The Nobility Joins in Redistributional Play

During the reign of Louis XIV, competition for access to the spoils of government transformed the character of the French aristocracy. The great families of the realm had to establish residences in the capital or the court itself because the political and factional struggles between the king's courtiers often determined both major and minor economic decisions. Because seeking out royal patronage was more highly rewarded than staying in the provinces to oversee the local economy and local affairs, nobles moved to Paris and devoted themselves to competing for the unearned income handed out by the king. However, nobles needed to invest time and money to acquire the political information that would win them sinecures, posts in the Church, access to commercial or industrial patents of monopoly, or shares in tax farms (often using a false name or straw man).^[37] Like firms in the highly centralized nations of present-day Latin America, they had to move their offices to the capital at the expense of their provincial activ-

[36] Ibid., 120.

[37] A nobleman from Languedoc, for example, might use his connections at court to secure a royal monopoly to produce porcelain in Languedoc, but he would turn the actual management of the operation over to a local bourgeois. It should be noted that even the protection offered by such monopolies could not guarantee the industrial concerns of nobles against poor management and bankruptcy. Freedom from the discipline of the market often did as much harm as good.

ities.^[38] Once transformed into courtiers, the nobility directed much of their activities toward gaining shares in short-term loans to the Crown and trying to persuade the government that the projects of their clients were best suited to national priorities. One hidden cost the mercantile economy had to bear was the extravagant court and social life of Paris, which by the time of Louis XVI consumed almost 6 percent of the state's revenues and an equally significant, but difficult to measure, proportion of private revenues.^[39] The calculation scarcely captures the full economic costs of the competition for privilege.

Louis XIV's goal was to control the social success of aristocratic French families. Analyzing this process in Court Society, a classic of historical sociology, Norbert Elias writes:

It is possible, within the framework of such a social system, to control and direct the rise of certain families from the royal perspective, even as the king can within certain limits, control and direct their fall. Thus, he could slow or even prevent the impoverishment of an aristocratic family by personal favors; he could save it by the granting of an octroi at court or by a military or diplomatic appointment. He could give the family a gift of money in the form of a pension. The benevolence of the king is thus one of the most important opportunities of which noble families dispose in order to escape the vicious cycle provoked by their court related expenses.^[40]

The transformation of the nobility into revenue seekers marked the beginning of their alienation from the rest of society. Once the nobles had lost their role as provincial leaders, their remaining privileges came to seem gratuitous and earned the contempt of the peasantry and local bourgeois.

Whereas favoritism flourished in France, it aroused strong resentment in England and created political problems for the monarchy.^[41] The Stuarts' attempts to develop a system of awarding monopolies and sinecures to

[38] This need to locate in Paris applied to the arts as well as to industry. Musicians, playwrights, and artists similarly vied for the king's support. The provinces ceased to be centers of artistic or economic activity.

[39] The amount was 5.67 percent according to F. Braesch's recreation of the budget of 1788 reprinted in Florin Aftalion, L'Economie de la Révolution française (Paris: Hachette, 1987), 47.

[40] Norbert Elias, La Société de cour, trans. Pierre Kanntzer (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1974), 54.

[41] Consider the impeachment by Parliament of Charles I's favorite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham. One of the reasons Queen Elizabeth I was so successful as compared to James I and Charles I was that she made every effort to avoid favoring only one individual or group.

their favorites was one of the causes of the Civil War, which English historians sometimes describe as a conflict between the ins (those who benefited from royal favors) and the outs (those who did not). After the Restoration, Parliament attempted to limit the Crown's means of rewarding royal favorites: the granting of pensions and favors probably diminished, as did the royal share of the national budget. The purpose of governmental rewards and methods of bestowing them changed significantly from the Stuart model. Unlike the Stuarts, the Whig oligarchy employed patronage primarily to ensure political security, not fiscal survival. They did not, for example, grant monopolies in exchange for short-term fiscal assistance. The duke of Newcastle became infamous for his patronage; however, the recipients were members of Parliament or employees of the administration, not Crown favorites or moneylenders. The rise of Parliament made it more difficult for the Crown to offer favors to particular merchants or nobles. The policies of Parliament may have privileged the economic pursuits of the landed gentry as a class, but it did not reward individual gentlemen at the expense of their peers or individual ministerial families at the expense of the aristocracy more generally.

The venality of seventeenth-century ministers of the French Crown far surpassed that of their English counterparts. Richelieu became one of the wealthiest men in Europe serving the Crown, and Mazarin acquired a fortune without precedent in the history of the French monarchy.^[42] Mazarin abandoned management of the Crown's fiscal and financial resources to a hierarchy of relatives and cronies, and his venality was often invoked by those who led the Fronde in 1648. The political grievances underlying that rebellion have received much attention from historians, but Daniel Dessert asserts that it was not only a conflict over the exercise of political authority but also a reaction to what he calls the new "feudalism" of a state eager to enrich itself at its subjects' expense.^[43]

Colbert, who began his career as a personal agent of Mazarin's, continued the tradition of ministerial venality associated with his mentor, acquiring a fortune surpassed only by those of Richelieu and Mazarin.^[44] One

[42] See Joseph Bergin, Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and Daniel Dessert, "Pouvoir et finance au XVIII siècle: La Fortune du cardinal Mazarin," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 23 (1976): 161–81.

[43] Daniel Dessert, Louis XIV prend le pouvoir (Paris: Editions complexe, 1989), 33. Dessert speaks of the "extreme greed tainted by the abject baseness that Mazarin puts into his frantic quest for wealth, [which] explains in part the defensive postures of the 'Grands' confronted by an extremely hungry shark little inclined to share his sources of profit."

[44] Mazarin's fortune is estimated to have been 36 million livres, Richelieu's, 22 million livres, and Colbert's, 5.1 million livres. See Meyer, Colbert (Paris: Hachette, 1981), 317–18. See, too, Antoine-Jean-Baptiste Robert Auget de Montyon, Particularités et observations ... depuis 1660 jusqu'en 1791 (Paris: Le Normant, 1812), 38–40.

of Colbert's outstanding achievements as minister was the ability to hide personal gain under the cloak of service to the state. It was an illusion so well maintained that until very recently it has gone practically unchallenged by historians. Colbert's ministry began by purging the groups that could oppose his domination of the nation's financial system. Nicolas Fouquet, the previous finance minister, was denounced and imprisoned for initiating a system of clientelism, for creating a corps of parasites who consumed the nation's resources; he was accused of lèse-majesté for having usurped the Crown's authority. The kingdom's finances were turned over to Colbert's cronies, who were also awarded the management of the Crown's great economic enterprises: maritime commerce, the colonial trade, and the new state manufactures. Colbert's family and cronies constituted what Dessert has called the best-organized lobby in the history of the French monarchy. As Dessert explains, it was not Colbert who made his family but rather the family that made Colbert; it held on to power long after the death of Jean-Baptiste.^[45] The last ministry of Louis XIV's 54-year reign was that of Nicolas Desmaretz, Colbert's nephew, whose reputation for being unable to distinguish his private purse from that of the king was established long before he was appointed to the office of controller general. Desmaretz had been involved in a scheme for reminting the nation's money in which the gold and silver content of coins was reduced and he pocketed the difference. Nevertheless, his reputation did not prevent Desmaretz from becoming finance minister. Nor did the desperate economic condition of the nation during the War of the Spanish Succession prevent Desmaretz from adding to the fortune he had already illicitly acquired.^[46] Because Desmaretz also allowed his cronies to make considerable fortunes, he was often praised as a reliable business partner. Like Colbert, Desmaretz provided needed assurance to other investors by taking a share in a project. The participation of the controller general was needed to overcome information asymmetry and the threat of confiscation, which inhibited private sector investment.^[47]

[45] Dessert, Louis XIV prend le pouvoir, 124.

[46] See Montyon's account of Desmaretz's ministry (Particularités, 88–90). See also M. le Chevalier Hennet, Théorie du crédit public (Paris, 1816), 157.

[47] During the last years of Louis XV's reign, power was effectively exercised "not by a monarch in decline; it was in the hands of two ministerial families—the Colberts and the Phelypeaux [Pontchartrain]," comments Claude-Frédéric Lévy, who has conducted the most extensive study of contemporary French business (Capitalistes et pouvoir, 2:10).