Étienne de Silhouette
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Étienne de Silhouette (July 8, 1709 - 1767) was a French Controller-General of Finances under Louis XV.
He was born in Limoges where his father Arnaud de Silhouette (from Biarritz, the modern Standard Basque form of the name would be zuloeta) was sent. He studied finances and economics and spent a year in London learning from the economy of England.
He translated into French several works by Alexander Pope, H. Bolingbroke, William Warburton's The Alliance between Church and State, (1736) as Dissertations sur l’Union de la Religion, de la Morale, et de la Politique (1742) and Baltasar Gracián's El político. The party of the Prince of Condé used his translations from English authors to criticize him but the protection of Madame Pompadour awarded him the position of Controller-General, the most extensive of all the administrative positions and a very unstable one, in 4 March 1759. His task was to curb the running deficit and strengthen the finances for the Seven Years' War against England (1754 and 1756–1763). Public opinion liked his 72-million-livres public loan over the benefits of the ferme générale, the company outsourcing tax collection. He also reduced the spending of the royal house and revised the pensions. To favour free trade, he eliminated some taxes and established new ones operating on a unified French market.
He forecast a bleak budget for 1760: Income would amount to 286 millions with expenses of 503 millions including at least 94 millions servicing debt. He tried to restore the kingdom finances's by the English method of taxing the rich and privileged (nobility and church were exempt from taxes in the Ancient Regime). He devised the "general subvention", taxes on external signs of richness (doors and windows, farms, luxury goods, servants, profits). On 26 October, he took the war measure of ordering the melting of Frenchmen's gold and silverware. He was criticized by nobility including Voltaire, who thought that his theoretically good measures were not suitable for war time and the current situation of French politics.
On 20 November 1759, after eight months in the position, he left the court and retired to his reconstructed chateau at Bry-sur-Marne, where he reorganized the economy of his estates. After his death in 1767, his nephew and heir Clément de Laage ended his works.
[edit] The silhouettes
A silhouette is a profile traced onto and then cut from black paper and was a simple alternative for people who could not afford other forms of portraiture, which, in the eighteenth century, was still an expensive proposition. The word took its name from Étienne de Silhouette, either because the victims of his taxes complained that they were reduced to mere shadows or because he enjoyed this fad art in his retirement.
[edit] References
- Biography at a page on silhouette art.
- The corresponding page at the French Wikipedia.
- extract from the Dictionnaire des surintendants et contrôleurs généraux des finances, Françoise Bayard, Joël Felix, Philippe Hamon, ISBN 2-11-090091-1
