the fisco-financier system

Financing the French state during the ancien régime was an exceptionally complicated business, so much so that most historians have shied away from the subject. The crown was wholly dependent upon the business and financial activities of hundreds of officials and private individuals, whose interests were overlapping, interlocking and often mutually conflicting, in what historians have recently come to see as a ‘fisco-financier’ cosmos. Thanks to the work in recent decades of Julian Dent, Richard Bonney, James Collins, Françoise Bayard and Daniel Dessert, building on the earlier researches of tax historians over the last century, we now have a reasonably clear, if still uncomfortably intricate and incomplete, picture of the fiscal system of the Grand Siècle. However, the focus of all this work has been on the raising and mobilising of resources, and much less on the deployment and spending of money. In particular, the way money was channelled to the units making up the French army, and to the suppliers who provided for it, remains almost wholly unexplored. To be sure, there are tantalising clues scattered thinly throughout the pages of a number of books, but nobody has yet launched an investigation of military finance in the way that Jean Legoherel has delved into the navy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there has been almost a complete divorce between scholarship on finance and scholarship on war for the reign of Louis XIV.