Le secret des finances de France
A fine wide-margined copy preserved in its original ivory vellum.
3 parts in 1 volume in-8 of (28) ff., 152 pp., 16 pp. and pp.33-472; 435 pp. (erroneously numbered 439).
Vellum, calligraphed title on spine. Contemporary binding.
177 x 105 mm.
Froumenteau, Nicolas. The Secret of the Finances of France, Discovered & divided into three books & now published, to reveal the legitimate & necessary means to pay the King's debts, relieve his subjects from the taxes imposed for thirty-one years, & recover all the monies taken from His Majesty.
S. l., 1581.
First complete edition of this famous work of economics: the first statistical essay.
The author presents a picture of France’s miseries and the losses caused by the Wars of Religion under the reigns of Kings Henri II to Henri III.
The best edition, it features volume III in its original edition.
Brunet, II, 1414; Einaudi, 5204; Say and Chaillet, I, 1091; Kress, 146; Coquelin, I, 811-813.
This edition is much more complete than the first, published the same year in 16mo format under the title: “Les secrets des thrésors de la France descouvert et départi en deux livres.”
“The first edition is much less complete” (Brunet).
“More interesting for the finances of the temporal and spiritual magnates than for the finance of the king” (Schumpeter 202).
“ In Le Secret des finances de France, Froumenteau expresses even more than Bodin a concern for information and statistical publicity, rare for the time. He estimates the number of victims during the Wars of Religion. The economic and social aspect is not neglected, as the work contains in great abundance figures on church property, the number of ecclesiastics and 'parasites' they support, and the number of nobles able to bear arms” (J. Y. Grenier, History of Economic Political Thought).
Froumenteau is a pseudonym behind which historians have proposed two possible authors: Nicolas Barnaud, a Calvinist polemicist, and Jean Frotté, finance secretary to Marguerite de Navarre and then to the king until 1560, a convert to Protestantism, author of a “Miroir des Français” in 1581; his experience in business makes him perfectly suited to write the “Secret des finances.”
The author gives an account of losses of all types caused by the unrest and civil wars that devastated France.
The elements of the Secret des finances appear to have been drawn from the notebooks presented by the three estates to Henri III, at the Estates-General assembled in Blois in 1576.
“The value of the “Secret” remains important for economic history. You can sense in the author a genuine professional” (Hauser).
Beautiful copy, wide-margined, preserved in its original ivory vellum.
