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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 justice2 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, 1, ii, 676.

3 Ibid. I, i, p. clxi.

* Clément, Lettres de Colbert, 11, i, p. cclxvi.

2 Ibid. 1, ii, 484.

Cit. Lavisse, Histoire de France, VII, 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.

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. II, i, p. • Ibid. 11, ii, 456. 5 Ibid. VI, 232. Ibid. III, ii, 394.

clxiv.

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.

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La Rochelle (1627-9). France and England were enthusiastic monarchies; Holland, an impenitent republic. The Dutch, none the less, shared with the English a passion for civil rights to which the French were strangers. Many now regard the churches of France and England as always Catholic, while the Dutch were heretics from the first. In 1664, however, there was no greater bond of sympathy between the Dutch and English peoples than their common antagonism to Rome. The day of religious wars did not then seem to have ended. Fifteen years later, Shaftesbury could denounce "a secret universal Catholic league, carried on by the clergy for the utter extirpation of the Protestant religion". If France ruled Europe, Burnet in all sincerity assured Queen Anne, "in less than three years' time she would be murdered and the fires would be again raised in Smithfield".2

But, disregarding forms and fears and bygones, what relations between the three Powers did their respective interests in 1664 dictate? It is perhaps impossible to find a formula of policy which could reconcile the legitimate demands of each for security and progress. Each nation, it is true, owed something to the others in prosperity as well as in freedom. "If the Dutch", argues a Dutchman, "almost completely expelled the Portuguese and Spaniards from the Indies, the overthrow of these nations contributed not a little to the aggrandisement of the English in America and to the bloom of their commerce in Europe. "3 The Dutch, Colbert reasoned in 1665, could not break with France, since without her their commerce could not exist. Imports to the annual value of more than 20,000,000 livres, employing 3000 of their ships and more than 50,000 of their subjects, pledged them to her alliance.4 French and English, again, cooperated whole-heartedly in some parts of North America and the West Indies, while political and commercial jealousy failed to suppress their mutual trade in Europe.

In spite of Colbert and of the companies, the nations might one day realise that they traded with each other for their own advantage, that the world was wide enough for all, and that forts and armies and prohibitions usually cost more than they brought in. The age, however, had decided for the ideas of the Navigation Acts and there only remained the vital question of security. What the Dutch had in great part accomplished in the commercial field, Louis threatened in the political. Two decades of his rule were needed to display to Europe all that was in his mind and to league the remaining nations against France. A king who holds and practises the belief that, since God has made him stronger than other kings, He must intend him to 1 Christie, W. D., A Life of... Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, p. 282. * Burnet, History of my own time, p. 874.

3 Aelberts, J. (publisher), Les heureuses suites de l'alliance...de...Guillaume III et Marie II ...avec...les S.S. États-Généraux des Provinces-Unies (La Haye, 1689).

4 Clément, Lettres de Colbert, VI, 243.

RIVALRY OF FRENCH, DUTCH AND ENGLISH

313 dictate to them, is apt to excite alarm before his full design appears, and such was the case with Louis. Popular instinct was aroused in Holland and England long before the Revolution, and neither nation can be blamed for obstructing the commercial career of France.

"If England", asked a pamphleteer, "by means of the woollen manufactures and by vent of her tin, lead and sea-coal has amassed such riches, what might one not have believed France would have gained, which, besides her manufactures of wool, silk, linen, hats, paper and many other things which are eagerly sought after by all the world, supplies other countries with wines, brandies, wheat, salt, oil, and fruits of all sorts for immense sums? This...made my Lord Bellasis say, That if God should one day make the Turks know what they could do at sea and the French how far they might extend their commerce, all Europe would soon fall a conquest to those Powers."1 It is difficult, indeed, to assign any bounds to the dominion to which seventeenth-century France, if adroitly guided, might have attained. The sober road of purchase would assuredly have carried her frontier posts far afield,2 while her enhanced wealth and power after successive incorporations would have rendered new advances more easy. Leibniz urged Louis to acquire a Holland of his own in Egypt, a halting-place at the cross-roads of commerce, which powerfully appealed to the instincts of the French. Had he made this choice, which no Power could have successfully contested, "the necessity of mastering the Mediterranean and opening the Red Sea...would have compelled the occupation of stations on either side of Egypt, and France would have been led step by step, as England has been led by the possession of India, to the seizure of points like Malta, Cyprus, Aden, in short, to a great sea-power". The guidance of France, however, was not always clear-sighted or adroit, and the result, as will be shown, was failure.

3

In 1665, however, war between the two chief maritime Powers favoured the ambitions of their would-be rival so plainly that some attributed the Anglo-Dutch struggle to France. Evelyn thought in April that "this terrible war" had been "begun doubtless at secret instigation of the French to weaken the States and Protestant interest."4 In fact, the struggle arose from commercial and colonial disputes which excited both the rulers and the people of the two nations, and neither Louis nor Colbert was eager to join in. The early success of the English was accounted profitable to the Dutch, since it would compel their French allies to rescue them.5 Before taking this unwelcome step, the French besought the Dutch to buy peace by concessions to England in America, Guinea and the East Indies.

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1 Huet, P. D., Bishop of Avranches, View of the Dutch trade (London, 1722).

2 Cf. Dreyss, C., Mémoires de Louis XIV pour l'instruction du Dauphin, pp. 552-60.

Mahan, A. T., The influence of sea-power upon history, 1660-1783, p. 141.

Diary, 5 April 1665. Cf. Davenant, Works, III, 309, 310.

Abraham de Wicquefort to Lionne, 2 July 1665 (Colenbrander, Bescheiden, 1, 239).

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