the world of private banking

PROtEStANt bANKING 243
“pragmatic army” of Austrian, Dutch, English and Hanoverian troops in the Low
Countries. He must quickly have made his mark, since he was asked in 1748 to go
to London to negotiate for a stipulated £100,000 subsidy the English government
was refusing to pay. Fries’ mission, which lasted a year, was successful. The English
government paid up in March 1749. The empress, impressed, summoned him to
Vienna. ... From April 1752 he was responsible for marketing a good portion of the
state’s silver thalers, and made large profits for the government and for himself. In
the Seven Years War he handled receipts of French subsidies, and of Belgian and
Italian loans and taxes to a total of nearly 45 million florins.’ 25
Almost every year he was on foreign mission for subsidies, loans and shortterm
credits, for paying the Austrian army in good coins, and was in charge in
1759–83 of commercializing the production of the state mines. When in Paris in
1764, he married in the Dutch chapel Anne d’Escherny, daughter of a burgess from
Neuchâtel, who was also consul at Lyons for the King of Poland. After 1763 most of
the government’s external loans were emitted under Fries’s responsibility. As well
as this, there were also a great many other trading affairs we cannot enumerate, e.g.
with two Greek partners in 1774 in Constantinople. Changing his business partners
in the firm rather often, in 1766 he admitted Johann Jacob Gontard who came from
a Frankfurt banking family of French refugee origin. When he died in 1785, he left
a very large fortune calculated at more than three and a half million Austrian florins.
One thinks that he probably committed suicide because of the public resentment
against this foreign Protestant who grew rich at the state’s expense. His son Moritz
Christian was not at all a successful banker. He systematically dissipated his
inherited fortune, so that the firm went bankrupt in 1826.
At this point the question may arise as to why some of the Protestants could
rise to the position of dominant financiers and bankers in Catholic Vienna. Dickson
thinks that the phenomenon is ‘consistent with contemporary statements that
Austrian mercantile and banking resources were weak, and bankruptcies frequent,
and that domestic entrepreneurs needed to be strengthened from outside’ 26 first
by Jewish financiers, who were prominent under the empress’s father Charles VI
(1711–40), and into the 1740s and even later with the Hönigs, Poppers and some
others who still had considerable capital. Another move of the government was
its willingness to tolerate Protestant finance as an expedient for escaping from
Jewish finance. And Dickson concludes: ‘The qualified freedom for Protestant
Wholesalers conceded in 1774 was an example of this. The career of Johann Fries
demonstrates it very vividly. He was a man of immense competence, able to build
up a huge fortune partly as a result of monopolies conceded to him by the state....
He thus stands with ... others, whose varied backgrounds and policies gave the
Austrian state in this period a more mixed and interesting character...’ 27 .
25
Dickson, Finance, vol. I, p. 173.
26
Ibid., p. 177.
27
Dickson, Finance, vol. I, p. 178.