histofthought1

French mercantilist thought in the seventeenth century 241he claimed that the fiasco of silk subsidy in the reign of Henry IV had comeabout only because of faithlessness on the part of the monarch's aides. Furthermore,since 'whatever is foreign corrupts us', foreign books should be prohibited,since they 'poison our spirits' and 'corrupt our manners'.Nor did Montchretien neglect his own scythe business. It was a nationaltragedy, he warned, that German scythes were outcompeting French products,even though French scythes were superior. One wonders, then, whyFrench consumers were perverse enough to prefer the German product ­unless, of course, its price was lower.Idleness, according to Montchretien, was evil and had to be stamped out,by force if necessary. Man, to Montchretien, is born to live in continuallabour; the policy of the state should therefore be to make sure that no part ofthe population ever remains idle. Idle hands are the devil's hands; idlenesscorrupts the strength of men and the chastity of women. Idleness, in short, isthe mother of all sins. The criminals and the unruly should, therefore, bemade to work. As for so many other mercantilists, full employment forMontchretien meant at bottom coerced employment.The most pervasive motif in Montchretien's work was his deep and abidinghatred and revulsion towards foreigners, towards their imported productsand towards their persons. Foreigners, he fulminated, 'are leeches who attachthemselves to this great [French] body, suck out its best blood, and gorgethemselves with it, then leave the skin and detach themselves'. All in all,France, 'once so pure, so clean', had been turned into 'a bilge, a sewer, acesspool for other countries'.It is impossible to know if Montchretien was hoping for great things fromthe French monarch, but in any case nothing happened, and so he began toordain himself into the nobility, by simply calling himself the 'sieur deVateville' . And even though he implied in several spots in his Treatise that hewas Catholic, and declared his adoration for the absolute monarchy oftenenough, yet he took part in a Huguenot uprising in Normandy in 1621, andwas killed in battle. Four days later, a judicial tribunal condemned the deadman posthumously, dragged, broke and burned his body, and then scatteredhis ashes to the winds. Such was the punishment handed out to Antoine deMontchretien by his much vaunted absolute rulers.8.5 The grandiose failure of Fran~ois du NoyerFran~ois du Noyer, sieur de Saint-Martin, had a dream. It was a grandiosevision of the future. All around him, in the early seventeenth century, and in allmajor nations of the West, the state was creating monopoly companies. Thenwhy not, du Noyer reasoned, go all the way? If monopoly companies forspecific products or specific areas of trade were good, why not go one better?Why not one big company, one gigantic monopoly for virtually everything?