Calonne attempted repeatedly to pass reforms that lowered government spending and implemented property added value tax among other things, but failed due to popular opposition to his policies from the Parlement and the Assembly of Notables.

In the terrible crisis preceding the French Revolution, when successive ministers tried in vain to replenish the exhausted royal treasury, Calonne was summoned as Controller-General of Finances, an office he assumed on 3 November 1783.

Calonne immediately set about remedying the fiscal crisis, and he found in Louis XVI enough support to create a vast and ambitious plan of revenue-raising and administrative centralization.

This central proposal was accompanied by other reforms meant to further rationalize the French economy, a package that included free trade in grain and abolition of France's myriad internal customs barriers.

After taking office, he discovered the nation had debts of 110 million livres (partly incurred by France's involvement in the American Revolution) and no means of paying them.

Knowing the Parlement of Paris would veto a single land tax that all landowners would have to pay, Calonne persuaded Louis XVI to call an assembly of notables to vote on his referendum.

Composed of the old regime's social and political elite, however, the assembly of notables balked at the deficit presented to them when they met at Versailles in February 1787, and despite Calonne's plan for reform and his backing from the king, they suspected that the controller-general was in some way responsible for the enormous financial strains.

[2] Calonne's negative reputation and assumed responsibility for France's financial crisis in the years leading to the Revolution of 1789 have been judged unfair by historians such as Munro Price.

The financial strains made apparent through Calonne's attempts at reform revealed the instability of the monarchy as a whole, which up until then had been managed on the basis of traditional monarchical absolutism: secretly, hierarchically, without public scrutiny of accounts or consent to taxation.

For centuries, the monarchy had controlled fiscal policy on its own terms, and when knowledge of an unmanageable and growing deficit became more widely known, the image was of a failed and, in many ways, corrupt institution.