¹ Chevrier, G., Remarques sur I'introduction et les vicissitudes de la distinction du “jus privatium” et du “jus publicum” dans les oeuvres des anciens juristes francaises (Paris, 1952).Google Scholar Cited in Antoine, Michel, Le Conseil du Roi sous le régime de Louis XV (Paris and Geneva: Libraire Drox, 1970), 2.Google Scholar

² The Council of State, or King's Council as it was also known, consisted of several individual councils: the Conseil des dépêches, responsible for the police or administration of the interior of the kingdom; the Privy Council, dealing with suits between private parties, especially those concerning the king's finance; the Council of Finances; the Council of Commerce; and the Council of Conscience, which dealt with religious matters. These different councils were, however, but different manifestations of one and the same council.

³ de Jouvencel, Henri, Le contrôleur général des Finances sous I'Ancien Régime (Paris: Larose, 1901), 85.Google Scholar

⁴ Antoine reports that Finance had definitively taken Commerce back in hand in 1724 when M. Le Peletier des Forts, conseiller d'ÉEtat et conseil royal des Finances, assumed control of the Bureau of Commerce. The intendants of commerce were created so that the controller general “would be immediately informed of all business that combined the concerns of Commerce and Finance, which at heart are the same and which at present are not as well united as they could be” (Memoir présenté au Roi le 31 mai 1724 en vue du retablissement des intendants du commerce). AN. E 3656, cited in Antoine, 404.

⁵ A réglement of 1699, however, divided the responsibility between secretary of the navy and the controller general. On the Council of Commerce, see Schaeper, Thomas J., The French Council of Commerce 1700–1715: A Study in Mercantilism after Colbert (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

⁶ Argenson, Loisirs, vol. 1, 37–38. Cited in Jouvencel, Le contrôleur général des Finances, 71. In 1769, Maupeou similarly exclaimed, “The dignity of the Chancellor is but an empty title since politics on one side and finance on the other have become the two axis upon which all administration rotates.” Cited in Antoine, Le Conseil, 425. The Chancellor was the first of the great officers of state. He presided all tribunals, and he sat in the parlement above the premier president. In short, he embodied all justice under the king. Maupeou's statement indicates how justice was also subordinated to finance.

⁷ By the ministry of Desmarets the Council of Finance included sixteen intendants of finance and six intendants of commerce. The intendants of finance were suppressed during the Regency and were reestablished by a royal edict of May 31, 1724. Antoine, Le Conseil, 404.

⁸ The first one appeared in Marseilles in 1599. This first chamber achieved little, and in 1664 the merchants of Marseilles created a new chamber.

⁹ Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce, 73–76. Both Marseilles and Dunkirk already had chambers in 1700, and Lyon established a chamber in 1702 under a different edict. Although authorized by the crown to organize chambers, Saint-Malo and Nantes did not have any chambers of commerce during the eighteenth century.

¹⁰ Schaeper, The French Council of Commerce, 74.

¹¹ Deveau, Jean-Michel, Le Commerce Rochelais face à la Révolution: Correspondence de Jean-Baptiste Nairac (La Rochelle, France: Rumeur des Ages, 1989), 65–66.Google Scholar The major cities not only had a permanent representative in Paris that they supported, but they typically sent a special delegation to Paris when matters of special concern arose. The royal arrêt that acknowledged the Chamber of Commerce in La Rochelle was typical. It called for thirty of the town's business leaders to choose a director and four syndics; however, Louis XIV reserved the right to make the original thirty appointments. Allowing the king to approve the original membership was an essential element in gaining formal recognition of local chambers. The original members were given the right to coopt future members, thus assuring that the membership was restricted to those groups or networks of merchants that had ties to the crown.

¹² This was one reason why the Protestant merchants became so loyal to the king after the signing of the Edict of Nantes. The crown had essentially bought their loyalty by lavishing upon them monopoly rights of all kinds, especially with regard to international trade.

¹³ Pierre Dardel has commented how even in a major commercial center like Rouen, the city's commerce was dominated in 1779 by an elite of sixty-one marchands armateurs who controlled the city's exports. See Dardel, Pierre, Commerce, Industrie, et navagation: Rouen et Havre au XVIIIe siècle (1966), 141.Google Scholar Also of interest is that during the same period Rouen could only count four bankers (Dardel, Commerce, 159). Even Paris at that time had but 100 bankers.

¹⁴ Cited in Lévy, Claude-Frédéric, Capitalistes el pouvoir au siècle des Lumières, 3 vols. (Paris: Mouton, 1969), vol. 2, 60.Google Scholar

¹⁵ For instance, only twelve ports were authorized to trade with the French American islands.

¹⁶ Levy, C.F., Capitalistes, vol. I, 72.Google Scholar

¹⁷ For example, La Rochelle was the only port between Guyenne and Brittany that existed in a duty-free zone called the Cinq Grosses Fermes. This meant that any purchases of goods sold by La Rochelle to consumers within the zone were sold duty free. Earlier, La Rochelle had the exclusive right to trade in slaves. This privilege was ended in 1716 when the triangular trade was opened up to Bordeaux, Nantes, and Rouen.

¹⁸ Deveau, Le Commerce, 72.

¹⁹ Whereas in France the chambers of commerce unified the voice of specific cities, in England there were many voices and no official spokesman for reaching the government. The collapse of the General Chamber of Manufacturers revealed no homogeneous business interest. One historian, Brewer, reports how the younger Pitt, like Henry Pelham before him, showed an unusual degree of solicitude for commercial opinion and would not bow to the collective pressures of the General Chamber of Manufacturers. Brewer tells us that Pitt “was glad to collect, from all parts of the kingdom, a just representation of the interests of all the various branches of trade and manufacture but he would not, as the association founder Samuel Garbett hoped, allow the Chamber to contribute actively to the formulation of policy” (Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power [New York: Knopf, 1989], 233Google Scholar).

²⁰ Under the Stuarts, bankers often combined lending to the monarch with tax farming and the operation of monopolies granted by royal fiat.

²¹ As an example of the continual appropriation of commerce by the controller general, Antoine reports how, in 1745, Maurepas complained that to the dismay of the royal navy, the controller general had “appropriated the government of the India Company.” Cited in Antoine, he Conseil, 405. Continuing the tradition begun by Colbert of allowing financiers to direct the trading companies, Calonne appointed financier Jean-Baptiste de Boullongne de Magnanville, nephew of Mme. Pompadour, trésorier de l'extraordinaire des guerres en survivance (1772–79), as the king's commissioner of the New Compagnie des Indes. He was appointed fermier général in 1787 (Durand, Yves, Finance et Mecenat: Les Fermiers Généroux au XVIIle siècle [Paris: Hachette, 1976], 84Google Scholar).

²² The large financiers could farm out or licence smaller companies to carry out some of their activity.

²³ With a memoir written in favor of giving financiers leadership in commercial ventures, the author argues that they alone have access to the capital to sustain the company through difficult periods. Arguments like this could always be used against the smaller businessmen in a world where banking and credit facilities were highly personal (Chaussinaud-Nogaret, Guy, Les financiers de Languedoc au XVIIe siècle [Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1970], 106Google Scholar).

²⁴ One of the most prestigious traders of the late eighteenth century, Etienne Berthelot de Pleneuf, whose family held important interest in the domains d' occident and in the manufacture of gun powder for the army had leve le pied for the outside. The due de Noailles, acting in the name of the Regency, seized his papers; and later when Berthelot was seen in Genoa, the Regency council announced it was prepared to take drastic measures to prevent the defection of individuals from the kingdom where they had made their fortunes: The council was acting under the assumption that it had the right to forbid individuals from sending the fruits of their traffic for the king overseas (Lévy, , Capitalistes, vol 2, 85Google Scholar).

²⁵ Fernand Braudel has remarked that even the wealthiest of France's merchants did not reach the heights of the great financiers and court bankers like Samuel Bernard and Antoine Crozat. See Braudel, Fernand, L'identité de la France (Paris: Arthaud and Flammarion, 1986), 336.Google Scholar

²⁶ Hoarded reserves of gold and silver, or what Fernand Braudel has termed “dormant capital,” was another consequence of France's failure to develop modern banking facilities (see Braudel, L'identité, 349–55).

²⁷ Scott, W.R., The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish, and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1912).Google Scholar The incorporation of the Bank of England in 1694 permitted it to gradually assume management of the longterm national debt and the chartering of the New East India Company and the South Sea Company. But even before the creation of the Bank, shares in English companies could be bought and sold with a considerable degree of freedom. In the smaller companies, shareholders could dispose of a part or the whole of their shares without the consent of the other members. In fact, early in the reign of William III, put and call options, bear sales, and bull accounts were well known, so that before the end of the seventeenth century, an open organized market existed in London for stocks and shares of companies (Scott, , The Constitution, vol. 1, 442–43Google Scholar).

²⁸ See C. F. Lévy Capitalisme, 417. According to Lévy, Crozat controlled nearly all of the principal maritime commerce at the end of Louis XIV's reign.

²⁹ “II faut qu'elle soit entre les mains de peu de gens qui la conduisent sans éclat et qui, étant dévoués aux ordres (du ministre), les exécuteront sans qu'il soit besoin d'en instruire le public” (Nogaret, Les financiers, 110).

³⁰ Nogaret, Les financiers, 120.

³¹ Marquis de Valfons, Charles, Mémoires sur le XVIIIe siècle: Souvenir de Marquis de Valfons (Paris, 1906), 128–9.Google Scholar

³² A nobleman from Languedoc, for example, might use his connections at court to secure a royal monopoly to produce porcelain in Languedoc, but he would turn the actual management of the operation over to a local bourgeois. It should be noted that even the protection offered by such monopolies could not guarantee the industrial concerns of nobles against poor management and bankruptcy. Freedom from the discipline of the market often did as much harm as good.

³³ This need to locate in Paris applied to the arts as well as to industry. Musicians, playwrights, and artists similarly vied for the king's support. The provinces ceased to be centers of artistic or economic activity.

³⁴ It was 5.67 percent according to F. Braesch's recreation of the budget of 1788 (reprinted in Aftalion, Florin, L'économie de la Révolution française [Paris: Hachette, 1987], 47Google Scholar).

³⁵ Elias, Norbert, Court Society, Kanntzer, Pierre, trans. (Paris: Caiman-Levy, 1974), 54.Google Scholar

³⁶ Consider the example of Buckingham, who was censured by the Parliament. One of the reasons for the success of Elizabeth as compared to James I and Charles I was that the Queen made every effort to avoid favoring only one individual or group.

³⁷ Antoine, Le Conseil, 377. Whereas the controller was a participant in the Conseil des dépôches, he was all powerful in two of the Councils, finance and commerce; there the other councilors had no real power. Four of the members of the Council of Finance were intendants of finance who worked for the controller. The controller general could only enter the councils if he also possessed the titles of ministre d'État, most controller generals did with the notable exception of Necker.

³⁸ Antoine, Le Conseil, 30. By the time of Turgot, four of the eight members of the council were intendants of finance subordinate to the controller general.

³⁹ Jouvencel, Le contrôleur général des Finances, 83.

⁴⁰ See Antoine, Le Conseil, 378, 384.

⁴¹ Jouvencel, he contrôleur général des Finances, 81.

⁴² This fiction was to have significant long-term consequences; because the King's Council of State had originated and was often identified with royal justice, its decisions seemed less arbitrary than those of a single minister acting on his own. The legitimacy of the government's decision making could be questioned once legislation became the reflection of the discretionary authority of a single minister.

⁴³ Loewenstein, Karl, British Cabinet Government (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 87.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ The Twenty-Eight Heads of 1689, the predecessor of the Bill of Rights of 1689 provides in head 24 “that the buying and selling of offices, may effectually be provided against” (Horowitz, Henry, Parliament, Policy, and Politics in the Reign of William III [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977]Google Scholar).

⁴⁵ Landau, Norma, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Private bills could originate in either house. For the procedures of introducing bills in the House of Lords, see Lambert, Sheila (Lady Elton), Bills and Acts: Legislative Procedure in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Mc-Cahill, Michael, Order and Equipoise: The Peerage and the House of Lords (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Antoine, Le Conseil, 598.

⁴⁸ Antoine, Le Conseil, 371.

⁴⁹ Thomas, Peter D.G., The House of Commons in The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 45–57.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ For instance, in committee a Member could speak as many times as he wished, but only once in a debate of the House.

⁵¹ Thomas, The House of Commons, 45–57.

⁵² Ibid., 57.

⁵³ Ibid., 59—standing order of 1705.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 243.

⁵⁶ For more on the defeat of the 1713 trade treaty with France, see Coleman, D.C., “Politics and Economics in the Age of Anne: The Case of the Anglo-French Trade Treaty of 1713,” Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-lndustrial England, Coleman, D.C. and John, A.H. eds., (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 187–213.Google Scholar For more on the proposed excise scheme of 1733, see Price, Jacob M., “The Excise Affair Revisited: The Administrative and Colonial Dimensions of a Parliamentary Crisis,” England's Rise to Greatness, 1660–1763, Baxter, Stephen ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 257–322.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Olson, Alison G., “The Board of Trade and London-American Interest Groups in the Eighteenth Century,” The British Atlantic Empire Before the American Revolution, Marshall, Peter and Williams, Glyn eds. (Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1980), 41–43.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ A. Olson, “The Board of Trade,” 36–39.

⁵⁹ Plumb, J.H., “Robert Walpole's World: The Structure of Government,” in Aristocratic Governance and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: The Foundations of Stability, Baugh, Daniel A., ed. (New York: New View Points 1975), 116–55,Google Scholar 146.

⁶⁰ Plumb, “Robert Walpole's World,” 151.

⁶¹ The Lord Lieutenant's authority, Plumb emphasised, was due to the fact “that it gave local friends and clients of the Lord Lieutenant a spokesmen of the court, the center of patronage. Thus he could keep an eye on all appointments including those of the justices of the peace and sheriff” (Plumb, “Walpole's World”, 122). This patronage was used to secure a corps of loyal members. The Lord Lieutenant's powers were ill-suited for the task of closely regulating the nation's industrial and financial development. In fact some of that patronage had to be dispensed to members of the oposition, which suggests restraints on the Lord Lieutenant's discretion. Above all a successful Lord Lieutenant had to be a manager, not a regulator.

⁶² Namier, Sir Lewis, “The Social Foundations,” in Baugh, Daniel, ed., Aristocratic Governance and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: The Foundations of Stability (New York: New View Points, 1975), 204–43,Google Scholar at 201.

⁶³ For more on English corruption, see Hurstfield, Joel, Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973);Google Scholar and Levy Peck, Linda, “Corruption and Political Development in Early Modem Britain,” Political Corruption: A Handbook, Heidenheimer, Arnold J., Johnston, Michael, and LeVine, Victor T. eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989).Google Scholar

⁶⁴ John Stevens, in a book translated and commented upon in French, wrote: “In a government so systematically venal as that of England at present, when administration can expect to be supported in their measures by pecuniary motives alone, an unbounded dissipation of the public revenues becomes unavoidable, nay it becomes absolutely necessary; abuses are not only winked at, but the authors of them, at all events, supported. Contracts are given, not to those who make the most advantageous offers, but to those who have the greatest parliamentary interest; thus, from the minister of state, down to the lowest officer, a combination is formed to plunder the nation. Venality and corruption become one common tie, whereby the various parts of this infamous system of administration are knit together in one common interest” (Stevens, John, Observations on Government Including Some Animadversions on Mr. Adam's Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States and of Mr. De Lolme's Constitution of England by a Farmer of New Jersey [New York: W. Ross in Broad Street, 1787], 21).Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Cronyism restricts entry and exit from the market; corruption does not restrict the number of producers that can supply the good. In this sense cronyism is like credit rationing, which limits funds to preferred clients and prevents some enterprises from getting funds at any price. Corruption, on the other hand, creates the same difficulties for all parties equally.

⁶⁶ Cronyism can be coupled with efficiency as post-World War II Taiwan and Korea suggests.

⁶⁷ Antoine, Le Conseil, 410–1.

⁶⁸ On the honesty of the King's financial ministers, see Antoine, he Conseil, 408–11.

⁶⁹ Namier, Sir Lewis B., The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan. 1929), 45–90.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Namier, The Structure, 234.

⁷¹ Nevertheless, John Brewer had concluded that though there can be no doubt that a small number of individuals fed well from the public trough, the overall cost of their privileges and perquisites does not seem high by contemporary European standards (Brewer, The Sinews of Power, 73).

⁷² Between 1783 and 1789, Pitt and the British Parliament raised taxes and increased revenues from approximately £13 million to £17.5 million, allowing them to retire some of the debts inherited from the American Revolutionary War. As a result, the amount of money needed to service the national debt was reduced to 56 percent of the annual budget and investors could anticipate further reductions (see Binney, J.E.D., British Public Revenue and Administration, 1774–1792 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958]Google Scholar).

⁷³ Steven Kaplan, L., The Famine Plot Persuasion In Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, PA: The American Philosophical Society, vol. 72, 1982), 4.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Ln/27/19433. Chazal, M.L., L'Abbé Terray: Contrôleur Général des Finances (Paris: Batignolles, 1847), 11.Google Scholar Steven Kaplan stresses that the famine plot rumors clung to Terray's name and were one of the principle reasons why Louis XVI chose to replace Terray with a minister known for his personal integrity. Kaplan discounts the rumors of the plot and writes that, unlike Laverdy (the previous minister), Terray had no doubts about the wisdom of engaging in public victualing whenever and wherever necessary. Like Orry, he supervised all provisioning operations vigilantly, working through a kind of public corporation called a régie (see Steven Kaplan, The Famine Plot, 58.

⁷⁵ An important exception in English history was the South Sea Bubble in 1721, when it was widely believed that the South Sea Company bribed ministers and other MPs. The company hoped to gain political support for its efforts to acquire the funding of that portion of the National Debt not held by the Bank of the East India Company. This scandal concerned speculators and bankers but had little impact on the population at large. For more on the South Sea Bubble, see Plumb, J.H., Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London: Creeset Press, 1956), 293–329.Google Scholar The Bubble struck at the interests of the financial elite and was akin to the John Law scandal in France, not the Famine Plots. Laws limiting joint-stock companies prevented a repeat of the Bubble. In France, the Famine Plots recurred throughout the eighteenth century and concerned the welfare of the populace at large.

⁷⁶ Harris, Michael and Lee, Allan, The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ It is revealing how the English landed elite succeed in initiating an agricultural revolution through the use of private bills in Parliament during the eighteenth century. By contrast, the government's efforts to create and then to implement national legislation to support the initiatives of large land owners in France failed due to the pressures of the financial interests (see Root, Hilton L., Peasants and King in Burgundy: The Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]Google Scholar).

⁷⁸ Olson contrasts what he calls an encompassing interest group with one that represents, as most special-interest organizations do, only a minuscule segment of the whole society. This encompassing interest group Olson remarks “has not only an incentive at least to consider the effect of its policies on the efficiency of the society, but also an incentive to bargain with other substantial organized groups in the interest of a more productive society. The really narrow interest group does not even have an interest to do even that.” Such a group will want to limit the excess burden arising from distributional policies favorable to its members out of self-interest because its membership on average obtained greater benefits from efforts to make the society more productive. Olson claims that organizations that represent even a tenth of the income earning capacity of a society can act as an encompassing interest group. The landed interests that sat in Parliament could by these definitions be considered an encompassing group, as could the political parties represented in Parliament. But Olson emphasizes such groups provide less than the optimal support for policies that enhance society's welfare. An example of this failure was the grain bounties. It would have been socially more efficient to promote the welfare of small- and medium-sized producers (see Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982], 48Google Scholar).

⁷⁹ The English crown could even award pocket boroughs to ensure its control of government.