FROM the time of Colbert the Government of France had strictly conformed to the universal maxims of the Mercantile System then in vogue, - namely of encouraging Manufactures at the expense of Agriculture. The main object was as usual to secure easily accessible sources of wealth to be tapped for the benefit of the State; whether the revenue thus accruing was expended for the all important object of national administration and defence, or was largely blown away in the luxuries and dissipations of the Court, need not concern us here. It is certain that Colbert himself genuinely believed, like the rest of the world, that more national wealth would accrue from the working up of the raw materials of the soil into special classes of highly finished manufactures for consumption at home and abroad, than from the cultivation of the soil itself. But he also saw that more revenue was to be squeezed out of them as well, and that taxes could be more easily raised from the industrials of the towns than from the landlords or peasants of the country.

For these industrials having for centuries been protected in their rights and privileges by the king himself against the extortions of the surrounding nobility, - and especially in this matter of taxation, - were all the more amenable when he wished to squeeze them himself. Whatever, therefore, contributed to their material prosperity could be easily made to contribute to his revenue, and to fall automatically into his coffers. But it was different with the inhabitants of the country. The nobility, both lay and ecclesiastic, were exempt from taxes on their property, and even when a capitation tax of more than customary amount happened to be placed on their shoulders, all the machinery of Court intrigue was brought to bear, by means of special exemptions and under-valuations, to have it shifted on to the other classes of the community, whether it were the peasants or the industrial workers of the town. The seigneurs, it is evident, were still far too powerful and their hereditary privileges and exemptions from taxation too assured, to make the agriculture of the country districts an easy hunting ground for hungry officials bent on replenishing the king's treasury; while as for the peasants themselves, they had from time immemorial been specially reserved by peculiar and exceptional privileges for the extortions of the landlords, and so were not available for further exploitation by the king.

If fresh taxes, therefore, were to be raised, and gold to be had on emergency, it was at the gates of the towns with their factories and workshops that the tax collectors must encamp to secure an ever present source of revenue on which at any moment they could lay their hands, and from whose productive yield they could skim the cream on every passing wave of local or national prosperity. But if the milch cow was to give an increased yield, it must be fed and otherwise looked after; and accordingly the government of Colbert bent all its energies to the encouragement of manufactures, and to the extension of their markets abroad. New kinds of manufactured goods were subsidized, and exports of the old ones were stimulated by bounties, by treaties of commerce, by the restriction of competing imports, and by all the other devices of the old mercantile system. But the exportation of corn, on the other hand, was absolutely forbidden, ostensibly on the ground that by keeping it in the country the workmen of the towns would be able to live at less expense, and their manufactures becoming cheaper in consequence, there would be a greater demand for them in foreign markets.

Besides, the great Provinces of France were still in many respects like separate nations, and in none more than this, that corn could not be imported from one into the other except under the severest restrictions. The consequence was that while the harvests were plentiful in one province, famine might be raging in a neighbouring one, without the corn being able to pass the frontier between them; and while the landlords of each alternately benefited and suffered by this capricious deficiency and excess, the general distress became so great that the prohibition of the export of corn was after the time of Colbert more and more relaxed. Special treaties of commerce with neighbouring nations took the place of general prohibitions, and were attended with varying success, - except in the trade relations with England which were uniformly at a deadlock. For as manufactures formed the natural industrial strength of England, while wine and silk constituted that of France, and as France was determined to push her manufactures at all costs in competition with those of England, the consequence was that the two nations were in a chronic state of commercial war during the whole of the eighteenth century.

But in spite of all difficulties, and through innumerable changes of detail, France remained staunch to the Mercantile policy of promoting the export of her manufactures at the expense of her agriculture, down to the time of the Revolution.

In the generation before that outbreak, however, a school of Economic Thinkers had arisen in France whose practical aim was to reverse not only the principles of taxation then prevailing, but the principles of that Mercantile system which for so many ages had everywhere given to manufactures a position of priority over agriculture in the industrial policy of States. This was the school of the Physiocrats to which we have already referred, and which numbered as we have said such men as Turcot, Morellet, and the elder Mirabeau among its most devoted and enthusiastic disciples. But as the Government of France had long been a strongly centralized despotism, there was no possibility, as in England, of inaugurating and carrying through these or any other political or industrial reforms by means of legislative measures forced on it by the representatives of the people themselves. The only way of effecting them was by bringing cultivated opinion to bear on the upper and middle ranks of society through the medium of books, - as was so strikingly exemplified at that very time by the far reaching influence of Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopaedists, not only on politics and religion but on almost every subject of human speculation.