| In seventeenth-century France, it was a maxim of statecraft that "the strength and grandeur of kingdoms consists in the number of their subjects." In the latter half of Louis XIV's reign, however, critics such as the marechal de Vauban and Archbishop Fenelon used the populationist imperative to question the politics of commercial belligerence that had brought a once-glorious realm to famine and defeat. These statesmen sponsored statistical inquiries that revealed depopulation while modeling an alternative mode of government focused on agricultural renewal and political virtue. This dissertation uses these inquiries to trace the new political economy that emerges from competing efforts to repopulate the realm during the Sun King's reign.; The first part of the thesis is a revisionist analysis of the statistical legacy of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's first finance minister and architect of French mercantilism. Historians often portray statistical inquiry as a natural corollary of the effort to increase the number of inhabitants, but I show that the association of populousness with classical-republican and militant Catholic ideologies prevented the Controller-General from attempting a census of population. The first comprehensive head counts of major populations were achieved outside of the financial apparatus, in efforts to convert France's Protestants or strengthen the French colonies in America.; The latter half of the dissertation shows how these ecclesiastical- and colonial-style censuses informed the subsequent political criticism of Fenelon and Vauban. Vauban's study of the colonial enumerations of "soldier-inhabitants" led him to connect the census to classical ideals of agrarian austerity and martial discipline, and thus to criticize the mercantile orientation of Colbert's policies. Fenelon built on his experience counting Protestants to articulate the distinction between measuring population and enumerating individuals. By associating political measurement with "natural laws" of human behavior, Fenelon criticized Louis XIV's overly "detailed" style of economic direction. Both Fenelon and Vauban drew on new scientific forms of quantitative analysis, but the dissertation concludes that their interest in counting people grew from an effort to render individuals countable rather than to derive a science of government from the practical politics of census-taking. |
