Colbert labored to increase the receipts; the new imposts excited insurrections in Angoumois, in Guyenne, in Brittany. Bordeaux rose in 1695 with shouts of “Hurrah! for the king without gabel.” Marshal d’Albret ventured into the streets in the district of St. Michel; he was accosted by one of the ringleaders. “Well, my friend,” said the marshal, “with whom is thy business? Dost wish to speak to me?” “Yes,” replied the townsman, “I am deputed by the people of St. Michel to tell you that they are good servants of the king, but that they do not mean to have any gabel, or marks on pewter or tobacco, or stamped papers, or yreffe d’arbitrage (arbitration-clerk’s fee).” It was not until a year afterwards that the taxes could be established in Gascony; troops had to be sent to Rennes to impose the stamp-tax upon the Bretons. “Soldiers are more likely to be wanted in Lower Brittany than in any other spot,” said a letter to Colbert from the lieutenant general, M. de Lavardin; “it is a rough and wild country, which breeds inhabitants who resemble it. They understand French but slightly, and reason not much better. The Parliament is at the back of all this.” Riots were frequent, and were put down with great severity. “The poor Low-Bretons collect by forty or fifty in the fields,” writes Madame de Sevigne on the 24th of September, 1675: “as soon as they see soldiers, they throw themselves on their knees, saying, Mea culpa! all the French they know. . . .”
“The severities are abating,” she adds on the 3d of November: “after the hangings there will be no more hanging.” All these fresh imposts, which had cost so much suffering and severity, brought in but two millions five hundred thousand livres at Colbert’s death. The indirect taxes, which were at that time called fermes generales (farmings-general), amounted to thirty-seven millions during the first two years of Colbert’s administration, and rose to sixty-four millions at the time of his death. “I should be apprehensive of going too far, and that the prodigious augmentations of the fermes (farmings) would be very burdensome to the people,” wrote Louis XIV. in 1680. The expenses of recovering the taxes, which had but lately led to great abuses, were diminished by half. “The bailiffs generally, and especially those who are set over the recovery of talliages, are such terrible brutes that, by way of exterminating a good number of these, you could not do anything more worthy of you than suppress those,” wrote Colbert to the criminal magistrate of Orleans. “I am at this moment promoting two suits against the collectors of talliages, in which I expect at present to get ten thousand crowns’ damages, without counting another against an assessor’s officer, who wounded one Grimault, the which had one of his daughters killed before his eyes, his wife, another of his daughters, and his female servant wounded with swords and sticks, the writ of distrainment being executed whilst the poor creature was being buried.” The bailiffs were suppressed, and the king’s justice was let loose not only against the fiscal officers who abused their power, but also against tyrannical nobles. Masters of requests and members of the Parliament of Paris went to Auvergne and Velay and held temporary courts of justice, which were called grands jours. Several lords were found guilty; Sieur de la Mothe actually died upon the scaffold for having unjustly despoiled and maltreated the people on his estates. “He was not one of the worst,” says Flechier, in his Journal des Grands Jours d’Auvergne. The Duke of Bouillon, governor of the province, had too long favored the guilty. “I resolved,” says the king in his Memoires, “to prevent the people from being subjected to thousands and thousands of tyrants, instead of one lawful king, whose indulgence alone it is that causes all this disorder.” The puissance of the provincial governors, already curtailed by Richelieu, suffered from fresh attacks under Louis XIV. Everywhere the power passed into the hands of the superintendents, themselves subjected in their turn to inspection by the masters of requests. “Acting on the information I had that in many provinces the people were plagued by certain folks who abused their title of governors in order to make unjust requisitions,” says the king in his Memoires, “I posted men in all quarters for the express purpose of keeping myself more surely informed of such exactions, in order to punish them as they deserved.” Order was restored in all parts of France. “The Auvergnats,” said a letter to Colbert from President de Novion, “never knew so certainly that they had a king as they do now.”
“A useless banquet at a cost of a thousand crowns causes me incredible pain,” said Colbert to Louis XIV., “and yet, when it is a question of millions of gold for Poland, I would sell all my property, I would pawn my wife and children, and I would go afoot all my life to provide for it if necessary. Your Majesty, if it please you, will forgive me this little transport. I begin to doubt whether the liberty I take is agreeable to your Majesty; it has seemed to me that you were beginning to prefer your pleasures and your diversions to everything else; at the very time when your Majesty told me at St. Germain that the morsel must be taken from one’s mouth to provide for the increment of the naval armament, you spent two hundred thousand livres down for a trip to Versailles, to wit, thirteen thousand pistoles for your gambling expenses and the queen’s, and fifty thousand livres for extraordinary banquets; you have likewise so intermingled our diversions, with the war on land that it is difficult to separate the two, and, if your Majesty will be graciously pleased to examine in detail the amount of useless expenditure you have incurred, you will plainly see that, if it were all deducted, you would not be reduced to your present necessity. The right thing to do, sir, is to grudge five sous for unnecessary things, and to throw millions about when it is for your glory.”
Colbert knew, in fact, how to “throw millions about” when it was for endowing France with new manufactures and industries. “One of the most important works of peace,” he used to say, “is the re-establishment of every kind of trade in this kingdom, and to put it in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for the things necessary for the use and comfort of the subjects.” “We have no need of anybody, and our neighbors have need of us;” such was the maxim laid down in a document of that date, which has often been attributed to Colbert, and which he certainly put incessantly into practice. The cloth manufactures were dying out, they received encouragement; a Protestant Hollander, Van Robais, attracted over to Abbeville by Colbert, there introduced the making of fine cloths; at Beauvais and in the Gobelins establishment at Paris, under the direction of the great painter Lebrun, the French tapestries soon threw into the shade the reputation of the tapestries of Flanders; Venice had to yield up her secrets and her workmen for the glass manufactories of St. Gobain and Tourlaville. The great lords and ladies were obliged to give up the Venetian point with which their dresses had been trimmed; the importation of it was forbidden, and lace manufactories were everywhere established in France; there was even a strike amongst the women at Alencon against the new lace which it was desired to force them to make. “There are more than eighty thousand persons working at lace in Alencon, Seez, Argentan, Falaise, and the circumjacent parishes,” said a letter to Colbert from the superintendent of Alencon, “and I can assure you, my lord, that it is manna and a blessing from heaven over all this district, where even little children of seven years of age find means of earning a livelihood; the little shepherd-girls from the fields work, like the rest, at it; they say that they will never be able to make such fine point as this, and that one wants to take away their bread and their means of paying their talliage.” Point d’Alencon won the battle, and the making of lace spread all over Normandy. Manufactures of soap, tin, arms, silk, gave work to a multitude of laborers; the home trade of France at the same time received development; the bad state of the roads was “a dreadful hinderance to traffic;” Colbert ordered them to be every where improved. “The superintendents have done wonders, and we are never tired of singing their praises,” writes, Madame de Sevigne to her daughter during one of her trips; “it is quite extraordinary what beautiful roads there are; there is not a single moment’s stoppage; there are malls and walks everywhere.” The magnificent canal of Languedoc, due to the generous initiative of Riquet, united the Ocean to the Mediterranean; the canal of Orleans completed the canal of Briare, commenced by Henry IV. The inland custom-houses which shackled the traffic between province and province were suppressed at divers points; many provinces demurred to the admission of this innovation, declaring that, to set their affairs right, “there was need of nothing but order, order, order.” Colbert also wanted order, but his views were higher and broader than those of Breton or Gascon merchants; in spite of his desire to “put the kingdom in a position to do without having recourse to foreigners for things necessary for the use and comfort of the French,” he had too lofty and too judicious a mind to neglect the extension of trade; like Richelieu, he was for founding great trading companies; he had five, for the East and West Indies, the Levant, the North, and Africa; just as with Richelieu, they were with difficulty established, and lasted but a little while; it was necessary to levy subscriptions on the members of the sovereign corporations; “M. de Bercy put down his name for a thousand livres,” says the journal of Oliver d’Ormesson. “M. de Colbert laughed at him, and said that it could not be for his pocket’s sake; and the end of it was, that he put down three thousand livres.” Colbert could not get over the mortifying success of the company of the Dutch Indies. “I cannot believe that they pay forty per cent.,” said he. It was with the Dutch that he most frequently had commercial difficulties. The United Provinces produced but little, and their merchant navy was exclusively engaged in the business of transport; the charge of fifty sous per ton on merchandise carried in foreign vessels caused so much ill humor amongst the Hollanders that it was partly the origin of their rupture with France and of the treaty of the Triple Alliance. Colbert made great efforts to develop the French navy, both the fighting and the merchant. “The sea-traffic of all the world,” he wrote in 1669 to M. de Pomponne, then ambassador to Holland, “is done with twenty thousand vessels or thereabouts. In the natural order of things, each nation should have its own share thereof in proportion to its power, population, and seaboard. The Hollanders have fifteen or sixteen thousand out of this number, and the French perhaps four or five hundred at most. The king is employing all sorts of means which he thinks useful in order to approach a little more nearly to the number his subjects ought naturally to have.” Colbert’s efforts were not useless; at his death, the maritime trade of France had developed itself, and French merchants were effectually protected at sea by ships of war. “It is necessary,” said Colbert in his instructions to Seignelay, “that my son should be as keenly alive to all the disorders that may occur in trade, and all the losses that may be incurred by every trader, as if they were his own.” In 1692 the royal navy numbered a hundred and eighty-six vessels; a hundred and sixty thousand sailors were down on the books; the works at the ports of Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort were in full activity; Louis XIV. was in a position to refuse the salute of the flag which the English had up to that time exacted in the Channel from all nations. “The king my brother and those of whom he takes counsel do not quite know me yet,” wrote the king to his ambassador in London, “when they adopt towards me a tone of haughtiness and a certain sturdiness which has a savor of menace. I know of no power under heaven that can make me move a step by that sort of way; evil may come to me, of course, but no sensation of fear. The King of England and his chancellor may, of course, see pretty well what my strength is, but they do not see my heart; I, who feel and know full well both one and the other, desire that, for sole reply to so haughty a declaration, they learn from your mouth that I neither seek nor ask for any accommodation in the matter of the flag, because I shall know quite well how to maintain my right whatever may happen. I intend before long to place my maritime forces on such a footing that the English shall consider it a favor if it be my good pleasure then to listen to modifications touching a right which is due to me more legitimately than to them.” Duquesne and Tourville, Duguay-Trouin and John Bart, permitted the king to make good on the seas such proud words. From 1685 to 1712 the French fleets could everywhere hold their own against the allied squadrons of England and Holland.
So many and such sustained efforts in all directions, so many vast projects and of so great promise, suited the mind of Louis XIV. as well as that of his minister. “I tell you what I think,” wrote Louis XIV. to Colbert in 1674; “but, after all, I end as I began, by placing myself entirely in your hands, being certain that you will do what is most advantageous for my service.” Colbert’s zeal for his master’s service merited this confidence. “O,” he exclaimed one day, “that I could render this country happy, and that, far from the court, without favor, without influence, the grass might grow in my very courts!”
Louis XIV. was the victim of three passions which hampered and in the long-run destroyed the accord between king and minister: that for war, whetted and indulged by Louvois; that for kingly and courtly extravagance; and that for building and costly fancies. Colbert likewise loved “buildments” (les batiments), as the phrase then was; he urged the king to complete the Louvre, plans for which were requested of Bernini, who went to Paris for the purpose; after two years’ infructuous feelers and compliments, the Italian returned to Rome, and the work was intrusted to Perrault, whose plan for the beautiful colonnade still existing had always pleased Colbert. The completion of the castle of St. Germain, the works at Fontainebleau and at Chambord, the triumphal arches of St. Denis and St. Martin, the laying out of the Tuileries, the construction of the Observatory, and even that of the Palais des Invalides, which was Louvois’ idea, found the comptroller of the finances well disposed, if not eager.
