Royal finances in the Third Reign of Louis XIV

This essay in a volume of essays on the "Third Reign" of Louis XIV seeks to establish when there was a turning-point in the state of royal finances during the personal rule of Louis XIV, as the state ran into mounting difficulties in the face of pan-European warfare that put an increasing strain on the fiscal-military system that had earlier been remodeled by Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the marquis de Louvois. It examines the legacy of Colbert's tenure of office as finance minister, and by looking at fiscal, monetary, credit and expenditure dimensions of royal finances it situates the financial turning-point of the reign in the early 1690s, particularly 1692, when the fiscal-military constitution Louis XIV established in the first part of his personal rule had to give way to far more expedients and a level of credit-raising that would be unsustainable in the long term.