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The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of
royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to
1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until
recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the
1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes
and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the
mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had
come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a
greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer
as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this
volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social,
cultural and economic dispensations emerged from the mid-1680s to
create a different France in the final decades of Louis XIV's
reign, even though the basic ideological, social and economic
underpinnings of the country remained very largely the same. The
contributions examine such varied matters as the structure and
practices of government, naval power, the financial operations of
the state, trade and commerce, social pressures, overseas
expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.
The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of
royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to
1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until
recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the
1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes
and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the
mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had
come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a
greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer
as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this
volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social,
cultural and economic dispensations emerged from the mid-1680s to
create a different France in the final decades of Louis XIV's
reign, even though the basic ideological, social and economic
underpinnings of the country remained very largely the same. The
contributions examine such varied matters as the structure and
practices of government, naval power, the financial operations of
the state, trade and commerce, social pressures, overseas
expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.
The financial humbling of a great power in any age demands
explanation. In the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) Louis
XIV's France had to fight way beyond its borders and the costs of
war rose to unprecedented heights. With royal income falling as
economic activity slowed down, the widening gap between revenue and
expenditure led the government into a series of desperate
expedients. Ever-larger quantities of credit, often obtained
through fairly novel and poorly-understood financial instruments,
were combined with ill-advised monetary manipulations. Moreover,
through poor ministerial management the system of earmarking
revenues for spending descended into chaos. All this forced up the
cost of loans, foreign exchange, and military logistics as
government contractors and bankers built the mounting risks into
the price of their contracts and sought to profit from the
situation. There was already a problem with controlling royal
contractors, who ran the entire financial machinery, but this only
grew worse, not least because the government further indemnified
and bailed out men deemed too essential to fail. In some cases
entrepreneurs even managed to penetrate the corridors of the
ministries, either as heads of royal agencies or even as junior
ministers. This added up to nothing less than an early
military-industrial complex. As state debt climbed to astronomical
levels and financial instruments collapsed in value France's
chances of remaining the superpower of the age shrank. The military
decline of a great power often goes hand-in-hand with its financial
decline, but rarely so dramatically as in early eighteenth-century
France.
The 'personal rule' of Louis XIV witnessed a massive increase in
the size of the French army and an apparent improvement in the
quality of its officers, its men and the War Ministry. However,
this is the first book to treat the French army under Louis XIV as
a living political, social and economic organism, an institution
which reflected the dynastic interests and personal concerns of the
king and his privileged subjects. The book explains the development
of the army between the end of Cardinal Mazarin's ministry and the
outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, emphasising the
awareness of Louis XIV and his ministers of the need to pay careful
attention to the condition of the king's officers, and to take
account of their military, political, social and cultural
aspirations.
This book presents a new interpretation of the development of the French army during the "personal rule" of Louis XIV. Based on massive archival research, it examines the army not only as a military institution but also as a political, social and economic organism. Guy Rowlands asserts that the key to the development of Louis XIV's armed forces was the king's determination to acknowledge and satisfy the military, political, social and cultural aspirations of his officers, and maintain the solid standing of the Bourbon dynasty.
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