The Financial Decline of a Great Power War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France

by Rowlands, Guy

• ISBN13: 9780199585076
• ISBN10: 0199585075
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) Louis XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and expenditure led the government into a series of desperate expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments, were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover, through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century France.

Author Biography

Guy Rowlands is Director of the Centre for French History and Culture and a Lecturer in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV. Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661-1701 (2002), which was co-winner of the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize (2003). Prior to his appointment at St Andrews he held teaching and research positions at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, and Durham. His research interests span western European history between 1660 and 1800, with particular focus upon politics, war, and finance. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2007-08) and a Senior Research Fellow of the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust (2010-11).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. x
A Note on Monetary Circulation in Louis XIV's France	p. xii
Glossary	p. xv
The Treasurers General of the Extraordinaire des Guerres: Years on Duty, 1688-1715	p. xviii
General Introduction	p. 1
The Strategic Management of War and the Financial Chain of Command
Introduction	p. 19
Geostrategy, International Politics, and the Burden of War, 1688-1714	p. 20
The King, His Ministers, and the Direction of Financial Policy	p. 31
Raising Money, Finding Money, Making Money: Sourcing Revenue in an Age of Crisis
Introduction	p. 53
Taxing to the Hilt? Structural Weakness and Falling Revenues	p. 57
Borrowing to the Limit	p. 72
Manipulating the Coinage	p. 90
Paper Money and Absolute Monarchy	p. 108
The Degeneration of Military Funding and the Rising Costs of War
Introduction	p. 131
The Treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres in the Era of the Spanish Succession	p. 133
The Crisis of Spending and Appropriations in Louis XIV's Personal Rule	p. 157
The Overdraft of War: Short-Term Debt and Military Finance	p. 176
Rent-Seeking in the Military Paymaster World	p. 199
Conclusion	p. 228
Select Bibliography	p. 240
Index	p. 247
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