This chapter provides an essential overview of the wider financial environment in which the French navy was administered under Louis XIV. In outlining Louis XIV's financial position, it focuses attention on the reasons behind increased military expenditure between 1701 and 1713 and investigates how overspending affected France's revenue-raising system. While the monarchy's financial position was unsustainably leveraged to the point of collapse to meet the costs of war, Louis XIV's revenue-raising system demonstrated a degree of adaptability and resilience in finding ways to shift the burden of debt onto fiscal stakeholders and corporate bodies. However, reliance on fiscal and financial intermediaries in the crown's taxation and expenditure systems would lead to a power imbalance between the state and its agents as office-holders engaged in increasingly risky practices to meet the crown's fiscal demands and spending needs. The chapter gives further evidence for Guy Rowlands's recent corrective that the French monarchy's fiscal problems were expenditure-driven rather than the issue being a limited revenue-raising capacity, thus providing a more accurate context to Louis XIV's growing inability to fund his navy.

Costs of War, 1701–13

The prolonged nature and geographic extent of Louis XIV's military mobilisations over the course of the Nine Years’ War and the War of the Spanish Succession inflicted enormous financial strain upon France, burdening the monarchy with accumulated debts of at least 1.5 billion l., as estimated by a printed état de dépense (statement of expenses) in 1721. In addition, the capital invested by provincial and Parisian elites in interest-bearing offices would have likely stood at a net 666 million l. in 1721 after 454 million l. worth of liabilities were wiped out following the suppression of certain offices and augmentations de gages in the years surrounding the Chambre de justice in 1716. The crown's total financial liabilities in 1720 therefore stood at an estimated 2.2 billion l., which represented a nine-fold increase on debt levels in 1683, assessed at 240 million l. at the time of Jean-Baptiste Colbert's death. Unsurprisingly, the debt amassed during the final decades of Louis's reign was overwhelmingly generated by military expenses, with the naval treasury and the army's financing arm, the Extraordinaire des Guerres, accounting for at least 51 per cent of total expenditure, reaching nearly 3.5 billion l. between 1689 and 1707, according to Forbonnais's figures.