Word: turgot
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...world's most famous scientist. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him the "new Prometheus." Most important, Franklin's fame helped open French hearts--and purse strings--when years later he came calling at Louis XVI's court on behalf of his embattled young nation. As the French financier Turgot would say of the kite flyer from Philadelphia, "He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants...
Both Vergennes and Beaumarchais have faced the steady opposition of the new monarch, Louis XVI, who inclines toward pacifism, and of former Finance Minister Anne Robert Turgot, who maintains that France's Treasury cannot afford a possible conflict with Britain and that the American Colonies will eventually win their freedom anyway. Vergennes, however, has never forgiven Britain for stripping France of most of its colonies after the French and Indian War. He sees the American Rebellion as a means of getting back at Britain, that "rapacious, unjust and faithless enemy...
...Alembert wrote on mathematics, Turgot on economics, Quesnay on agriculture, Buffon on nature, Rousseau on music, and Montesquieu on taste. Diderot himself wrote on everything from intolerance and Spinoza to anagrams and onomancy-the "science" of telling a man's fortune by the letters in his name. He treated topics that intellectuals had been apt to ignore before. He spent hours studying iron foundries and gunpowder mills at first hand, imported workers from the factories of Lyons to help him with an article on the velvet trade...
Efforts of Louis the Fourteenth's finance minister, Turgot, to build up an efficient national mail and freight transport service are shown in an "arrest" or decree, as well as many other Acts relating to the Postal Bureau...
When the Revolution came he was a big man. He corrected Thomas Jefferson's rhetorical Declaration of Independence, went to France as Commissioner, crowned his career by persuading France to recognize U.S. independence (March 20, 1778). In France he became the rage, his plain, shrewd honesty a cult. Turgot wrote a verse about him: Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis-"He has snatched from heaven the thunderbolt and the scepter from tyrants." Ladies kissed him. Said he: "Somebody, it seems, gave it out that I lov'd Ladies; and then everybody presented me their Ladies (or the Ladies presented...