Mark Potter - Corps and Clienteles: Public Finance and Political Change in France, 1688-1715

CORPS AND CLIENTELES

La grande despence me fait beaucoup de peine; mais il y en a de ncessaires

Great expenses cause me much pain, but there are those that cannot be avoided

(Louis XIV to Colbert, June 1683)

Corps and Clienteles

Public Finance and Political Change in France, 16881715

MARK POTTER

University of Wyoming, USA

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2019 by Routledge

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Mark Potter 2003

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-70925-6 (hbk)

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Do we need yet another book on French public finances in the seventeenth century? Franoise Bayard, William Beik, Richard Bonney, James Collins, Julian Dent, Daniel Dessert and Alain Gury have each covered this ground quite thoroughly, and because of their works our understanding of French finances in the Old Regime surpasses that of any other European country in the early modern era. Indeed, without the contributions of these historians, my work would not have been possible. I did not set out to revisit the findings of these scholars, nor, to be sure, was it ever my intention to reconstruct figures for the receipts and expenditures of the French crown. Instead, I seek here to fill an historiographical gap while charting some new ground in our understanding of the French absolutist state. The final decades of Louis XIVs reign have indeed been largely overlooked by historians of both French public finances and absolutist state development. In relying on the financial intermediation of privileged corps to pay for the costs of war, the French crown in this period embarked upon a political and financial experiment that, while short-lived in duration, affected the financial options and decisions of Louis XIVs successors through to the end of the Old Regime. It is thus from this vantage point that I am able ultimately to draw my conclusions regarding warfare and state development. My overriding interest in this work is to investigate how both historical and structural constraints interacted to shape the crowns options for financing war. It is that intersection of the historical and the structural, I argue, that guided political change in early modern France.

There are many to thank for lending help and support to this project, and my gratitude and appreciation extend far. Generous financial support provided by a Fulbright fellowship made possible the research that forms the foundation of this project. I was able to follow this up with further research funded by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Wyoming.

While in France, Alain Gury, Robert Descimon, Anette Smedley and Gilles Postel-Vinay all took time from their own responsibilities to lend valuable guidance to my research, addressing everything from the most mundane questions that I had to the more complicated matters of reading, digesting and analysing a mass of archival sources.

In the U.S., I have been fortunate to find the support and expertise of a number of experienced scholars. The first incarnation of this work came in the form of my Ph.D. dissertation, and at that stage the contributions of my dissertation codirectors, Robert Brenner and Geoffrey Symcox, were valuable and irreplaceable, and their intellectual influences remain notable throughout this present work. While their comments, suggestions, and probing questions were instrumental to producing a quality dissertation, equally important was the high level of intellectual rigor that they demanded of me from the very beginning of my graduate career.

Jean-Laurent Rosenthal has been instrumental throughout the life of this project. By demonstrating his confidence in me at a very early stage of my academic formation and agreeing to form a lasting research partnership that has run parallel to this project, Jean-Laurent has helped me to develop the experience and skills, not to mention the confidence, necessary to undertake the distinct body of research that went into this work. His influence, too, can be found throughout this study, but I should note that Chapter Six in particular would not have been possible without his generous intellectual and material support. Likewise, Phil Hoffman and Naomi Lamoreaux gave generously of their time to read drafts and provide comments on this project at various points throughout its life.

Since I turned to the occasionally arduous task of transforming the dissertation into this present monograph, several scholars and colleagues have helped tremendously in the completion of the project. Bill Beik, Gail Bossenga, Al Hamscher, John Hurt, Sharon Kettering and Julian Swann each provided feedback, encouragement and advice at one point or the other. Much of that interaction came at the indispensable annual meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies. Colleagues at the University of Wyoming who took part in the Colloquium on History, Culture and Society also provided useful comments on drafts of chapters.

My cohort of French historians who completed their graduate studies at roughly the same time as I and who, like I, have been confronting the challenges of establishing themselves within the profession have given me both moral and intellectual support, without which I would have arrived at this point in my career only with great difficulty. These include Megan Armstrong, Sara Beam, Michael Breen, Greg Brown, Sara Chapman, Steve Miller and David K. Smith.

Tom Gray at Ashgate Publishing deserves my gratitude for giving this project the chance to see the light of day from within the world of published books.

For many years, I have looked upon my brother Jim as a model of academic rigor and accomplishment, and it is to him that I dedicate this book.