This scholarly work throws light on the qualities of the French royal administration during the reign of Louis XVI, which was one of the most enduring legacies of the French monarchy to later regimes, and on the relations of that administration to the French economy and people. In the Controller General's department, the Bureau of Commerce was the center of administrative thought about the relations of the French royal government to French industry. Through a flow-of-activity, flow-of-consciousness narrative, author Harold T. Parker seeks to discover and to communicate how the Bureau's four executive intendants of commerce, individually and collegially, operated during twenty-nine months in routine performance and in the management of two major crises: the mass mutiny of most French textile artisans against the Bureau's new textile regulations and the developing surge of British inventions, productivity, and competitiveness, especially in textiles and iron and steel.^
This book thus bears on the nature of the royal administration on the eve of the French Revolution. It tends to confirm and illustrate the thesis advanced in other monographs that, except in the realm of financing the deficit, Louis XVI was a dutiful and reasonably successful administrative monarch. He appointed professionals to head his major administrative departments - War (Army), Navy, Foreign Affairs, and Controller-Generalcy. He himself did his part in hearing reports and reaching decisions, and together with his ministers and their subordinate civil servants he was restoring French strength in the army, navy, foreign affairs, and administrative/industrial effort. Not only were the four intendants hampered by the two crises in industry but also by the encrusted legal legacy of multitudinous privileges of provinces, towns, clergy, nobles, semipublic agencies (Farmers General), and other ministerial departments.^
Nevertheless, in their own minds the intendants thought they were making solid advances toward the development of a balanced French economy. The response of the French people, it seems, varied. Between the managers at the center of legal authority and power and the subordinate subjects the relationship was not necessarily one of automatic obedience to royal command. Rather there was often a gray zone of stalling and negotiation, always with the lurking possibility of successful defiance of any royal order. Dr. Parker's study is also a quiet comment on how narrative history ought to be written. Most narrative historians purport to represent symbolically what actually happened - yet they introduce a degree of narrative order and abstraction that never existed. History is actually often meandering and frequently a surprise, and the narrative in this book tries to suggest that. The account is therefore rich both in what it says and in what it suggests.
