Jean-Baptiste de Machault d'Arnouville

Jean-Baptiste de Machault, comte d'Arnouville (1701–1794), was a French statesman born in Paris. He was appointed Controller-General of Finances in December 1745, when France was deep in debt from the War of the Austrian Succession.

In 1749 he proposed the vingtième, a tax of one twentieth to be paid by all landowners including the clergy and nobility, but privileged opposition forced the plan's failure. Dismissed in 1757 after moving to the Naval Ministry, he died in a Paris revolutionary prison in 1794, aged ninety-two.