Louis XIV died on September 8, 1715, at the age of seventy-seven, after a reign of seventy-two years. He left France utterly exhausted. The state was ruined and there seemed to be no resource but bankruptcy. Before the War of the Spanish Succession* [1702-1713] Vauban* had written, “Almost a tenth of the population is reduced to beggary; of the other nine-tenths, five cannot aid the tenth, being in a similar position; three-tenths are ill at ease; the remaining tenth, containing not more than 100,000 families, has only 10,000 who are comfortably off.”
The condition of affairs was worse in 1715 after a war during which money had been borrowed at 400 per cent., new taxes had been created, the revenue spent two years in advance, and the national debt increased to 2400 million francs.*
abridged
* See The War of the Spanish Succession.
* Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), Marquis de Vauban, was a French military engineer, widely regarded as one of the great engineers of European history. His contemporaries held him in the highest esteem. American historian Henry Edward Guerlac (1910-1985) wrote of him: “With his modest origin, his diligence and honesty, his personal courage, and his loyalty to the state, he seemed the reincarnation of some servitor of the Roman Republic. Indeed, Fontenelle, in his famous éloge, describes him as a ‘Roman, whom the century of Louis XIV seems almost to have stolen from the happiest days of the Republic.’ To Voltaire he was ‘the finest of citizens.’ Saint- Simon, not content with dubbing him a Roman, applied to him, for the first time with its modern meaning, the word patriote.”
* That is, 2.4bn francs or, as they were called at the time, livres. Modern scholars tend to prefer a slightly lower figure. In 1999, economist Eugene White calculated the debt at 1.8bn livres, with France’s nominal Gross National Product standing at 1.76bn. According to White, 1.76bn livres were worth about £116m at the time. Research in 2018 by the UK Parliament’s statisticians put Great Britain’s debt at £50m in 1715, or 60% of Gross Domestic Product, which is about £8.3bn in today’s money. The UK’s national debt in March 2022 stood at £2,365.4bn, or 99.6% of GDP.