A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State by John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter (review)

A welcome addition to the growing corpus of books on the history of information in early modern Europe, A World of Paper by the late John Rule and his former student Ben Trotter elegantly expands our understanding of diplomacy during the reign of the Sun King. The authors ask new questions of documents in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and draw on a vast amount of scholarship on bureaucracy. Rule and Trotter use the methods of scholars like Eric Ash, James Cortada, Jacob Soll, and Cornelia Vismann to bring the study of information within the purview of diplomacy.

Questioning just what is “modern” about bureaucracy with the help of contingency theory, the authors analyze Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy’s foreign affairs department during the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign to show both that this ministry was highly specialized and organized by 1715 and that this system is not so different from bureaucracies of our time. The idea of strict barriers between patrimonial and bureaucratic systems already questioned by many scholars (esp. Peter Burke) is shown to be even more problematic in this close study of one of Louis XIV’s major ministries. Moving away from Weber’s idea of bureaucracy as a machine, the authors emphasize complex human activity and changeable, but sometimes routinized task-based work, as the driving forces in Torcy’s department. Throughout the work the authors embrace contingency theory, which posits that organizational effectiveness reaches its pinnacle when structures are specialized to match the needs and size of the organization. They adopt this theory as a means of introducing flexibility in bureaucracy studies so as to avoid using evidence about the period between 1661 and 1715 as “an index of modernity” (p. 30).

The book is a long one, and almost half of the printed pages are dedicated to comprehensive notes. The text could have been split into multiple monographs (a biography of Torcy, a prosopography of the commis, and a study of the foreign ministry’s portfolio) yet as a whole it is a testament to the life work of Rule. It is premised on the idea that administrative history should not judge the past by a Weberian “idealized rationality” but rather focus on the “actual workings of power” (p. 32). For Rule (1929–2013), the book is the culmination of decades of work, but it is also a publication that reflects Trotter’s contributions and research (pp. xiv-xv). Rule and Trotter carefully map out the history of the foreign office under Louis XIV as a bureaucracy in motion, one that depended on unique, skilled individuals as much as it was shaped by the institutional, social, and economic structures of the regime.

The title of the book refers to the great waves of paperwork that streamed into and out of the foreign secretary’s chambers at Versailles, or later in Paris at Torcy’s private residence. Discussion of the ministry’s materiality and its inner workings animate this book even more so than the professional biographies of the clerks or ambassadors working under Torcy or his father Croissy. The “things” of ministers, clerks, and diplomats — their mail, horses, pens, gifts, and residences — open up a new appreciation for just how an ancien régime ministry functioned from day to day. Things move, and so Rule and Trotter describe the movements inherent in diplomacy, explaining the importance of equerries and the relais de poste, not to mention the complications of a mobile court. In the vein of Jacob Soll’s book on Torcy’s uncle, the authors paint a more precise picture of operations as they took place within the corridors of Versailles. This focus on the places where diplomatic decisions were made and registers were filled out brings...