The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System
328
The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System
328Paperback(First Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
—-Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
—-Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles
"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
—-Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
—-Keith Baker, Stanford University
When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert—-the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry—-to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.
Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches—-regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy—-Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.
Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472034642 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2011 |
| Series: | Cultures Of Knowledge In The Early Modern World |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Information Master
JEAN-BAPTISTE COLBERT'S SECRET STATE INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMBy Jacob Soll
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2009 University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11690-4
Chapter One
Between Public and Secret Spheres THE CASE OF COLBERT
In 1698, the Cambridge-trained naturalist and royal physician Martin Lister wrote an account of his trip to Paris. Lister described birds, hedges, flagstones, housing materials, architectural and antiquarian treasures, and French traditions, clothing, and diet. He measured the wheels of carriages, "not above two Foot and a half Diameter; which makes them [carriages] easie to get into." He visited museums and the workshop of the great gardener of Versailles, André Le Nôtre. Most of all, Lister visited libraries. Part book and manuscript collections, part antiquarian and natural history museums, Parisian libraries were famed storehouses of erudition and science, and thus obligatory stops on any grand tour.
Among the libraries he visited was that of Louis XIV's famed minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83). A block from the Royal Library, on the rue de Richelieu, it was still the finest private collection in Paris. Here Lister found something unique among the Parisian collections. Colbert had died in 1683, and his son, the marquis of Seignelay, had followed hisfather to the grave in 1690, but their old family librarian, Étienne Baluze, still stood guard over the collection. Once the hub of Colbert's administration, the library was now slowly turning into a private museum. With Baluze as his guide, Lister toured the library:
I saw the Library of the late Monsieur Colbert, the great patron of Learning. The Gallery, wherein the printed Books are kept, is a Ground-Room, with Windows on one side only, along a fine Garden. It is the neatest Library in Paris, very large, and exceedingly well-furnish'd. At the upper-end is a fair Room, wherein the Papers of State are kept; particularly those of the Administration of Cardinal Mazarin, and his own Accounts, when he was in Employment. These make up many hundred Folio's, finely bound in Red Maroquin and Gilt. The Manuscript Library is above-stairs, in three Rooms, and is the choicest of that kind in Paris: It contains 6,610 Volumes. The Catalogue of them Monsieur Baluze shewed me: which he said was designed shortly for the Press.
Entrance to Colbert's library had once been guarded, for his financial registers held extensive accounts and administrative papers of Louis XIV's France, the largest European state of its time. For almost thirty years (1654-83), Colbert had built his own private library in tandem with the semipublic royal collection, creating one of the biggest library-archives in Europe. It was an encyclopedia of the state. What Martin Lister saw during his tour was the nerve center of Colbert's immense administrative project. On the first floor, Colbert kept a humanist library with classical works, ancient Bibles, medieval manuscripts, rare editions, prints, scientific texts, and naturalist collections. Upstairs, in finely bound double-book accounts, he kept his internal government reports, administrative correspondence, state statistical reports, and the information of industry and administration, such as reports on the quality of cloth, and sketches of winches and sails. Colbert had consciously integrated a traditional humanist library and practical state and industrial administrative archive on a large scale on a single site, with one catalog, and one primary librarian.
Colbert believed that all knowledge had practical value for politics. Though himself a relentless man of affairs, he believed antiquarian and classical learning to be as important as engineering and accounting. He was convinced that a ruler or minister of state could learn essential lessons from the most unlikely of sources, such as the price lists of nails, astronomical mathematical research, or studies on Ciceronian poetry. Fusing the cultures of library and archival management, the world of natural science, finance, merchant learning, and industrial technology, he began asking questions basic to encyclopedists and archival and library managers, as well as to Google information technicians today: how to compile, copy, and store a mass of eclectic documents and render them searchable for topics. He managed his multifaceted administration through his library, developing a system to use archives, state research institutes, internal reports, and trained teams of specialists to develop high policymaking in areas of colonial expansion and diplomacy, as well as to micromanage industrial production and matters as mundane as the policing of intellectuals, book printers, prostitutes, and the butcher's guild.
The object of this book is to bring to light the traditions that Colbert harnessed for government, and how he did it. It seeks to go beyond the debate over Colbert's mercantilist, centralized model of state regulation, and to examine in detail the intellectual tools he used as the patron of the Grand Siècle, the builder of Versailles, and the architect of Louis XIV's administrative state. The rise of the modern administrative state has long been associated with Max Weber's teleology of rationalization, secularization, and the rise of bureaucracy. Louis XIV's government has been seen by historians as a rational form of state administration, inspired by Cartesianism and the Scientific Revolution. Yet the building blocks of Colbert's intelligence system and administration were neither modern nor purely secular. Although Colbert believed in Louis XIV's claims to absolute monarchy, Colbert's approach to learning for government grew neither from theory, nor from pure mercantilist ideology, nor from scientific tradition, but rather from his own brand of curiosity and an astute recognition that myriad traditions of knowledge that had roots in humanist, ecclesiastical, financial, military, and naval culture could be used to build a state.
In editing Colbert's papers in the nineteenth century, Pierre Clément described them as not simply an archive, but as a testament to Colbert's obsession with the mastery of information and its connection with government, noting the "excessive care with which Colbert conserved the documents relative to his administration and the attention he applied to correct himself in the margins of all his own letters." Philippe de Champaigne's famous 1655 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert shows him early in his career, as Cardinal Mazarin's personal accountant, dressed in black, holding a folded piece of paper (see fig. 1). Oddly, Colbert is smiling, or at least smirking. What was it that made an obsessive financier-a man apparently never happier than when filling out account ledgers-develop the astonishing view that all knowledge was useful for political affairs? From the accounts we have of Colbert, and from his own humorless and often brutal correspondence, this smile is quite remarkable, for he was not known for joviality. Madame de Sévigné famously called him "Le Nord," or the north, for his cold demeanor. It was Colbert's first biographer, Courtilz de Sandras, who recognized both Colbert's stern disposition and his interest in using information to govern: "He spoke rarely, and never responded to questions immediately, wanting to be further informed by reports [before doing so]."
Ezechiel Spanheim (1629-1710), the German antiquarian and diplomat who had visited Louis XIV's court, described Colbert's "rigor" and "austerity," and was also sensitive to Colbert's particular reliance on possessing and handling information. He reveals a clue as to Philippe de Champaigne's portrayal of Colbert smiling with a piece of paper in his hand:
He never was content, as were those who preceded him in this direction, to learn about high government business, and then to avail himself of the commissioners, intendants, controllers, or other people of finance that were customarily employed; he wanted to take it all on himself, to enter into every detail, as much in regard to income as to expenditure, as well as the expedients to furnish these funds in the future, wanting only to depend on his own skills, precise information that he collected, and in relation to them, to develop methods for handling this information, in exact and particular registers that he kept himself.
Files, correspondence, reports, historical documents, account books, legers, and paperwork in general made the otherwise cantankerous Colbert happy, not least because he recognized them as a source of power, but also, as we shall see, because he simply reveled in the various activities involved in handling paperwork, which others often found dull and even odious.
Adam Smith, who warned against mercantilism, recognized Colbert's aptitude for informing himself: "Mr. Colbert, the famous minister of Lewis XIVth, was a man of probity, of great industry and knowledge of detail; of great experience and acuteness in the examination of publick accounts, in short, every way fitted for introducing method and good order into the collection and expenditure of the publick revenue." Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751-72) mixed political criticism and calls for scientific reason and political liberty with a revolutionary valorization of practical, everyday knowledge. It is, therefore, not surprising that it called Colbert a "great statesman" and "le grand Colbert." It painted him as an innovator and the able builder of the learned holdings of the Royal Library.
Diderot and his enlightened collaborators credited Colbert with building the state's financial, industrial, and colonial apparatus and, at the same time, with developing basic research and learning. In their eyes, Louis XIV's minister was a glorious genius, for he established the Enlightened ideal of practical knowledge while also systematizing the old world of scholarship. The Encyclopédie's entries under "Inspector," "Taxation," "Loan," "Subsidy," "Luxury," "Measure," "Iron," "Grains," "Paper Industry," "Cloth Dying," "Engraving," and "Tapestry," as well as "Académie Française," "Académie Royale des Sciences," "Académie de Peinture," "Archival Diplomatica," "Cabinet of Natural History," "Letters," and "Library," all discuss Colbert. Indeed, the Encyclopédie contains 143 references to him. This is an impressive showing. Louis XIV has 614 mentions, Richelieu 120, Newton 783, Descartes 506, Voltaire 313, Pierre Bayle 274, Spinoza 200, Francis Bacon 172, and John Locke 116. Colbert is present in all fields of the Encyclopédie: artistic, learned, scientific, political, financial, industrial, and legal. Colbert was not an encyclopedist, but the philosophes recognized in him a precursor to their own interest in harnessing and mixing both formal learning and practical knowledge.
The most detailed entry in the Encyclopédie on Colbert is that on libraries, and describes how he made the Royal Library and the Académie Royale des Sciences a world center of learning and erudition. Colbert may not have been a Latin scholar, but he built the Latin holdings of the library. Vision and even pretension count for something if they inspire curiosity and innovation. Colbert was no scholar, but rather a political administrator who did not hesitate to trample France's ancient constitution. Yet he was, in his own way, a major figure in the history of learning. Echoing the Encyclopédie, the Cambridge Modern History notes: "We stand amazed at the different subjects which came under the survey of Colbert and at the minute attention which he was able to bestow on them."
A century earlier than Diderot, Colbert grew up in a merchant household and trained on the shop-room floor. Though neither encyclopedist nor scholar, he saw before Diderot many of the elements that would characterize the new practical learning of the eighteenth century. Studying with the Jesuits and as an accountant, and then working as a financial manager and military contractor, he saw the connection between these cultures and their usefulness for state administration. Humanist encyclopedic scholars, churchmen, state administrators, and accountants had much in common: they categorized subjects and developed methods of data collection and assessment. Colbert recognized and bridged these cultures and integrated them into his governmental system. Ernest Lavisse remarked that Colbert's education was as "mediocre as his birth," and yet Colbert was able to see new applications for disciplines outside the respective fields.
Rather than a paragon of rationality or Cartesianism, Colbert often sounded more like a medieval Italian banker, or an enlightened, hard-driving Scottish merchant manager. "My natural inclination to work is such," stated Colbert, "that every day ... it is impossible for my spirit to support leisure and moderate work." Colbert was a Jesuit-trained accountant and state administrator, whose education had its roots in medieval financial culture and Counter-Reformation pedagogy, and as such he was skilled in methods of data gathering and practical learning. His state information system shows that curious learning and encyclopedism are not necessarily critical and corrosive to autocratic political authority. Indeed, political absolutism and methods from critical scholarship could, under particular circumstances, mutually serve each other. Louis XIV and Colbert may not have succeeded in instituting complete absolute government, yet the early decades of Louis's reign show the extent to which an able minister such as Colbert could use administrative and financial tools not only to dominate France's politics, society, and culture, but also to build his centralized state information system, a feat impossible in the days of more balanced constitutional power-sharing.
Louis XIV claimed the innovation of the "métier du roy": governing his large kingdom himself. Yet he relied on the administrative techniques and methods of learning and information handling designed by Colbert. Louis gave the orders, but he depended on Colbert to build an administrative machine and show Louis how to use it. Colbert's biographer Pierre Clément insists on this point: Louis le Grand was trained by the Grand Colbert. The abbé de Choisy points out Colbert's role as Louis XIV's personal informant and teacher:
He presented to the King, every first day of the year, an agenda in which his revenues were marked down in detail; and each time the King signed laws, Colbert made him remember to write them in his agenda, so that he could see when it pleased him how many funds he had left (as opposed to past times when he [Louis XIV] could never know how much he had).
Without Colbert, Louis XIV, the most powerful king in Europe, had not the slightest knowledge of how his finances worked. Louis XIV credited his minister with the feat of directing the royal finances, noting that he trusted him with the "register" of state funds. He needed not only a minister who could inform him about his kingdom, but also a technical instructor to help him build and use his innovative, absolutist state apparatus. Colbert showed Louis how he could dominate and use the world of learning not only as a source of public propaganda, but also as a tool of secret government. As much as mercantilism, this was Colbert's contribution to state governmental culture.
With the resources of a nation-state at his disposal, Colbert the bibliophile administrator, accountant, and founder of academies amassed enormous libraries and state, diplomatic, industrial, colonial, and naval archives; hired researchers and archival teams; founded scientific academies and journals; ran a publishing house; and managed an international network of scholars. By Colbert's death in 1683, the Royal Library, which became in part a state archive, contained around 36,000 printed books and 10,500 manuscripts, and Colbert's own collection numbered some 23,000 printed books and 5,100 manuscripts. It was one of the largest collections in the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Information Master by Jacob Soll Copyright © 2009 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1 Between Public and Secret Spheres
The Case of Colbert 1
2 Colbert's Cosmos
The Expert and the Rise of the Modern State 13
3 The Accountant and the Coups d'État 34
4 Royal Accountability
Louis XIV and the Golden Notebooks 50
5 The Rule of the Informers 67
6 Managing the System
Colbert Trains his Son for the Great Intendancy 84
7 From Universal Library to State Encyclopedia
Colbert's House of Solomon 94
8 Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Republic of Letters
The State Control of Knowledge 120
9 The Information State in Play
Archives, Erudition, and the Affair of the Régale 140
10 The System Falls Apart, but the State Remains 153
Notes 169
Bibliography 243
Index 269