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, Henry 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 preferred his 72-million-livres public loan to the ferme générale, an outsourced tax collection system. He also reduced spending by the royal house and revised pensions. To favour free trade, he eliminated some taxes and established new ones operating on a unified French market.

de Silhouette forecast a bleak budget for 1760: income of 286 million livres compared to expenses of 503 million livres, including at least 94 million in debt service. In an attempt to restore the kingdom's finances by the English method of taxing the rich and privileged (nobility and church were exempt from taxes in the Ancien Regime). de Silhouette devised the "general subvention," i.e., taxes on external signs of wealth (doors and windows, farms, luxury goods, servants, profits). On 26 October, he took the war measure of ordering the melting down of goldware and silverware. He was criticized by the nobility including Voltaire, who thought his measures, though theoretically beneficial, were not suitable for war time and the French political situation.

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 shadow profile cut from black paper. It provided a simple and inexpensive alternative for those who could not afford more decorative and expensive forms of portraiture, such as painting or sculpture. The word "silhouette" mocks the parsimonious Étienne de Silhouette as applied to this cheap artform.

[edit] References