Overloading Atlas: Samuel Bernard and the Crisis of French Banking

In the immediate aftermath of the Huguetan affair Bernard was so overextended, thanks to the crisis and the deterioration of government revenue streams, that he came to fear his bills of exchange would be protested. He was operating in advance of payment by some 33 million livres in the summer of 1705, and his correspondents were demanding either more solid guarantees or payment up to three months in advance. This was a structural gap in war-effort-related remitting that would not shrink significantly for as long as funds needed to be sent abroad on a large scale. Bernard faced a dire situation. By the end of the year Venetian, Genoese and Milanese military officers were willing to provide one million livres to the French army of Lombardy, but were refusing to have anything to do with Bernard. In March 1706 Bernard was forced to give up his contract to supply money to French forces in Spain, and he explicitly grieved that he was being treated with far less confidence than in his previous five years of service. His lamentations that he was no longer getting the revenue instruments he wanted continued into 1707, when he exclaimed, ‘I would not have been able to imagine that after five years of service I would have attracted less confidence than that which Monseigneur [Chamillart] had in me from the start, and notably in 1702.’