capacity for taking trouble. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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!
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. 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. 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. 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.