Conclusion

Guy Rowlands
Additional contact information
Guy Rowlands: University of St Andrews

A chapter in Dangerous and Dishonest Men: The International Bankers of Louis XIV’s France, 2015, pp 166-185 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract For most French people it touched, the War of the Spanish Succession was a disaster, or at least it blighted more than a decade of their lives. But there were some men who did rather well out of the war, to borrow an expression. What form did this take? Much of the money made by Samuel Bernard and the other bankers who escaped the wreckage of Lyon was invested in financial instruments, which were vulnerable to fluctuations in value. But the paper-related world of the financiers and bankers was not so clearly demarcated from that of the land-based fortunes of the French greater nobility by the end of Louis XIV’s reign as it had been at the beginning. And the extreme pressures and opportunities of the War of the Spanish Succession had greatly accelerated this process. As part of their drive to enhance, protect and embed their fortunes, bankers like Bernard invested a great deal not just in more solid trading ventures but also in acquiring respectability. For those who had converted to Catholicism it was especially important that their choice of religion should be accompanied by greater social acceptance. It is not surprising, therefore, that these men — like foreigners who had come to France to seek their fortune in the service of great families or the king — were ambitious social climbers who bought into the culture of the court and the high aristocracy.1

Keywords: Foreign Exchange; French Government; International Banker; Financial World; British State (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:psitcp:978-1-137-38179-8_7

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137381798

DOI: 10.1057/9781137381798_7

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().