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.

The shortcomings of paymaster accountability measures and the flaws in the crown's implementation of them created a vacuum in which the trésoriers were able to advance their personal interests at the expense of the navy. Assessing the scale of misappropriation that occurred in the naval treasury under Louis XIV is a difficult task since most of the trésoriers’ improper activities escaped the crown's immediate attention and ministers privileged the effective execution of the war effort over potentially costly meddling in the trésoriers’ financial affairs. Nonetheless, there were suggestions of misconduct by the paymasters as the naval administration went through its various accounts: the trésoriers were cautioned for moving funds without the naval minister's consent; there was suspicion that the lack of receipts from the trésoriers’ commis was not always caused by the naval intendants and ordonnateurs failing to provide them on time; and the routine complications that administrators encountered in ascertaining the navy's extraordinary income in the ports suggest that the trésoriers, who acted as primary revenue receivers in this regard, misspent the funds.

The navy's trésoriers were typically punished for misappropriating funds only when the crown was not preoccupied with the overriding demands of meeting wartime expenditure. The periodic fiscal enquiries were initiated by the crown to punish financiers for misconduct and fraudulent activity, although some of the most important individuals who had bankrolled the crown in war escaped scrutiny, and the proceedings could be used by its instigators as a means of displacing established financial arrangements with their own client networks, as Jean-Baptiste Colbert successfully achieved through the Chambre de justice of 1661–65. During the Chambre de justice that was opened in 1661, and which investigated fiscal wrongdoing in the period between 1635 and 1661, the financial affairs of the navy's trésoriers were scrutinised, alongside those of other major comptables and traitants. In particular, Claude and Georges Pellissary, the brothers who dominated the naval treasury between 1648 and 1676, faced a total tax charge of 220,000 l., although this was later reduced by 100,000 l. Equally, following Louis XIV's reign, the Chambre de justice of 1716–17 imposed substantial financial penalties reaching almost 2.7 million l. on the naval and galley fleet trésoriers that it investigated, although only 1.5 million l. was ultimately recovered after several reductions in fines were granted.

There are two fundamentally important organisational expedients that Cardinal Richelieu pursued in the 1620s and 1630s which had long-term implications for the functioning of the naval treasury. First of all, as the self-styled grand maître, chef, et surintendant général de la navigation et du commerce de France, Richelieu established the principle of depending on a single trésorier. In order to expand Richelieu's control over the navy at the expense of local admiralties, and to rein in the independence of individual trésoriers, power was concentrated in favoured individuals in the naval treasury and efforts were made to accommodate their personal interests and ambitions. In 1628, the navy's need for reliable funding prompted Richelieu to allow François Le Conte, already a trésorier of the Extraordinaire des Guerres, to exercise de facto responsibility for funding the navy. Le Conte would eventually formally occupy all three offices of trésorier de la Marine du Ponant. The decision to rely on a single yet financially robust trésorier enabled the navy to handle unprecedented expenses of 4 million l. in 1628, which principally resulted from the blockade of the Huguenot stronghold at La Rochelle between December 1627 and November 1628. The extent to which Richelieu was willing to circumvent formal procedures in the service of the navy's interests was clear when the start of open conflict with Spain in 1635 caused the government to rush the closure of the navy's open and unfinished exercices. Scrutiny of Le Conte's états au vrai of 1631 to 1634 revealed pervasive levels of financial misappropriation, particularly at Brest, but the navy urgently needed its debts to be settled since naval preparations were required to respond to the Spanish capture of the Lérins islands off Cannes in September 1635, and to the subsequent threat posed by the enemy fleet to Toulon and Marseille. In response, Richelieu manipulated Le Conte's états au vrai to ensure that they would pass unobstructed through the Chambre des comptes of Paris, thus enabling the trésorier to focus on the navy's forthcoming financial needs. Through a strengthened Conseil de la marine, which began to oversee the activities of the trésoriers, Richelieu was therefore able to exert greater control over the naval treasury and to formalise its organisation according to his interests.

In disbursing money for the navy and acting as a short-term funding recourse, the trésoriers incurred regular and extraordinary expenses which exposed them to many personal risks. As Table 1 below shows, over the course of a particular exercice, or financial year, the trésoriers faced a series of basic structural costs in remitting funds throughout France. The most prominent of these ordinary expenses was the remuneration, or appointements, of the commis employed by the trésoriers to execute payments in the ports and other localities. As the establishment and management of this network of private agents rested exclusively with the trésoriers, it was the trésoriers’ responsibility to pay the salaries of the commis working under them. However, the precise cost of hiring an individual commis for the duration of an exercice remains difficult to determine as the commis operated in relative obscurity. The total expense for which the trésoriers were personally liable was contingent on the proposed size of the naval budget and the projected scale of naval activity, which had a direct bearing on the number of commis that the trésoriers needed to help them make remittances. In the 1690s and 1700s, when the trésoriers’ private network reached its greatest extent, the trésoriers had to pay 197,500 l. in appointements to their agents in France and overseas over the course of an exercice. While the fact that the trésorier was responsible for salary payments to the commis might suggest that he exerted a degree of control over his agents, the opportunities offered by profiting from the provision of short-term loans and advances in the ports far outweighed the regular salary offered by the trésorier.

Aside from salary expenses, the trésoriers accumulated courier fees from the transmission of letters and packets between the trésoriers’ bureaus in Paris and the commis in the ports, as well as from correspondence with government ministers, local naval administrators, creditors, and major suppliers. By the 1700s, the trésoriers were paying an estimated 10,000 l. per exercice to the ferme générale des postes (the tax contractors that collected duties on post) through either the directors of the postal bureau or the tax contractors in Paris where the ferme directly administered the postal system.