Section 5: Economic Policy and Military/Foreign Policy

 

Louis XIV’s successes would have been impossible without the brilliant workaholic he appointed to oversee the economy–Jean Baptiste Colbert. Exposing massive corruption under his predecessor, Colbert clawed back millions from bankers and arms manufacturers who had stolen from the government with complete impunity. The government was still too weak to collect taxes directly, however. Instead, “tax farmers”--private corporations that used violence to squeeze revenue from the common people–gave the government a fixed portion of what they could collect and kept the rest for themselves. Colbert made sure that tax farmers had to bid competitively to win the right to collect from a particular province, thus greatly increasing the government’s percentage of total revenue collected.

In addition, the palace of Versailles (see Section 3) played a major role in the French economy. First of all, it consumed an average of 10% of the state budget during its construction (1661-1715), money that could have benefited the French people. Versailles, however, was more than a residence and a symbol–its splendor was a chance of France’s artisans to market their products. For example, since Louis’s court set fashion for the nation, around ⅓ of all salaried workers in nearby Paris worked in the fashion industry.

Just one example shows the court’s impact of Versailles fashion trends on France’s economy and daily life–the accidental fad for wigs, which lasted centuries after Louis’s death. When the king lost some hair due to illness, he started wearing a wig; soon his courtiers were imitating him, and the practice trickled down to the rest of French society from there, eventually spreading throughout Europe. Since it took ten heads of hair to fill out one top of the line wig, they were quite expensive at first, but as more ordinary men started wearing them, cheaper versions became available. An estimated 10,000 traveling salesmen made a living in France selling wigs. For many men and women in an age before the invention of indoor plumbing, shampoo and ointments to control head lice, wigs were an attractive alternative to natural hair.

In the end though, Louis and Colbert’s economic reforms have to be judged a failure. They barely made a dent in the confusing mishmash of France’s tax obligations, weights and measures, and legal systems, all of which differed depending on where in France you lived and who you were in the social hierarchy. This crucial failure wasn’t fixed until after the French Revolution, and in many ways helped cause the Revolution that overthrew Louis XVI. Colbert’s greatest public works project–a canal that connected the Atlantic to the Mediterranean–barely made a difference in comparison to the deadweight the chaotic state of French law and taxes imposed on the economy.

 

 Also Section 5: Military/Foreign Policy

Being in command of France’s military was an important part of the king’s legitimacy in the eyes of his people. Louis XIV spent most of his life not at Versailles but in the field with his armies. According to his leading biographer: “More than the court, more even than women, the army would be the love of his life.” 

In addition to making France the strongest power in Europe, constant wars helped Louis in other ways. As one historian put it: “War was not undertaken solely for the sake of conquests. The King enjoyed it and… war was considered a necessity to tame and satisfy the French nobility… War increased nobles’ chances of promotion, money, fame and emotional satisfaction. It justified, to themselves and the public, their prestige and privileges.” 

The reality of war, however, was grim. French troops “unleashed a reign of terror” on the Dutch countryside, with the king directly ordering the burning of villages. In two villages in particular, French troops burned alive an estimated 2,000 Dutch civilians inside their homes. Such actions only served to unify other European nations against the growing power of France, eventually leading to defeat after costly defeat.

In addition to foreign conquests, Louis fought several wars to subdue cities and regions that are now considered part of France, but at the time were independent and distinct. For example, resistance to his conquest of the Franche-Comte region, near Switzerland, was so deeply felt that many residents stipulated in their wills that they be buried face down in their graves “to avoid seeing the French sun”, a clear reference to Louis the “Sun King”. Despite this, his typical mix of brutality and bribery transformed their descendants into loyal French citizens. Louis built a massive citadel in the provincial capital and made sure to visit frequently, accompanied by a large number of well armed soldiers. At the same time, he respected local customs, confirmed local law codes, and introduced bribery into local government, encouraging the region’s elites to enrich themselves at the common people’s (and the government’s) expense. This pattern repeated in several outlying regions with a lot of success.

The increased revenue that resulted from Colbert’s reforms allowed Louis to increase the army from 72,000 to 120,000 men, armed with the products of several munitions factories. Nobles could no longer purchase ranks for themselves or their sons; instead, promotion was determined largely by merit. Uniforms were standardized–instead of the medieval tradition of soldiers wearing unique colors and designs to show that they served a particular noble family, all soldiers wore the same uniform of the Kingdom of France. 

France also became a serious naval power for the first time–-increasing galley ships from 6 to 40. Each galley contained 200 rowers, chained to their oars. Most were condemned criminals, but foreign slaves from the Middle East were also condemned to this living hell, another sign of the king’s cruelty.

Perhaps Louis’s most costly blunder was the War of the Spanish Succession. When Spain found itself without a ruler, Louis engineered his grandson’s inheritance to the Spanish throne. The new king, Phillippe/Felipe V, was supposed to ignore his blood ties to Louis and rule Spain separately from France, a common enough arrangement in an age of royals constantly marrying their children off to cement alliances with other European nations. However, Louis got greedy and provoked a war with England and Austria when he tried to unite both kingdoms under the French crown. Phillipe V was run out of Spain but even in the face of a brutal famine in 1709, Louis refused to give up a war he had clearly lost. He ordered a tax hike as the common people starved. Some French peasants started their own version of the Lord’s Prayer as a protest:

Our father, who is in Versailles,

Your name is not glorified,

Your kingdom is not great,

Your will is not done on earth or on the waves.

Forgive our enemies who beat us,

And not our generals who let them do it.

In the end, Louis had to sue for peace, a terrible humiliation. All of Europe united against him to push France back to its traditional borders. Reflecting on his life, he privately admitted that his greatest flaw was that he “loved war too much.” Indeed, the accumulated debts that Louis XIV ran up to pay for his wars would eventually crush the French budget and directly contributed to the French Revolution, 74 years after his death in 1715.