Necker, Jacques

Necker, Jacques (1732-1804), French financier and statesman, born in Geneva. He entered a Paris banking firm as an apprentice in 1747 and subsequently improved his financial position and his knowledge of financial operations to such an extent that in 1762 he was able to establish his own bank. During the ensuing decade he became a director of the East India Company of France. In 1775 he wrote a notable economic study, Essai sur la législation et le commerce des grains (Essay on Legislation and the Grain Trade), in which he attacked the free trade policies instituted by the comptroller-general of finance, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.

Necker was appointed to succeed Turgot in 1776 and introduced a number of financial reforms, including a more equitable system of taxation and a plan for the funding of the national debt. In 1781 he completed the Compte rendu au Roi (Report to the King), a comprehensive analysis of the national finances. Later in the same year Necker was dismissed by Louis XVI, partly because the king disapproved of his Protestantism and partly because Necker had angered Queen Marie Antoinette by preventing her from carrying out certain extravagances through his insistence on retrenchment of the economy.

In 1788, when Necker was reappointed, he was acclaimed by the populace as the only man capable of restoring sound administration to the disordered French financial system. In the following year his popularity was further increased when he recommended to the king that the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, be convened. The adoption of various radical proposals by that body caused Louis XVI to dismiss Necker again; this act was the immediate cause of the storming of the Bastille by the roused populace of Paris on July 14, 1789. Shortly thereafter Necker was again recalled by the king, but he was unable to resolve the crisis and resigned in September 1790 to live in retirement on his estate at Coppet, Switzerland.