Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Up to this point we have left France out of the account because France was interested not so much in the eastern coast as in the great island of Madagascar, about a thousand miles long and larger than France itself, which lies two hundred and forty miles off the East African coast.

In the days of Richelieu and Colbert the French East India Company of the seventeenth century had been interested in the island, then called Eastern France, la France Orientale.

But the French colonists had been massacred and French claims became a vague tradition while English missionaries labored on the island converting the natives to Christianity, teaching them to read and write, and to use the plow and, in a word, forging a bond of union between Madagascar and England.

The French, however, still cherished their historic claims.

In a culture dominated by wealthy nobles and increasingly centralized by monarchy in the tradition of Philip II, the primary avenue of social ascension for the ambitious financier or merchant was through service to a great aristocrat.

Louis mixed his traditional late humanist education with the practical legal knowledge of this guy he brought in, a banker by the name of Colbert.

Colbert and his house of scholars, intendants, and agents provided him.

Humanist education was clearly useful, but it was not enough to run a state effectively.

For the first time, the administrative project of King Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, accounting and traditional learning were used together to manage a large government.

So here's the first time you see an accountant, a financier working alongside a king, whereas before they were kept at a distance.

And this was in the interest of getting a lot of money for the empire because, you know, you started seeing with France and throughout Europe, more wars, more famine, more just the coffers are drained.

They don't keep books.

Subsection France in Madagascar Up to this point we have left France out of the account because France was interested not so much in the eastern coast as in the great island of Madagascar, about a thousand miles long and larger than France itself, which lies two hundred and forty miles off the East African coast.

In the days of Richelieu and Colbert, the French East India Company of the seventeenth century had been interested in the island, then called Eastern France, La France Orientale.

But the French colonists had been massacred, and French claims became a vague tradition, while English missionaries labored on the island converting the natives to Christianity, teaching them to read and write, and to use the plow and, in a word, forging a bond of union between Madagascar and England.

The French, however, still cherished their historic claims.

Basically, France could create its own economic empire within its own borders.

So Richelieu picked up on this, and even more so the great minister under Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

What Richelieu and Colbert started doing was insulating France from the negative results of losing in this competition in terms of international trade, colonies, basically everything that they lost in the 18th century with losing Canada and India.

Colbert, Richelieu and Colbert had wanted to do was avoid that scenario, avoid getting involved in the international race for colonies that would support the mother country and so forth.

So the idea of being economically self-sufficient kind of disappeared in the 18th century.

And the result of that was the great collapse of the Seven Years' War.

Peddle your goods somewhere else.

So that's just a short overview.

The most curious example of this in history comes from France in the 17th century when Louis, the Sun King, was looking to exert his ego across his kingdom, but he needed a lot of money to do it, and it took a financial genius to help him finally get France organized enough to where the king actually got his due.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert waited for years to take his place in the French court.

In 1651, he saw his opportunity.

The chief advisor to the young King Louis XIV was a man named Cardinal Mazarin, and he was exiled from the court for angering the nobles by trying to consolidate the king's power.

And that's something that you're going to find pretty wide agreement among economists about because it's very, very clear that The tax you want to levy is the type of tax where the attempts to avoid it are going to be the least problematic for the economy.

The great French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, used to say it's about plucking the goose without getting too much hissing.

How do you pluck the feathers from the goose with the least amount of hissing? In this case, what we're doing is we're plucking the goose that's laying the golden eggs, not just the golden eggs, but creating jobs for everyone.

And I think it's going to be very dangerous and harmful if it passes.

Having placed herself under the spiritual direction of Father Lacombe, who had been a disciple of Molinos, she became tinctured with his views; and having composed two works in illustration of them, she traversed great part of France, making everywhere friends and proselytes with inconceivable rapidity.

At length she arrived in Paris, and her graces and her eloquence soon procured her admittance to the private parties at the Hotel de Beauviller, where Madame de Maintenon used to dine once or twice a week with the Duke de Beauviller, one of the most estimable noblemen France ever knew; his wife, a daughter of the celebrated Colbert, and their own immediate connections.

All ceremony and pomp were banished from these social and intellectual meetings.

The court was excluded from them.

but Spain remained in control of the Gulf.

The young and ambitious Louis XIV sat on the throne of France, and he was assisted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his first minister, one of the great strategists of his age.

I was, of course, disappointed, though not surprised, to learn that there is no evidence whatsoever that Stephen Colbert has descended from Jean-Baptiste.

As long-standing and attentive listeners well know, by the 1660s, Louis and Colbert had to a great degree brought Restoration England into France's orbit.

Charles II and James, Duke of York, were unofficially pro-Catholic.

James actually converted in the 1660s.

And Louis subsidized the English monarchy in return for England helping France in its on-again, off-again wars with the Dutch Republic.

The French, therefore, were principally concerned with Spain, the rich, powerful, but poorly led Catholic power to its south.