Necker, JACQUES, a famous financier and minister of France, was born 30th September 1732, at Geneva, where his father, a native of Kiüstrin in Pomerania, had become professor of Public Law. At fifteen he went to Paris as a clerk to the banker Vernet, and in 1762 established the famous London and Paris bank of Thellusson and Necker. His public career commenced with his becoming a syndic of the French East India Company, as well as minister for the republic of Geneva at Paris, and with his marriage (1764) to the charming, accomplished, and ambitious Suzanne Curchod, who was born in 1737, the daughter of a pastor near Lausanne, and had loved Gibbon for five years with a constancy of which his colder temper was not worthy. The rich banker had first wooed Madame de Verméneux, a wealthy young widow, who scrupled at her suitor's lack of nobility, but he easily transferred his affections to her young protégée, and he proved till death an affectionate and faithful husband. She was religious and above reproach in character, yet her salon became a centre of all the intellect of Paris, and her Fridays drew together such celebrities as Grimm, Diderot, the aged Buffon, Marmontel, Thomas, D'Alembert, and the Abbé Galiani. In 1773 Necker gained the prize of the French Academy for an éloge on Colbert, and in 1775 he distinguished himself still further by his Essai sur le Commerce des Grains, in answer to the free-trade policy of the great Turgot, in which he claims for the state the right of fixing the price of grain and, if necessary, of prohibiting its exportation. Already also he had lent money to the needy government when in 1776, Protestant as he was, he was made Director of the Treasury and next year Director-general of Finance. He devoted five years of hard work to his hopeless task, and, if he showed no great statesmanlike foresight, he proved himself an honest, prudent, and sagacious minister. Indeed, some of his remedial measures were a real boon to suffering France, as his more equitable adjustment of taxes, his establishment of state-guaranteed annuities and monts de piété. But his most ambitious scheme—the establishment of provincial assemblies over all France, one of the functions of which should be the apportionment of taxes, proved a disastrous failure. His retrenchments were hateful to the queen, and the publication in 1781 of his famous Compte Rendu, a plain statement of the financial state of France, was promptly made the occasion for his dismissal. He retired to Geneva, carrying with him the respect of all Frenchmen; and here he busied himself with writing, and married his only daughter in 1786 to the Swedish Baron von Staël-Holstein. In 1787 he returned to Paris, and when M. de Calonne at the opening of the Assembly of Notables in that year cast a doubt on the truth of the Compte Rendu, he published a justificatory minute, which drew upon him the king's displeasure and his banishment to a distance of forty leagues from Paris.
He was recalled to his former office in September 1788, and quickly made himself the popular hero of the hour by recommending the summons of the States-general. But the successful banker was infatuated with his popularity, and quickly proved himself unfit to steer the ship of state amid the storms of revolution, while his constitutional irresolution in the hour of danger drew the well-meaning king into the fatal error of being forced into recognising the union of the three estates, instead of taking the lead in freely granting what was inevitable. On the 11th July, while sitting at dinner, he received the royal command to leave France at once, but the fall of the Bastille three days later frightened the king into recalling him amid the wildest popular enthusiasm. But now his incompetence for greater matters than accounts was at length fully discovered, and after with fatal obstinacy spurning the help of Lafayette and Mirabeau, and leading the king to surrender his suspensive veto and the Assembly to stultify itself by a self-denying ordinance that ministers should not be chosen from its members, which made a really responsible parliamentary government in France impossible, he finally laid down his office unnoticed and without regret, after the carrying of Mirabeau's scheme for relieving immediate financial distress by the issue of assignats, September 1790. He retired to his estate of Coppet near Geneva, and here his wife died, 6th May 1794, while he himself, after publishing books which had no longer any importance, followed her on 9th April 1804.
The only other works that need be named are De l'Administration des Finances de la France (3 vols. 1784), Sur l'Administration de M. Necker, par lui-même (1791), Du Pouvoir exécutif dans les Grands États (2 vols. 1792), De la Révolution Française (last ed. 4 vols. 1797), and Dernières Vues de Politique et de Finance (1802). A collected edition was edited by his grandson (15 vols. 1820-21). See also the Manuscripts de
M. Necker, published by his daughter in 1804; and for his life, her work, La Vie privée de M. Necker (1804), and his grandson's Notice sur la Vie de M. Necker, prefixed to the collected edition of his works. Five volumes of Mélanges from his wife's journals and papers were printed (1798-1802). The story of her life is charmingly told, from the papers preserved at Coppet, in the Comte D'Haussonville's work, Le Salon de Madame Necker (2 vols. 1882; Eng. trans. 1882).