André-Hercule de Fleury
Étienne François de Choiseul (1758) | |
---|---|
André-Hercule de Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus (22 June or 26 June 1653 – 29 January 1743) was a French cardinal who served as the chief minister of Louis XV.
Life and government
He was born in
In May 1715, a few months before the Sun-King's death, Fleury became tutor to Louis' great-grandson and heir, and in spite of a seeming lack of ambition, he acquired an influence over the child that was never broken, fostered by Louis' love and confidence. On the death of the regent
Under the Régence, the Scottish economist John Law had introduced financial measures that were modern for the time: a national bank, easy credit to encourage investors, and paper money exchangeable for gold bullion. Investor overconfidence in the ability to exchange paper money for gold led to wild speculation after 1720, and when the bubble burst, Law and his policies were thoroughly discredited, and French finances were in as dire straits as they had been when Louis XIV died.[citation needed] Fleury was imperturbable in his demeanor, frugal and prudent, and he carried these qualities into the administration. In 1726 he fixed the standard of the currency and secured French credit by initiating regular payment of interest on the national debt, with the result that in 1738/39 there was a surplus of 15,000,000 livres instead of the usual deficit. Fleury's stringencies were enforced through the contrôleur général des finances Philibert Orry (who remained in office until 1745). By exacting forced labor from the peasants (see corvée) he improved France's roads, though at the cost of rousing angry discontent, which later found expression in the French Revolution. During the seventeen years of his orderly government, the country found time to recuperate its forces after the exhaustion caused by the ambitions of Louis XIV and extravagances of the regent, and national prosperity increased. Social peace was seriously disturbed by the severities which Fleury exercised against the Jansenists.[2] He was one of the minority of French bishops who published Clement XI's bull Unigenitus and imprisoned priests who refused to accept it, and he met the Jansenist opposition of the Parlement of Paris by exiling forty of its members to a "gilded cage" not far from Paris.
In foreign affairs, the maintenance of peace was a preoccupation he shared with
Fleury's economies in the army and navy, as elsewhere, found the nation poorly prepared when in 1733 the
He had enriched the royal library by many valuable oriental manuscripts, and was a member of the Académie Française from 1717, of the Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Inscriptions.[2]
In the years following Fleury's death, escalating Franco-British skirmishes at sea culminated in a declaration of war with Britain in March 1744, a war he had avoided for so long, a war effectively ending the relatively peaceful period from 1713–1744, a period sometimes referred to the "Thirty Years' Peace" of which Cardinal Dubois and Philippe D'Orléans were the primary architects.[citation needed]
Quotes
References
- ISBN 978-0-14-013093-5.
- ^ a b c d e f public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Fleury, André Hercule de". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 10 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 500–501. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
Further reading
- Shennan, J. H."The political role of the parlement of Paris under Cardinal Fleury." English Historical Review (1966): 520–542.
- Wilson, Arthur McCandless. French Foreign Policy during the Administration of Cardinal Fleury, 1726–1743: A Study in Diplomacy and Commercial Development, (1936) the standard modern treatment .
External links
- Catholic Encyclopedia entry
- Biographical dictionary of Roman Catholic cardinals
- Fleury's covert Corsican policy in a letter from the foreign minister, Chauvelin, to the French envoy at Genoa, January 30, 1735 (French)
- Drummond and other Scots Jacobites misread Fleury's politeness for support, and over-represent his vague promises in Scotland, 1742