Abstract
If the financial and administrative arrangements inside the treasury of the Extraordinaire des Guerres and surrounding the other fisco-financiers were fairly secretive, they were at least under some degree of ministerial supervision and scrutiny. Accounts, though sometimes presented years after the duty-year, were scrutinised in an effort to suppress excessive profiteering, while intendants and generals directed and maintained a watching brief over the fisco-financiers and their agents. Moreover, the first rank of fisco-financiers needed the continued support and patronage of the contrôleur général des finances, in spite of enjoying a degree of autonomy in the management of their ongoing operations. Their operations may not have been wonderfully clear to accounting experts, and they may have been able to manipulate financial instruments in their own favour, but it was far easier to keep these men in check than it was to control the international bankers upon whom the French monarchy came to depend for fuelling its continent-wide war effort during the Spanish Succession conflict. To appreciate why this was so first requires an understanding of the fundamentals and framework of the foreign exchange system in the era of Louis XIV.
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Notes
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Thierry Claeys (2009), Dictionnaire biographique des financiers en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris), II, pp. 77–8, 894. Another agent, Etienne Pierre Cornette, followed his uncle into the profession and later became treasurer general of the Galleys after 1711 (ibid., I, pp. 532–4).
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BL Add. Ms. 70193, fos 21–22: report on French circulation of bills [probably Feb. 1705]. Though living in a much more flexible and integrated financial world by 1700, French bankers were in this respect operating like their earlier Genoese counterparts, who in the 1580s-1620s toured bills of exchange related to Spanish government needs, prolonging them from one Bisenzone fair to the next and circulating them at other fairs too. See Dennis O. Flynn (1978), ‘A New Perspective on the Spanish Price Revolution: The Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments’, Explorations in Economic History 15, 400–1.
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Rowlands, G. (2015). The French Monarchy and the Foreign Exchange System in the Era of Louis XIV. In: Dangerous and Dishonest Men: The International Bankers of Louis XIV’s France. Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381798_2
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