Extending State Authority at Home and Abroad

Louis XIV could not have enforced his religious policies without the services of a nationwide bureaucracy. Bureaucracy—a network of state officials carrying out orders according to a regular and routine line of authority—comes from the French word bureau, for “desk,” which came to mean “office,” both in the sense of a physical space and a position of authority. Louis personally supervised the activities of his bureaucrats and worked to ensure his supremacy in all matters. But he always had to negotiate with nobles and local officials who sometimes thwarted his will.

Louis extended the bureaucratic forms his predecessors had developed, especially the use of intendants. He handpicked an intendant for each region to represent his rule against entrenched local interests such as the parlements, provincial estates, and noble governors. The intendants supervised the collection of taxes, the financing of public works, and the provisioning of the army. In 1673, Louis decreed that the parlements could no longer vote against his proposed laws or even speak against them.

To keep tabs on all the issues before him, Louis relied on a series of talented ministers, usually of modest origins, who gained fame, fortune, and even noble status from serving the king. Most important among them was Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), a wool merchant’s son turned royal official. Colbert had managed Mazarin’s personal finances and worked his way up under Louis XIV to become head of royal finances, public works, and the navy.

Colbert used the bureaucracy to establish a new economic doctrine, mercantilism. According to mercantilist policy, governments must intervene to increase national wealth by whatever means possible. Such government intervention inevitably increased the number of bureaucrats needed. Under Colbert, the French government established overseas trading companies and granted manufacturing monopolies. A government inspection system regulated the quality of finished goods and compelled all craftsmen to organize into guilds, in which masters could supervise the work of the journeymen and apprentices. To protect French production, Colbert rescinded many internal customs fees but enacted high foreign tariffs, which cut imports of competing goods. To compete more effectively with England and the Dutch Republic, Colbert also subsidized shipbuilding, a policy that dramatically expanded the number of seaworthy French vessels. Such mercantilist measures aimed to ensure France’s prominence in world markets and to provide the resources needed to fight wars against the nation’s increasingly long list of enemies. Although later economists questioned the value of mercantilism, virtually every government in Europe embraced it.

Colbert’s mercantilist projects shaped life in the French colonies, too. He forbade colonial businesses from manufacturing anything already produced in mainland France. In 1663, he took control of the trading company that had founded New France (Canada). With the goal of establishing permanent settlements like those in the British North American colonies, he transplanted several thousand peasants from western France to the present-day province of Quebec, which France had claimed since 1608. He also tried to limit expansion westward, without success.

Despite the Iroquois’ initial interruption of French fur-trading convoys, fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette reached the upper Mississippi River in 1672 and traveled downstream as far as Arkansas. In 1684, French explorer Sieur de La Salle went all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming a vast territory for Louis XIV and calling it Louisiana after him. Colbert’s successors embraced the expansion he had resisted, thinking it crucial to competing successfully with the English and the Dutch in the New World.

Colonial settlement occupied only a portion of Louis XIV’s attention, however, for his main foreign policy goal was to extend French power in Europe. To expand the army, Louis’s minister of war centralized the organization of French troops. Barracks built in major towns received supplies—among which were uniforms to reinforce discipline—from a central distribution system. Louis’s wartime army could field a force as large as that of all his enemies combined.

Absolutist governments always tried to increase their territorial holdings, and as Louis extended his reach, he gained new enemies. In 1667–1668, in the War of Devolution (so called because Louis claimed that lands in the Spanish Netherlands should devolve to him since the Spanish king had failed to pay the dowry of Louis’s Spanish bride), Louis defeated the Spanish armies but had to make peace when England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic joined the war. In the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668, he gained control of a few towns on the border of the Spanish Netherlands.

In 1672, Louis XIV opened hostilities against the Dutch because they stood in the way of his acquisition of more territory in the Spanish Netherlands. He declared war again on Spain in 1673. By now the Dutch had allied themselves with their former Spanish masters to hold off the French. Louis also marched his troops into territories of the Holy Roman Empire, provoking many of the German princes to join with the emperor, the Spanish, and the Dutch in an alliance against Louis, whom they now denounced as a “Christian Turk” for his imperialist ambitions. Faced with bloody but inconclusive results on the battlefield, the parties agreed to the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678–1679, which ceded several Flemish towns and the Franche-Comté region to Louis, linking Alsace to the rest of France. French government deficits soared, and in 1675 increases in taxes touched off the most serious antitax revolt of Louis’s reign.

Wars of Louis XIV

Louis had no intention of standing still. Heartened by the Habsburgs’ seeming weakness, he pushed eastward, seizing the city of Strasbourg in 1681 and invading the province of Lorraine in 1684. In 1688, he attacked some of the small German cities of the Holy Roman Empire. So obsessed was Louis with his military standing that he had miniature battle scenes painted on his high heels and commissioned tapestries showing his military processions into conquered cities, even those he did not take by force. It took a large coalition known as the League of Augsburg—made up of England, Spain, Sweden, the Dutch Republic, the Austrian emperor, and various German princes—to hold back the French king. When hostilities between Louis and the League of Augsburg ended in the Peace of Rijswijk in 1697, Louis returned many of his conquests made since 1678, with the exception of Strasbourg (Map 16.1).

Four years later, Louis embarked on his last and most damaging war, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713). It was caused by disagreement over who would inherit the throne of Spain. Before he died, Spanish king Charles II (r. 1665–1700) named Louis XIV’s second grandson—Philip, duke of Anjou—as his heir, but the Austrian emperor Leopold I refused to agree and the British and the Dutch supported his refusal. In the ensuing war, the French lost several major battles and had to accept disadvantageous terms in the Peace of Utrecht of 1713–1714. France ceded possessions in North America (Newfoundland, the Hudson Bay area, and most of Nova Scotia) to Britain. Although Philip was recognized as king of Spain, he had to renounce any future claim to the French crown, thus barring unification of the two kingdoms. Spain surrendered its territories in Italy and the Netherlands to the Austrians, and Gibraltar to the British. Lying on his deathbed in 1715, the seventy-six-year-old Louis XIV watched helplessly as his accomplishments began to unravel.

Louis XIV’s policy of absolutism fomented bitter hostility among his own subjects. Critics complained about the secrecy of Louis’s government, and nobles resented his promotions of commoners to high office. The duke of Saint-Simon complained that “falseness, servility, admiring glances, combined with a dependent and cringing attitude, above all, an appearance of being nothing without him, were the only ways of pleasing him.” Ordinary people suffered the most for Louis’s ambitions. By the end of the Sun King’s reign, one in six Frenchmen had served in the military. In addition to the higher taxes paid by everyone, those who lived on the routes leading to the battlefields had to house and feed soldiers; only nobles were exempt from this requirement.