The Sun King was not a pacific monarch; his soldiers and sailors fought a series of costly wars, the last of which, the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–1713), proved to be ruinously expensive. Projecting French power beyond France's frontiers required raising and then remitting vast sums. Although coin might be carted to the front to pay the troops and buy supplies, it was simpler to borrow and remit funds with bills of exchange through the well- developed network of bankers who financed trade.

These bankers are the “dangerous and dishonest men” in the title of Rowlands’ book, where he takes the reader on a tour of Louis XIV's complex and opaque financial machine. To understand the problems posed by French seventeenth war finance, it is useful to contrast it to modern war finance that arose in eighteenth-century Britain. This mode of financing provides resources via a mix of taxation, borrowing, and inflation. When tax-smoothing (efficient), it spreads the cost over time via the long-term bond market, thereby advantaging a combatant by minimizing the cost of acquiring resources.

Seventeenth, and even eighteenth century, France lacked the flexible tax system and deep long-term bond markets required, thus increasing costs. To make matters worse, the largest financial market, Amsterdam was in enemy territory. Yet, the bankers found the means to draw on this market; and when it was closed to France, construct an even more costly circuitous flow of bills through Geneva and other neutral lands, enabling Louis XIV to support his troops, allies in Bavaria, a revolt in Hungary, and the Spanish in Italy. The bills, a form of short-term debt, had to be continuously rolled over. When the Crown could not renew them, it resorted to expedients, such as the forced prolongation of settlement days in Lyon, resulting in a credit crunch.

Rowlands contends that that the difficulties of managing the system of remittances were so great that the King needed “a banker standing above the herd, acting as the king's intermediary with the exchange markets,” to discipline the market. He examines several candidates, Jean- Henri Huguetan, the Högger brothers, and finally Samuel Bernard whom contemporaries regarded as the richest individual in Europe and who possessed “a formidably efficient private courier system” and concludes that it was reasonable for the King to have Bernard dominant the realm's finances.

While seeing Bernard as a solution to the Crown's financial ills, Rowlands labels him a “thug.” The evidence for this scarlet letter is the compensation for his services, which rose from under 10 percent to 25 percent and then far higher. To determine whether these were unreasonable, we need to know how much risk premia added, but Rowlands offers no estimate. Another feature of French finance complicates the compensation issue: bankers knew that the state often imposed postwar clawbacks—chambres de justice. Bankers were certainly aware of the fate of Nicholas Fouquet, the former surintendant des finances, condemned by a chambre to rot in the Alpine prison of Pignerol. If a banker hoped to avoid a chambre, he might keep his rates low, but if he thought that one was inevitable, he might add a premium.

Were the bankers then simply dishonest agents, taking advantage of Louis XIV's less than capable ministers? Rowlands characterizes the administration of Michel Chamillart, as chaotic and overburdened. He sees a fundamental problem in the revenue assignment system that used assignations, which promised specific future revenues from the tax-collecting “farms.” These assignations then supplied the funds for the bills issued by the bankers. Ministers’ mismanagement and bankers’ greed are blamed for causing the bill-remittance system “so carefully constructed and attentively run by Colbert” to collapse. However, it is more likely that the central problem was that the Crown was pledging revenues farther out into the future, raising the probability of default and bankers’ fees. While Louis XIV was able to place his grandson on the Spanish throne and Bernard was ennobled, the Crown defaulted, paving the way for John Law's experiment.

While this book will serve those interested in a deeper understanding of seventeenth-century finance, it is a difficult read. Although it is certainly true that statistics for this period are irregular and fragmentary, there are no tables or charts to help the reader envision the big picture. Separate chapters detail the geography of remittances, the price of foreign exchange, and the development of remittances, with the fundamental problems partially treated in each chapter. For readers interested in how a pre-modern system of war finance can be insightfully analyzed, I would recommend Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth's Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes and Default in the Age of Philip II (Princeton, 2014).

Lastly, while it is easy to castigate bankers in any era, it is important to see them in the context of their contemporary political system. Given the impossibility for many officials—including the King—of separating personal and state finance, it is tempting to ask: Was Louis XIV any less of a “thug” than his banker?