"MERCANTILISM" — CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY
BY A PRE-INDUSTRIAL STATE — IS UNIVERSAL
Think of how the chief of Kondodougou controls trade by having his wives grow supplies for merchants and his sons fetch the kola. But the French monarchy takes it so far that it is associated with 17th- and 18th-century France.
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Louis XIV and Colbert visit the Gobelins, 17th-century tapestry, Gobelins museum
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The king inspects State production.
Yet inexorable growth forces society and kingship to change:
(From about 1750)
- Straight streets no longer lead to symbols of monarchy and Louis XV chooses commoners as royal mistresses: Jeanne Poisson, who becomes Madame de Pompadour; Jeanne Bécu, eventually Madame du Barry.*
*French nobles' last names usually begin with the particle "de" or "du."
- The Duke of Orleans — owner of the Palais-Royal gardens and future Equality Philip — rents boutiques under the arcades, a commercial enterprise until then unthinkable for a prince. As well, those boutiques sell luxury wares to anyone with the means to purchase them, when formerly they could be acquired through nobles' suppliers alone.
- Protestants return.
- Establishments on the peripheries employ unheard-of numbers of workers: as many as 800 in the northern suburbs beyond the Saint-Denis gate, at least 300 in the south, 300 in the Reveillon establishment mentioned below...
-- Beyond the Saint-Denis gate,
The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1982, a classic.
The Crowd in the French Revolution by George Rudé, 1982, a classic.
-- In a southern outskirt,
Eléments pour une histoire de la Commune dans le 13ème arrondissement
by Gerard Conte, 1981.
• Louis XVI lets English industrialists set up manufactures in Orleans and Rouen.
-- Les derniers feux de la monarchie (The Monarchy's Last Glow)
by Charles-Eloi Vial, ch. 1, 2016
Louis XVI stops inheriting foreigners' legacies.*
*Vial: Another example of a major fact slipping in with otherwise meaningless data.
- Change in Africa reveals that practice's universality: Amadu imposes it and Nambolosse is burned for trying to.
- Ending it means giving up a major way to contain the most dynamic forces.
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Those changes foreshadow the transformation
that the French Revolution would soon bring.
