COLBERT AND FRENCH COLONIAL POLICY 307 At this juncture a third Power, differing widely in character, organisation and resources from the other two, entered the race for commerce and for empire. With the Dutch the primum mobile was their trade and the merchants were the State. In England, a larger and a less homogeneous country, these elements had not so dominant a place, but must in the long run prove decisive. But in France, more than the double of both combined in resources and in population, the merchant class was despised, and the fleet both discredited and in decay. There was in the directing of France, moreover, a conflict of tradition and of policy which might permanently confine her to Europe. The adventurous character of her sons and her possession of three great coastlines pointed towards the world outside. Her acquisition of important West Indian islands and of wide regions on the American mainland showed that she could both explore and colonise. But their vast and fertile homeland furnished little incentive to her people to remove, while the danger from her neighbours in the past had set up a tradition of counter-aggression towards Flanders and the Rhine which the present weakness of both Habsburg families was only too likely to confirm. It was therefore of vital importance that, while French policy hung thus unfixed, Louis XIV gave his confidence to Colbert. Born a poor gentleman in 1619, Colbert had grown up in the public service and was now its soul. By sheer competence, he attracted office after office to himself, and soon it could be said that all France passed under his eyes in every moment.1 By serving Mazarin he had learned to worship Richelieu, so that his advent to power became a Richelieu restoration. "To expedients, endless calculations, Italian tergiversations, there succeeded energetic resolutions, more than were necessary, sometimes shooting beyond the mark."2 Louis knew well that the man who had planned and effected the downfall of Fouquet had made him really King, and that the minister who behaved like an industrious attorney could never be dangerous to the Crown. With characteristic magnificence, he accepted and rewarded Colbert's devotion, committing even his irregularities to his care, and not seldom following his advice. Colbert's unique devotion, however, was not the outcome of adoration for his master, for which indeed he lacked the needful imagination. While the courtiers were assuring Louis that the rain of Marly did not wet, Colbert was writing, "Your Majesty has so mixed up your pleasure with the war on land that to disentangle them is not easy". His mainspring was a passion, rivalling that of Napoleon, for affairs. To the question whether labour late or early was the better, he answered, "Both"; being wont to divert himself at his desk for some fifteen hours a day. What constituted his strength was his zeal not for Louis, but for France. 1 Lavisse, E., Histoire de France, vï, i, 157. 2 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, 1, xx. 3 Ibid. п, i, p. ccxviii. To the King he gave the loyal service that was due to the lawful head of France, but he was too dispassionate to admire a sceptred colleague in her service who could prefer the ideals of a Louvois to his own. The harsh recluse who held that every man had at least nine vices to one virtue, and who disliked many classes of Frenchmen without giving praise to any, dreamed none the less, as the Venetian senate were informed, "of making the whole country superior to every other in wealth...having need of nothing, but dispensing everything to other States". When he had been a dozen years in power, a manual of commerce was dedicated to him as the man who had taught France that she could do everything and must be ashamed to enrich foreigners by her neglect. Foreigners, it is true, he disliked, one and all, unless they were prepared to become French. "All his policy", wrote a great modern critic, "was to create in France and to destroy abroad.”3 The least mistakable of men, Colbert produced no less methodically than fearlessly his great design for the world primacy of France. She had already by far the strongest army. Her navy must become its peer, and her revenue such as would easily suffice for both. In every industry she must be unrivalled: internal communications must be made perfect: and she must appropriate all commerce to herself. All this could be effected by obedience to the King's directions as formulated by his faithful servant in an unending shower of rescripts. Adam Smith, indeed, belittled him as a plodding man of business who endeavoured to regulate the industry and commerce of a great country upon the same model as the departments of a public office. It is certain, however, that his unfailing energy and his influence with the King made his ideas on commerce of great moment to mankind. His distended working-day gave him little leisure for abstract economics, but, happily for his own peace of mind, he found these matters too self-evident to demand prolonged investigation. Commerce, it was clear, was a war for gold and silver. The numbers of mankind remaining stationary and their wants unchanged, commerce could not but be fixed in volume. What proportion of this fixed volume a State obtained should depend upon its power, the numbers of its people and the extent of its coastline. "It is certain", he declared, "that the maritime forces of a state are always in proportion to the commercial. 995 To increase its commerce and therefore its navy, no means was so sure as to despoil a competing power. In thinking of the Dutch or English, he agreed with Captain Cocke that "the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down". This did not necessarily mean resort to pike or cannon: ordinances, subsidies, bribes and the sight of superior fleets and armies might be enough. To royal companies he once triumphantly ascribed the King's wealth 1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, VII, p. clxxii. 5 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, vi, 268. 2 Savary, J., Le parfait négociant (Paris, 1675). Wealth of Nations, IV, ix. 6 Pepys, Diary, 2 February 1664. COLBERT'S COMMERCIAL POLICY 309 and the need that he had spread in neighbouring States.1 But though not bellicose, or even highly vindictive, Colbert was restrained by little human sympathy and by few of the finer scruples. Frenchmen he cherished in so far as they served the State, but he would have them reduced to four useful callings. He perverted justice to supply the galleys with labour, and shipped off girls to the colonies with orders to be married within a fortnight of arriving. Against foreigners he was ready to weight the scales of justice and to use any means to render them subservient to the needs of France. Of religion he had sufficient to announce, probably without conscious hypocrisy, that the chief object of new companies for the Indies was to carry the light of the gospel into those distant lands. But to the Japanese he explained that the King's subjects were of two religions, and that, in view of their preference, he would send them only those whose religion was that of the Dutch. He is said to have driven his wife from his deathbed, surprised that she, who would not have dared to interrupt his work for Louis, should intrude upon his converse with the King of kings. But the 270,000 priests, monks and nuns of France, being neither productive nor reproductive, gave him little joy. It was natural to him to resent clerical interference with the sale of spirits to the Redskins, and to show himself eager to bring Calvinist craftsmen into France. Rather a statesman than a doctrinaire, he was in spirit a Hohenzollern, though less fundamentally tolerant than they, and the architect of power by sea rather than by land. The ruthless realism of policy, the patient attention to detail, the unfailing energy of application are common to Prussia and to Colbert's France. Early in 1664 the great adventure was begun. Before securing the King's decision to make France a commercial nation, Colbert had set out fairly the arguments against this course. It might be regarded, he insisted, as a breach not merely with French tradition but with the tradition of all powerful States. Fertile France, moreover, was not naturally industrious or prone to save. By sea she was unskilful, needing twice the numbers of the Dutch to produce a given result. Either the French would be undersold by the Dutch, and therefore ruined, or they would ruin and alienate a dependent republic of which the entire disposal was in His Majesty's hands. Dutch behaviour, however, gave little countenance to this contention that Dutch sea power was tantamount to French, and the measures now proclaimed by Colbert were such as must inevitably bring about a rupture. Regardless of public opinion, he announced to Marseilles and other important towns that a million livres would be expended yearly in promoting manufactures and navigation. River dues were to be abolished, roads improved, shipping subsidised and merchants 1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, II, ii, 676. 3 Ibid. п, i, p. clxi. 5 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, II, i, p. cclxvi. 3 Ibid. m, ii, 484. 4 Cit. Lavisse, Histoire de France, vu, i, 236. protected diplomatically in foreign lands. While studiously allowing the French States-General to decay, the King proclaimed his wish to receive merchants at his court and to render conference with them easy.1 At the same time the expenditure that Mazarin had thought necessary for the navy was multiplied fivefold, and no pains were spared to transplant to France the naval science of the Dutch and English. The most immediately arresting of all Colbert's measures, however, was the formation, with lavish assistance from the State, of privileged companies for the Indies, both West and East. To the reconstructed West India Company Colbert assigned a monopoly of trade with all the islands, as well as at Cayenne and on the mainland from the Amazon to the Orinoco, with French North America and with Africa from Cape Verde to the Cape of Good Hope. The French West Indies, though acquired by private gentlemen, were transferred to the Company, and vigorous orders were issued to appropriate for Frenchmen their existing commerce with the Dutch.2 The East India Company, with a capital of 15,000,000 livres, was an even more grandiose creation. Its monopoly, granted for fifty years, began at the Cape of Good Hope and embraced all the eastern and southern seas. Its conquests, with all their minerals and the right of making slaves, were to remain its own for ever, on condition that it maintained Christian worship and the French judicial system. Besides subscribing one-fifth of the initial capital and extracting much more by influence, the Crown promised liberal bounties on all French goods carried abroad, and on all colonial goods imported by the Company into France. Efforts were made to stem the tide of Dutch conquest by securing the relics of the Portuguese dominion in India. Two million pounds of salt were offered to Denmark as a loan in kind if she would sell the unprofitable post which she held upon the coast of Malabar. But the Dutch East India Company, created and maintained by the energy of a whole people, strengthened by long experience and possessing assets estimated at 800,000,000 livres, was not easily to be undersold, intimidated or dispossessed. French success in the East Indies postulated the prior subjugation of the Dutch in Europe. 5 At the same time Colbert spared no pains to develop the French colonies in North America. Wishing his children in Canada, as the minister explained, to feel the sweetness and happiness of his reign like those in the heart of France, Louis exhorted them to work, to trade, and to manufacture. The great obstacle to progress lay in the reluctance of almost all Frenchmen to go to Canada or to settle quietly when they arrived there. The fact that French colonies were in a very real sense Catholic missions closed them to Huguenot emi1 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, п, ii, 426. 2 Ibid. m, ii, 484, etc. 3 Ibid. n, i, p. clxiv. ▲ Ibid. п, ii, 456. Ibid. VI, 232. • Ibid. ш, ii, 394. FRENCH, DUTCH AND ENGLISH COLONISATION 311 gration. Short of compulsory expatriation, to which the King would not resort, however, every lawful method of augmenting the population was tried. Copious rescripts, the exhortations of the Church, the despatch of troops with orders to marry, the export of young women and of livestock, the preparation of houses and holdings by the forces of the Crown-all were freely employed, yet the reluctant growth of the Canadian people almost drove Colbert to despair. Breaking with the Jesuit policy of Indian segregation, he insisted that the numbers should be raised by the incorporation of the natives. Every possible freedom of activity was granted to the colonists. Intercourse with Boston was encouraged, and when the trade in furs declined, the representatives of the Crown were encouraged with the argument that this would turn the settlers' minds towards more solid occupations. Despite all his tenacity and resource, indeed, progress proved of the slowest, but in the 'sixties this could hardly be foreseen. What first appeared (1664-7) was that France had made a bold push for colonies and commerce when she enjoyed the advantage of peace with Spain and when the Dutch and English were at each other's throats. For in February 1664 the Royal African Company, presided over by James, Duke of York, had seized part of the coast of Guinea, and further English aggressions against the Dutch included the capture of New Amsterdam (September 1664). Early in March 1665 England formally declared war. By the challenge of Colbert and the outbreak of war between England and the Dutch, the relations between the three active colonial peoples became almost inextricably intertwined. Their history, their forms of government, their religion, and their interest seemed each to point in directions mutually opposed. As rebels against the House of Habsburg, the Dutch must be the natural allies of France, and France claimed that to her they owed their independence. Recent years had shown the French, however, that gratitude could not be counted on to save their influence in Constantinople and northern Africa from Dutch attack, while Dutch statesmen saw clearly that to safeguard Amsterdam the French must be kept far from Antwerp, their natural goal. In the days of the Armada, Dutch and English had protected each other against Spain, and Britons had continued to form the kernel of the army which Dugald Dalgetty's "mean, amphibious, twenty-breeched boors" hired for their own defence.1 Yet the Stuarts and Cromwell alike recognised in Dutch power a deadly menace to England, and strove both by laws and arms to ward it off. Against the republic Charles II cherished the grievance that his nephew of Orange was improperly debarred from power. Of France and England it could be said that despite the mutual hatred of their peoples they had generally lived in peace and alliance for more than a century, apart from the little war of 1 Edmundson, G., Anglo-Dutch rivalry during the first half of the seventeenth century, p. 82. |