No matter what aspect of the condition of France in these years we consider, it cannot be understood apart from the behaviour of the machinery of state. The present survey may usefully begin, therefore, by summarizing the strong and the weak elements in the monarchical government about the year 1688. Colbert died in September 1683, Louvois in July 1691. The disappearance of these two ministers left a real void. Admittedly the king had taken control of affairs in 1661, but for the first thirty years of his personal rule, in practice, many important decisions, and a fortiori most laws and ordinances, had been the work of one or other of his councillors. It was only from 1691, in effect, that Louis XIV became effectively his own first minister. Even then, however, anything affecting war or foreign policy retained a special interest for him; in these two fields his routine labour involved him in every detail, and he had acquired undisputed ability in handling them. Questions of justice, finance and commerce, to which he attended as in duty bound, certainly occupied his mind a great deal less. The organization of power at the centre corresponded with these personal inclinations. The Conseil d'en haut, an extremely restricted cabinet, dealt with scarcely more than those ‘foreign’ affairs of which the king had made a kind of speciality. The other councils had far less effective importance: as a rule, they merely ratified decisions taken elsewhere. Responsibility for home affairs was, on the one hand divided geographically between the four secretaries of state—each, as of old, having a fraction of the kingdom in his department—and, on the other hand, was more or less systematically divided between the various ever-encroaching departments of the Controller-General of Finance.