page_title: Jacques Necker
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Necker / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Corbel010 Vue du château de Madrid, dessiné sur le chemin venant de Neuilly-sur-Seine
context_page_description: Jacques Necker was a banker of Genevan origin who became a finance minister for Louis XVI and a French statesman. Necker played a key role in French history before and during the first period of the French Revolution.
  Necker held the finance post between 1777 and 1781 and "is remembered today for taking the unprecedented step in 1781 of making public the country’s budget, a novelty in an absolute monarchy where the state of finances had always been kept a secret." Necker was dismissed within a few months. By 1788 the inexorable compounding of interest on the national debt brought France to a fiscal crisis. Necker was recalled to royal service. When he was dismissed on 11 July 1789, it was a factor in causing the Storming of the Bastille. Within two days Necker was recalled by the king and the assembly. Necker entered France in triumph and tried to accelerate the tax reform process. Faced with the opposition of the Constituent Assembly he resigned in September 1790 to a reaction of general indifference.
  Necker was a constitutional monarchist, a political economist, and a moralist, who wrote a severe critique of the new principle of equality before the law.
context_section_description: Necker was born in Geneva in a Calvinist household. In 1747 Jacques became a clerk in the bank of Thellusson and Vernet. In 1750 he was sent to Paris and worked for the bank Girardot. Soon after he managed to learn Dutch and English. On one day, he replaced the first clerk in charge of trading on the stock exchange and through a sequence of trades, he made a quick profit of half a million. In 1762, Vernet retired and Necker became a partner in the bank with Peter Thellusson who managed the bank in London, while Necker served as his managing partner in Paris. In 1763, before the end of the Seven Years' War, he successfully speculated in British debentures or bonds, wheat, and possibly Canadian shares, which he sold at a good profit in the next few years. 
  Necker had fallen in love with Madame de Verménou, the widow of a French officer. When she went to see Théodore Tronchin, she became acquainted with Suzanne Curchod. In 1764, Madame de Verménou brought Suzanne to Paris as a companion for Thelusson's children. Suzanne was engaged to British writer Edward Gibbon, but he was forced to break the engagement. Necker transferred his love from the wealthy widow to the ambitious Swiss governess. They married before the end of the year. In 1766, they moved to Rue de Cléry and had a daughter, Anne Louise Germaine, later the famed author and salonnière Madame de Staël.
  Madame Necker encouraged her husband to try to find himself a public position. He accordingly became a syndic (or director) of the French East India Company, around which a fierce political debate revolved in the 1760s between the company's directors and shareholders and the royal ministry over its administration and the company's autonomy.  "The ministry, concerned about the financial stability of the company, employed the Abbé Morellet to shift the debate from the rights of the shareholders to the advantages of commercial liberty over the company's privileged trading monopoly." After showing his financial ability in its management, Necker defended the company's autonomy in an able memoir against the attacks of Morellet in 1769. As the company never made any profit during its existence, the monopoly ended. The era of free trade had begun. Necker bought up the company's ships and stock of unsold goods when it went bankrupt in 1769.
  From 1768 till 1776 he made loans to the French government in the form of life annuities and by lottery operations. His wife made him give up his share in the bank, which he transferred to his brother Louis Necker and Jean Girardot in 1772. In 1773, Necker won the prize of the Académie Française for a defense of state corporatism framed as an eulogy in honor of Louis XIV's minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Necker was envied by his contemporaries for his fabulous wealth. His capital amounted to six or eight million livres, and he used Château de Madrid as a summer house. In 1775, in Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grains, he attacked the physiocrats, like Ferdinando Galiani, and questioned the laissez-faire policies of Turgot, the Controller-General of Finances. Turgot had made too many enemies; in May 1776, he was dismissed. But his successor, Clugny de Nuis, died in October. Therefore, on 22 October 1776, on the recommendation of Maurepas, Necker was appointed "Directeur du trésor royal". (As a Protestant, Necker could not serve as Controller.)
caption: Vue du château de Madrid, dessiné sur le chemin venant de Neuilly-sur-Seine
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