Dangerous and Dishonest Men

During the War of Spanish Succession, Louis XIV’s armies fought major military campaigns in the Low Countries, Northern Italy, the Empire and Spain. French forces could not have been sustained on so many fronts without a vast outlay of money, and the mechanism which delivered funds to armies in the field is the subject of the present book by Guy Rowlands. Between 1701 and 1707, nearly 75 per cent of French state expenditure went to the army, with about half of this sum spent abroad. (The fraction declined to one-third between 1707 and 1709, and to one-quarter thereafter, as French forces fell back on their own frontiers.) The Sun King’s armies were dependent on such remittances, rather than relying on local exactions, because they fought so often on the soil of allied states, or in jurisdictions where they could ill afford to alienate local authorities or populations. Funds could be transferred by moving bullion, but this was cumbersome and expensive; remitting was generally done using bills of exchange, which piggybacked on existing commercial credit networks. Sometimes this was simply a matter of moving money from France to a foreign location, but bankers also supplied short-term credit to the monarchy, acquiring funds abroad for its use. Bankers, rather than the financiers who serviced most of the financial needs of the monarchy, were critical to this process because only they had the requisite international financial networks. Huguenot and Genevan bankers, in particular, played a key role in financing Louis XIV’s war effort, Rowlands shows. Genoa, Amsterdam and, to a lesser extent, London and Hamburg were also important nodes in the French remitting system. Contra Larry Neal, Rowlands argues that it was during the war years, not in 1720, that short-term international capital flowed for the first time in large quantities between Paris, London and Amsterdam

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