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.