by Will Durant
For the actual operation of the government Louis preferred those leaders of the middle class who had proved their ability by their rise, and could be depended upon to support the absolutism of the King. 35 Administration was directed chiefly by three councils, each meeting under the King’s presidency, and serving to prepare the information and recommendations upon which he based his decisions. A Conseil d’État of four or five men met thrice weekly to deal with major questions of action or policy; a Conseil des Dépêches managed provincial affairs; and a Conseil des Finances attended to taxation, revenue, and expenditure. Additional councils dealt with war, commerce, religion. Local government was taken out of the hands of irresponsible nobles and entrusted to royal intendants, and municipal elections were manipulated to produce mayors satisfactory to the King. Today we should consider so centralized a government to be oppressive; it was, but probably less so than the preceding rule by municipal oligarchies or feudal lords. When a royal commission entered the Auvergne district (1665) to inquire into local abuses of seignorial power, the people welcomed this grand inquest (les grands jours d’Auvergne) as their liberation from tyranny; they were delighted to see a grand seigneur beheaded for murdering a peasant, and lesser nobles punished for malfeasance or cruelty. 36 By such procedures monarchical replaced feudal law.
The laws were revised into as much order and logic as comported with aristocracy, and the Code Louis so formed (1667–73) governed France till the Code Napoléon (1804–10). The new code was superior to anything of the kind since Justinian, and it “powerfully contributed to advance French . . . civilization.” 37 A system of police was established to check the crime and filth of Paris. Marc René, Marquis de Voyer d’Argenson, serving through twenty-one years as lieutenant general of police, left a noble record for just and energetic administration of a difficult post. Under his surveillance the streets of Paris were paved, were moderately cleaned, were lighted by five thousand lamps, and were made passably safe for the citizens; in such matters Paris was now far ahead of any other city in Europe. But the code legalized much barbarism and tyranny. A net of informers was spread through France, spying on words as well as actions. Arbitrary arrests could be made by lettres de cachet—secret orders of the king or his ministers. Prisoners could be kept for years without trial, and without being told the cause of their arrest. The code forbade accusations of witchcraft, and it ended capital punishment for blasphemy, but it retained the use of torture to elicit confessions. A great variety of offenses could be punished by condemnation to the war galleys—large, low ships rowed by convicts chained to the benches. Six men were allotted to each fifteen-foot oar, and were forced to hold a pace set by an overseer’s whistle. Their bodies were naked except for a loincloth; their hair, beards, and eyebrows were shaved. Their sentences were long, and could be arbitrarily extended for inadequate submission; sometimes they were kept to their slavery for years after their sentences had expired. They knew relief only when, in port, still coupled in chains, they could sell trifles or beg for charity.
Louis himself was placed above the law, free to decree any punishment for anything. In 1674 he decreed that all prostitutes found with soldiers within five miles of Versailles should have their noses and ears cut off. 38 He was often humane, but often severe. “A measure of severity,” he told his son, “was the greatest kindness I could do to my people; the opposite policy would have brought in an endless series of evils. For as soon as a king weakens in that which he has commanded, authority perishes, and with it the public peace. . . . Everything falls upon the lowest ranks, oppressed by thousands of petty tyrants, instead of by a legitimate king.” 39
He labored conscientiously at what he called le métier de roi. He required frequent and detailed reports from his ministers, and was the best-informed man in the kingdom. He did not resent ministerial advice contrary to his own views, and sometimes yielded to his councilors. He maintained the most friendly relations with his aides, provided that they remembered who was king. “Continue to write to me whatever comes into your mind,” he told Vauban, “and do not be discouraged though I do not always do what you suggest.” 40 He kept an eye on everything—the army, the navy, the courts, his household, the finances, the Church, the drama, literature, the arts; and though, in this first half of his reign, he was supported by devoted ministers of high ability, the major policies and decisions, and the union of all phases of the complex government into a consistent whole, were his. He was every hour a king.
It was hard work. He was waited on at every step, but paid for it by being watched in every move. His getting out of bed and getting into it (when unaccompanied) were public functions. After his lever, or official rising, he heard Mass, breakfasted, went to the council chamber, emerged toward one o’clock, ate a big meal, usually at a single small table, but surrounded by courtiers and servitors. Then, usually, a walk in the garden, or a hunt, attended by the favorites of the day. Returning, he spent three or four hours in council. From seven till ten in the evening he joined the court in its amusements—music, cards, billiards, flirtation, dancing, receptions, balls. At several stages in this daily routine “anyone spoke to him who wished,” 41 though few took the liberty. “I gave my subjects, without distinction, the freedom to address me at all hours, in person or by petition.” 42 About 10 P.M. the King supped in state with his children and grandchildren, and, sometimes, the Queen.
France was edified to note how punctually, seven or eight hours six days a week, the King attended to the tasks of government. “It is unbelievable,” wrote the Dutch ambassador, “with what promptness, clarity, judgment, and intelligence this young prince treats and expedites business, which he accompanies with a great agreeableness to those with whom he deals, and with a great patience in listening to that which one has to say to him: which wins all hearts.” 43 He continued his devotion to administration through fifty-four years, even when ill in bed. 44 He came to councils and conferences carefully prepared. He “never decided on the spur of the moment, and never without consultation.” 45 He chose his aides with remarkable acumen; he inherited some of them, like Colbert, from Mazarin, but he had the good sense to keep them, usually till their death. He gave them every courtesy and reasonable trust, but he kept an eye on them. “After choosing my ministers I made it a point to enter their offices when they least expected it. . . In this way I learned thousands of things useful in determining my course.” 46
Despite or because of the concentration of authority and direction, despite or because all threads of rule were drawn into one hand, France, in those days of her ascendant sun, was better governed than ever before.
III. NICOLAS FOUQUET: 1615–80
The first task was to reorganize finance, which under Mazarin had fallen through a sieve of embezzlements. Nicolas Fouquet, as surintendant des finances since 1653, had managed taxation and expenditure with sticky fingers and lordly hand. He had reduced the hindrances to internal trade, and had stimulated the growth of French commerce overseas; and he had dutifully shared the spoils of his office with the “farmers” of the taxes and with Mazarin. The “farmers-general” were capitalists who advanced large sums to the state, and were in return, and for a fixed sum, empowered to collect taxes. This they did with such efficient rapacity that they were the most hated persons in the kingdom; twenty-four such men were executed during the French Revolution. In collusion with these fermiers-généraux Fouquet amassed the greatest private fortune of his time.
In 1657 he engaged the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun, and the landscape artist André Le Nôtre to design, build, and decorate the immense and magnificent Château Vaux-le-Vicomte, to lay out the gardens and adorn them with statuary. The project employed eighteen thousand men at one time, 47 cost eighteen million livres, 48 and covered the area of three villages. There Fouquet collected paintings, sculpture, objects of art, and a library of 27,000 volumes, impartially including Bibles, Talmuds, and Korans. To these elegant rooms (we are told) “women of the h
ighest nobility went secretly to keep him company at an extravagant price.” 49 With similar taste but at less cost he brought poets like Corneille, Molière, and La Fontaine to grace his salon.
Louis envied this splendor, and suspected its source. He asked Colbert to examine the Surintendant’s methods and accounts; Colbert reported that they were incredibly corrupt. On August 17, 1661, Fouquet invited the young King to a fete at Vaux. The six thousand guests were served on six thousand plates of silver or gold; Molière presented, in the gardens, his comedy Les Fâcheux. That evening cost Fouquet 120,000 livres, and his liberty. Louis felt that this man was “stealing beyond his station.” He did not like the motto Quo non ascendam?—“To what may I not ascend?”—accompanied by the figure of a squirrel climbing a tree; and he thought that one of Le Brun’s paintings contained a portrait of Mlle, de La Vallière, already a royal mistress. He would have arrested Fouquet on the spot, but his mother convinced him that it would spoil an enchanting evening.
The King bided his time until the evidence of the minister’s peculations was overwhelming. On September 5 he ordered the chief of his musketeers to arrest him. (This mousquetaire was Charles de Baatz, Sieur d’Artagnan, hero of Dumas père.) The trial, dragging on for three years, became the cause most célèbre in the history of the reign. Mme. de Sévigné, La Fontaine, and other friends worked and prayed for Fouquet’s acquittal, but the papers found in his château convicted him. The court condemned him to banishment and the confiscation of his property; the King changed this to life imprisonment. For sixteen years the once joyous minister languished in the fortress of Pignerol (Pinerolo) in Piedmont, consoled by the faithful comradeship of his wife. It was a harsh sentence, but it checked political corruption, and served notice that the appropriation of public funds for private pleasure was a prerogative of the king.
IV. COLBERT REBUILDS FRANCE
“To keep an eye on Fouquet,” Louis wrote, “I associated with him Colbert as . . . intendant, a man in whom I had all possible confidence, for I knew his intelligence, application, and honesty.” 50 Fouquet’s friends thought that Colbert had pursued him vindictively; some envy may have been involved, but in all the France of that age no man rivaled Colbert in tireless devotion to the public good. Mazarin, dying, is reported to have said to the King, “Sire, I owe everything to you; but I pay my debt . . . by giving you Colbert.” 51
Jean Baptiste Colbert was the son of a clothier in Reims, and the nephew of a rich merchant. Bourgeois in blood and economist by contagion, he was trained to hate confusion and incompetence, and was fitted by nature and time to transform the economy of France from peasant changelessness and feudal fragmentation into a nationally unified system of agriculture, industry, commerce, and finance, marching with a centralized monarchy, and providing it with the material basis of grandeur and power.
Entering the war office as a minor secretary at the age of twenty (1639), Colbert toiled his way into notice, was taken into the service of Mazarin, and became the successful manager of the Cardinal’s fortune. When Fouquet fell, Colbert was given the critical task of reorganizing the nation’s finances. In 1664 he was made also superintendent of buildings, royal manufactures, commerce, and fine arts; in 1665 he was named controller general of finances; in 1669, secretary of the navy, and secretary of state for the King’s household. No other man under Louis XIV rose so rapidly, worked so hard, or accomplished so much. He sullied his rise with nepotism, dowering countless Colberts with place and pay, and remunerated himself almost in proportion to his worth. He was subject to vanity, insisting on his alleged descent from Scottish kings. Sometimes, in his hurry to get things done, he rode roughly over existing laws, and circumvented opposition with superior bribery. As his power grew he became imperious, and angered the nobility by stepping on toes that bled blue blood. In remolding the French economy he used the same dictatorial methods that Richelieu had used in remolding the French state. He was no better than a cardinal.
He began by looking into the ways of the financiers who collected taxes, supplied the army with weapons, clothing, and food, and advanced loans to feudal lords or the national treasury. Some of these bankers were as rich as kings; Samuel Bernard had 33,000,000 livres. 52 Many of them infuriated the aristocracy by marrying into it, by buying or earning titles, and by living in luxury unattainable by mere pedigree. They charged up to eighteen per cent for their loans, according to the uncertainty of repayment. At Colbert’s request the King set up a Chamber of Justice to inquire into all financial malfeasance since 1635 “by any person of any quality or condition whatsoever.” 53 All fiscal agents, tax collectors and rentiers were summoned to open their records and explain the legitimacy of their gains. Everyone had to show clean hands or suffer confiscation and other penalties. The Chamber spread its agents through France, and encouraged informers. Several men of wealth were imprisoned, some were sent to the galleys, some were hanged. The upper classes were shocked by this “Colbert Terror”; the lower classes applauded. In Burgundy the money men organized a revolt against the minister, but the populace rose in arms against them, and the government was hard put to save them from the public wrath. Some 150,000,000 francs were restored to the treasury, and fear, for a generation, tempered the corruptions of finance. 54
Colbert marched through the fisc with an economizing scythe. He dismissed half the officials in the department of finance. Probably at his suggestion Louis abolished, in the royal household, all offices that carried emoluments without duties. Twenty “secretaries to the king” were sent out to earn their bread. The number of attorneys, sergeants, ushers, and other minor functionaries at the court was drastically reduced. All fiscal agents were ordered to keep and submit accurate and intelligible accounts. Colbert converted old governmental debts into new ones at a lower rate of interest. He simplified the collection of taxes. Recognizing the difficulty of collecting arrears, he persuaded the King to cancel all taxes still due for 1647–58. He lowered the tax rate in 1661, and mourned when he had to raise it again in 1667 to finance the “War of Devolution” and the extravagance of Versailles.
His greatest failure was in retaining the old system of taxation. Perhaps a basic reconstruction would have entailed disorder endangering the flow of revenue. The state was financed chiefly by two taxes—the taille and the gabelle. In some provinces the taille (cut) was assessed on real property, in others on income. The nobles and the clergy were exempt from this tax, so that it fell entirely upon the “third estate”—which was all the rest of the population. Each district was required to collect a stated amount, and the principal citizens were held responsible for raising the allotted sum. The gabelle was a tax on salt. The government held a monopoly on its sale, and compelled all subjects to buy periodically a prescribed quantity at prices fixed by the government. To these basic taxes were added a variety of minor imposts, and the tithe of the peasant’s produce to be paid to the Church. This, however, was usually much less than a tenth, 55 and was collected with mercy.
Colbert’s reforms affected agriculture least. The technique of tillage was still so primitive that it could not support twenty million people reproducing without restraint. Many couples had twenty children; the population would have doubled every twenty years except for war, famine, disease, and infant mortality. 56 Yet Colbert, instead of seeking to increase the fertility of the soil, gave tax exemptions for early marriage, and rewards for large families: a thousand livres to parents of ten children, two thousand livres to parents of twelve. 57 He protested the multiplication of convents as a threat to the manpower of France. 58 Nevertheless the French birth rate declined during the reign, as war raised taxes and deepened poverty. Even so, war did not kill enough to keep a balance between births and food, and pestilence had to co-operate with war. Two successive crop failures could bring famine, for transportation was not developed to the point of effectively supplying the deficiencies of one region with the surplus of another. There was no year without famine somewhere in France. 59 The years 1648�
��51, 1660–62, 1693–94, and 1709–10 were periods of starvation terror, when, in some districts, thirty per cent of the population died. In 1662 the King imported corn, sold it at a low price or gave it to the poor, and remitted three million francs of taxes due. 60
Legislation alleviated some rural griefs. The seizure of peasants’ beasts, carts, or implements for debt was forbidden, even for debts owed the Crown; stud farms were established where the peasants might have their mares serviced without charge; hunters were forbidden to traverse sown fields; and tax exemptions were offered to those who restored abandoned lands to cultivation. But these palliatives could not reach the heart of the problem—the disbalance between human and soil fertility, and the lack of mechanical invention. All the peasantries of Europe suffered likewise, and the French paysans were probably better off than their fellows in England or Germany. 61
Colbert sacrificed agriculture to industry. To feed the rising population of the towns, and the expanding armies of the King, he kept the price of grain from rising commensurately with other staples. He took it as elementary that a government, to be strong, must have ample revenues and an army of sturdy soldiers well equipped; a peasantry inured to hardships would provide a tough infantry; a growing industry and commerce must supply the wealth and the tools. Therefore Colbert’s persisting aim was to stimulate industry. Even trade was to be subordinate; home industries were to be protected by tariffs that would exclude dangerous competition from abroad. Continuing the economic policies of Sully and Richelieu, he brought all but the minor enterprises of France under the control of the corporative state: each industry, with its guilds, finances, masters, apprentices, and journeymen, formed a corporation regulated by the government in practices, prices, wages, and sales. He established high standards for each industry, hoping to win foreign markets by the refinement of design and finish in French products. He and Louis believed that the aristocratic taste for elegance supported and improved the luxury trades; so the goldsmiths, engravers, cabinetmakers, and tapestry weavers found employment, stimulus, and renown.