Jean Baptiste Colbert, 1619-1683.

Powerful contrôleur général  (roughly, minister of finance) under King Louis XIV of France from 1661 to 1683.  Colbert managed, against the incredible odds of the Sun King's extravagance, to keep some degree of solvency in French state finances.  He is the architect of the French strain of Mercantilism, known as Colbertisme. 

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a commoner, born to a  merchant family in Reims, in the Champagne region of France . After some reverses to his father's business, the family moved to Paris in 1629, in the hopes of starting a new career in finance, leaving young Colbert behind in a Jesuit boarding school in Reims.  In 1634, at the age of fifteen, Colbert was sent to Lyons to apprentice in a commercial banking house. He eventually returned to Paris to rejoin his family, and was placed by his father as an intern in various offices around Paris (notary, procurator) to complete his training. 

In 1640, reaching the age of twenty one,  his father (with the help of his influential cousin, Colbert de Saint-Pouange) managed to purchase a State office for young Colbert in the administration of Cardinal Richelieu.  Colbert thus moved from the private sector to the public sector.  His position, as commissaire ordinaire des guerres, had Colbert traveling around France, visiting garrisons to inspect their supplies and equipment.  He acquired a reputation as a diligent, meticulous and exacting bureaucrat.  Colbert had a knack for the public service, and hero-worshipped Richelieu. 

Richelieu death in 1642 was followed a few months later by the death of his master, Louis XIII.  The new king, Louis XIV, was merely five years old, and a regency council was formed under the queen-mother Anne of Austria and Richelieu's protegé, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the new prime minister of France.  Mazarin promptly appointed Michel Le Tellier as the secretary of state for war in 1643.  Le Tellier was the brother-in-law of the aforementioned Colbert de Saint Pouange, and the family connection improved young Colbert's prospects, and he soon became Le Tellier's personal commissioner. 

Political fortune was soon joined by material fortune: in 1647, one of Colbert's uncles was charged with treason, and Le Tellier arranged for the confiscation and transfer of his property to the young Colbert. In 1648, Colbert married Marie Charron, a rich heiress.  As a wedding gift, La Tellier secured him the honorific title of "Councillor of State", enshrining Colbert's position as a high official. 

Between 1648 and 1652, France was convulsed in "La Fronde", a complicated, multi-stage civil war. Colbert remained loyally by Le Tellier's side. He soon found himself shuttling with frequency as a messenger between the frontline, where Le Tellier was organizing the royal troops, and the fugitive royal court, moving around in the provinces. As a result, Colbert soon became a familiar face to the young king, his mother and the cardinal.  Colbert and Mazarin did not get along initially - Colbert felt the Italian-born Mazarin was an inadequate successor to the great Richelieu, and his nationalist feathers were ruffled by Mazarin's entourage of Italian advisors; for his part, Mazarin protested to Le Tellier about Colbert's ill-concealed contempt and manners.  Nonetheless, Colbert's professionalism, diligence and discretion in handling high States secrets gradually inspired the trust of Mazarin in the young commissioner.  As the wars of the Fronde advanced, and Mazarin found his other officials abandoning or betraying him, Mazarin relied increasingly on Colbert to handle sensitive communications, and soon regarded him as the sole trustworthy man left in France.

In June 1651, Colbert made the fateful decision of detaching from Le Tellier's service and entering the service of Cardinal Mazarin. At that moment, Mazarin was at the bottom of his fortunes, deprived of his formal powers and confined to internal exile in Saint-Germain. It seemed like an end to a political career, but Mazarin offered to make Colbert the manager of his private affairs and interlocutor between the exiled cardinal and the current official government.   The gamble paid off.  The Fronde dissolved by late 1652, and in February 1653, Mazarin returned to Paris, his powers as prime minister restored. Colbert came with him. 

For the next eight years, Colbert served as intendant of Mazarin's household.  Officially, that meant Colbert was in charge of the cardinal's private affairs, while the cardinal focused on public affairs, but the distinction between the two areas was never strict nor clear.

Cardinal Mazarin, in conjunction with the queen mother Anne of Austria, had led the regency council for the young King Louis XIV, who had ascended to throne at the tender age of five in 1643.  Although Louis was officially declared of age to rule in 1651, Mazarin had kept him out of power, and kept the regency council going.  Cardinal Mazarin died in 1661, and recommended his protegé Colbert as his replacement.  But King Louis XIV, now in his early twenties, decided enough was enough, and that he would be his own prime minister.  The king, however, did recognize Colbert's abilities, and held on to him. Colbert's profile fit Louis XIV's preference for ambitious commoners, instead of aristocrats, in his governing council. It was Colbert who arranged the intrigue that led to the fall and arrest of Nicolas Fouquet, the French superintendant of finances, in the summer of 1661.  In his place, Louis XIV appointed Colbert as contrôleur-général des finances (French minister of finance).

Jean-Baptiste Colbert presided over the economic policy of France under Louis XIV from 1661 to his death in 1683.  Colbert believed in the Mercantilist doctrine that the expansion of commerce (and the maintenance of a favorable balance of trade) was the key to State wealth.  His policies -- what became known as Colbertisme -- were all geared in this direction.  Colbert doted on his charter companies, set up chambers of commerce, redirected capital to export and import-substitution industries, set up a protective system of tariffs and duties, blocked foreigners from trading in French colonies, etc.  

By and large, Colbert was not interested in internal commerce which, in his view, did nothing for State wealth.  French farmers and small manufacturers were left locked in the stifling embrace of Medieval town crafts and merchant guilds.  Restrictions and internal tariffs on the movement of goods and labor between regions remained in place.  France's incredibly regressive tax system was reinforced.  With the privileged landowning gentry and clergy exempt from taxation and Colbert's new big merchant capitalists coddled with subsidies, the burden of taxes fell even heavier upon the luckless French farmers and small town craftsmen.  Colbert's encouragement of export industries, notably wine, transformed land-use patterns, leaving some areas of France dangerously close to food-insufficiency.

Like the Duke of Sully before him, Colbert recognized the need for a good internal transportation network, but only because it was necessary to connect the ports to French export industries. Colbert revived the hated corvée, the unpaid labor-time owed by peasants to their feudal lords (and now the State) and forced local farmers and their draught-animals to work on road maintenance. 

The Colbertiste system created a paradox.  It generated a "progressive" external economy while allowing the internal economy to stagnate.  Indeed, by the very set-up of the system, the promotion of the former often meant greater burdens for the latter.  Later commentators like the Maréchal de Vauban, Claude Jacques Herbert, Pierre le Pesant de Boisguilbert and Vincent de Gournay raised their voices and called for the reform of the fiscal and commercial system set up by Colbert.  

When Colbert died in 1683, his steady restraining hand on the king was released.  King Louis XIV launched a series of expensively, ruinous wars for the next three decades.  By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, the French state was bankrupt, reviving a nostalgia for Colbert.  After the failed experiment of John Law to rescue French finances, Cardinal Fleury and Philibert Orry reinstituted Colbert's policies in the late 1720s and presided over a high period of Neo-Colbertisme in French state policy.

Attention to the internal state of France accompanied the wave of liberalism in the the Enlightenment period of the late 18th Century.  Neo-Colbertistes such as Jacques Necker (who composed an Eloge to Colbert in 1773), Forbonnais and Graslin maintained that Colbert's policies were, on the whole, correct.  All that was required, they argued, was to bring the internal economy into shape by getting rid of some of the crippling Medieval restrictions, rationalizing administration and making the fiscal burden more equitable.  But French liberals, notably Quesnay and the Physiocratic clique, believed that Colbert's ideas was entirely wrong-headed and called unequivocally for their complete abandonment.  Much of the Colbertiste system was (temporarily) dismantled during Jacques Turgot's brief tenure as controller-general in the 1770s.  At the end of the day, the reforms were too little and too late. The tensions created by the Colbertiste paradox -- and the inability (or unwillingness) of Colbert's successors to fix it -- were one of the underlying causes, if not the primary cause, of the French Revolution of 1789. 

Jean-Baptiste Colbert is sometimes given the sobriquet "the Great Colbert" (Le Grand Colbert) to distinguish him from his nephew and namesake, the Marquis de Torcy.

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