When Louis XIV. died in 1715, after his reign of seventy-two years, he left the finances of France in a condition of inconceivable disorder. For fourteen years there had been an average annual deficit of more than fourteen millions of francs, to meet which the king had raised money by every paper device that had then been discovered. Having previously sold all the offices for which any pretext could be invented, he next sold annuities of all kinds, for one life, for two lives, for three lives, and in perpetuity. Then he issued all known varieties of promises to pay, from rentes perpétuelles to treasury-notes of a few francs, payable on demand. But there was one thing he did not do—reduce the expenditure of his enormous and extravagant court. In the midst of that deficit, when his ministers were at their wits' end to carry on the government from day to day, and half the lackeys of Paris held the depreciated royal paper, the old king ordered one more of those magnificent fêtes at Fontainebleau which had, as he thought, shed such lustre on his reign. The fête would cost four millions, the treasury was empty, and treasury-notes had fallen to thirty-five. While an anxious minister was meditating the situation, he chanced to see in his inner office two valets slyly scanning the papers on his desk, for the purpose, as he instantly conjectured, of getting news for the speculators. He conceived an idea. The next time those enterprising valets found themselves alone in the same cabinet, they were so happy as to discover on the desk the outlines of a royal lottery scheme for the purpose of paying off a certain class of treasury-notes. The news was soon felt in the street. Those notes mysteriously rose in a few days from thirty-five to eighty-five; and while they were at that point the minister, anticipating the Fiskian era, slipped upon the market thirty millions of the same notes. The king had his fête; and when next he borrowed money of his subjects, for every twenty-five francs of coin he was obliged to give a hundred-franc note.[18]
Two years after, the foolish old king died, leaving, besides a consolidated debt of bewildering magnitude, a floating debt, then due and overdue, of seven hundred and eighty-nine millions, equivalent, as M. Cochut computes, to about twice the amount in money of to-day. Coin had vanished; the royal paper was at twenty-five; the treasury was void; prices were distressingly high; some provinces refused to pay taxes; trade languished; there were vast numbers of workmen unemployed; and during the winter after the king's death a considerable number of persons died in Paris of cold and hunger. The only prosperous people were Government contractors, farmers of the revenue, brokers, and speculators in the king's paper; and these classes mocked the misery of their fellow-citizens by an ostentatious and tasteless profusion.
Island of Madhead.
"Picture of the very famous Island of Madhead. Situated in Share Sea, and inhabited by a multitude of all kinds of people, to which is given the general name of Shareholders." (Amsterdam, 1720.)
The natural successor of a king bigoted is a prince dissolute. The regent, who had to face this state of things on behalf of his nephew, Louis XV., a child of five, had at least the virtue and good sense to reject with indignant scorn the proposition made in his council by one member to declare France bankrupt and begin a new reign by opening a clean set of books. We, too, had our single repudiator, who fared no better than his French predecessor. But the regent's next measures were worthy of a prodigal. He called in the various kinds of public paper, and offered in exchange a new variety, called billets d'état, bearing interest at four per cent. But the public not responding to the call, the new bills fell to forty in twenty-four hours, and drew down all other public paper, until in a few days the royal promise to pay one hundred francs was worth twenty francs. The regent's coffers did not fill. That scarred veterans could not get their pensions paid was an evil which could be borne; but the regent had mistresses to appease!
Then he tried a system of squeezing the rich contractors and others of the vermin class who batten on a sick body-politic. As informers were to have half the product of the squeeze, an offended lackey had only to denounce his master, to get him tried on a charge of having made too much money. Woe to the plebeian who was convicted of this crime! Besides being despoiled of his property, Paris saw him, naked to the shirt, a rope round his neck, a penitential candle in his handcuffed hands, tied to a dirty cart and dragged to the pillory, carrying on his back a large label, "Plunderer of the People." The French pillory was a revolving platform, so that all the crowd had an equal chance to hurl mud and execration at the fixed and pallid face. Judge if there was not a making haste to compound with a government capable of such squeezing! There was also a mounting in hot haste to get out of such a France. One lucky merchant crossed the frontier, dressed as a peasant, driving a cart-load of straw, under which was a chest of gold. A train of fourteen carts loaded with barrels of wine was stopped, and in each barrel a keg of gold was found, which was emptied into the royal treasury.
The universal consternation and the utter paralysis of business which resulted from these violent spoliations may be imagined. Six thousand persons were tried, who confessed to the possession of twelve hundred millions of francs. The number of the condemned was four thousand four hundred and ten, and the sum extorted from them was, nominally, nearly four hundred millions, of which, however, less than one hundred millions reached the treasury. It was easy for a rich man to compound. A person condemned to disgorge twelve hundred thousand francs was visited by a "great lord." "Give me three hundred thousand francs," said the great lord, "and you won't be troubled for the rest." To which the merchant replied, "Really, my lord, you come too late, for I have already made a bargain with madame, your wife, for a hundred and fifty thousand." Thus the business of busy and frugal France was brought to a stand without relieving the Government. The royal coffers would not fill; the deficit widened; the royal paper still declined; the poor were hungry; and, oh, horror! the regent's mistresses pouted. The Government debased the coin. But that, too, proved an aggravation of the evil.
Such was that ancien régime which still has its admirers; such are the consequences of placing a great nation under the rule of the greatest fool in it; and such were the circumstances which gave the Scotch adventurer, John Law, his opportunity to madden and despoil France, so often a prey to the alien.