LOUIS XIV. AND COLBERT
Alteration of political ideals in the middle of the
century--Seventeenth-century kingship--Character of Louis
XIV.--His government--The organisation of France under
him--The training of Colbert--Nicholas Fouquet--Colbert becomes
minister of finance--His financial reforms--The principles of his
financial policy--Advantages and dangers of his system--Character
of Colbert--The choice before Louis in 1671 between commercial and
military supremacy--Preference of military supremacy.
[Sidenote: =Altered political ideals, 1660.=]
The eighteen months which followed the peace of the Pyrenees form the
turning-point of the seventeenth century. Up to that time the ideas and
the policy which sprang from the controversies of the sixteenth century
had made themselves felt, albeit but dimly. As long as the battle
between the Church and Puritanism was being waged in England, as long
as Spain with her uncompromising Catholicism was still in the front
rank of European states, as long as Sweden, strong in the traditions
of Gustavus Adolphus, was still the first power in the north, it was
impossible to say that the interest of religious questions had quite
ceased to be the dominant interest in European politics. But the years
1660 and 1661 saw a great change, not so much in the motives and
ambitions which really actuated nations, as in the men who were called
upon to express them in politics. From the peace of the Pyrenees, Spain
retired from the arena of politics into a sleep of decay and decline,
and ceased to be of importance in the affairs of Europe, until the
ill-omened day when were seen gathering round her carcase the eagles
of the world prepared for deadly strife. From the Restoration in May
1660, England wholly surrendered any claim to be thought to be guided
by moral ideals in her policy at home or abroad, and offered herself
to the highest bidder, under the guidance of a king whose sole thought
was for his own personal comfort. The peace of Oliva, and the death of
Charles X. left Frederick William of Brandenburg the foremost figure
in northern Europe, and consecrated by the rewards of success the
policy of pure selfishness in its most shameless form. History often
has to note how among the contests inspired by religion, liberty and
patriotism, there is much of selfish intrigue and personal ambition;
how in the most sacred causes the dictates of humanity and of justice
are not unfrequently forgotten; and it may well be said, that the
spectacle of a Charles II. bartering away his country’s honour to gain
for himself immunity from trouble, or of a Frederick William cynically
breaking faith with the ally of yesterday because he could obtain
more from the ally of to-day, is only more repulsive, because less
hypocritical, than the ambition of an Elizabeth or a Philip II., which
attempted to conceal itself under nobler ideals. But after all, taking
men at their worst, which is always the most untrue of estimates,
it is something in international politics, where self-interest must
necessarily play so large a part, that its working should be concealed
as much as possible, even from those who are actuated by it. Moral
conventions are necessary where an agreed standard of moral principle
is impossible, and bad faith is as reprehensible in diplomacy as the
employment of savages is in war. Those who use them may gain the
battle, but at the cost of civilisation.
[Sidenote: =Personal power and territorial aggrandisement, the
motives of policy.=]
The monarchs and statesmen who were succeeding to the responsibilities
of government in the middle of the seventeenth century found themselves
in a very different position from that which their fathers had
inherited. No longer were there great ideals around them to take
captive their imaginations and absorb their energies. No longer were
there obvious difficulties of home government to conquer or avoid.
There were no struggling nationalities like that of Holland to protect,
no overgrown dominating tyranny like that of Spain to oppose, no
turbulent territorial baronage to crush, or be crushed by, the Crown.
These questions had worked themselves out in the earlier part of the
century and had left a blank behind them. A young king, who took up
the reins of government after the middle of the century, found an
open map before him. [Sidenote: =Unique position of the Crown.=]
His country was much exhausted by war, longing above everything for
rest, ready to make any sacrifices for order. The nobles, thinned and
impoverished by war, were not in a position to dispute his authority.
The army, well organised and obedient, gave him a power over the lives
and property of his subjects, wholly unknown to former generations.
A highly developed system of diplomacy enabled him to conduct
negotiations secretly with all the important states of Europe, while as
yet the comity of nations had established no general moral standard to
which diplomatists were expected to conform. Under these circumstances
it was only natural that the ambition of sovereigns should impel them
to try and make their own power supreme at home, and to enlarge the
boundaries of their territories abroad. Absolute power and territorial
aggrandisement become the main objects of European kings. The nation is
identified with the king; the larger and the richer the territory he
rules, the greater his glory and circumstance. Before that all things
give way. Differences of speech, differences of race, differences of
religion, differences of government, count for nothing, and whole
peoples are tossed about from one ruler to another like counters at
the table of the diplomatists, not in cynicism but in sheer unconcern.
Wrapped up in the supreme importance of gaining for their respective
masters one district or one town the more, politicians have become
wholly oblivious of everything else; until from the sheer necessity of
having some principle to which to appeal, they eventually evolved the
doctrine of the balance of power, which, when pushed to its logical
development in the succeeding century, meant little else than that, if
one European state managed to steal something, all the other states
had the right of stealing something too. In the nineteenth century,
the cause of oppressed nationalities has most powerfully influenced
the map of Europe. It is the glory and the boast of the greater powers
to have assisted in the unification of Italy, or the liberation of the
Christian states of the Balkan Peninsula. At the end of the seventeenth
century it was quite otherwise. To establish beyond all question
the authority of the crown, to maintain a powerful and perfectly
equipped army, to astonish the world by the splendour of the court,
to push ever further and further away the frontiers of the nation,
to extend a lordly protection, little short of vassalage, to weaker
countries,--such were the objects of a patriot king, such the rewards
of successful statesmanship. The nation was focussed and crystallised
into the person of the king. It worked, fought, lived, conquered for
him alone. In his glory it saw its own reflected, it recognised him as
its representative and its champion, it surrendered its independence to
him ungrudgingly, and in his success it reaped its reward. The rights
of peoples were not so much set aside, as not even thought of, for
everything was absorbed in the personality of the king.
[Sidenote: =Louis XIV. the type of seventeenth century kingship.=]
Of this type of kingship Louis XIV. is always looked upon
as the representative if not the founder. Its founder he certainly
was not, for his was not the mind to found anything. There is nothing
original, no initiative, about Louis XIV. He can use, he
cannot produce. The productive power seems wholly wanting in him. He
is essentially a barren man, singularly skilful in making use of the
material with which he is provided, but unable to add to it. It has
often been pointed out how he inherited everything which has made him
great, and left nothing great behind him. Condé and Turenne, Lionne and
Servien, Colbert, Corneille, and Racine were the products of the age
of Richelieu and Mazarin, and only utilised by Louis, while Villeroy
and Tallard and Boileau were the work of his own hands. [Sidenote:
=Louis a man of second-rate abilities.=] The statement requires
some modification, but the principle which underlies it is true. Nearly
everything which was great in France at the time of his accession to
power Louis had the ability to use. For the most part what became great
in France during his reign was not trained by him, and indeed in the
case of Port Royal attained its greatness in spite of him, and what was
directly trained by him was not great. The reason is not far to seek.
It is the vice of an absolutely centralised monarchy, where the king
is all in all, that it cannot in the nature of things tolerate any one
greater than the king. The ministers are servants, and no servant can
be greater than his master. [Sidenote: =His determination to admit
of no rival.=] Even in the Prussian monarchy of to-day there is
no room for a Bismarck, still less could one have been permitted to
exist at the court of Louis XIV. An absolute monarch sets the
standard of his ministers, if he absorbs the whole state into himself
as did Louis, and does not merely let things govern themselves as is
the fashion among Oriental despots. From the time of the death of
Mazarin, Louis determined he would never have another prime minister.
He himself, like Napoleon after him, would be the head and motive power
of the whole of the governmental and social machinery. He kept his word
with singular patience and pertinacity, and working harder probably
than any sovereign had worked, since the days of Philip II.,
never permitted a minister, not even Louvois, to rise above the merest
departmental independence. The result was inevitable. A commonplace man
himself, without insight, without originality, without independence
of mind, he could not inspire genius, and could not tolerate it
if he found it. He wanted diligence and accuracy, not genius and
statesmanship, clerks not ministers of state, and he got what he
wanted. It is significant that in all departments of administration
except one, when he had used up the men whom Richelieu and Mazarin
had left to him, he found no others to take their places. In diplomacy
alone France remained unrivalled to the end of the century, the one
department of which Louis himself was complete master, and in the
conduct of which he was thoroughly competent to take the lead.
[Sidenote: =His great kingly qualities.=]
But in spite of his deficiencies in the higher qualities of
statesmanship, not Aristides better deserved his title of the Just,
than did Louis XIV. that of _le Grand Monarque_. It was essentially
as a king that Louis was great. No sovereign of modern days has had
the kingly gifts in such rich profusion. Dignity without awkwardness,
courtesy without familiarity, gallantry without coarseness, a winning
manner, ready tact, chivalrous bearing, refined mind, and modest
demeanour, made the young king at once the pride of the French court
and the boast of the French nation. But something more than this was
required to make him the pattern and type of European kingship. It was
not merely that his social insight brought instinctively to his lips
the word which, within the bounds of good breeding, would prove most
pleasing or most effective to those whom he wished to impress, or that
his knowledge of character taught him almost intuitively the best mode
of approaching those whom he wished to win. It was not only that his
elaborate and punctual care for the etiquette and ceremonial of the
court could not fail to affect the mind with a sense of the perfection
of regal state, and attract it by a polished order of courtly
magnificence. [Sidenote: =His theory of kingship.=] Versailles was not
the first court in Europe to be distinguished by the splendour of its
ceremonial, and the refinement of its manners, but Louis XIV. was the
first great sovereign in Europe who made the perfection of his court an
essential part of his system of policy. When the Popes had ceased to
be the common fathers of Western Christendom, they applied themselves
to make the seat of their power the centre of the wider realm of art.
Rome deposed from the throne of universal faith was to be recompensed
by the sceptre of universal culture. So when France was assuming the
headship of Europe, and was preparing to strike for the dominion of the
civilised world, her court was to be the epitome, the representation
of the world’s greatness. Mirrored there in a tiny but radiant sphere
was to be found all which makes humanity noble and life beautiful.
Intellect and birth, genius and beauty, culture and statesmanship,
art and devotion, all were to be there marshalled in an admirable
perfection of order, but shining one and all with a reflected light,
illuminated by the rays of the king, their sun. Not unthinkingly did
Louis adopt the sun as his type. According to his theory of government
he was the centre, the life-giving principle of the system in which
he ruled. All that was young and beautiful in France sprang into life
at his bidding, and withered into decay when he averted his face, all
that was powerful drew its vigour from his favour, while from less
privileged lands the kings of the earth, like the Magi of old, drawn
by the light of his compelling rays, were to come from the ends of the
world to find under his protecting care the pattern of life and the
home of faith.
[Sidenote: =Truth of Thackeray’s caricature.=]
Sarcasm comes easy to the lips when dealing with a theory such as
this. Men cannot stop the course of the winds of heaven by building
houses of cards, and no artificial arrangements of a court can conceal
national weakness or physical decay. The sturdy English pencil of
Thackeray has drawn out the hollowness of this theory of seventeenth
century kingship in the bitter sarcasm of the well-known sketches of
_Louis le Roi_ in his later years. In the first appears the real
_Louis_, insignificant, decrepit, bald, and old, shaking and
feeble with age, a living corpse rather than a man. Opposite to him
stands _le Roi_--the flowing peruke curled and oiled, the royal
robes bedecked with ribbons, flashing with jewels, the tailor-made
divinity that doth hedge a king, standing ready for the monarch’s use
on its skeleton frame. Lastly we see the human atom and its gorgeous
artificial covering united in _Louis le Roi_, and are bidden to
reflect how much of the _Grand Monarque_ is the work of the tailor
and the wigmaker, and how little of God. The argument is true, the
sarcasm is just. Where the splendour of a court is part of the system
of government, represents and enforces the national dignity, sets the
fashion to foreign ambition, is the living embodiment of the power
and genius of the state, king and courtiers must not grow old. Queen
Elizabeth, encouraging protestations of love at the age of seventy,
and Louis XIV. attempting artificially to conceal the advance
of years, are spectacles offensive because unnaturally theatrical.
[Sidenote: =The French court at the head of civilisation.=] But
their loathsomeness never struck contemporaries as it does us. Louis
XIV. never lost the respect of Europe or the love of his
subjects. His kingliness was a fact which had so impressed itself upon
Europe, as both the cause and effect of the greatness of France and
the success of his policy, that men became insensible to the physical
incongruity. And they were right. From the court of Louis flowed out
influences far more potent than those which followed the feet of
his soldiers or the coaches of his diplomatists. Versailles set the
fashion to the civilised world. French manners, French dress, French
speech, French art, French literature, French preaching, French science
became the property and the models of civilised Europe. For a hundred
years in every department of life, from the turning of a couplet to
the drilling of recruits, from the composition of a panegyric to the
design of a card-table, everything is ruled by the French instinct of
order, cramped by the French love of artificial completeness, refined
by the French genius for finish, illuminated by the justness of French
taste. There are few kings to whom it has been given to dictate to
civilisation for a century the principles by which she is to live.
The secret of the wonderful success of Louis XIV. in all
those departments of life and of government which he understood lay in
the close personal attention which he gave to the matter in hand. His
genius certainly lay in his infinite
[Sidenote: =Louis’s attention to business.=]
capacity for taking trouble. [Sidenote: =Louis’s attention to
business.=] Even in his earlier years, when his court was the gayest
in Europe, not only would he listen to all the despatches of his
ambassadors and personally dictate the answers, but he actually kept
up a private correspondence with the more favoured of the envoys on
matters of which he did not wish the foreign office to have cognisance.
Of important negotiations, especially those in connection with the
great treaties of his reign, he took entire management himself, and
frequently wrote his directions to his representatives with his own
hand. He was equally punctilious about the smaller questions of
etiquette which occupied so much of the time and thought of ambassadors
in the seventeenth century. The order of an ambassador’s entry, the
rules by which he is to be guided in the decisive matters of covering
and uncovering, giving or denying the ‘_pas_,’ the supreme
necessity of trying to get in front of the Spanish ambassador, if
it could possibly be managed, are all laid down and commented upon
by Louis with the utmost sense of their importance. Nothing was too
great, nothing too small, for his personal care. The negotiations for
a partition treaty, the arrangements for a fête at Marli, the design
for the fortifications of Lille, the rebuke to be administered to a
malapert courtier or a forgetful servant were alike the subject of
careful consideration. ‘I have almost been obliged to wait’ is a phrase
which has become proverbial.
[Sidenote: =Organisation the characteristic of his government.=]
This minute attention to detail on the part of the Crown in a nation
gifted like the French with a genius for completeness produced a
corresponding thoroughness of treatment in every branch of the
administration. Organisation was the order of the day. During the years
of Louis’s greatness, before the constant strain of the over-ambitious
wars had broken everything down, organisation is the note of his
government. The great ministers are organisers not statesmen. They
are at the very antipodes of genius to Richelieu. And they are
organisers, not in the sense in which Sully was an organiser, merely
the rooter-out of patent abuses, but in the far higher sense in which
Charles Montague was an organiser, one who laid down true principles
of administration and constructed the machinery necessary for carrying
them out. Lionne organised the French foreign office and diplomatic
service, Colbert the internal administration of France, Louvois the
war office, on principles which became the acknowledged principles of
foreign, home, and military administration among all countries for
more than a century, some of which will remain acknowledged principles
for all time. It was this which enabled France to take full advantage
of her centralisation, which enabled her to bear the extraordinary
strain of unsuccessful war in the way she did, which gave her such
advantages in dealing with a huge unorganised mass like the Empire,
which left her even after all her losses at the end of the reign of
Louis XIV. stronger than she had been at the beginning. To the
ministers who planned and carried it out belong justly the honours of
the achievement, but it would never have been carried out at all had it
not been for the master who inspired them.
[Sidenote: =Training of Colbert in the household of Mazarin.=]
Colbert had served his apprenticeship in the household of Mazarin.
Early in life the cardinal had noticed his singular capacity for
business, and had taken him into his service from that of Le Tellier,
and intrusted him with the care of his household. The suggestions which
Colbert made from time to time to his master about the conduct of his
business soon showed Mazarin that he had in his new servant not merely
an accurate clerk, but a financial organiser, and gradually he placed
in his hands the whole management of his private affairs. The cardinal
was at once frugal and extravagant, avaricious and luxurious, and it
was the duty of Colbert to buy the best of everything in the cheapest
market, and to surround his master with comforts, while he doubled and
trebled his fortune. It was no easy task, for the cardinal was very
particular. Shirts for Mazarin’s own use, the trousseaux of his nieces,
carpets for his palace, his wedding gift to the young queen, all had
to receive Colbert’s personal attention; while he was more particularly
responsible for the investments and commercial undertakings by means
of which the cardinal amassed his huge fortune. Colbert was thoroughly
fitted for the work he had to do. Gifted with a keen eye for business,
great shrewdness in his estimate of men, and unlimited patience in his
attention to details, unhampered by scruples, stimulated but not led
away by ambition, he unhesitatingly set himself to satisfy his master’s
avarice. He used the powers of the state to give the cardinal’s
merchandise priority in the markets, and to relieve it from the
overwhelming burden of the dues which pressed so hardly upon all other
merchants. Under his guidance the state itself as it were went into
business for the benefit of the prime minister, with the result that
only seven years after the end of the _Fronde_ the cardinal died
worth £2,000,000 of money, and bequeathed on his deathbed the architect
of his fortune to the young king and to France as his most precious
possession.
[Sidenote: =Nicholas Fouquet.=]
When Mazarin died the finances of the country were under the control
of Nicholas Fouquet, the brother of the Abbé Fouquet, who had for some
years been the head of Mazarin’s secret police. Nicholas Fouquet was
a man of great ability and vaulting ambition. Seeing corruption all
around him he quickly yielded to the prevailing vice, and used his
double position of Superintendant of the Finances and Procureur-General
to collect a large fortune. But unlike Mazarin there was no stain of
avarice about Fouquet. He was the prey of large schemes of ambition,
the dispenser of a magnificence more than royal. By a lavish use of
his ill-gotten wealth he became the owner of colonial settlements,
the patron of art and literature, the builder of the most magnificent
palace in France, the centre and head of a social côterie which might
at any moment become a political danger. But if Fouquet had many
friends at court he had many enemies in the country. His splendour
and success made men jealous of him, his reckless mismanagement made
the business class distrust him, the increase of the debt made all
the _bourgeois_ hate him, his unblushing corruption gave his
enemies the whip-hand over him, and when it was known that the king
would not support him a cabal was formed with Colbert at its head to
ruin him. There was no difficulty in proving charges of peculation
and mismanagement, the question was entirely whether his faction at
court was strong enough to save him. The ladies were on his side, but
the king, either because he was jealous of his political power and
thought him dangerous to the Crown, or because he was jealous of his
personal influence with Mdlle. de la Vallière, who at that moment
exercised unlimited sway over Louis’s susceptible heart, determined
on his destruction. [Sidenote: =Condemnation of Fouquet, 1661.=]
He was induced to sell his office of Procureur-General, which carried
with it the privilege of being tried only by the Parlement, and then
was suddenly arrested only a few days after he had entertained Louis
and his court with regal magnificence at his sumptuous palace of Vaux.
A special commission was formed in order to try him. For three years
the tedious trial spun out its weary length. At last he was found
guilty of crime against the state and banished. Louis’s jealousy and
Colbert’s hate were not to be appeased so easily. By a stretch of royal
power almost unprecedented Louis substituted a sentence of perpetual
imprisonment for that of banishment, and men have darkly whispered
since, that even that severe punishment did not exhaust the royal
vengeance, and that the Iron Mask so well known to French romance
concealed the features of the brilliant Superintendant of Finance who
had dared to raise his eyes to the mistress of the king!
[Sidenote: =Colbert appointed to succeed him.=]
The disgrace of Nicholas Fouquet placed the whole internal
administration of France in the hands of Colbert, and he entered at
once with zeal on the business of its reorganisation. The finances
demanded his first attention. Under the mismanagement of Richelieu
Mazarin and Fouquet all the evils which Sully had suppressed had again
reappeared. The tax-gatherers and the financiers made large fortunes,
while the treasury received but a small percentage of the vast sums
wrung from the people. The expenses of the state were defrayed
from day to day by the sale of offices, by the creation of offices
for the purpose of sale, and by loans raised at ruinous interest.
[Sidenote: =Financial mismanagement.=] There was no check upon
peculation, no system of accounts, no thought of economy. France, like
a happy-go-lucky spendthrift in the hands of the Jews, was drifting
aimlessly into bankruptcy without even having money at command. Colbert
determined on severe measures. His experience in Mazarin’s household
had taught him how fortunes are made, and what sort of consideration
was due to those who became rich by lending money to the state.
[Sidenote: =Remedial measures of Colbert.=] At one stroke he
repudiated the worst of the loans raised by Fouquet, and diminished
the interest payable on those which he acknowledged. Having thus
reduced the burden of the debt to reasonable proportions he proceeded
to deal with the collection of the taxes. He remitted the longstanding
arrears of _taille_, forced the tax-gatherers to render accounts,
took proceedings against the worst of the peculators, and made them
disgorge their stolen gains. Order was restored in the administration
as if by magic. Every penny of expense was carefully considered,
duly authorised, and properly accounted for. Intendants were again
appointed to superintend the farmers of revenue, the _taille_ was
reassessed, the claims for exemption inquired into, the receipt-books
duly audited and checked. By these means he procured sufficient money
to pay the interest on the debt, and the expenses of the government
without increasing the taxes. In 1662, only a year after he became
Controller General, he was able to show a surplus of 45,000,000 of
francs without having increased the financial burdens on a single
honest man.
But Colbert was not content with merely restoring order in the
financial administration. It was not sufficient in his eyes merely
to take care that the receipts should exceed the expenditure, and
that opportunities for peculation should be reduced to a minimum.
[Sidenote: =Principles of his financial policy.=] He was one of
the first of ministers to realise how intimately the greatness and
prosperity of a nation are bound up with a good financial system,
to trace the wonderful effect in developing the national wealth and
promoting the national happiness, produced by a system of taxation
which carefully adjusts the financial burden to the shoulders of those
best able to bear it. Ministers of finance before Colbert’s time had
looked upon taxation solely from the point of view of the government,
had taxed those things upon which it was most easy to levy taxes, and
had levied the taxes in the way which ensured to the government a
certain income with very little trouble, quite regardless of the effect
of the system upon the tax-payer. Colbert on the contrary saw that the
secret of a good revenue lay not in the ease with which the tax was
collected, but in the ease with which it was paid. The interest of the
government and of the tax-payer were identical not antagonistic, and
the more the government could consult the convenience of the tax-payer,
the more the tax-payer would be able to afford for the convenience
of government. A good finance minister therefore would not content
himself with restoring order in the collection of taxes, and economy
in the disbursements of the treasury, but must apply himself to far
greater and more difficult problems, must study how to increase the
resources of the country to their utmost capacity, and how to adjust
the necessary taxation so as to interfere as little as possible with
their development.
[Sidenote: =Character of his protective system.=]
In the answer to these two questions lies the whole secret of
scientific finance. Colbert was the first finance minister to attempt
to give a scientific answer to them, that is, an answer based upon
reasoned principle. The reasoned principles adopted by Colbert have
been in the main the principles acted upon by most civilised countries
from this day to our own. They are principles which underlie the
economical system known as Protection, and are the application of the
theory of national sovereignty to economical subjects. The seventeenth
century, as we have seen, was essentially governed in all political
thought by the theory of the solidarity of nations under their kings.
All Europe was coalescing into territorial entities under their
respective sovereigns. Every such territorial entity guarded itself off
from its neighbours by the acquisition of natural frontiers, and by
the equipment of a professional army, and emphasised its individuality
by its concentration under its king and by the representation of its
king and his interests diplomatically at other courts. The idea of
a Europe united through the Christian brotherhood of man had passed
away. The idea of a Europe united through the cosmopolitan brotherhood
of man had not yet come. Between those two theories of brotherhood,
men were content to relapse practically into a condition of enmity,
and were engaged in building barriers against their neighbours, in
developing their own strength as much as possible, and in preventing
their neighbours from developing theirs. The same principles governed
men’s conduct in economics as in politics. Economic independence was
considered just as important for a nation as political independence. To
be as strong and resourceful as possible within the territorial limits
of the kingdom, to be as independent as possible outside those limits
were the recognised objects of every statesman. In the eyes of Colbert
it was just as necessary for France that she should not depend upon
the foreigner for her bread, as that she should not owe him allegiance
for her land. He would have thought it as reckless a piece of criminal
folly to derive the food-supply of the nation from certain rivals and
possible enemies, as to intrust to them the defence of the frontier.
[Sidenote: =Encouragement of home trade and manufactures.=]
Following out these principles Colbert set before himself two great
objects, to promote within the limits of France itself the production
of wealth by all the means in the power of the government, and to
prevent the foreigner by the imposition of hostile tariffs from
underselling the home producer in any of the commodities necessary
to the national well-being. He endeavoured to abolish the provincial
customs and local dues which impeded the free circulation of trade
from French province to province, and actually succeeded in abolishing
them over three-fourths of the country, in spite of the most strenuous
local opposition. He improved roads and developed the canals which had
been begun by Sully into a great system of water communication. Of this
system the celebrated canal of Languedoc, between the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic, which has done so much to promote the prosperity
of France, was the most striking example. For more than a century it
remained without a rival. When at last other nations began to realise
the importance of quick and easy communication, French roads and canals
became the models upon which they worked, French engineering talent the
authority to which they appealed, and the Suez Canal in the present
day derives its ancestry from the canal of Languedoc and the genius
of Colbert. He encouraged manufactures of all sorts. Under his care
French lace, glass, tapestries, silks, and brocades, became the most
celebrated in the world. He introduced a more scientific system of
dealing with the state forests, promoted large breeding establishments
for horses, encouraged the formation of industrial and commercial
companies, assisted the founding of colonies, and protected the infant
colonial trade by the formation of an efficient navy. At the same time
he relieved the peasantry from the heaviest of the fiscal burdens
which oppressed them by reducing the _taille_ nearly a half, and
recouping the treasury by imposing indirect taxes, principally upon
articles of luxury which were paid by the consumer. He helped the
manufacturer by removing the export duties on articles manufactured at
home, while he imposed heavy import duties on similar articles imported
from abroad. [Sidenote: =Prohibition of corn exportation.=] There
was, however, one serious exception to this policy. So fearful was
he lest France should ever become dependent on other nations for her
bread, that he absolutely refused to allow corn to be exported under
any circumstances. The surplus corn produced by the rich corn fields
of France over and above the wants of the nation would if freely
exported have formed one of the most lucrative sources of the national
wealth, for France in the seventeenth century was the corn-growing
country of Europe, but Colbert deliberately deprived himself of this
source of revenue, and kept the French agriculturist poor, in order to
make food cheap and ensure a large surplus of corn in the country.
[Sidenote: =Condition of France after ten years of Colbert’s
government, 1671.=]
The result of this policy, taken as a whole, was undoubtedly most
beneficial to France, in spite of the exaggeration of Colbert’s
protective measures. In the ten years, from 1661–71, during which
time Colbert had a real control over the national finances, with
the exception of the court expenses, not only was the debt largely
reduced, peculation checked, and the taxation greatly lightened and
better distributed, but new and fertilising streams of prosperity were
tapped in the establishment of manufactures and the opening of means
of communication which no misgovernment could again wholly close. By
the year 1671, France had gained for herself under Louis XIV.,
through the abilities of Colbert, a position to which history does not
afford any exact parallel. United and concentrated far more thoroughly
than any other country, with the whole forces of the nation absolutely
at the control of the king, defended on all sides except one by a
clearly defined and well-fortified frontier, rich by the fertility of
her soil and the industry and frugality of her people, she was now
adding riches to riches by the establishment of manufactures and the
promotion of commercial enterprise. Her colonies were springing up in
every part of the globe, her navy was formidable enough to defend them
from attack, her army second to none in discipline and reputation. Her
people were prosperous, contented and obedient; her administrators
just, careful and honest; her system of administration pure, and based
upon principles which made the security and independence of the country
the first consideration.
[Sidenote: =Dangers of the protective system.=]
On the other hand it did not require much foresight to see that a
system of scientific finance which was based purely upon selfish
principles could not fail to lead to international complications.
If every nation of Europe were to construct for its own advantage a
hostile system of tariffs against other nations, excuses for war would
be endlessly multiplied. However self-sufficient a country may be there
must be many articles of convenience, if not of necessity, for which
it depends upon its neighbours. Let a nation increase its colonial
empire as much as possible, and keep its trade wholly to itself by
an elaborate code of navigation laws, even then international trade
will not die nor foreign smuggling be stopped. Protective duties and
prohibitive legislation have never yet succeeded in destroying the
commercial dependence of one civilised nation upon another. Nations
which wish to protect their own trade by tariffs can only do so by
constructing a system which shall be injurious to that of their
neighbours, and is sure to lead to smuggling and reprisals. In the
sixteenth century trade adventurers looked after themselves, and it
was rare for the home government to consider itself compromised by
high-handed acts of piracy committed by its subjects on the other side
of the world. But when it was the action of governments themselves
which led to collisions between their subjects, they were bound in
honour to defend their own system. Tariff reprisals were instituted,
and claims made of a right to punish foreign smugglers, and search
foreign ships for smuggled goods, which were certain before long to
lead to war in downright earnest. It has often been said that the
wars of the sixteenth century were wars of religion, but those of the
eighteenth century wars of tariffs. The Dutch war of 1672 is adduced
as the first great war of the latter class, which was the first great
war waged in Europe since the adoption of a scientific system of
protective duties by a first-class power. There is some exaggeration
in this statement, but it is undoubtedly true that, from the date of
the adoption of a protective system by France under the guidance of
Colbert, there is not an important war waged in Europe for a century
and a half in which considerations of tariffs and commerce do not
play a large part; and it may well be doubted whether the national
organisation of finance any more than the national organisation of
defence, though steps along the path of civilisation, have proved
movements towards the attainment of peace.
[Sidenote: =Contrast between Louis and Colbert.=]
By the time he had completed his first decade of personal rule
the administrative talents of his ministers and his own gift for
governing had indeed raised Louis to a pinnacle of glory and of
reputation far exceeding all other sovereigns of his time. His court
was the most splendid and the most polished in Europe. Round it were
gathered the genius of Turenne, the brilliance of Condé, the dignity
of Corneille, the wit of Molière, the finish of Boileau, the art of
Racine. From Italy Bernini brought his solid if too dramatic talent
for the embellishment of Paris, while the sweetness of Claude and
the breadth of Le Brun were called upon to minister to the greatness
of the greatest of European sovereigns. In sharp contrast to all
this magnificence and grace stood the minister without whom it could
not have existed. Dour, grim, and harsh, Colbert moved through the
world without a friend, a man to whom ambition was life, and business
pleasure. Scrupulously honest, severely conscientious, strictly just,
painfully accurate, sincerely religious, he was wanting in humanity. He
was absolutely without heart and without sympathy. A man of religion,
he angered the clergy by trying to reduce the number of ‘religious’
because they did not make wealth; a man of the people, he offended
the populace by reducing the number of holidays; a zealous Catholic,
he displeased the orthodox by the favour he extended to the Huguenot
craftsmen, while he made himself unpopular with the Huguenots because
he deserted them in the hour of their need, when the king turned
against them. A man of conscientious probity, he had no scruples in
directing the judges to convict strong and powerful prisoners who were
accused of crime, in order that the king’s galleys might be well
manned, and even prevented galley slaves who had served their time
from being set free if they were still useful for the king’s service.
Less and more than human no wonder that men felt instinctively that he
was their enemy, however great the blessings of good government which
he had conferred upon them, and followed his coffin to the grave with
execrations in 1683.
In that, however, they were grossly unjust. They were visiting upon
him their dislike of the increased war taxation of which he was the
mouthpiece not the author. [Sidenote: =The choice of policy before
Louis, 1671.=] In the year 1671 France stood at the parting of
the ways. On each side stretched far into the future a long vista of
glory and prosperity, but she had to choose between them. Through the
victories of Richelieu and of Mazarin, through the administration of
Colbert, through the government of Louis, France stood at the head
of the countries of Europe in absolute security, without a rival
who wished to attack her, without an enemy whose attack she might
justly fear. [Sidenote: =Commercial supremacy open to France.=]
Entrenched within the borders of a frontier easily defensible by the
genius of a Vauban, she might sit free from all possible danger until
the floodgates of European warfare should reopen. Planting her colonies
in America, in Africa, in Madagascar, and among the islands of the
West, pushing out the operations of her trading companies to India and
the Spice Islands of the East, enjoying a pre-eminence through treaty
over all other European powers at the court of the Sultan and in the
trade of the Levant, on the point of gaining an influence, hitherto
unparallelled and undreamed of, over the vast expanse of the empire of
China through her Jesuit missionaries, she had but to stretch forth her
hand to seize the crown of colonial empire and of commercial supremacy,
which was already threatening to fall from the head of the Dutch. In
the middle of the seventeenth century she had no rivals to fear. The
day of Spain and Portugal was over. Holland, though vigorous, capable
and persevering, could not stand out for long against the pressure
of her greater neighbours. She had gained her unique and glorious
position through their weakness, she could not maintain herself against
them in their strength. Already she was stricken to the knees by the
English Navigation Act and the war of 1651, and had had to recognise
in England an equal in naval power and a rival in commerce. But the
day of England had not yet come. In the lucid intervals of a mad and
despicable policy, Charles II. did something to encourage the
American plantations, and to promote the operations of the East India
Company, but it was quite certain that the power of the state would
never be thrown into commercial or colonial competition with France,
as long as Louis retained in his own hands the means of rendering the
king independent of parliamentary control. It is moreover a significant
fact that the most important and permanent part of the English colonial
empire, which was built up in the eighteenth century, was not the
result of colonial enterprise but of war. Canada, the West Indies, the
Cape of Good Hope, India itself were the direct fruits of the long
wars with France, which in their origin and essence sprang from the
military and political ambition of Louis XIV. The rivalry with
France, which beginning in 1690 did not end till 1815, which produced
during that century and a quarter no less than seven distinct and
prolonged contests between the two nations, which gained for England
mainly at the expense of France a vast colonial empire, which lost
for her her only considerable plantations, was primarily and in its
essence a military and European rivalry. The wars were primarily and
essentially wars to check the military and political ascendency of
France over Europe, and to preserve the balance of power in Europe.
They sprang from the policy adopted by Louis XIV. in 1672,
when, no longer satisfied with pre-eminence in Europe, he deliberately
struck for supremacy over Europe. They followed from the determination
of William III. and the Whig party in England to prevent such
a consummation at all costs. Had Louis turned his ambition into other
directions, followed where the policy of Colbert pointed the way,
thrown the energies of his government and the genius of his people into
the path of colonial development and commercial supremacy, pushed his
fleets and his armies along the savage tracks where the cupidity of his
traders and the self-sacrifice of his missionaries had first marked the
road, he would have had nothing to fear from the impotent stubbornness
of the Dutch, or the venal indolence of England. And if a century or
half a century later England had awoke from her trance and put forth
her claims to dominion, a very different task would have awaited her.
She would have found an established organised power to conquer, not a
rival to outdo.
[Sidenote: =Preference of military supremacy by Louis.=]
But it was not to be. The traditions of France lay in the direction of
military conquest not of commercial supremacy. With an army carefully
trained and organised by Louvois, with generals at his command like
Turenne, Condé and Vauban, with all the traditions of the French
monarchy behind him, with all the longing for glory within him, which
was the very atmosphere he breathed, with his intimate knowledge of
European courts to assist him, what wonder is it that Louis determined
on the course which seemed to combine the certainty of success with the
maximum of glory? There was no nation in Europe that could resist him.
A combination of nations was alone to be feared, and what combination
could long resist the disintegrating effects of his diplomacy and
their own selfishness? What league had ever been a military success?
The resources of France seemed inexhaustible, her armies invincible,
her genius irresistible. In the distance but not so very far removed
from practical politics must come some day the great question of the
succession to the crown of Spain. When that question was ripe for
solution France must be in a position to solve it. Impelled alike by
the foresight of a statesman, the ambition of a king, and the flattery
of a court, Louis took the fatal step and plunged his country into a
century and a half of incessant war. With singular ease he had made
himself master of France, he now determined to be master of Europe too.