VII. CONTROLS ON PROFIT START TO CRACK

"MERCANTILISM" — CONTROL OF THE ECONOMY

BY A PRE-INDUSTRIAL STATE — WAS 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 central control so far that it is associated with that country in the 17th- and 18th-centuries. 

Establishment of the French Academy of Sciences and of Paris Observatory in 1667 by Henri Testelin / zoom

The king inspects State production (announcement for radio podcast, no further information) / zoom

Louis XIV Visits the Manufacture des Gobelins, 15 october 1767, by Simon Renard de Saint-André / zoom

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Yet from about 1750, inexorable growth makes society and kingship change: 

•  Straight streets no longer lead to symbols of monarchy 

• Louis XV chooses commoners as royal mistresses: Jeanne Poisson, who the king ennobles as Madame de Pompadour; Jeanne Bécu, made Madame du Barry.* 

• 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. 

"Dentellière" : lace-making

• 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 of the faubourg Saint-Antoine, future heartland of revolt.

 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.*

• Change in Africa reveals that practice's universality: Amadu imposes it, Nambolosse is burned for trying and Senufo continue his fight.

• Ending the practice means abandoning a way to contain the most dynamic forces.

*     *

Those changes foreshadow the transformation

 that the French Revolution would soon bring.

End of this short section.

*     *     *

Next and last section:
VIII. 

History that illuminates