Between the late 1660s and early 1690s, the French navy underwent significant operational and administrative expansion. Naval minister and contrôleur général (finance minister) Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1665–83) and later his son, the marquis de Seignelay (1683–90), presided over a series of naval reforms in an effort to match Anglo-Dutch naval strength. Rebuilding the navy required not only the construction and acquisition of ships, but also the creation of a naval supply chain, investments in ports and arsenals at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort, the formation of a conscription system to supply the navy with over 40,000 sailors, and the oversight of a centralised, commission-based administrative system of maritime intendants and commissaires, the king's agents in the ports with a broad array of responsibilities. While Colbert's navy was built on a network of ‘fisco-financiers’, where administrative and subcontracting roles were often conflated, the growth of Louis XIV's navy echoed, it would seem, a wider determination by the king to reassert monarchical sovereignty and establish firm royal control over the armed forces.

With impressive speed, the navy increased in size and sophistication over the course of three decades, expanding from 18 ships in 1661 to 132 rated warships by January 1692. By 1676, when it gained an important victory over a combined Spanish-Dutch fleet at Palermo during the Franco-Dutch War (1672–78), the navy demonstrated its importance as an instrument of war by enabling the French monarchy to project its military power and influence beyond its immediate reach. The offshore bombardments of Algiers (1682–83), Genoa (1684), and Tripoli (1685) underscored not only the strategic value of a standing fleet, but also the devastating effect with which it could be deployed. On the surface, the results of the Colbertian naval reconstruction programme were decisive. France had a fleet capable of challenging the Anglo-Dutch navies both in terms of warship tonnage, and for relative strategic dominance of the Mediterranean between 1676 and 1693.

Yet, as the French navy reached the apogee of its numerical and operational strength during the Nine Years’ War (1688–97), Louis XIV's government was forced in 1694–95 to drawdown the fleet. The decades-long revival of the French navy came to a halt as fleet operations were suspended and Louis XIV's larger rated warships, emblematic of royal prestige and dynastic might, were laid up in Brest and Toulon. By 1695, the Atlantic fleet was no longer operating.

Introduction

Part II established the importance of the naval trésoriers to the crown's ability to fund the navy and outlined the financial risks of their responsibilities. Part III highlights the weaknesses of the financial controls in place to oversee and regulate the activities of the naval treasury in the 1700s. Chapter Six begins by outlining the three levels of accountability to which the trésoriers were theoretically subjected and then underscores how ineffective these accountability measures became when war strained the state's organisational capacities. Chapter Seven examines the challenges of holding the trésoriers to account in wartime as the naval administration failed to manage the flow of financial information. Chapter Eight then outlines the scale of misappropriation and fraudulent activity that certain trésoriers perpetrated. In practice, the trésoriers had long operated in an accountability void under Louis XIV. However, by the War of the Spanish Succession, the crown's inability to exercise tight control over the trésoriers’ operations allowed the trésoriers to prioritise their own financial positions over the navy's financial needs and prevented ministers from identifying financing problems as they developed.

The financial officers who constituted the naval treasury, the trésoriers généraux de la Marine, were an integral part of the navy's system of finance. Alongside the trésoriers of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, the navy's trésoriers were some of Louis XIV's most important paymasters, whose operations uniquely spanned virtually all of France's provinces and interacted with the wide range of industries and manpower resources that the navy relied on. Situated in the Marais and the quartier Richelieu in Paris, these office-holders were tightly integrated into the administrative and financial hub that financed and sustained the crown's military enterprises: these were the same locations where the administrative and social elite had established their grands hôtels, and leading officers, bankers, and financiers conducted their business. In the 1690s and 1700s, the growing indispensability of the position of trésorier to the navy's funding was the direct result of Louis XIV's increasingly expensive war effort and the deteriorating fiscal resources he could rely on to fund his military activities.

The fundamental purpose of the navy's paymasters was to fund the navy's operations by matching the royal revenues designated for its consumption to the navy's myriad expenses. Responsible for managing the navy's accounts, these comptables effectively operated as a central clearing house by receiving the navy's share of the crown's income and disbursing these funds on the government's request. Once the navy's funding allocation was decided at the start of the year, the authority to arrange payments to the navy's creditors resided principally with the king. Once aware of the specifics of the navy's needs, the secrétaire d’État de la Marine (naval minister) operating out of the naval bureau in Paris was responsible for drawing up a series of ordonnances de paiements, or payment orders, which then would have been presented to the contrôleur général des finances (finance minister) and, subsequently, the king for countersigning before they were issued to the trésoriers. The ordonnances de paiements formed the basis of a trésorier's operations, directing him to remit money to payees in the ports and other localities throughout France. Without possession of one of these payment orders, the trésorier was strictly forbidden from moving royal funds to acquit costs.

In theory, the crown had several measures at its disposal to control the flow and distribution of funds. The trésoriers experienced checks on their handling of royal funds at three key points: throughout their exercices via the payment orders written by the naval minister; at the point of disbursement in the dockyards where the intendant, seconded by a contrôleur particulier (auditor or comptroller), was given copies of the payment orders sent to the trésorier's commis and then compiled registers of completed remittances; and finally, at the end of the exercice when the trésorier presented a provisional balance sheet, known as the état au vrai, to the Conseil royal des finances, which then closed his exercice before detailed accounts were sent to the Chambre des comptes to be cleared according to the financial regulations set out in the edict of August 1669. However, in practice, inherent weaknesses and implementation difficulties complicated auditing efforts and limited the crown's ability to enforce its financial controls, thus allowing the trésoriers to operate without any effective accountability.

As Legohérel first examined, the fiscal-financial regulations written into the Ordonnance de la Marine by Colbert and his son, the marquis de Seignelay, were principally concerned with maintaining the separation of ordonnateurs and paymasters. In an administrative and fiscal system where powers were widely devolved to officers and commissioners and the potential for manipulation and misappropriation of funds was significant, it was critical to ensure that royal funds were handled only by the trésoriers from the point of receipt to the point of disbursement, and not by the naval intendants and the commissaires ordonnateurs who ordered and authorised expenditure. While this strict division of responsibility was broadly sustained (despite instances of incompetence or abuse) by virtue of the incentives the trésoriers had to maintain control over the flow of funds, the regulations controlling the activities of the trésoriers were limited and often weakly implemented.

In terms of its ability to hold the trésoriers directly accountable, the naval ministry exercised loose control since it lacked the means to verify that the trésoriers were following its remittance instructions.

The funding shortfalls of the first nine years of the Spanish Succession conflict had placed substantial financial pressures on the naval trésoriers, several of whom experienced personal insolvency. Three days before Louis de Lubert died on 8 May 1705 following a stroke, the trésorier's accounts for the exercice of 1704 indicated that he was over-committed to the extent of 1.6 million l. In the weeks after Lubert's death, his widow and the trésorier's heirs, alongside his former principal commis, were confronted by the task of completing his exercice. In less than 26 days, the final payments of nearly 1.3 million l. worth of lettres de change were met, but this caused the deficit in the late trésorier's accounts to rise to almost 3.5 million l. by 31 May 1705. With the crown assigning little importance to resolving the late trésorier's financial problems, Louis de Lubert's son of the same name sought an extraordinary intervention from the finance ministry on 6 September 1706. Lubert wanted to finance his father's debts from 1704 by continuing the practice of revenue anticipation, specifically by drawing on the funds assigned to the forthcoming exercice of 1707. He reasoned to the finance ministry that the level of underfunding that this measure would create for the trésorier on duty in 1707 would force Pontchartrain's hand on the issue of a further round of office creations in the navy. It remains unclear if Pontchartrain eventually gave in to the specific proposals mentioned by Lubert, or whether Chamillart simply went ahead and paid some of Lubert's debts by taking funds nominally allocated to the trésorier in charge of the exercice of 1707. But this attempt to shift responsibility for funding problems onto the naval minister and other trésoriers underscores the extent to which the navy's financial intermediaries and, indeed, the finance ministry could fail to act in the navy's interests. Both the trésoriers’ pursuit of their personal interests and the finance minister's desire to reduce spending commitments, or to offload liabilities whenever practically possible, had disastrous consequences for the viability of the fleet.

Louis XIV's strategic ambitions at sea were inherently limited by the naval trésoriers’ ability to acquit their debts on time.

The Nine Years’ War demanded an unprecedented operational commitment from the navy: French control of the western Mediterranean had to be preserved, France's Atlantic and Channel coastline needed securing against the threat of an Anglo-Dutch seaborne attack, and the French king's desire to restore James II to the English throne necessitated off-shore support and an amphibious landing in Ireland. Louis XIV's strategic ambitions therefore required a significant level of activity at sea. Colbert's eldest son and successor as naval minister after 1683, the marquis de Seignelay, planned for the arming of at least 50 ships-of-the-line in 1689. The following year, when viceamiral Anne Hilarion de Costentin, comte de Tourville, achieved a victory at Beachy Head in July 1690 over the Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of Vice-Admiral Arthur Herbert, earl of Torrington, a total of 90 rated warships were deployed. After Tourville's campagne du large in 1691, which sought to draw the Allied fleet away from the coast and target the returning convoy from Smyrna, 107 ships-of-the-line were armed in 1692, including the 44 warships that sailed under Tourville's command during the French defeat off the coast of Barfleur and Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue in May–June 1692.

The reprise of large fleet engagements for the first time since the Franco- Dutch War (1672–78), and the deployment of rated ships with even larger crews and more concentrated firepower than had been previously possible, had important fiscal consequences. Table 15 details the navy's spending habits in the period between 1671 and 1699. Naval expenditure in the 1690s reached previously unseen levels, and the rate at which expenses grew reflected the unprecedented scale of the navy's operational demands. The navy's spending increased over threefold from 7.9 million l. in 1688 to almost 26.7 million l. in 1691. Liable for consecutive exercices between 1678 and 1691 as the navy's only trésorier, Louis de Lubert would have been unaccustomed to the high levels of expenditure in the early years of the Nine Years’ War. In the first eleven years of Lubert's tenure as trésorier, between 1678 and 1688, average annual spending was approximately 7.1 million l., with a total of 77.9 million l. passing through his accounts in this period.

Introduction

Chapter Three emphasised the extent to which royal office-holders intermediated on the crown's behalf to finance its war-driven expenditure. Part II continues to develop this theme of private capitalisation of the navy by examining in detail the paymasters on whom the navy relied, and the consequences of treating an administrative office as a method of achieving a complex symbiosis of mobilising access to private funds and allocating financial rewards for doing so. Chapter Four begins by first outlining the purpose and responsibilities of the office of trésorier général de la Marine and then examining why Louis XIV's government depended on the trésoriers as short-term funding facilitators. Chapter Five then investigates what the costs, risks, and rewards of this office were for its holder, particularly in the 1700s. The argument of these chapters is that the crown depended on the trésoriers to overcome both the chronic insufficiency of its budgeting procedures, which consistently underfunded the navy in the short term, and the difficulties it faced in generating sufficient cash flow. The crown's reliance on the trésoriers’ private access to credit was intentional, rather than an oversight. These chapters therefore shift attention to the importance of striking the correct balance between the financial risks and rewards of acting as a trésorier, and underscore the potentially disastrous consequences that any imbalance might have for the navy's operational viability.

Introduction

Part I explores the strategic considerations motivating French naval policy in the last third of Louis XIV's reign, drawing connections between the fiscal capabilities of the Louis Quatorzian state and the strength of French naval power. Chapter One argues that the downsizing of the fleet in the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) was fiscally necessary as the French navy had been built on unsustainable principles between the 1660s and 1680s. The decision to drawdown the fleet and embrace privateering more fully was a pragmatic repositioning by a government burdened by wartime debt in the 1690s. As Chapter Two shows, the real strategic shift in Louis XIV's naval policy took place in 1700 as the Bourbon inheritance of the Spanish empire and the ensuing global conflict vastly increased France's naval commitments. The expanded scope of Louis XIV's naval ambitions caused the navy to become rapidly overstretched and eventually collapse as the crown experienced wider financial exhaustion. Chapter Three provides the fiscal context to France's growing inability to fund its navy. It outlines how the crown's strategy of financing war through private intermediaries enabled it to mobilise fiscal resources on an otherwise impossible scale, arguing instead that excessive spending rather than revenue raising was the root cause of the monarchy's fiscal problems.

Introduction

In Part IV, the two principal limitations of the navy's financing mechanism were established: the long-standing reliance on a single trésorier's access to credit, and how the trésoriers were insufficiently compensated for financing naval activity. Part V develops these themes and investigates how the trésoriers’ funding of the navy in the War of the Spanish Succession became an unsustainable and loss-making financial operation in the face of substantial funding shortfalls in payments and increased financial pressures. Chapter Eleven presents evidence of a damaging pattern of overspending and underfunding, and it examines the organisational factors behind both the navy's tendency to exceed its budget and the chronically inadequate supply of funds from the finance ministry. The chapter then shows how the trésoriers’ personal finances came under pressure as they were forced to borrow unsustainable amounts of money to bridge widening funding gaps. This in turn increasingly incited the trésoriers to manage the navy's finances in response to their own financial priorities and the demands of their creditors. The fundamental cause of the naval treasury's deteriorating performance in the 1700s was a failure to allocate sufficient financial reimbursement to the trésoriers and, more importantly, to improve the navy's access to relatively limited credit facilities. Combined, these factors ensured that the trésoriers would be unable to fund the continuous, large-scale mobilisations that Louis XIV's naval ambitions required, and, as Chapter Twelve shows, resulted in the spectacular collapse of the navy in 1707–09.

In the period between 1701 and 1709, naval expenditure reached a cumulative 171.8 million l. Yet, on the basis of an agreement reached in the Conseil royal des finances, contrôleur général Chamillart had only committed the finance ministry to supplying the navy with an annual wartime budget of 18 million l., before the worsening fiscal environment forced a reduction to 14 million l. per annum after 1706. In directing the navy's trésoriers to pay the navy's expenses, naval minister Pontchartrain would have been aware that the contrôleur général was going to provide approximately 150 million l. in funding over this nine-year period, but the pressures of war and the state's organisational shortcomings ensured that naval spending rarely reflected the availability of fiscal resources. At the height of the fleet's strategic importance between 1701 and 1706, the naval ministry exceeded Chamillart's total theoretical funding commitment by 21.3 per cent, or 23 million l. The problem stemmed from a series of important overruns in spending which had occurred in 1702 and 1704–05, when Louis XIV's wide-ranging geostrategic needs at sea caused the navy to exceed its budget by 35.7 per cent in those years alone.

The disjuncture between the navy's incurred expenses and its allocated budget stemmed from the finance ministry's inability to control spending by other ministers. The contrôleur général lacked the authority and practical framework to oversee each ministry's internal expenditure procedures, which embedded a pervasive tendency to overspend in Louis XIV's expenditure system. In other words, the spending ministries often contracted debts without specific reference to their capacity to fund them. Both the ordonnances de paiements, which required the naval treasury to transfer royal funds to the navy's locations of expenditure, and the ordonnances de fonds, which released funds to the naval treasury, were theoretically agreed between the king and the naval minister in consultation with the contrôleur général, but practice indicates that the naval ministry's spending decisions were not always made with the finance ministry's full awareness. The degree of information compartmentalisation that existed in the crown's revenue-raising and expenditure systems was disruptive because the contrôleur général, who was ultimately responsible for ensuring that the Trésor royal matched the ordonnances de fonds with assignations on revenue sources, could be presented with spending demands that exceeded available funds.

The difficulties that the trésoriers encountered in settling and presenting their accounts during the final wars of Louis XIV's reign underline the broader administrative limitations of the Louis Quatorzian state. For the trésoriers, financing the navy's expenditure and collecting the receipts and other pièces justificatives that validated remittances was a drawn-out process. However, in order to settle their accounts, the trésoriers required the approval of the naval intendants, who had to be satisfied that the navy's books were balanced, that they had fully accounted for the individuals to whom the crown owed money, and that the paymasters had fulfilled their obligations. Once these issues had been addressed, the intendant was expected to declare to the naval minister the closure of the exercice in the port and dockyards for which he was responsible, meaning that no further expenditure or costs could be undertaken or attributed to that particular year. The problem was that in order to close an exercice at the level of the ports and dockyards in a timely manner, the navy's individual administrators had to remain apprised of the local financial situation throughout the financial year, maintain pressure on the trésoriers and their commis to finance expenditure, and determine the volume of remaining unpaid expenses. This degree of financial awareness often eluded the intendants since it was an intensive task that required obtaining and sifting through large amounts of information under considerable time pressures.

The principal obstacle to gathering financial intelligence in the era of the Spanish Succession was the naval administration's chronic inability to meet the organisational challenges of war. The failure to manage the flow of information undermined proactive efforts to hold the trésoriers accountable at the local level and prevented the Chambre des comptes from exercising its authority by severely delaying the presentation of accounts. Accurate and punctual financial reporting was persistently stymied by administrative overstretch, with significant time and resources spent on resolving discrepancies in the various balance sheets produced by the intendants, commis, and trésoriers, which were usually the result of accounting delays and different methods of attributing funds.

Given the efforts and resources spent by Colbert and Seignelay to rebuild and sustain the French navy between the late 1660s and early 1690s, historians have found the French government's decision to abandon fleet operations during the Nine Years’ War deeply problematic. Indeed, the drawdown of the fleet in 1694–95 appears even more striking following the French navy's victory over the earl of Torrington's fleet off Beachy Head (Bévéziers) in July 1690, which created great political pressure and unease in London. Traditional accounts of Louis XIV's navy fixate on rationalising the halt to the Colbertian naval expansion and subsequently question the government's decision to encourage an alternative, decentralised form of naval organisation, in the form of privateering, just as the fleet was reaching its peak strength. In reconciling the Colbertian project's successful revival of naval power with the fleet's demobilisation by 1695, historians place an overwhelming emphasis on identifying an abrupt strategic shift, if not transformation, from the guerre d’escadre to the guerre de course in the 1690s.

According to conventional wisdom, the guerre d’escadre and guerre de course diverged greatly in strategic and operational terms. In the guerre d’escadre, the standing fleet's objective was to engage and destroy the enemy's force in order to gain control of the seas or, more feasibly for the early modern state, to temporarily deny the enemy access to vital maritime corridors and chokepoints. As a direct contrast with these large-scale strategic ambitions, the guerre de course purposely avoided fleet engagements. In this strategy, the enemy's trade routes and merchant vessels were specifically targeted and destroyed or captured, with the objective being to inflict economic damage on the enemy. Private initiative, enticed by a state-sanctioned opportunity for profit-making through the sale of prizes and cargo, played a greater role since the economic barriers to entry into maritime violence, raised by the development of line-of-battle tactics, were lower in a guerre de course. As a result, naval operations were not under the strict purview of the state and could be undertaken by privateers armed with state commissions, acting individually or backed by large syndicates. By transferring presumably non-negotiable sovereignty to private individuals and allowing them an explicit role in the conduct of war, the guerre de course lacked the centralised state control typically associated with the Colbertian navy.