Chapter 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.
The 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.
That 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.
It 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.
The 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.
Thus 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.
The 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?
Obviously 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.
Thus 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.
2.
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.
Like 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.
He 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.
Apart 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.
Like 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.
For 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.
Lafamard 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.
The 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.
The 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.
The 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.
In 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.
Some 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.
The 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.
He 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.
The 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.
The 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.
That 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.
One 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.
As 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.
It 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.
The 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.
They 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
and 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.
All 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.
The 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.
In 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.
Finally, 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.
After 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.
6. 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.
Richelieu'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.
While 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.
Thus 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.
By 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.
He 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.
Except 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.
Hayon 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.
The 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.
7. 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.
His 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.
The 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.
There 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.
Like 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.
Each 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.
Like 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.
During 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.
Colbert 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.
While 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.
With 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.
The 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.
Soon 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.
And 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.
Apparently 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.
All 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.
Protective 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.
For 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.
And 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.
Furthermore, 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.
But 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.
King 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.
And 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.
Professor 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.
Absolutism 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.
God 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.