On May 3, 1709, Pierre Hector Le Guerchoys, intendant of Franche-Comté, reached the limits of desperation. Although Louis XIV and his ministers had imposed immense military burdens on his province, the Extraordinaire des Guerres, the royal treasury responsible for furnishing funds for the army, had failed to send even a single sou. The Comtois authorities had already used up what little money there was available; Le Guerchoys had even exhausted his own personal credit. Yet the royal army's expenses kept piling up, seemingly without end. The intendant now wrote to Nicolas Desmarets, the king's controller general of finances, for permission to use the province's own tax revenues to meet these costs. These funds, however, were earmarked for the central treasury in Paris. More importantly, Desmarets had earlier expressly prohibited the provincial intendants from directly appropriating royal taxes to pay for military charges in their localities. Le Guerchoys pleaded with the controller general “to permit me to carry this out in light of the miserable and regrettable situation I find here.”

Le Guerchoys's distress arose out of the increasingly overwhelming challenges of administration in a frontier province during the nadir of the War of the Spanish Succession. Since the war's outbreak, Franche-Comté's royal agents and elites had managed to raise the revenues needed to meet Versailles's relentless demands. But there was another side to the story. In addition to escalating fiscal pressures, the war also created significant new challenges in the day-to-day business of government.