How Did Turgot Contribute To The French Revolution

One of the important contributors to the physiocratic school of thought, an economic school of thought that placed value on land agriculture and advocated laissez-faire principles, was Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. In 1774 he became the finance minister of France, and during his term he introduced physiocratic ideas in his Six Edicts, such as anti-feudal and anti-mercantilist laws. However, he would eventually attract the hatred of the noble class in France, leading to his dismissal by King Louis XVI. While he did advocate for an absolute monarchy, his ideas were quite progressive for his time, and helped lead revolutionaries to a rejection of despotism and his ideas contributed to the start the French Revolution.
During Turgot’s time as a minister
In his book Memoire sur les municipalites, written in 1775, he laid out his idea of what he called a constitution “by means of which most of the essential functions [of government] would be effectively performed”, with almost no oversight or participation needed by the king (qtd. in Cavanaugh, 32). Turgot’s idea advocated an order of representative institutions covering all levels of society from local parishes to the national assembly. He argued that only landowners should be involved, as artisans and people who owned no land had a tendency to move from one town to another, and thus were not as involved in specific towns (Cavanaugh 33). Turgot hoped that this would help to heal the social and political problems in France, as he wrote to King Louis XVI, saying “The problem, Sire…, is that your nation has no constitution. It is a society composed of several different orders having no real unity” (qtd. in Cavanaugh 32). Turgot believed that the problem was that the king was forced to decide everything himself, and could not delegate different matters to others, thus leading to