A Career in the Making

This excursion into the biography of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy has a dual purpose. It offers exercise in biographical reconstruction, which draws on the rich but uneven evidence of Torcy's youth, his testing years, spent in the households of important government officials and in travels on discrete diplomatic missions for Louis XIV. The essay then addresses the problems of writing a biography of a bureaucrat whose private life lies buried in avalanche of official documents. It concludes by suggesting that a close reading of these papers reveals not only efficient administrator, distinguished diplomat, and celebrated statesman, but a man of wit, probity, and humanity, traits which served him well in the opening years of the European Enlightenment. Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy was born to Francoise and Charles Colbert on 14 September 1665 at the home of his maternal grandfather, Joachim Beraud, sieur de Croissy, a high official in Louis XIV's Council of State. At the Colbert's parish church of Saint-Eustache on the twenty-third of September, Torcy's uncle, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, held his nephew, godson, and namesake at the baptismal font before an array of the Colbert clan, clients and friends, present to celebrate the birth of a son and firstborn to Colbert's favorite brother and his new wife

Economics · Management · Political science · European Political History Analysis · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History