8. French Mercantilist Thought in the 17th Century

0:00Chapter 8. French Mercantilist Thought in the Seventeenth Century 1. Building the Ruling Elite The system of mercantilism needed no high-flown theory to get launched. It came naturally to the ruling castes of the burgeoning nation states. The King, seconded by the nobility, favored high government expenditures, military conquests, and high taxes to build up their common and individual power and wealth.

0:46The King naturally favored alliances with nobles and with cartelizing and monopoly guilds and Companies, for these built up his political power through alliances, and his revenue through sales and fees from the beneficiaries. Neither did the cartelizing companies need much of a theory to come out in favor of themselves acquiring monopoly privilege. Subsidy to export, keeping out of imports, needed no theory either, nor did increasing Supplying the supply of money and credit to the kings, nobles or favored business groups. Neither did the famous urge of mercantilists to build up the supply of bullion in the country.

1:31That supply, in effect, meant increased bullion flowing into the coffers of kings, nobles and monopoly export companies. And who does not want the supply of money in their pockets to rise? Theory came later. Theory came either to sell to the deluded masses the necessity and benevolence of the new system, or to sell to the king the particular scheme being promoted by the pamphleteer or his confrères. Mercantilist theory was a set of rationales designed to uphold or expand particular vested economic interests. Many twentieth century historians have lauded the mercantilists for their proto-Keynesian concern for full employment, thus showing allegedly surprising modern tendencies.

2:30It should be stressed, however, that the mercantilist concern for full employment was scarcely humanitarian. On the contrary, their desire was to stamp out idleness and to force the idle, the vagrant, of the Sturdy Beggars to Work. In short, for the mercantilists, full employment frankly implied its logical corollary, forced labor. Thus in 1545 the sturdy beggars of Paris were forced to work for long hours, and two years later, to take away all opportunity for idleness from the Healthy, all women able but unwilling to work were whipped and driven out of Paris, while all men in the same category were sent to the galleys as slave labor.

3:24The class basis of this mercantilist horror of idleness should be instantly noted. The nobility and the clergy, for example, were scarcely concerned with their own idleness. It was only that of the lower classes that must be ended by any means necessary. The same is true of the privileged merchants of the third estate. The thinly veiled excuse was the necessity of increasing the productivity of the nation. But these classes constituted the ruling elite, and such forced ending of idleness, whether on Public Works or in Private Production was a boon to the rulers. It not only increased production for the latter's benefit, it also lowered wage rates by adding to the supply of labor by coercion.

4:20Thus at the meeting of the States General, the parliamentary body of France, in 1576, all three estates united in their call for forced labor. The clergy urged that no idle person be allowed or tolerated. The third estate wanted sturdy beggars to be put to work, whipped or exiled. The nobles urged that sturdy beggars and idlers be forced to work and whipped if they refused to comply. The same states general made their special pleading all too painfully clear in the matter of protective tariffs. The Estates called for the prohibition of imports of all manufactured goods and the export of all raw materials.

5:10The purpose of both measures was to throw a wall of monopoly protection around domestic manufacturers and to force producers of raw materials to sell their goods to those domestic businesses at an artificially low price. The excuse that such measures were necessary to keep bullion, or money, at home would seem patently absurd to any objective person. For if French consumers are to be prevented from buying imports in order to safeguard their bullion, what might happen otherwise? Was there really any danger of Frenchmen sending all their bullion abroad and keeping none for themselves?

5:57Obviously such an event would be absurd. But even if it happened, the worst-case scenario, there is an evident hard maximum limit to any outflow of bullion from home. For where are the consumers bent on further importation going to get more bullion? Clearly, only by exporting other products abroad. Consequently, the keeping-money-at-home argument is patently fraudulent, whether in 17th century France or in the 20th century United States. The states general were interested in protecting certain French industries, period. The keeping-money-at-home argument was also a convenient stick to beat foreign businessmen or financiers who could out-compete natives.

6:51Thus the prospect of German bankers and Italian financiers flourishing in France gave rise to paroxysms of fury at the ill-gotten gains of foreigners taking money out of the country. Fury that was, of course, fed by the typically mercantilist egregious Montaigne fallacy that But one man's, or one nation's, gain on the market was, ipso facto, another man's, or nation's, loss. These disgruntled Frenchmen often suggested that foreign financiers be expelled from the country, but the kings were typically too bogged down in debt to afford such counsel.

7:382. The First Major French Mercantilist, Barthélemy de Lafamma The first French mercantilist of note was Barthélemy de Lafamma, 1545-1612, an uneducated son of a very poor Protestant family in Dauphiné. All his life he was the servitor of Henry Henry of Navarre, the Protestant Pretender, rising in 1582 to the exalted post of honorary tailor and valet to his master. When Henry of Navarre became King Henry IV, Lafamasse's fortune was made, and he became in 1601 Comptroller General of Commerce and head of the Commission of Commerce, to remain so until the King's death.

8:32Like a devoted dog who dies shortly after his master, Lafamma, now broken in power, died a year after Henry was assassinated in 1610. Lafamma comes to our attention because of the literally dozens of excrably written pamphlets he produced during his decades in power, on behalf of the mercantile system which he was helping to put into place in France. Laphama's focal point, his criterion for numerous economic policies, was whether or not they brought bullion into the kingdom. But note that these views need not necessarily be interpreted as dim-witted reliance on money as wealth, for when Laphama wrote that gold and silver were the sinews and support of kingdoms and monarchies, The True Matter and Substance Which Maintains the State Against Enemies.

9:31He was, of course, quite right. The more money kings can amass from their subjects, the wealthier and more powerful they would become. There is nothing odd or fallacious about that. The fallacy existed, should the argument be taken seriously, for anyone who identified The King's Interest with that of all of French society. The one spark of economic intelligence here came with the fact that Lafamard was one of the first mercantilists to shrewdly advise the king not to directly prohibit the export of bullion. Far better, he believed, to allow bullion to flow in and out of the country freely and and then strictly regulate commerce and industry in such a way that bullion would flow into the country.

10:28Apart from that, Lafamard's economic advice was a dreary litany. Prohibit all manufactured imports. Prohibit fares which drained money out of the kingdom and into the hands of foreigners. Forced merchants to buy only raw materials abroad and not manufacturers, prohibit the export of raw materials. Guilds must be revived and used to regulate all urban work and to keep up the quality of products. Committees of masters should supervise guilds, a bureau of manufacturers should supervise them and so on up to the royal court. Promoting the usual mercantilist cant, Lafamma assured agriculture that it would benefit, not suffer, from the establishment of protected manufacturers, since these would supply a home market for farm products. That this would be a highly inefficient and costly home market, Lafamma did not bother to add. Everyone who opposed his views, according to Lafamma, was All who disobeyed the regulations and prohibitions should suffer confiscation of their goods, as well as death.

11:54Like most of his mercantilist confraers, Barthélemy de la Fama was enamored of the idea of full employment and the eradication of idleness. Full employment, of course, meant coerced employment, and Lafamard called for an end to idleness by putting the idle to work, the reluctant to be forced into it by chains and prisons. Taverns and cabarets were to be severely restricted, and confirmed drunkards arrested and put into the pillory. Humanism begins by trying to ensure national self-sufficiency in goods that can be made at home, and then continues by expanding the definition of what can indeed be made.

12:45For when profitability on the market is abandoned as a criterion, virtually every good in creation can be made, at some cost, at home. If Americans wanted to, they could undoubtedly grow all their bananas in hothouses in Maine or Montana at astronomical cost. But what would be the point, apart from subsidies to a few privileged hothouse growers? One of Barthélemy de la Femasse's daftest projects, which, as Comptroller General, he did his best to put into effect, was to make France self-sufficient in one of her for Favorite Luxury Imports, Silks. Many of his pamphlets and practical efforts were devoted to force-feeding an enormous expansion of the French silk industry, hitherto small and confined to the south of France. Lafamard insisted that the climate of France was ideal for raising silkworms. Any belief to the contrary, any subversive talk that France was largely was merely propaganda spread by the evil designs of certain French merchants, retailers of foreign silks.

14:06Lafamard pointed to his own successful silk-growing, to King Henry's planting of mulberry trees on which silkworms were fed. He advocated a law compelling all property owners, including the clergy and monasteries, to plant two or three mulberry trees per acre. He painted a beautiful picture of vast profits that were sure to flow from mulberry trees and silk culture. Lafamma also claimed magical medicinal properties for mulberries. They would cure toothache and stomach trouble, relieve burns, chase away vermin, and be an antidote to poisons. Even though Lafamard persuaded the king to pour hundreds of thousands of livres into fostering the growth of mulberry trees and silk culture, and the king duly ordered each diocese in France to establish a nursery of 50,000 mulberries, the great silk experiment proved an abject failure.

15:12The climate of most of France indeed proved inhospitable, a product of hard reality rather La Fama's main, if not only, disciple was his son Isaac. At the tender age of 19, young Isaac de la Fama, 1587-1657, keen to become the heir of his powerful father in every sense, published A History of Commerce in France, 1606. The history was scarcely a memorable work, distinguished mainly for the fawning praise which he lavished upon his father and on King Henry and on the slavish repetition of his father's patnotions and nostrums.

16:18The tone of this work may be gauged from the fact that Isaac lauded Henry IV as the source of all that is good in France. Addressing his majesty, young Isaac wrote that heaven has favored my father in having him live during your reign. With the fall of his father from grace and his subsequent death, Isaac's career as a political economist came to an untimely end, and he ended his days as a minor but faithful lieutenant of the chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. 3. The First Colbert, the Duc de Sully That Jean-Baptiste Colbert would be in the last half of the 17th century to Louis XIV, Maximilien de Bétune, Baron de Rony, the Duke de Sully, 1560-1641, was to Henry IV.

17:21The young Bétune was born a Huguenot aristocrat, Baron de Rony. Naturally, he too gravitated to the court of Henry of Navarre and fought and was wounded during the religious wars. It is characteristic of Rony that he urged Henry IV to turn Catholic in order to save his throne, although he himself refused to do so. The arrogant and ruthless Rony quickly became Henry IV's leading minister as superintendent of Finance, and, for his services, was made by his master, the duke de Sully. Sully's own views stem from his memoirs, 1638, written in old age as a glowing apologia for his own term in office, for Sully had been forcibly retired to private life after the assassination of His Royal Patron.

18:19In his memoirs, Sully claims to have opposed the more crackpot schemes of his fellow top bureaucrat, Lafamard. Thus he writes at length of his opposition to Lafamard's silk fiasco. Silk could not readily grow in the French climate, he had warned, and also it would lead Frenchmen into undue luxury. It is not, of course, that Sully was not a mercantilist. It is just that, instead of proceeding with the folly of force-feeding domestic luxury industries, such as silk, he would have passed laws directly against luxurious consumption. He was eager to ban the export of gold and silver directly, paying fees to himself and others for ferreting out without evaders of the law.

19:12Some of his specific views, of course, such as on the silk scheme, might be a rewriting of history to make himself look good to contemporaries. After all, neither Laphama nor King Henry were then alive to verify his recollections. Others might be simply the product of bureaucratic infighting with his fellow economic czar. A dedicated absolutist, who indeed did much to entrench centralized absolutism in France, the Duc de Sully was basically as much a protectionist as his colleague Lafamard, despite the claim of some historians that Sully and his monarch was some sort of free trader.

19:58The one significant case where Sully opposed a Lafamard protection scheme was the latter's Sully's proposal to ban all imports of textiles. But here, the basic reason was his loyalty to the city of Lyon, the leading Protestant stronghold in southeastern France, which would have suffered greatly from the prohibition of such trade. Throughout his career, Sully fought to uphold the fortunes and privileges of Lyon. 4. The Eccentric Poet, Antoine de Montcretien One of the most bizarre characters in the history of economic thought was the poet and dramatist Antoine de Montcretien, circa 1575 to 1621. Born in Falaise, in Normandy, Montcretien He grew up in a middle-class household, his father probably having been an apothecary.

21:00He went to a fashionable school at Caen and at the age of 20 began to write poetry and tragic plays, some of which, including Hector and Les Cossais, are still considered classics of French literature. At 30, Montcretien became involved in a scandalous duel and fled to England. After traveling in Holland, he returned to France around 1610 and married a rich Norman widow, who financed his start in the hardware business. He thereupon set up a factory at Ousson-sur-Loire, where he produced knives and scythes. In 1615, at the age of 40, Antoine de Montcretien published his one and only work on economics, The Treatise on Political Economy The only distinction of this book was its title, for it was the first time in history that the phrase political economy had ever appeared.

22:03The treatise is a rambling, disorganized account of the economic resources of the country, and a plea to the twin rulers of France, the young King Louis XIII and his regent and queen and Mother Marie de Medici to impose order, rule with an iron hand and advance the greatness of their nation state, France. As Charles Cole puts it, the book is based in large part on the tacit assumption that control and direction of the economic life of the country is one of the chief functions of government, and it is a plea for greater activity in economic matters on the part of of the Rulers. One sentence from the work will convey its essential spirit. Your Majesties possess a great state, agreeable in geographic situation, abounding in wealth, flourishing in peoples, powerful in good and strong cities, invincible in arms, triumphant in glory. All All France needs, Moncrétien opined, is order. Order is the Antelike of states.

23:15The alleged need for a state-imposed order was linked neatly with Moncrétien's conscious echoing of the Montaigne fallacy. It is said that no one ever loses without another gaining. This is true, and is borne out in the realm of commerce more than anywhere else. For Montcretillon, the French Crown in particular was supposed to regulate and foster production and trade, and especially manufacturers, so that France could become self-sufficient. Foreign goods and foreign manufacturers should be driven out of France. Thus, Dutch linen manufacturers were at the time allowed to operate in France.

24:02That must be ended. English textiles should be banned. France must be made self-sufficient in silk, Moncretien asserted, and he claimed that the fiasco of silk subsidy in the reign of Henry IV had come about only because of faithlessness on the part of the monarch's aides. Furthermore, since whatever is foreign corrupts us, foreign books should be prohibited, since Since they poison our spirits and corrupt our manners. Nor did Montcretien neglect his own scythe business. It was a national tragedy, he warned, that German scythes were outcompeting French products, even though French scythes were superior.

24:50One wonders, then, why French consumers were perverse enough to prefer the German product, Unless, of course, its price was lower. Idleness, according to Montcretien, was evil and had to be stamped out by force if necessary. Man, to Montcretien, is born to live in continual labor. The policy of the State should therefore be to make sure that no part of the population ever remains idle. The devil's hands are the devil's hands. Idleness corrupts the strength of men and the chastity of women. Idleness, in short, is the mother of all sins. The criminals and the unruly should, therefore, be made to work.

25:39As for so many other mercantilists, full employment for Montcretien meant, at bottom, coerced employment. The most pervasive motif in Montcretien's work was his deep and abiding hatred and revulsion toward foreigners, toward their imported products and toward their persons. Foreigners, he fulminated, are leeches who attach themselves to this great French body, suck out its best blood and gorge themselves with it, then leave the skin and detach themselves. All in all, France, once so pure, so clean, had been turned into a bilge, a sewer, a cesspool for other countries.

26:27It is impossible to know if Montcretien was hoping for great things from the French monarch, but in any case nothing happened, and so he began to ordain himself into the nobility by simply calling himself the sur de vaudeville. And even though he implied in several spots in his treatise that he was Catholic and declared his adoration for the absolute monarchy often enough, yet he took part in a Huguenot uprising in Normandy in 1621 and was killed in battle. Four days later, a judicial tribunal condemned the dead man posthumously, dragged, broke 5.

27:27The Grandiose Failure of François de Noyer François de Noyer, Sûr de Saint-Martin, had a dream. It was a grandiose vision of the future. All around him, in the early seventeenth century, and in all major nations of the West, the state was creating monopoly companies. Then why not, Du Noyer reasoned, go all the way? If monopoly companies for specific products or specific areas of trade were good, why not go one better? Why Not One Big Company, One Gigantic Monopoly for Virtually Everything King Henry IV listened to Du Noyer's schemes with interest.

28:13They were, after all, only logical conclusions of doctrines and notions that were everywhere in the air. But it was not until 1613 that Du Noyer worked out his plan in detail and set it before the Council of State. It was to be an enormous, virtually all-inclusive company, to be called the French Royal Company of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem. The company, to be headed, of course, by Du Noyer himself, was to have either a privileged monopoly or the right to regulate all other firms in virtually every trade. Thus, the Royal Company was to make cloth and regulate all other manufacture and preparation of all types of cloth, control all aspects of winemaking, and all merchants and hotels buying wine would have to invest certain sums in the company at a low fixed return, hold Hold four privileged fairs a year in Paris, have a monopoly of all public coaches, control all mines in France, obtain gratis various unoccupied crown lands and abandoned quarries, dig canals, erect mills, have a monopoly on sale of playing cards, make munitions, borrow

29:39and lend money, and numerous other activities. Furthermore, Du Noyer would have the Royal Company obtain extraordinary powers from the Crown. It would have the right to seize beggars and vagabonds and take them to the French colonies, which it would presumably run. All convicted criminals would be sentenced to forced labor for the Company in the colonies. All bankrupts who had managed to save some money from their wreckage would be forced to invest that amount in the company. All people exiled from France could be let back into the country by serving or paying money to the company. All who conducted trade higher than their rank or privileges would be forced to join the company.

30:31All business documents whatsoever would have to use stamped paper sold to them by the company. The Council of State was impressed by Dunoyet's vision and ordered an investigation of the project. The following year, 1614, the Royal Company Plan was approved by the States General of France, and various generals, admirals and other high-level officials joined in the praise. Dunoyet reached the peak of his influence, being given the old Lafima post of Comptroller General of Commerce. It seemed as if the grandiloquent Royal Company Plan was actually going to be adopted. Dunoyet elaborated on his plan in a pamphlet which he presented to the King The King, or rather the regent, Marie de' Medici, was impressed, and in 1616 recreated the old Commission of Commerce, formerly headed by Lafama, with instructions to study the Du Noyer project in detail.

31:41The Commission met, and the following year approved the plan of the Royal Company, and urged that all persons carrying on trade be forced to invest their money exclusively in it. In short, the Royal Company would be the monopoly company to end all companies. The delighted Dunoyet, in the meanwhile, seeing his cherished scheme close to fruition, published a longer pamphlet on the plan, urging his one big company upon France. Like the king himself, the royal company would be unique and universal, and its capital would come from both private and royal sources. The Royal Company project seemed to keep barreling along, the Council of State granting its approval in 1618 and again in 1620, when King Louis XIII himself gave it his warm endorsement.

32:40In early 1621, public criers throughout Paris announced the glad tidings that the Royal Company had been formed and was open to receive funds for investment. The problem, however, was money. No one seemed to want to provide actual cash or even pledges to the new enterprise, however grandiloquent and privileged it appeared to be. The King urged every city in France to join, but the cities kept hanging back, pleading that they had no funds. In desperation, Comptroller General of Commerce Du Noyer scaled down the Royal Company to concentrate only on commerce and trade with the Indies and other overseas areas.

33:28Finally, Du Noyer narrowed the scope of his beloved company's capital still further to just Paris and Brittany, but even the Bretons proved not to be interested. The coming to power as Prime Minister of Cardinal Richelieu in 1624 put the Du Noyer scheme into abeyance. But four years later, the project had its final fling. The King urged the Commission of Commerce to act, and in the spring of 1629 it again approved the plan, this time adding to its original grandiose powers the right to make treaties with foreign countries and to establish colonial islands for entrepot trade.

34:14After nearly three decades of planning and lobbying, Du Noyer now needed only the simple signature of King Louis to put his hypertrophied vision into effect. But, for some reason, the royal signature never came. No one knows quite why. Perhaps the powerful Rishu didn't want a rival scheme to be approved. or perhaps the king was getting weary of the aging monomaniac and his untiring enthusiasm. Repeated entreaties and importuning, however, fell only on deaf ears. The royal company was, at last, dead, stillborn, and old Du Noyer's loss was the French public's gain.

35:036. Under the Rule of the Cardinals Cardinals 1624-1661 The 1620s to the 1650s were decades of rule in France by two very secular cardinals. The first was the stern, implacable, cunning and charismatic Armand Jean de Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, 1585-1642. A scion of an old family of lesser nobility and poitou, Richelieu's father, François, had been a particular favorite of Henry III and Henry IV. As a result, young Armand was made bishop of Lucent by Henry IV in 1606. Eight years later, Richelieu attracted the attention of the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, and became chief advisor in her exile. He He was made a cardinal in 1622 and became prime minister in 1624, to remain so until his death 20 years later.

36:10Richelieu's main interest was his participation in the Thirty Years' War, 1618 to 1648, which devastated Germany for decades to come. This war symbolized a fundamental shift in European wars from the strictly religious conflicts of the previous century to the political nation-state ambitions of the 17th century. Thus Richelieu, the at least nominally Catholic, albeit politique, cardinal of a Catholic country, found himself heading a largely Protestant European coalition against the Catholic Habsburgs of Austria and Spain. The Cardinal's theoretical views were set forth in two books written near the end of his life, his Memoirs on the Reign of Louis XIII and his Political Testament.

37:05While his major practical interest had not been domestic or economic affairs, he had helped build up the absolutism of the French state. In his works, he repeated the usual absolutist mercantilist views of the France of his era. France should be self-sufficient in all things, the navy and merchant marine built up, monopolies granted, the idol put to work or locked up in institutions, and luxurious consumption prohibited. An interesting new variant was Richelieu's candid attitude toward the mass of Frenchmen Richelieu added the revealing comment that it is necessary for the French state to be as simple as animals, to be prodded or coerced in ways that were optimal for the French state.

37:54Thus taxes should not be so high that commerce and industry are discouraged, but neither should they be so low as to leave the public too well off. For if the people were too comfortable and complacent, it would be impossible to contain them in the rules of their duty. Richelieu added the revealing comment that it is necessary to compare them, the people, to mules, who, being accustomed to burdens, are spoiled by a long rest more than by work. It is clear that in the course of promoting the interests of the nation-state and of his monarch, Richelieu did not neglect his own concerns. A receiver of a modest annual income of 25,000 livres upon his entry into the post of Prime Minister.

38:43By the end of his career in office, Cardinal Richelieu was earning some 3 million livres per annum. Apparently the Cardinal had no problem in serving the enrichment of his sovereign and of himself at the same time. Richelieu's successor was a fascinating character, a Sicilian whose father was a high official attached to the powerful Colonna family. Jules Mazarin, 1602-1661, was educated in Rome by the Jesuits and then became a church official at the University of Alcala in Spain. Returning to Rome to earn his doctorate in law, Mazarin was a captain of infantry and and then a papal diplomat of note.

39:30He was made a church canon without ever having been a priest. While serving as papal nuncio to France, he gained the favor of the great Richelieu, who offered Mazarin a high official post if he should become a naturalized French citizen. It is not many men who emigrate, become a citizen of another land, as Mazarin did in in 1639, and then become Prime Minister of that country only three years later. Mazarin, however, achieved that feat, becoming Cardinal, still without being a priest, in 1641, and succeeding Richelieu when the latter died a year later. Mazarin was shrewd enough to court the favor of the Queen, so that when Louis XIII died the next year and the Queen became regent, Maserat could continue in his powerful post.

40:28Except for a year or two's hiatus, Maserat continued as prime minister until his death in 1661. Maserat had far less interest in economic affairs than his predecessor and was no theoretician, devoting himself largely to diplomacy and war. He didn't need much theoretical insight, however, to amass a fortune in high office that put even his predecessor to shame. By the end of his rule, he had accumulated an immense personal fortune of approximately 50 million livres. One noteworthy work written during Mazarin's term was by a Carmelite monk, Jean Ayon, whose Hayek's religious name was Matthias de Saint-Jean, circa 1600 to 1681.

41:20Hayon was born in Saint-Malo in Brittany and became a friend and advisor of the governor of Brittany, a relative of Richelieu's, Marshal de la Mélaraie. Hayon eventually became Carmelite provincial in Turenne and refused the opportunity to become attorney general of that province. During Ayon's life in Brittany, the Breton merchants became interested in founding a privileged commercial company, and in 1641, a group of merchants consulting with de la Mellerie worked out plans for a large company, centered at Nantes, to be called the Société de la Bourse Commune de Nantes. The company was approved by the Council of State in 1646, but it provoked an anonymous 1647.

42:31The book was dedicated to Ayon's friend and patron, La Mélaraie, whom he extolled as as inheriting the mantle of economic leadership of the nation from Richelieu. Ayon's book was a compilation of standard mercantilist doctrines and need not be examined in detail here. He almost rivaled Montcretien in his Hatred for Foreigners and in his wish to drastically curtail their activities in or selling to France. Two of his personal and original contributions were his peon to the sea, shipping and the seafaring life, and his eulogy to the city of Nantes, its glory and its unique suitability for locating a privileged company.

43:207. Colbert and Louis XIV Jean-Baptiste Colbert, 1619-1683, was no scholar or theorist, but he knew with firm conviction what ideas he liked, and these were the mercantilist notions that had filled the air in France and the rest of Europe for generations. Colbert's accomplishment, while functioning as the Sun King's economic czar, was to put this compendium of mercantilist ideas into effect on a grand scale. Colbert was convinced that the ideas were good, just and correct, and he fervently believed that any opponent was completely wrong, either ignorant or biased by personal motives and special pleading.

44:13His opponents, such as businessmen who preferred competition or free exchange, were narrow, and Sighted and Selfish. Only he, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had the long-run interests of the nation and the nation-state at heart. Merchants, he repeatedly declared, were little men, with only little private interests. For example, they often preferred liberty to compete with each other, whereas it is in the public interest and the good of the state to see to it that all products are uniform in Make-Up and Quality. Colbert was speaking here, of course, of the joint interests of the State, its rulers and bureaucracy, and of cartelists, all of whose private interests were in fact at stake. But although the myth of the public was, as usual, a mask for particular individuals and groups, their interests were indeed far grander than those of little individual Merchants.

45:18The mercantilist ideas of Colbert were familiar, encouraging and keeping bullion in the country so that it can flow into the coffers of the state, prohibiting the export of bullion, cartelizing through compulsory high standards of quality, subsidizing of exports and restriction on imports until France became self-sufficient. Mayer's ideas on taxation were those of almost every minister of finance everywhere, except they were more clearly and far more candidly expressed. The art of taxation, he said, consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.

46:04There is no more dramatic encapsulation of the inherently conflicting interests of the people versus the state. From the point of view of the State and its rulers, the people are but a giant goose to be plucked as efficaciously as possible. Furthermore, that swelling the coffers of the King and the State was the simple reason for the otherwise silly bullionist doctrines of the mercantilists, can be seen in this revealing statement of Colbert's to the King. The universal rule of finances should be always to watch and use every care and all the authority of your majesty to attract money into the kingdom, to spread it out into all the provinces so as to pay their taxes.

46:56Like other mercantilists, Colbert warmly embraced the Montaigne fallacy about trade. Trade was was war and conflict. The total amount of trade in the world, the total number of ships, the total production of manufacturing, was fixed. One nation could only improve its trade or shipping or manufactures by depriving some other country of this fixed quantum. One nation's gain must be another's loss. Colbert gloried in the fact that French trade was growing, In reality, trade and conquest are not akin, but are diametric opposites.

47:57Each party to every exchange benefits, whether the exchange is between nationals of the same country or of different countries. Political boundaries have nothing to do with the economic gain from trade and markets. In exchange, one man's gain is only accomplished by contributing to the gain of someone else. Most as both nation, that is, people living in certain countries or any other geographical area, mutually benefit from trade between them. Colbert's theories, however, fitted in with deep hostility toward all foreigners, particularly such prosperous nations as England and Holland.

48:43Like other mercantilists, Colbert detested the idleness of others and sought to force Colbert was unusual among mercantilists in giving a special care to bringing the intellectual and artistic life of the nation under state control. The object was to make sure that art and intellect served to glorify the king and his works. An enormous amount of money was poured into palaces and chateaux for the king, the mightiest of which was approximately 40 million livres on the great isolated palace at Versailles.

49:35During Colbert's term, some 80 million livres were spent on royal edifices. Moreover, Colbert mobilized artists and intellectuals into academies and supported them by grants and government projects. The French Academy, created shortly before as an uninfluential semi-private group, was nationalized by Colbert and put in charge of the French language. The Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded under Mazarin and given a legal monopoly of art instruction, was reinforced by Colbert, who imposed strict regulations on these artists so that their work would be proper and orderly and always in service to the king.

50:22Colbert founded an Academy of Architecture to work on royal buildings and to inculcate the proper architectural principles. principles. Neither were music nor the theater safe from the all-encompassing rule of Colbert. Colbert preferred the Italian opera form to the French ballet, and so doomed the latter to the benefit of the Italian import. In 1659 the Abbe Parrain produced the first French opera, and so a decade later Colbert were conferred upon the abbé a monopoly of all rights to present musical performances. Perrin, however, was a poor manager, and he went bankrupt.

51:08While in a debtor's prison, Perrin sold his monopoly right to Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian musician and composer. Lully was given the right to form the Royal Academy of Music, and Lully's permission was is necessary for any further musical performance with more than two instruments. Similarly, Colbert created a theatrical monopoly. In 1673 he forced two existing theatres to unite. When a third troupe was later forced to join them, the Comédie Francaise was thereby formed in 1680. The Comédie Francaise was given a monopoly of all dramatic performances in Paris, was subjected to tight state regulation and control, and aided by state funds.

52:01With regulation and monopoly came subsidy and subvention, pensions, grants, no-show appointments as valets of the king, lucrative appointments as artists to the king, exemptions – from taxes or from the wrath of creditors – all poured out into the arts. Similarly for the theatre, writers, scientists, historians, philosophers, mathematicians and essayists. All manner of largesse poured out to them from the state trough. It was subvention that put to shame any contemporary national endowment for the Humanities or National Science Foundation. The outpouring truly subverted any sort of spirit of independence that French intellectuals might have attained.

52:52The mind of a whole nation had been corrupted into the service of the State. What manner of man was this, then, this grand bureaucrat who scorned the interests of mere individuals and merchants as petty and narrow, who presumed always to speak and act for the The National and even Public Interest Jean-Baptiste Colbert was born in Reims, into a merchant family. His father, Nicolas, purchased a minor government office in Paris. His more influential uncle, Odar Colbert, was a successful merchant banker. Jean-Baptiste was an uneducated young man, but his uncle knew a banker for for Cardinal Mazarin. More importantly, one of Audard's sons married the sister of an important government official, Michel Letelier. Uncle Audard got young Colbert a job working for Letelier, who had just been appointed to the post of Secretary of State for Military Affairs. Jean-Baptiste's lifelong service in the top French bureaucracy had begun. After After seven years in this post, Colbert married Marie Charon after obtaining for her father, a wealthy financial official, an important tax exemption.

54:17Soon Colbert became counselor of state and then one of the top aides of Cardinal Mazarin. Soon after Mazarin's death, Colbert rose to become virtual economic czar of Louis XIV, Cold, humorless, hard and implacable, a man of marble, as he was called by a contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert yet had the wit to engage in boundless flattery and demeaning personal service to his royal patron. Thus Colbert wrote to Louis on the occasion of a military victory, One must, sire, remain in silent wonder, and thank God every day for having caused us to be born in the reign of a king like your Majesty.

55:08And no service to the Sun King was too demeaning. Colbert searched for the king's missing swans, supplied Louis with his favorite oranges, arranged for the birth of the king's illegitimate children, and bought jewels for mistresses on the king's behalf. Colbert's personal philosophy was best summed up in his advice to his beloved son, Senuli, on how to get ahead in the world. He told his son that the chief end that he should set himself is to make himself agreeable to the king. He should work with great industry during his whole life to know well what might be agreeable to his majesty. Colbert was well rewarded for his life of hard work and abject sycophancy in the service of the king.

55:59Apparently only the interests of individual merchants and citizens were narrow and petty. Colbert had little difficulty in identifying the lucrative feathering of his own nest with the public interest, national glory and the common will. A stream of offices, benefices, pensions and grants streamed into his coffers from the ever-grateful king. In addition, Colbert received special bonuses or gratifications from the king. Thus, in one order, in February 1679, Colbert received a gratification of no less than 400,000 livres. The overall sum poured into Colbert's coffers was immense, including lands and bribes for subsidies and exemptions from grateful lobbyists and economic interests.

56:54All in all, he amassed at least 10 million livres, notable, to be sure, but not the enormous extent of Cardinal Mazarin's boodle as prime minister. Colbert also did extremely well by his extensive family. Brothers, cousins, sons and daughters of Colbert were showered with favors and became bishops, ambassadors, military commanders, entendants and abbesses of leading convents. The Colbert family certainly did well by doing good on behalf of the sovereign and the public interest of France. After Colbert's death in 1683, his successors under Louis XIV developed and strengthened the policy of Colbertism.

57:44Protective tariffs were greatly increased, imports of various goods limited to specific ports, quality regulations strengthened, and innovations hobbled for the protection of the industrial and occupational status quo. All of them was frozen into the French political economy.

58:18For his part, Louis XIV had no trouble fitting the absolutist role. Even more than Colbert, he totally identified his own private interest as monarch, with the interests of the state and with the public good. Whether or not Louis uttered the famous words often attributed to him, I am the state, he certainly believed and acted upon them, as did his father, Louis XIII, before him, who had said, It is not I who speak, it is my state. Statism logically implies that the state owns all the property in the land, and that all who live on or use such property do so only by the sufferance of the true owner.

59:05And Louis certainly believed that he was the true owner of all property in France. Hence justice was my justice, and hence he claimed the inherent right to tax all his subjects at will. And why not, indeed, if they were all truly existing in his realm only at his, the owner's, pleasure? Furthermore, virtually everyone, even the king's opponents, believed that he ruled by divine grace and divine right. Previously, Cardinal Richelieu had called kings the images of God. Early in the Sun King's reign, court propagandist Daniel de Priézac, in his Political Discourses 1652-1666, called monarchical sovereignty a great light that never sets.

1:00:00Furthermore, that light is a great divine mystery hidden from mere mortals. As de Priézac put it, The source of the majesty of kings is so high, its essence so hidden, and its force so divine, that it should not seem strange that it should make men reverent, without their being permitted to understand it, just as is true with celestial things. In contrast to the adulatory worshippers at the Shrine of the King's quasi-divinity were the Montaigne-type skeptics and pessimists about human nature, who fed the stream of panegyriques to Louis XIV in their own way. In a set of three skeptical discourses, 1664, the cynical Samuel Sorbier, admirer and translator of Thomas Hobbes, decried the tendencies of bestial and corrupt modern man in grabbing from the public trough and having no sense of the common good.

1:01:06But there is, opined Sorbier, a way out, absolute submission to the commands of the presumably superhuman king, so that order is established out of perpetual conflict. In that total submission, the people will find their way back to the instinctual, childlike simplicity of the state of nature preceding their entry into civil society. As Professor Kyoan writes of Sorbier, As the subjects of an absolute despot, they would live much the same way, he argues, in serene simplicity, totally dependent on the sovereign for their lives and fortunes, protected against the encroachments of their fellows, happy in their slavery.

1:01:53King Louis XIV was able to combine both strands into a worshipful blend of absolutist thought. On the one hand, as he makes clear in his private memoirs, written for the instruction of his son, his view of human nature, at least of the nature of ordinary mortals, was pessimistic and Machiavellian. Individuals are, by nature, limited, striving always for their own personal ends, and heedless of the reasons why they should be subordinated to the commands of others. The king, on the other hand, is superhuman, a man who is above all and sees all, and is the only one working for the public good, which is identical with his own.

1:02:42And the sun-king also took unto himself quasi-divine status, for he, Louis XIV, is like the sun, the noblest of all, which by virtue of its uniqueness, by the brilliance that surrounds by the light it imparts to the other heavenly bodies that seem to pay at court, by its equal and just distribution of this same light to all the various parts of the world, by the good that it does everywhere, constantly producing life, joy and activity everywhere, by its perpetual yet always imperceptible movement, by never departing or deviating from its steady and invariable course, assuredly makes a most vivid and a most beautiful image for a great monarch.

1:03:33Professor Keough unjustly comments that Louis XIV is not content to compare himself to God. He compares in such a manner that it is clear that it is God who is the copy. The Acme of Absolutist Thought was provided by Jacques Benigny Bossuet, 1627-1704, Bishop of Meaux, court theologian and political theorist under Louis XIV. The whole state, opined the bishop, is in the person of the prince. In him is the will of the whole people. The kings identify with the public good because God has raised them to a condition where they no longer have anything to desire for themselves.

1:04:21Absolutism is necessary, asserted Bosway, because any constitutional limits on the prince raise the dread specter of anarchy, than which nothing can be worse. The only limits on the power of the sovereign should be those he imposes on himself in his His Own Interest, which must be identical to the public interest whenever the prince regards the state as his possession, to be cultivated and passed on to his descendants. Finally, Bossuet conflates the King and God as follows. Majesty is the image of the grandeur of God in the prince. God is infinite.

1:05:07God is all. The prince, as prince, is not to be considered an individual man. He is the public person. The whole state is included in him. Just as all perfection and all virtue are united in God, so all the power of the individuals is brought together in the person of the prince. What grandeur that a single man can contain so much! That political thought had come a long way from the Spanish scholastics.