Introduction

In the English-speaking world most of the disastrous episodes of French financial history are little known. The one great exception is the Mississippi Bubble of 1719–20, but while it is often referred to by historians, economists and political commentators, the longer-term developments and crises that helped to make it possible remain shrouded in obscurity. Yet John Law’s System of those years was both thinkable and deemed necessary because of the War of the Spanish Succession, the great conflict for the Spanish Habsburg inheritance that raged across much of western and southern Europe between 1701 and 1714. During this war the British ‘financial revolution’, for all its limitations, was reaching a degree of solidity and stability that allowed it to power not only Queen Anne’s war effort but make significant contributions to those of several of her allies. Less happily, on the other side of the divide Louis XIV’s France — the goliath of the international stage — was burdened with the crippling task of defending the Spanish lands acquired by Louis’s grandson, Philippe, duc d’Anjou, while the financial machinery at the service of the Bourbon kings to support their defensive endeavours was considerably less efficient than that across the Channel. Primarily, what France had going for it was its demographic and economic size, and its enormous trading and financial links with other European countries.