Vincent J. Pitts has focused attention on the arrest and trial of superintendent of finance Nicolas Fouquet, which occurred from 1661 to 1664. The observation closest to an argument seems to be that Fouquet's trial—by exposing the corrupt workings of the financial system—demonstrated that a dichotomy existed between power and justice (pp. 2–3). Although this view is hardly a revelation, Pitts concisely tells a well-told tale of the financial and political problems that plagued the first years of Louis XIV's personal reign.
The book begins with a brief introduction and an account of Fouquet's arrest on September 5, 1661. Two chapters on the Fouquet family and the career of young Nicolas follow. Next, two chapters detail Fouquet's increasingly precarious position in the court of Louis XIV as Cardinal Jules Mazarin's influence waned and that of Jean-Baptiste Colbert waxed. A description of the government's plans for the prosecution and trial precedes an in-depth narrative of the decisions made by officials and judges that shaped the trial and Fouquet's ability to prolong it and ultimately to defeat most of the charges that so embarrassed the regime. After recounting Fouquet's stellar performance at trial, Pitts launches into an extremely detailed retelling of what each judge did. The consequences of the trial for Fouquet, his family, his supporters, and his opponents receive considerable attention before the volume concludes with a curiously brief and uninformative appendix, “Ministerial Fortunes in Seventeenth-Century France.”
What Pitts does well is to use the trial documents and memoirs to evoke a time and a milieu. This book is best understood as an exploration of the legal culture of the period and the aftermath of the financial exigencies of French war making from 1635 to 1659 (pp. 4–5). The writing is generally quite strong and the account hangs together plausibly. The context of the court, the administration, and elite society is well drawn and engaging. Pitts consistently and effectively depicts Colbert as venal and power-hungry and Louis XIV as hypersensitive and dictatorial. The account of the workings of French finances is clear, though short. It tends to the episodic and epigrammatic (e.g., pp. 27–33). Except for the chapter on the judgment, the book reads easily, though there is quite a bit of repetition of certain points, especially concerning Mazarin's actions. As the Johns Hopkins University Press seems these days to insist on, the text is a mere 175 pages in length.
The evidentiary basis of Pitt's account is uneven. He is heavily, understandably, but perhaps overly dependent on a single memoir or secondary source in a number of key places. Other than an occasional reference, it is not until halfway through chapter 3 that primary sources form the basis of the work; archival references do not appear until chapter 5. From that point, historians are generally left out of the notes until the final chapter. For a book that depends almost completely on the deep, rich, and in many cases recent historiography on the subject for more than one-third of the text, this approach is curious. This reviewer wanted Pitts to engage the historiography far more than in a sporadic endnote, especially because his conclusions rely heavily on and repeat the conclusions of Daniel Dessert in Fouquet (1987) (p. 172). Finally, though Pitts has mastered the primary sources and the biographies of the key players, the legal and financial history is less thorough and the administrative history of the ancien régime is mostly absent from the notes and bibliography.
Based on the book's title, I was also expecting Pitts to continue the story to 1715 and the death of the Sun King. Other than the consequences of the trial for the participants and their families, Pitts includes only a few paragraphs—which tantalize more than convince—that consider the impact of the trial on French law and government or even what happened to later figures accused of embezzlement and treason (pp. 169–70). Unsurprisingly given his earlier works, Pitts is looking toward earlier Bourbon kings and their regimes. I was hoping he would link earlier trends to the better-known developments of Louis XIV's later reign to highlight continuities across the period at the intersection of law, finance, and politics.
Pitts is at pains to emphasize that Fouquet managed to turn public opinion in his favor and that his trial humiliated the monarchy (p. 5). Neither Colbert nor Louis XIV emerges favorably from this account (pp. 165–68). Even a cursory consideration of how Colbert and Louis XIV limited the fallout and moved on to accomplish what they did would have balanced the account. This book reads as an indictment of Mazarin, Colbert, and Louis XIV in favor of Fouquet and a few men of “honor and conscience” among the parlementaires (p. 169). That there was a dichotomy between power and justice is well established and well known; it is not clear what Pitts expected to find when he began to explore Fouquet's trial.
For those interested primarily in finances or political economy, there is little reason to consult this account; they would be better served by reading the accomplished historians whom Pitts cites so frequently. Perhaps the press's insistence on brevity kept Pitts from exploring at length such provocative observations as “the state was in fact hostage to these purveyors of capital” (p. 31). In short, for this reviewer, Pitts's book is underargued and underanalyzed. This narrative has definite charms, but I suspect that they will attract few readers of the Business History Review.
