Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Minister of King Louis XIV of France, exponent of mercantilist policy (Reims, 1619-Paris, 1683).His plebeian origin and his bureaucratic efficiency came to make him as loyal and indispensable to the king (who named him Marquis de Seignelay) as detested by the court.Coming from a family of merchants, he entered the service of the royal administration and in 1651 became Mazarin's personal secretary.It was the cardinal himself who recommended him to the king, who appointed him Mayor of Finance in 1661.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Meanwhile, Colbert he had worried about making a personal fortune with the management of other people's businesses, while accumulating evidence against the superintendent Nicolás Fouquet, whose position he was ambitious; he finally got the fall of Fouquet and accumulated the posts of superintendent of Constructions and Manufactures (1664), general controller of Finance (1665), secretary of the House of the King (1668) and secretary of the Navy (1669).He ennobled his family and turned it into a clan that dominated key positions of the Monarchy, thus increasing their power and the hatred that the nobility had for him.
During his rule, Colbert ended the corruption that had marked the Mazarin era and opened a period of economic prosperity.Following largely the political line of Cardinal Richelieu, he created and promoted manufactures; it stopped imports and encouraged exports; built roads, canals, and ports; boosted trade by creating companies with state participation; expanded the fleet; and laid the foundations for French colonial expansion in Canada, the West Indies and the Far East.
With all this, France became the first European power in the industrial field, achieving a favorable trade balance, which was how it believed that each country increased its reserves of precious metals and, therefore, its wealth, snatching it from neighboring countries.According to the ideas of mercantilism, this protectionist and interventionist policy was destined to create the economic bases on which the force of the Monarchy would rest; To get the new wealth to the royal coffers, he reformed the tax system making it more efficient and rational.
State interventionism was not limited to the economic: in large part it is due to Colbert the work of codification of the law, the administrative uniformity developed by the figure of the mayors, the royal patronage of the arts through of the creation of Academies and the intense construction work of the reign of Louis XIV.But Colbert also made important mistakes: he failed to establish freedom in domestic commerce, he sacrificed agriculture (on which most of the French lived) to commercial interests, and most of the companies he created ended up in failure.
In an excess of economic nationalism (since he saw trade as "the money war"), he did not hesitate to take the commercial rivalry to the field of arms, pushing Louis XIV to the invasion of Holland in 1672; that war failed in the face of stubborn resistance from the Dutch, and its costs weighed heavily on French finances.
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