A history of commerce

by Clive Day

The country had hardly recovered from this war (which ended in 1453), when it was again disturbed, this time by a series of civil wars between Protestants and Catholics, attended by the same unfortunate economic effects. The religious conflict was finally closed by a settlement which was even more disastrous; the French Protestants, to the number of nearly half a million and making up the most valuable industrial element in the population, were expelled from France as the Jews and Moriscoes had been expelled from Spain. The loss to France can be measured by the gain of other countries; the establishment and development of important manufactures can be traced in each of three countries, England, Prussia, and the Netherlands, to the influx of the Huguenot refugees.

267. Effect of the absolute monarchy on French development.—France secured finally freedom from foreign invasion and from internal dissension, but at a terrible cost. The whole power of the state was vested in the hands of the king. The stockholders lost all power to direct the concerns of the company. Rarely this power was exercised by a king both wise and strong, like Henry IV. During the long reign of Louis XIV it was wielded by a king who was strong but who was not wise; who wasted the rich resources of his country in fruitless wars, while he neglected the opportunities for reforms at home and for commercial expansion abroad. Too often the rule was held only in name by the king, but in fact by the royal favorites, worthless adventurers who by pleasing the taste of the sovereign gained the power to direct as they chose the policy of this great country. This evil is especially marked in the eighteenth century, when England was prepared to take advantage of every mistake of France, in building up her world power.

268. Failure to reform conditions inherited from the feudal period.—The absolute monarchy played a vital part in the history of French commerce, not only by its disregard of commercial interests abroad, but by its lack of business sense in home affairs. As the details will appear in the following pages it is necessary here to call attention only to some general points. The kings did not complete the unification of the country by breaking down the feudal toll barriers, of which some remained until the Revolution. They encouraged the separation of classes, just as they allowed the separation of sections; the French were split into groups, mutually jealous and hostile, which lacked the feeling of common interest, and were unable to cooperate. The most serious distinction between classes was in regard to taxation. Nobles and clergy were granted privileges, often of a kind that hindered production, while they paid very little to the public treasury. The productive classes, on the other hand, the business men and laborers, bore nearly the whole burden. The weight of this burden was tremendous, for the machinery of government had become more and more complicated and more and more inefficient with the passage of time, so that the government had to demand a great deal from the taxpayers to accomplish very little in the public service. An idea of the condition in the eighteenth century can be gathered from the fact that the peasant is estimated to have paid from one half to four fifths of his gross income to a government which gave him almost nothing in return.

269. Bloom of French commerce in the fifteenth century as shown in the business of Jacques Cœur.—Returning now from this political survey to the history of commerce proper, we find before the year 1500 one name standing out prominently in the history of French commerce, that of Jacques Cœur, a merchant of Bourges. A contemporary says of him: “His ships carried to the East the cloths and merchandise of the kingdom. On their return they carried back from Egypt and the Levant different silk stuffs, and all kinds of spices. On their arrival in France some of these ships ascended the Rhone, while others went to supply Catalonia and the neighboring provinces, competing in this way with the Genoese and the Catalonians in a branch of trade that up to that time they alone had exploited.” At the height of his fortunes, about 1450, he had a silk factory in Florence, did business with England and thought of establishing an office in Flanders also. The work of Cœur survived him, and French commerce developed rapidly in the intervals of peace following. Great interest was felt in France in the explorations of the sixteenth century, and though the French were behind the Spanish and Portuguese in the work, they led the English and Dutch, and the names of Verrazano (an Italian in the French service) and Cartier testify to their energy.

270. The bulk of French commerce still with nearby countries.—France was still unprepared, however, to engage extensively in oceanic commerce. The chief part of its trade in the sixteenth century was with its immediate neighbors; it found the best market for its exports in Spain, and it sought a large part of its imports in Italy. French military expeditions to Italy about 1500 had far more effect at the time than the discovery of the New World or of the sea route to India; the Italians stimulated and gratified new tastes and introduced new methods in business. The best days of the Levant trade had passed away, but the number of French ships engaged in it increased rapidly, until the outbreak of the religious wars at home. France shared with Venice the profits of its trade, and was the first of the European states to secure from the Sultan at Constantinople a “capitulation” in the modern form, defining the condition on which foreigners could trade.

271. Decline during the period of the religious wars.—The promising development was checked by the religious wars of the later sixteenth century; France must endure a period of anarchy at home and powerlessness abroad. French commerce declined at its source, as production languished; and was attacked abroad by competitors and by the pirates who infested the coasts. About 1600 the French merchant marine had almost disappeared from the Atlantic; voyages to foreign lands had ceased, and even the coasting trade had passed into the hands of the English, Flemish, and Dutch. Marseilles still maintained relations with the Levant, but the French merchants there were being mercilessly bled by Turkish governors, and were being rapidly driven out of the market by the English and Dutch. France seemed actually saved from ruin by the few years of peace and good government given by Henry IV and his minister Sully.

272. Recovery after 1600.—The first three quarters of the seventeenth century, until the disastrous foreign wars of Louis XIV, were on the whole a period of peace and progress. Under Henry IV taxes were low, the means of internal communication by land and water were restored and improved, and new industries were introduced. The revival of trade was shown in the prosperity of fairs. The great foreign minister, Richelieu, was interested mainly in questions of politics, and hampered the development of French resources by heavy taxes, but in some ways he continued the work of Henry IV. The English of this period called themselves “Kings of the Sea” and termed Richelieu a “fresh-water admiral”; French ships, afraid to refuse the English a salute and unwilling to accord it, sailed under the Dutch flag. Richelieu said, in the government newspaper, “France, bounded by two seas, can maintain herself only by sea power,” and began the construction of a navy which would give confidence to the merchant marine.

273. Founding of commercial companies, and colonial expansion.—The revival of French commerce was evidenced by the incorporation of companies designed to trade with distant parts of the world, and by the encouragement and growth of colonization. The list of commercial companies founded, 1599-1642, including reorganizations, amounted to twenty-two, including in its scope Canada, the West Indies, Guinea, the west coast of Africa, Madagascar, East India, and the Malay Archipelago (Java, etc.). The government accorded great privileges to the companies, and the royal influence was exerted in every way to help them; men were forced even by intimidation to invest in them, and nobles were allowed to participate without lowering the dignity of their order. The colonies were likewise pushed by the force of the government; emigration was encouraged and discharged soldiers and poor girls were sent out by the government to further the growth of population. The number of Europeans in Canada was perhaps 2,500 in 1660, and increased to 10,000 in the next twenty years; a considerable number of French settled also in various islands of the West Indies. France stood next to Spain as a colonial power, measuring merely by the area to which she could lay claim.

274. Reasons for the failure of these enterprises.—Most of these commercial and colonial enterprises were failures. They showed the characteristic faults of the time: inefficiency of organization, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of their task, and impatience in their attempts to solve the problems. They had special elements of weakness, moreover, in their rather artificial character, and in the fact that they carried with them abroad the class distinctions and prejudices of the home country. Still, the seventeenth century was for all nations a time of experiment in distant commerce and colonization; a large proportion of failures was natural, and the French had attained a sufficient measure of success before 1700 to have enabled them to enter the international competition of the eighteenth century with good prospects. Their prospects were blighted, and France lost its opportunity to become a “world-power” by the fault of the French political constitution, which put the interests of the people at the mercy of one man, the king.

275. Mistaken policy of Louis XIV.—The “Great Monarch,” Louis XIV, did not lack good advisers. The philosopher Leibnitz proposed, at this critical period in French history when the country could choose to be either a land or a sea power, that it should select the latter alternative, and base its greatness on control of the sea and of commerce. He said that France needed peace at home to permit an expansion of its power abroad, where the richest prizes of power were to be had; and he urged the occupation of Egypt, to give France the control of trade to the Levant and the far East. But Louis thought that the French frontier was too near to Paris and saw tempting morsels of territory on the other side of it; he found the arrogance of the Dutch galling to his pride; he wanted to raze the Pyrenees by putting a French prince on the Spanish throne. He engaged, therefore, in a series of continental wars continuing nearly fifty years, which returned little or no gain in Europe, and destroyed the power of France in the other continents. Louis’ policy prompted his biographer to a comment of sad significance, “The inhabitants of the several nations of Europe have scarce ever any interest in the wars of their sovereigns.”