COLBERT, JEAN BAPTISTE French statesman, was born at Reims, where his father and grandfather Tellier, secretary of State for war, Colbert obtained a place in the war office before he was 20 and presently became private secre tary to the minister. Twelve years later he became agent to Mazarin, driven from Paris (1651) during the supremacy of the Conde family, with the duty of keeping him informed of the progress of events. On his return, Mazarin gratified his agent with honours and places for various members of his family, and gave him his entire confidence. After Mazarin's death, Colbert secured the favour of Louis XIV. and became the chief power in the administration, though he did not at first hold an official position.
The king's new adviser set to work at once to reform the cha otic financial administration of France. He began by striking at the surintendant, Nicolas Fouquet, and secured his disgrace. The office of surintendant was abolished, and the control of finance was vested for a time in a royal council. Colbert, who contented himself with the title of intendant, was the ruling spirit of this council, but did not take over nominal direct control until 1665, when he was made controller-general. His first measures for cleansing the financial administration were ruthless enough. He set up a tribunal to deal with officials who intercepted money due to the treasury. Many were condemned to death, though the death sentences were not carried out ; some 4,000 were compelled to disgorge their gains. The tribunal was disbanded in 1665, but it had purified the service. The public debt was handled by dras tic methods. Some series of bonds were repudiated on the ground that only a small part of the money had been paid in ; others were cancelled by paying the original sum invested less the interest paid. Colbert did not propose the abolition of privilege, but he drew into the net of taxation many who had hitherto escaped by revising the application of the taille, or direct tax. Indirect taxes were increased and the tariff revised in 1664, as part of a pro tective system. The various dues which existed among the prov inces could not be swept away, but, although internal fiscal bar riers were not destroyed, a measure of uniformity was secured in central France. His reforms in the farming out and collection of taxes and the jealous watch kept on the officials brought large sums into the treasury.
Colbert then turned his attention to the general increase of wealth by the encouragement of industry. He had a narrow con ception of prosperity, which in his mind could not be real if neighbouring countries were prosperous. And in his encourage ment of industry and trade he used the same minute method of centralized regulation which had brought order into the fiscal system. Every detail was to be controlled. This minute regulation probably accounts for the failure of the great trading corporations which he set up in 1664 for trading in India and in America (the East Indies and West Indies companies), while the British and Dutch monopolistic trading companies, with their operations un trammelled by the home government, prospered. He set up model factories, either financed by State funds as in the case of the Gobelins (founded 1667) or by concessionaries. He sought to standardize the production of staple commodities for all produc ers ; faulty workmanship or deviation from the standard was pun ished by fine and by exposure in the pillory. These regulations hampered industry and annoyed the producers, and the encour agement given to industry tended to starve agriculture. French industry was to be developed by administrative measures and by a high protective tariff, and the proceeds accruing to the State were to be used for the development of communications and of external trade. The roads and canals were improved. The great canal of Languedoc was planned and constructed by Pierre Paul Riquet (1604-8o) under Colbert's patronage.
The greatest and most lasting of Colbert's achievements was the establishment of the French marine. He became minister of the marine in 1669; then, in addition, of the colonies and the king's palace. The royal navy owed all to him, for the king thought only of military exploits. Colbert reconstructed the works and arsenal of Toulon, founded the port and arsenal of Rochefort, and the naval schools of Rochefort, Dieppe, and St. Malo, and fortified. with some assistance from Vauban (who. however. be of Calais, Dunkirk, Brest, and Havre. To supply it with recruits he invented his system of classes, by which each seaman, accord ing to the class in which he was placed, gave six months' service every three or four or five years. For three months after his term of service he was to receive half-pay; pensions were prom ised ; and, in short, everything was done to make the navy popular. There was one department, however, that was supplied with men on a very different principle. The galleys used in the Mediter ranean service required oarsmen. Colbert wrote to the judges requiring them to sentence to the oar as many criminals as pos sible; and the convict, once chained to the bench, the expiration of his sentence was seldom allowed to bring him release. Vagrants, contraband dealers, political rebels, Turkish, Russian, and negro slaves, and poor Iroquois Indians, whom the Canadians were or dered to entrap, were pressed into that terrible service. By these means the benches of the galleys were filled, and Colbert took no thought of the long agony of those who filled them.
Encouragement was given to the building of ships for the mer cantile marine by allowing a premium on those built at home, and imposing a duty on those brought from abroad ; and as French workmen were forbidden to emigrate, so French seamen were forbidden to serve foreigners on pain of death.
Colbert was a patron of art and literature. He possessed a fine private library, rich in valuable manuscripts. He founded the academy of sciences, the observatory, which he employed Claude Perrault to build and brought G. D. Cassini (1625-1712) from Italy to superintend, the academies of inscriptions and medals, of architecture, and of music, the French academy at Rome, and academies at Arles, Soissons, Nimes, and many other towns, and he reorganized the academy of painting and sculpture which Richelieu had established. He was a member of the French acad emy. In 1673 he presided over the first exhibition of the works of living painters ; and he enriched the Louvre with hundreds of pictures and statues. He gave many pensions to men of letters, among whom we find Moliere, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, P. D. Huet (163o-1721) and Antoine Varillas (1626-96), and even foreigners, as Huyghens, Vossius the geographer, Carlo Dati the Dellacruscan, and Heinsius the great Dutch scholar.
Colbert's industry was colossal. He found time to do some thing for the better administration of justice (the codification of ordinances, the diminishing of the number of judges, the reduction of the expense and length of trials for the establishment of a superior system of police) and even for the improvement of the breed of horses and the increase of cattle. As superintendent of public buildings he enriched Paris with boulevards, quays, and triumphal arches ; he relaid the foundation stone of the Louvre, and brought Bernini from Rome to be its architect ; and he erected its splendid colonnade upon the plan of Claude Perrault, by whom Bernini had been replaced. He was not permitted, how ever, to complete the work, being compelled to yield to the king's preference for residences outside Paris, and to devote himself to Marly and Versailles.
Amid all these public labours he directed personally the man agement of every farm on his estates. He died extremely rich and left fine estates all over France. He had been created marquis de Seignelay, and for his eldest son he obtained the reversion of the office of minister of marine; his second son became archbishop of Rouen ; and a third son, the marquis d'Ormoy, became super intendent of buildings.
To carry out his reforms, Colbert needed peace and consistently advocated it, except in the case of the Dutch War, for which his commercial policy was partly responsible; but the war department was in the hands of his great rival Louvois, whose influence grad ually supplanted that of Colbert with the king. Louis decided on a policy of conquest. He was deaf also to all the appeals against the other forms of his boundless extravagance which Colbert ven tured to make (Lettres, vol. ii.). Thus, only a few years after he had begun to free the country from the weight of the loans and taxes which crushed her to the dust, Colbert was forced to heap upon her a new load of loans and taxes heavier than the last. De pressed by his failure, deeply wounded by the king's favour for Louvois, and worn out by overwork, his strength gave way at a comparatively early age.
Colbert was a great statesman, who did much for France. Nevertheless, his rule was a very bad example of over-government. He did not believe in popular liberty ; the parlements and the states-general received no support from him. The technicalities of justice he never allowed to interfere with his plans ; and he did not hesitate to shield his friends. He trafficked in public offices for the profit of Mazarin and in his own behalf. He caused the suffering of thousands in the galleys. There was indeed a more human side to his character, shown to his own family, but to all outside he was "the man of marble." Madame de Sevigne called him "the North Star." To diplomacy he never pretended.
most thorough student of Colbert's life and administration was Pierre Clement,. member of the Institute, who in 1846 published his Vie de Colbert, and in 1861 the first of the 9 vols. of the Lettres, instructions et memoires de Colbert. The historical introductions prefixed to each of these volumes have been published by Mme. Clement under the title of the Histoire de Colbert et de son administration, 3rd ed. (1892). The best short account of Colbert as a statesman is that in Lavisse, Histoire de France (1905), which gives a thorough study of the administration. See also Benoit du Rey, Recherches sur la politique coloniale de Colbert (1902). Among Colbert's papers are Memoires sur les affaires de finance de France (written about 1663), a fragment entitled Particularites secretes de la vie du Roy, and other accounts of the earlier part of the reign of Louis XIV.