Pierre Goubert is a prominent member of the Annales School of History that made its appearance in 1929-30 with the publication of the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. As you read, pay particular attention to what arguments Goubert makes regarding Louis XIV and France and what they may say about the type of history favored by the Annales School historians.

Chapter 2: ECONOMY

Looked at objectively, France at this period could be described very simply as a rich and varied agricultural country, extremely backward technically, with large but unexploited national resources.

No amount of national bias, whether unconscious or deliberate, on the part of admirers of the France of the Grand Siècle, can disguise the basic fact that throughout the 17thand even a good deal of the 18th centuries the Dutch were the dominant economic power in the world. The Bank of Amsterdam, an impressive copy of the banks of Venice and Genoa, of unparalleled size  and stability, sustained and directed the economy of the United Provinces even through its worst moments. The Amsterdam stock exchange was the Wall Street of the 17th century. Prices were quoted there for most of the world’s goods and printed and circulated weekly to the major European centres to form the basis of current world prices. Antwerp and the southern banks grew gradually sleepier as the bulk of international trade moved away to carry on its business at Amsterdam. Before long Parisian bills of exchange would find their way to Amsterdam, in particular to the famous private banking concern of the Pels family. The stability of the florin became a legend, and with good reason. Without paying too much attention to the jealous exaggerations of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, it may be said that the Dutch fleet of anything from eight to nine thousand vessels represented — with the exception of China — at least half of the world’s shipping. This busy, enterprising fleet, kept at the peak of condition by continual rebuilding, was constantly at sea carrying Nordic herrings, salt from Brittany and Portugal, wine from the Loire and Aquitaine, grain, flax, timber and tar from Muscovy and the Scandinavian countries, as well as all the treasures of the Indies: ebony, sugar, molasses and tobacco. The ships and sailors on which Dutch supremacy was based were to be met with everywhere in French ports and along her navigable rivers, filling the great gap left by the absence of an adequate merchant service.

Amsterdam was the market and warehouse of the world. French merchants and politicians went there for everything from Baltic corn in time of famine, Swedish artillery and gunpowder from Liege in time of war, to Lenten herrings and wool from Spain. And last but not least, the city existed for the moneylenders…  The additional fact that these achievements were the work of a bourgeois and nominally Calvinist republic, even though the majority of the inhabitants were in fact Catholics, made Dutch supremacy in these fields a natural object for Colbert’s envy and spite, as well as a source of irritation to King Louis. Anti-Dutch policies were a basic and inevitable part of the personal rule on which Louis now embarked, superbly allied to a somewhat naive attempt to remould the French economy on Dutch lines.

Needless to say, there was a vast gulf between the small, well-organized merchant republic and the great but still almost medieval kingdom…  Of what did the wealth of France consist? Not in her brilliantly successful business enterprises such as the New England or India Companies, the armaments factories of the Bishop of Liege or the Swedish/Dutch canon of Louis de Geer and Gustavus Adolphus. Nor had she anything to compare with American silver being unloaded at Seville or the world-wide trade of the Dutch. Her wealth lay simply in the happy combination of a fertile and varied land and a large, spirited and able population.

France at this time was a sprawling agricultural country in which the practical problems facing the bulk of the peasant population were threefold: to scrape a living, pay their taxes, tithes and other local and seigneurial dues and if possible, enlarge their holdings and improve the social status of their families. Obviously, this triple objective was rarely attained, but the means employed in the effort to achieve it may well explain the wealth of France…

This was a strong but still traditional economy, thrifty and careful with little use for the adventure on the high seas but instead firmly rooted in the generous earth like a centuries-old oak tree. It was varied, cautious and thriving and, with all its faults, drawbacks and unsatisfactoriness, ultimately capable of bearing, groaning but unflinching, not only a formidable and never-ending burden of social and political parasites but also whatever storms might blow from any quarter, and it had proved as much over a quarter of a century. It rested entirely on the hard, unceasing, intelligent and multifarious labours of a people who, in numbers and virtues, deserved to be the foremost in Europe…

Society, like the State and the economy rested on the most numerous, dependent and eminently productive section of the community: the peasantry. The peasants were less a social class than a complex group. What they had in common was their habitat, their occupations, the framework of dependency within which they were held and the fact of enabling the three real estates of the realm to live and prosper.

chapter 5: THE YOUNG KING IN QUEST OF GLORY

When in 1670 the king looked back on his early days, he saw the quest for ‘reputation’ as the supreme goal of all his acts, past, present and certainly future as well; reputation at home, by reducing his kingdom to obedience and doing away with the ‘chaos’ which reigned there; reputation among the Christian Princes of Europe (with the rest he was not concerned), at that time his peaceful neighbors, none of whom made any great impression on him. But ‘they did not know him yet’ and he burned to confront them ‘at the head of his armies’. At twenty-two years old [1661, when Louis took control of his government], ‘preferring in his heart, a high reputation above all things, even life itself’, the king was very conscious that he would have to ‘render an account of all his actions to the whole world and to all times’. Already he was preparing himself to do so. But what qualities had he in himself to ensure his success in achieving ‘that dominant and ruling passion of kings … their own advancement, greatness and glory’?

To begin with there was his magnificence health… Of a far more bookish education, the lessons which seem to have struck in his mind were chiefly those he learned from a Spaniard and an Italian, and even more those of the tempestuous yers of his minority. From his mother, from whom he inherited the many Spanish traits in his character — there was a good deal of Philip II in Louis XIV with his fondness for secrecy, his concentration on his work, his taste for splendor and formality — he seems to have acquired a regular and meticulous devotion in the exercise of his faith and that cold, exquisite courtesy which never deserted him. From his godfather, the cardinal [Mazarin], who had finally admitted him as a silent spectator to the Council, he had learned to know Europe, with all its intrigues, the details of its princely marriages and the consciences that were for sale.

Hustled out of Paris at the age of ten and shuttled from one town to the next in the midst of wars, rebellions, dangers and epidemics of disease, he had learned the hard way that one one, or hardly anyone, was consistently loyal, not even an archbishop or the first prince of the blood. In later years he could urge his son to forgive those who injured him, but for all that he never forgot that ‘in wise and able kings, resentment and anger towards their subjects is only prudence and justice’ and that ‘a little harshness was the greatest kindness I could do my subjects’. None were above suspicion… This universal distrust, born of experience, was the root of his reserve, of his utter self-command in affairs of state, and of his passion for secrecy which he tried to pass on to the dauphin.

Given the political, social and judicial climate in which he lived, Louis could not help but identify himself with France and believe, as Bossuet wrote later, that ‘he was the whole State, and the will of all the people was locked in his’. He prepared to instruct his grandson in the axiom that ‘The body of the nation resides not in France. It dwells wholly in the person of the King’…

Surrounded by his courtiers, his mistresses, his academicians and his polishers, his musicians and his bronzeworkers, his savants and engravers, patronizing some and pensioning others so long as they pleased him or had taste, the young king was unlike all who had gone before him — nec pluribus impar — and shone like the sun which he took as his emblem in 1662. It was his good fortune in the early years of his reign to have about him the best legacy bequeathed to him by Mazarin, a group of men of talent or even genius. It is to his own credit that he kept them. Upon examination it is these twelve years that contained all that was best in the age of Louis XIV. After this, the wave of creativity declined, building was not so widespread, pensions, subsidies and patronage dropped off and virtually disappeared and writers moved gradually into another sphere.

from ‘Tartuffe’ by Molière. First performed at Versailles in 1664.

For all its naivety and its inevitable failures, there are two things about this grand determination to take the kingdom firmly in hand which can never be too strongly emphasized. The first is that it was all thought out, decided, and where possible put into practice in the space of ten years. These were the years that Colbert was in power and generally supported the king. They were also years during which the country was more often at peace than at war, when national finances were once more on an even keel and people had time to think and make plans. After 1672, the most important thing was to keep the machine running which amounted basically to supplying war.

The second thing is how incredibly few people were actually responsible for it…  But there were some, Colbert among them, who dreamed of something far beyond simply taking the country in hand. They had visions of a France wholly unified under the monarchy, powerful by land and sea, rich in soldiers, merchants, artists and in far-flung provinces. They saw a kind of Augustan Rome transposed in the 17th century with all the Indies for Empire and all kings turned into good Catholics, gathered respectfully about King Louis’ throne. Some of these visions of new France actually took shape. Others remained a dream.