Colbert Sentence Examples
The duke of Sully carried out a revision in 1604, and other attempts were made by Mazarin and Colbert, but the extravagarces of Louis XV.
In opposition to Colbert's views he held that the wealth of a country consists, not in the abundance of money which it possesses but in what it produces and exchanges.
He married a daughter of Colbert.
In 1665 Colbert made to him on behalf of Louis XIV.
He was intended for the bar, but was employed by Colbert, who had determined on the foundation of a French East India Company, to draw up an explanatory account of the project for Louis XIV.
Colbert, seeing the public utility of such a periodical, ordered the abbe Gallois, a contributor of De Sallo's, to re-establish it, an event which took place on the 4th of January 1666.
Those who had most of the king's confidence afterwards were Colbert for home affairs; Lionne for diplomacy; Louvois for war; but as his reign proceeded he became more self-confident and more intolerant of independence of judgment in his ministers.
The first years of the king's rule were marked by the great schemes of Colbert for the financial, commercial, industrial and naval reorganization of France, and in these schemes Louis took a deep interest.
She was burdened with debt; the reforms of Colbert were ruined; and opposition to the king's regime began to make itself felt.
In France, Colbert, in 1670, ordered the extension to the rural communes of the system which had for many years been in force in Paris of registering and periodically publishing the domestic occurrences of the locality.
AdvertisementThe history of this struggle is most important, because it was identical, as long as it lasted, with that between the old gilds of France and the new body which Colbert, for political reasons, was determined to support.
Italian though he was by birth, education and nature, France owed him a great debt for his skilful management during the early years of Louis XIV., and the king owed him yet more, for he had not only transmitted to him a nation at peace, but had educated for him his great servants Le Tellier, Lionne and Colbert.
After a brief visit to France, where his collection of ancient coins attracted some attention, Galland returned to the Levant in 1676; and in 1679 he undertook a third voyage, being commissioned by the French East India Company to collect for the cabinet of Colbert; on the expiration of this commission he was instructed by the government to continue his researches, and had the title of "antiquary to the king" conferred upon him.
Yet when there appeared a prospect that the king would show her favour, the intrigue was vigorously pushed by the French ambassador, Colbert de Croissy, aided by the secretary of state, Lord Arlington, and his wife.
He spent his leisure and his fortune in the search for documents bearing on the old Basque and Bearnese provinces; and the fruits of his studies in the archives of Bayonne, Toulouse, Pau, Perigord and other cities were embodied in forty-five MS. volumes, which were sent by his son Gabriel to Colbert.
AdvertisementHe was entrusted by Colbert with the care and investigation of the records concerning the Low Countries preserved at Lille, where great part of his life was spent.
Herbelot, however, was recalled to France by Colbert, and received from the king a pension equal to the one he had lost.
These qualities, combined, it must be confessed, with a readiness to seize every opportunity of advancement, soon brought Colbert both wealth and influence.
Colbert, now aged' thirty-two, was engaged to keep him acquainted with what should happen in the capital during his absence.
At first Colbert's position was far from satisfactory; for the close wary Italian treated him merely as an ordinary agent.
AdvertisementThe gift was refused somewhat indignantly; and by giving proof of the immense value of his services, Colbert gained all that he desired.
Colbert obtained, besides, the higher object of his ambition; the confidence of Mazarin, so far as it was granted to any one, became his, and he was entrusted with matters of the gravest importance.
In 1661 the death of Mazarin allowed Colbert to take the first place in the administration, and he made sure of the king's favour by revealing to him some of Mazarin's hidden wealth.
Colbert sternly and fearlessly set about his task.
The sovereign was its president; but Colbert, though for four years he only possessed the title of intendant, was its ruling spirit, great personal authority being conferred upon him by the king.
AdvertisementThe career on which Colbert now entered must not be judged without constant remembrance of the utter rottenness of the previous financial administration.
Colbert's method was simple.
Order and economy being thus introduced into the working of the government, the country, according to Colbert's vast yet detailed plan, was to be enriched by commerce.
And other parts of Colbert's schemes deserve still less equivocal condemnation.
With regard to international commerce Colbert was equally unfortunate in not being in advance of his age; the tariffs he published were protective to an extreme.
The greatest and most lasting of Colbert's achievements was the establishment of the French marine.
For its use, Colbert reconstructed the works and arsenal of Toulon, founded the port and arsenal of Rochefort, and the naval schools of Rochefort, Dieppe and Saint-Malo, and fortified, with some assistance from Vauban (who, however, belonged to the party of his rival Louvois), among other ports those of Calais, Dunkirk, Brest and Havre.
Letters exist written by Colbert to the judges requiring them to sentence to the oar as many criminals as possible, including all those who had been condemned to death; and the convict once chained to the bench, the expiration of his sentence was seldom allowed to bring him release.
By these means the benches of the galleys were filled, and Colbert took no thought of the long unrelieved agony borne by those who filled them.
Even ecclesiastical affairs, though with these he had no official concern, did not altogether escape Colbert's attention.
In art and literature Colbert took much interest.
Indeed to everything that concerned the interests of France Colbert devoted unsparing thought and toil.
To carry out his reforms, Colbert needed peace; but the war department was in the hands of his great rival Louvois, whose influence gradually supplanted that of Colbert with the king.
Thus it came about that, only a few years after he had commenced to free the country from the weight of the loans and taxes which crushed her to the dust, Colbert was forced to heap upon her a new load of loans and taxes more heavy than the last.
Depressed by his failure, deeply wounded by the king's favour for Louvois, and worn out by overwork, Colbert's strength gave way at a comparatively early age.
It was said that he died of a broken heart, and a conversation with the king is reported in which Louis disparagingly compared the buildings of Versailles, which Colbert was superintending, with the works constructed by Louvois in Flanders.
Colbert was a great statesman, who did much for France.
Numerous vies and eloges of Colbert have been published; but the most thorough student of his life and administration was Pierre Clement, member of the Institute, who in 1846 published his Vie de Colbert, and in 1861 the first of the 9 vols.
The best short account of Colbert as a statesman is that in Lavisse, Histoire de France (1905), which gives a thorough study of the administration.
Among Colbert's papers are Memoires sur les affaires de finance de France (written about 1663), a fragment entitled Particularites secretes de la vie du Roy, and other accounts of the earlier part of the reign of Louis XIV.
The duke of York is said to have betrayed him to Colbert, the French ambassador in London.
He points out that Colbert, on the 3rd, 10th and 24th of June, writes from London to Louis XIV.
But he too now disappears, though a letter from Lionne (the French foreign secretary) to Colbert of July 17 (two days before Louvois's letter to Saint-Mars about Dauger) says that he is expected in Paris.
But even then the dates will not suit; for Lionne wrote to Colbert on July 27, saying, "Pregnani has been so slow on his voyage that he has only given me (m'a rendu) your despatch of July 4 several days after I had already received those of the 8th and the 11th."
Fenelon is on firmer ground when he leads a reaction against the "mercantile system" of Colbert, with its crushing restrictions on trade; or when he sings the praises of agriculture, in the hope of bringing back labour to the land, and thereby ensuring the physical efficiency of the race.
In this latter year Corneille (who had at last removed his residence from Rouen to Paris in 1662) was included among the list of men of letters pensioned at the proposal of Colbert.
The death of Colbert and the revocation of the edict of Nantes brought the first to a close (166116831685); coinciding with the date when the Revolution in England definitely reversed the traditional system of alliances, and when the administration began to disorganize.
Neither the immense fortunes amassed by these men, nor the venality and robust vitality which made their families veritable races of ministers, altered the fact that De Lionne, Le Tellier, Louvois and Colbert were in themselves of no account, even though the parts they played were much more important than Louis XIV.
Colbert now offered his aid in making Louis XIV.
Colbert, an agent of Le Tellier, the honest steward of Mazarins dishonest fortunes, had a future opened to him by cornert the fall of Fouquet (1661).
Next, like a good man of business, Colbert determined that the state accounts should be kept as accurately as those of a shop; but though in this respect a great minister, he was less so in his manner of levying contributions.
Order was for Colbert the prime condition of work.
Louis XIV.s aspirations towards glory chimed in very well with the extremely positive views of his minister; but here too Colbert was an innovator and an unsuccessful one.
Colbert, in common with all his century, believed that the true secret of commerce and the indisputable proof of a countrys prosperity was to sell as many of the products of national industry to the foreigner as possible, while Colbert purchasing as little as possible.
Once more Colbert failed; with regard to internal affairs, he was unable to unify weights and measures, or to suppress the many custom-houses which made France into a miniature Europe; nor could he in external affairs reform the consulates of the Levant.
In order to attach and defend these colonies Colbert created a navy which Lecame his passion; he took convicts to man the galleys in the Mediterranean, and for the fleet in the Atlantic he established the system of naval reserve which still obtains.
In the administration, the police and the law, Colbert preserved all the old machinery, including the inheritance of office.
He did not succeed either in stemming the tide of expense, nor in his administration, being in no way in advance of his age, and not perceiving that decisive reform could not be achieved by a government dealing with the nation as though it were inert and passive material, made to obey and to payS Like a good Cartesian he conceived of the state as an immense machine, every portion of which should receive its impulse from outsidethat is from him, Colbert.
As the minister of an ambitious and magnificent king, Colbert was under the hard necessity of sacrificing everything to the wars in Flanders and the pomp of Versailles a gulf which swallowed up all the countrys wealth;and, amid a society which might be supposed submissively docile to the wishes of Louis XIV., he had to retain the most absurd financial laws, making the burden of taxation weigh heaviest on those who had no other resources than their labor, whilst landed property escaped free of charge.
There was a volume of attack upon Colbert; but as the fundamental system remained unchanged, because reform would have necessitated an attack upon privilege and even upon the constitution of the monarchy, the evil only went on increasing.
Following the advice of Colbert and de Lionne, Louis XIV.
From the commencement it was evident that he was prepared to give effect to a policy of colonial expansion, and to exercise an independence of action that did not coincide with the views of the monarch or of his minister Colbert.
In 1773 Necker won the prize of the Academie Frangaise for an eloge on Colbert, and in 1775 published his Essai sur la legislation et le commerce des grains, in which he attacked the free-trade policy of Turgot.
Charpentier, who was long in receipt of a pension of 1200 livres from Colbert, was erudite and ingenious, but he was always heavy and commonplace.
He was deaf also to all the appeals against the other forms of his boundless extravagance which Colbert, with all his deference towards his sovereign, bravely ventured to make.'
To diplomacy he never pretended; persuasion and deceit were not the weapons he 1 See especially a Memoire presented to the king in 1666, published in the Lettres, Fee., de Colbert, vol.
Cruel means of repression assisted natural hardships and the carelessness of the administration in depopulating and laying waste the countryside; while Louis XIV.s martial and ostentatious policy was even more disastrous than pestilence and famine, when Louvois advice prevailed in council over that of Colbert, now embittered and desperate.
Pepys was effectively a minister in his own right, similar in style to Colbert, Louis XIV 's Minister of the Marine.
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