Louis XIV

by Olivier Bernier

  “People were rightly surprised,” he wrote, “that I was so quickly able to penetrate the obscurities which so many clever Surintendants had never been able to solve. But what should explain it is the natural difference between the Prince’s interest and that of his Surintendants, for private people have no greater care, in their office, than that of retaining the freedom of disposing of everything as they please; so they use their talents more often in making all this unfathomable than in making it easily understood, while a king brings about clearness and order since he can only lose through confusion.”88

  What Louis XIV found, as he and Colbert started disentangling the many complications set up by Fouquet, was nothing short of appalling. Massive thefts had been allowed, so steps were taken to recover as much of the missing funds as possible, but that was only a one-time operation. Far more important, it became clear, first, that although the taxes were, indeed, paid by the people, a significant portion of these funds failed to reach the Treasury. Without any rise in the tax rate, the yield went from 54 million livres in 1662 to 88.5 million in 1664.

  Under Fouquet, almost a sixth of the already shrunken revenue had been alienated: Certain debts were given priority by being assigned the yield of specific taxes; thus, in 1662, over 16 million livres never reached the Treasury. Needless to say, those favored creditors were closely connected to the surintendant so that, in many cases, the payments were altogether abusive. Finally, adding still further to the confusion was yet another unsound practice, that of the anticipations. When the Treasury ran out of money, it would borrow (usually at horrendous rates) against the following year’s income, thus creating an even larger future deficit and a greater need to borrow. In 1662, for instance, the sum involved came to some 13 million livres.89 Add that to the alienations, and it came to almost half the budget. Worse, on the day Fouquet was arrested, all the income for that year had already been spent, along with 26 million in anticipation of 1662, while 9.5 million still remained due: It was little wonder the king was perennially penniless.

  Given all this misappropriation, and Colbert’s absolute honesty, the king might well have left it up to him to clear up the mess; instead, he saw to it himself; to make sure that, henceforth, the state of the Treasury would be clear at all times, a little notebook,* bound in red leather and stamped in gold with the crown and fleur-de-lis, was prepared for him. In it, all the different sources of income, all the known outlays for the year, were listed, so that, at a glance, Louis XIV could be aware of the state of his finances. Since he was determined to balance the budget, he undertook no new expenditure without first seeing whether he had the necessary resources, and, to that effect, he carried the current notebook in a pocket.

  One of the consequences of the old system had been that while the king was perennially poor, people were also overtaxed. This Louis XIV decided to remedy - as he now could. “Nothing seemed more urgent to me,” he wrote, “than to relieve my people … The state of my finances seemed to preclude this, and, in any case, made for a delay; but one should always be in a hurry to do good … I therefore ignored every other consideration and immediately forgave three millions on the tailles which were about to be collected.”90 As it turned out, this action was the shrewdest of moves: It made for instant popularity without further embarrassing the Treasury, which was now recovering fast. And by 1664, the French finances were the healthiest in Europe: The expenditure for that year, including all the costs of a war, came to 63,071,008 livres; the revenue to 63,602,796 - a surplus of over half a million livres. To be sure, that was not a huge sum, but it came within two years of a 30-million deficit. Even better, in the following years, with the increase of prosperity, the surplus grew significantly. For a king who realized that money was strength, there could be no more satisfying result.

  All this - the assumption of power, the fall of Fouquet - had happened within a mere six months. By the end of September, it was clear that the king had, indeed, carried out a revolution. Not only did he control his finances, his was also the last word on every aspect of political and Court life; he alone gave out the plums - pensions, titles, offices, promotions - which had earlier been in the prime minister’s gift; he alone determined policy and made sure it was carried out. Free for the first time in French history from the pressures of the royal princes and the magnates, the king decided everything in the deepest of secrecy: Now there were no leaks from the new, restricted Council. Then, as if all this upheaval were not enough, on November 1, at 11:55 a.m., the queen gave birth to a son. The succession was assured, intrigues by members of the royal family without object. Free from all the uncertainties which had plagued his own father until 1638, Louis XIV now offered his dazzled subjects the very image of the rising sun.

  * I.e., once she was in France.

  * As a sign of mourning for Gaston d’Orléans, his uncle.

  * I.e., nominations to bishoprics, archbishoprics, abbacies and other ecclesiastic positions.

  * The king is referring here only to the power to tax as he sees fit.

  * The taille was a form of income tax paid by nonnoble persons.

  * The Surintendant des Finances, or Finance Minister, in charge of all the Crown’s financial operations.

  † Secretary of State for War and the Navy.

  ‡ Minister of State with a wide brief and oversight on Foreign Affairs, a department supposedly run by the two Brienne, father and son.

  § Pierre Sèguier, who was in charge of the judiciary.

  ** An ordonnance de comptant was a slip of paper, signed by the Surintendant des Finances, which ordered the Treasury to pay the sum specified. It was done outside the normal channels and gave rise to many abuses.

  * The Council of Conscience had been set up to advise on ecclesiastical appointments.

  * Fouquet had just bought the island of Belle Isle, was fortifying it and raising troops for its garrison.

  † The surintendant’s emblem, still displayed everywhere at Vaux, was a squirrel with the motto: “How far will I not rise?”

  * These memoirs were written as advice to the young dauphin should the king die while his son was still a child.

  † Many consumption taxes were farmed out to financiers, and the contracts governing their yield stood to be renewed.

  * The intendants were the representatives of the central government in the provinces.

  * The comte de Soissons was a member of the duke of Savoy’s family, and was closely related to the king himself.

  * The Superintendent, usually a member of the royal family, was the queen’s chief attendant; next came the dame d’honneur.

  * The chancellor was appointed for life; despite his age (he was seventy-three) and his apparent frailty, Séguier survived until 1672.

  * The forms allowing payments by the Treasury, thus a major obstacle to his continued plundering.

  * Some forty miles east of Paris, and in superb condition, Vaux is now open to the public.

  * These little books have been preserved for most years of the reign and can be consulted at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  The changes made by Louis XIV in the first year of his reign amounted to nothing less than a revolution. Even though Richelieu, in his long tenure as prime minister under Louis XIII, had shown the way toward centralization and firm government, he had been hampered by three major obstacles: the lack, until September 1638, of an heir, which gave the ever factious princes a very strong position; an endless and sometimes disastrous war which created constant financial strain and widespread dissatisfaction; and the fact that, in France, even the most powerful minister could never be as effective as the king: It was always legitimate to resist “evil advisers.”

  In the very act of taking over the government, Louis XIV freed himself of all these obstacles. France was at peace and prosperous, so he could reform the finances; there could be no doubt whatsoever that he himself was in charge, and that the ministers merely carried out his instructions; and he had an heir. Then, too, the deva
stations caused by the Fronde had been so great, and were still so recent, that a strong central authority, able to preserve civil peace, seemed highly desirable. And the Parlement, although anxious to recover its lost influence, was still far too unpopular to offer significant resistance.

  The opportunity for reform was there, but it had to be seized. In the end, the king’s understanding of the situation and his willingness to move fast may be his greatest claims to lasting glory. A weaker man, one less sure of his goals, might well have wasted the opening offered by circumstances in 1661, but Louis XIV showed that he was not only determined but also remarkably clear-eyed. In spite of the lessons taught him by Mazarin, he was not yet proficient in the arts of government. As it turned out, however, this knowledge, which he acquired quickly enough, was not necessary at the outset, and he realized that himself when he looked back some ten years later.

  “A king’s function,” he wrote then, “consists mainly in letting common sense rule; it always comes easily and naturally.”91 Of course, in his case, common sense was helped by the very best of advice. Le Tellier, who had long been in government, was fifty-nine in 1662 and a seasoned statesman; in the forthcoming - and highly effective - reorganization of the army, he was assisted by Louvois,* his hardworking and brilliant son. Thus, he was able to give the king all the information needed to set the best possible policy in circumstances where really troubling decisions were very seldom needed. Colbert, a master when it came to all financial, industrial, commercial, and artistic questions, was the most devoted of servants, and one who always had the information the king wanted. And finally Lionne, although not, perhaps, of quite the same caliber as his colleagues, was nonetheless thoroughly informed as to the state of Europe; since the king himself determined France’s foreign policy, the arrangement worked quite well.

  Indeed, in some ways, the king knew more than his ministers. Partly, no doubt, it was because he felt in himself the strength and confidence of youth. But also, almost alone, he realized that at long last France had become the greatest power in Europe, and he prized what he called ma gloire above all things. That, in itself, is a misleading expression. What the king had in mind was not glory in the Napoleonic sense, the fame won by famous victories, but rather a kind of high repute, an untarnished name. Boldness was necessary - cowardice being one of the antitheses of gloire - but also fairness, and generosity. To his contemporaries and posterity alike, Louis XIV wanted to be known as a great king, if possible the greatest ever to rule France, and that required a great deal: justice, moderation, compassion, enlightenment along with pride.

  Still, none of these qualities would be really effective unless they were seen to be so: For the first time, a ruler understood the uses of publicity. Of course, other monarchs before Louis XIV had paid poets, painters, and writers to celebrate their virtues, but that had been done more as a form of flattery; indeed, the praise given, for instance, to Marie de Médici, the king’s grandmother, to her face, was more than counterbalanced by her public reputation. Now Louis XIV saw that the right sort of publicity will, in fact, make it easier to carry through a policy: On a simple level, if you are thought to be a fierce warrior, you are much less likely to be attacked than if you are considered weak and yielding. In this particular case, if the king was thought to be a model monarch, he would clearly be obeyed faster and more willingly, and that, in turn, would create new habits, a new climate in which a repetition of the Fronde would become unthinkable.

  This outcome was something Colbert understood thoroughly, so he set about magnifying the king’s merits. Writers were pensioned to praise the monarch; painters exalted his rule; historians chronicled his every success; coins were struck to comment on the glories of the reign, and Louis XIV himself made very sure to reward all those who helped bring him renown. In the mid-sixties, for instance, he visited the petite Académie, a body set up to study Roman and other historical data and furnish the same kind of concise, laudatory sentences as were to be found on ancient monuments and medals, and he did not spare his compliments.

  “You may see how greatly I esteem you, Messieurs,” he said, “since I entrust you with the thing in the world I value most, and that is my gloire; I am sure you will do wonders; I will try, for myself, to give you material deserving of being shaped by people as clever as you are.”92

  The king’s very appellation adds an interesting note to this effort. It had long been the custom in France to give the monarch a qualifying epithet: Louis XIII, for instance, had been the Just. We in the twentieth century tend to think of Louis XIV as the Sun King; and in fact, starting with his role in the Ballet de la Nuit in 1653, he had often been identified with the sun. That, in a number of obvious ways, seemed an apposite symbol: As all light and warmth come from the sun, as only cold and dark can be expected without it, so the king brought happiness and prosperity to the realm, and without him, all was dark and drear. Then, too, the sun is king of the heavens, dazzlingly bright, golden, and splendid, so all through the reign, the sun was frequently used as the king’s emblem. His appellation, however, was another thing altogether. To his contemporaries, and to posterity as well, Louis XIV was Ludovicus Magnus, Louis le Grand, just as in the next century Tsar Peter of Russia or King Frederick II of Prussia were to be called “the Great,” a title which, in Louis XIV’s case, implied achievements in a variety of fields.

  A great king, in seventeenth-century France, was naturally expected to win whatever wars he waged, but he also had to foster the arts, encourage trade, build splendid palaces, look after the nobility and, perhaps most important, see that his people prospered. “We must,” Louis XIV wrote, “consider our subjects’ good before our own. They are, indeed, like a part of ourselves since we are the head of the body, and they the limbs. We must give them laws for their own advantage only; and we must use the power we have over them only so as more effectively to bring them happiness.”93

  Besides its obvious common sense, that exhortation also nicely disposes of the purely apocryphal remark “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the state). Far from being the self-absorbed, self-indulgent tyrant of legend, Louis XIV, all through the reign, cared greatly for his subjects’ welfare and knew that he had even more duties than rights.

  The king’s obligations, in fact, went further still. His subjects must not only be prosperous, they must also be free. That may seem like a paradox, given the fact that Louis XIV ruled absolutely: After all, he alone determined which taxes were to be paid* and how the revenue should be spent; he alone made war and peace, negotiated and ratified treaties, commanded all the armed forces of the state; he made laws, and they were just such as he pleased: Indeed, the obligatory final formula of all edicts was “car tel est notre bon plaisir” (for such is our pleasure); he could hire and fire every single government employee, from minister to copyist, from soldier to general; he appointed bishops, archbishops, and abbots;† he gave out the eagerly sought Court positions which ensured frequent access to his presence, as well as pensions, titles of nobility, and every other reward. He could have anyone arrested, and imprisoned, at will, and for any length of time; he could impose censorship on all publications. How then could the people be called free?

  Liberty, in seventeenth-century France, was a well-understood notion wholly unrelated to what it has now become; it did not imply popular representation or the kind of immunities enshrined in the Bill of Rights; rather it meant, first, the continued validity of a wide array of privileges: freedom from arrest for the procureur general of the Paris Parlement or the right, if you were one of its judges, to buy and sell your office; the exclusive right to manufacture specific articles or the exemption from certain taxes; self-government for incorporated cities or the right to be judged only by a specific court. These traditional “freedoms” were as disparate as they were numerous. Just as important was the opportunity to pursue one’s life and career safe from the kind of predators who, especially in time of civil disorders, preyed upon the weak: princes and great nobl
es or crooked moneylenders. In that sense, freedom, which was wholly unrelated to democracy, meant protection by the government of all those who were unable to defend themselves: In essence, the guarantee of a fair society. In 1774, the American rebels claimed they had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; to a Frenchman in 1661, the pursuit of happiness was, far and away, the most important thing; because France was still partly feudal, it was crucial to have a powerful, unrestricted central government, able to right wrongs as they occurred.

  In the same way, a reform of the judiciary had become essential. “Its offices,” the king noted, “were filled by chance or money,* rather than selection and merit; many judges had little experience and less knowledge; my predecessors’ ordinances on age and length of service were almost invariably ignored … My Council, even, instead of regulating the other jurisdictions, all too often created confusion by giving out a quantity of contradictory decisions, all equally bearing my name and as if ordered by me, which made the disorder more shameful still.”94 When injustice was done, when equity called for a reversal, only the king could come to the rescue of the subject’s freedom.

  Molière, always the true mirror of his society, gives this striking example in Tartuffe. At the end of the play, Orgon, the head of the family, at long last realizes he has been fooled: Tartuffe, far from being a saint, is a lecherous crook. But just when, in a fit of righteous anger, Orgon orders Tartuffe out of the house, the impostor triumphantly points to the deed of gift signed by Orgon; this house, he says, is his; it is for Orgon and his family to leave. The deed is valid; Orgon and his family are utterly ruined. And just at that point, a law officer comes in. “Nous vivons,” he says, “sous un roi ennemi de la fraude” (We are ruled by a king who will not tolerate injustice)95, and Orgon is saved: that scene is a perfect example of the kind of freedom the French meant.