The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV's France by Guy Rowlands (review)

Not long after the end of the already costly Nine Years War (1688-97), Louis XIV took France into the financially crippling War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14). Only Great Britain's exit from the war in 1712 prevented 'logistical collapse and financial shutdown' in France (p. 231). The easy explanation of the financial problems is that there was not enough money coming in. A model of scholarship, erudition, and exposition, this book aims to dig deeper. Guy Rowlands examines the history of taxation, borrowing, and spending, and relates it specifically to the administration of the war effort. Though many potentially useful sources have long since disappeared, he has made full use of the royal papers on the military treasury, the army paymasters, and bankers. The key players in the story are what Rowlands, for convenience, calls the Finance Ministry with its Contrôleur général and the War Ministry with its Secretary of State for War and its own particular treasury for administering the finances of war, the Extraordinaire des guerres. The first two chapters (Part I) set the scene: the increasing cost of military supplies and the geographical overextension of the army; the government bodies and, in particular, Michel Chamillart, who was Contrôleur général (1699-1708) and also Secretary of State for War from 1701, along with Nicolas Desmaretz, who replaced him as Contrôleur général in 1708. The next four chapters (Part II) examine weaknesses in the financial system in general: difficulties in collecting tax, excessive borrowing, manipulating the coinage, and increasing use of varieties of promissory notes. The remaining four chapters (Part III) focus specifically on the financial administration of the war: the operation of the Extraordinaire des guerres, the methods for allocating revenue to expenditure, use of short-term debt, the systematic exploitation of opportunities for personal advantage by those involved in the system. The nature of the war imposed too many demands, and the government's serial mismanagement of its financial affairs ensured that they could not be adequately met. Chamillart was chaotic, and ill-equipped to deal with financiers: his simultaneous occupancy of two key roles was a catastrophe, redeemed to only some degree by his successor as Contrôleur général. A lexical analysis of Rowland's writing makes the grim reality of the story he tells very plain. The following words and phrases recur: 'chaos', 'failure', 'weak', 'poor', incompetent', 'hopeless', 'muddle', 'incontinence', 'worse', 'alas', 'hand-to-mouth', 'inadequate', 'crumble', 'collapse', 'mess', 'useless'. There is sufficient variety to sustain interest, and sufficient repetition to paint an unremittingly chilling picture of how a government can fail to take control of the activities of the financiers on whom it depends. In 1709 Desmaretz defined bankers as 'men who have no other object than the profit from their trade, often very illegitimate, and who are in the habit of sacrificing everything to their own interest' (p. 233). Ostensibly focused on the financing of the War of the Spanish Succession, this book has many ramifications.