos , who was first married to the diplomat Claude-Camille-Emile Gaudin de Fers and who - according to some authors - already should have been Gaudin's mistress for many years . Gaudin adopted their daughter Athénaïs-Laure, born in 1809, who later married the Marquis Ernest Stanislas de Girardin , deputy for the Charente department during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic and a senator during the Second Empire .
Gaudin died on November 5, 1841 at the age of 85. His grave is in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .
Fonts (selection)
Among the numerous writings of Gaudin are to be emphasized:
- Aperçu sur les Emprunts, Paris 1817
- Notice historique sur les finances de la France depuis 1800 jusqu'au 1er avril 1814, Paris 1818
literature
swell
- Martin-Michel-Charles Gaudin: Mémoires, souvenirs, opinions et écrits du Duc de Gaëte (Martin-Michel-Charles Gaudin), ancien ministre des finances, ex-député, gouverneur de la banque de France, 3 volumes, facsimile reprint of the first edition from Paris 1826–1834 (2 volumes 1826 plus supplement 1834), Paris 1926.
- Remnants of Gaudin's papers are now in the Archives nationales , Paris, under the Sigle 188 AP.
Representations
- Michel Bruguière: Article "Gaudin (Martin-Michel-Charles, duc de Gaëte)", in: Jean Tulard (Ed.): Dictionnaire Napoléon, 2nd, revised and expanded edition, Paris 2001, pp. 783f., ISBN 2- 213-60485-1 .
- Michel Bruguière: Gestionnaires et profiteurs de la révolution: l'administration des finances françaises de Louis XVI à Bonaparte, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-85565-332-0 - Bruguière's study worth reading offers a good introduction to the field of public finance from the years between the end of the Ancien Régime and the time of the consulate. The written material published up to the publication of his book on Gaudin rated Bruguières as "extremely mediocre" ("fort mediocre").
- Joseph Valynseele: Article "Gaudin (Martin-Michel-Charles)", in: Prevost / d'Amat / de Morembert (ed.): Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, Volume 15, Paris 1982, pp. 704–707 - Valynseele gives different - and possibly simplistic - Paris as the place of death.
- François Latour: Le grand argentier de Napoléon: Gaudin, duc de Gaëte, Paris 1962.
- Marcel Marion: Histoire financière de la France depuis 1715, Volume 4: 1799–1818: La fin de la Révolution, le Consulat et l'Empire, la libération du térritoire, Paris 1927 - Marion dedicates a section to Gaudin (p. 170– 173) and rates him extremely positively.
- v. Stramberg: Article " Martin Michael Karl Gaudin ", in: Publish / Gruber: Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste , Volume 54, 1852, pp. 463-465
Individual evidence
Web links
- Marc Allégret: Gaudin, Martin-Michel-Charles (1756–1841) ministre des finances, duc de Gaëte on Napoleon.org , the website of the Fondation Napoléon.
- Text of the law of 16 September 1807 establishing the Court of Auditors ( Loi du 16 septembre 1807 relative à l'organization de la cour des comptes ( Memento of 1 December 2006 in the Internet Archive )), on the website of the Cours des Comptes .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Gaudin, Michel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gaudin, Martin Michel Charles |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French Minister of Finance |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 19, 1756 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis) |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 5, 1841 |
| Place of death | Gennevilliers |