History

In 1659-60, as England teetered on the brink of political collapse in the series of events which (as it turned out) was to lead to the restoration of Charles II to the throne, two republican authors were engaged in a bitter dispute about ancient Sparta. Although both authors took pains to establish their scholarly credibilitywith differing levels of successtheir battle was primarily political, part of a fervent and urgent debate among republicans about how a viable commonwealth might yet be established on the ruins of the interregnum's constitutional experiments and in time to halt a slide towards monarchy. The authors in question were James Harrington, the author of the republican masterpiece of the interregnum, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), and Henry Stubbe, a promising young academic and a protégé of the 'godly republican' Sir Henry Vane. The classical Greek focus of their dispute sheds light on the nature of English republican thought, the interplay of classical and scholarly authority with pamphlet debate and political argument, and the malleability of the Greek legacy for early modern readers. The classical offered a route through which political 'innovation', suspect as that always was in early modern England, could be legitimized. But while the rich and sometimes contradictory evidence of ancient texts could be brought to bear in multiple ways, some consensus positions developed in the early modern scholarship posed fairly effective limits to the claims it was possible to make. Both Harrington and Stubbe were writing in the context of a classical republican tradition (with origins in Italian humanism) which had been overtly and energetically adapted for English audiences by multiple authors only in the wake of the execution of

John Lilburne's extensive writings were a major part of the pamphlet output of the Leveller movement. The apparent traditionalism of his language has obscured the extent to which he developed a radical line of thought. For Lilburne, all Englishmen are ‘free-born’; his radicalism lies in his assertion that this free status is to be seen as political status. The phrase ‘free-born Englishman’ comes to be a signifier of a uniform and inclusive citizenship, and the word ‘subject’ drops out of Lilburne's vocabulary. He reinterprets the language of the English legal tradition – following the lead of Sir Edward Coke – to make a collection of ‘liberties’, ‘franchises’, and ‘privileges’ into a uniform set of citizen entitlements. His writing suggests varying and sometimes incompatible grounds for this citizen status: historical arguments, and arguments depending on different notions of positive law, are employed alongside appeals to divine or natural law. However, Lilburne's attac...

As we are reminded by the strong programme in the sociology of science, the processes by which ideas come to be counted as knowledge may have little to do with their intrinsic merits. Particularly in the social sciences and more particularly still in those social sciences relating to management, the absence of any analogue to Kuhnian anomaly enables certain favoured texts to circulate within the influence networks of academia, accumulating authority and creating alliances until certain of them achieve quasi-foundational status. Since these ...

This paper explores the relationship between masculinity, the body and the military through a close reading of the film Jarhead. Drawing on a Foucauldian frame of analysis, we consider three performances of the masculine military body that form key aspects of the film’s representational economy: the disciplined body, an outcome of the processes of basic training; the gendered body, realized through deployment of metaphors of the feminine to strengthen the masculine conception of the military body; and the cyborgian body, the result of the man-machine interface which is rapidly developing in many militaries around the world, and which poses significant questions for performances of military masculinity. We conclude by suggesting that the film’s rendering of the material and discursive body reveals an unexpected tension between the expectations of military bodies and the lived experience of their labour. As well as augmenting empirical explorations of male-worker-bodies and analysing ...

This paper explores the use of the concept of fashion in arguments about management knowledge, using the popularity of that literature during the 2000s as a case study. In order to do this, it will move through a series of linked arguments. First, that research on ‘management fashions’ has become fashionable, and that this has provided a topic for academics to write about. Second, that research on ‘management fashions’ appears to only ceremonially cite earlier work on fashion from outside the management disciplines, such as that by Simmel. Third, that this means that much research on management fashions appears to adopt an attitude which insulates its own judgements about what is mere fashion and what is well grounded science from a wider understanding of the role of fashion in social affairs more generally. We conclude by suggesting that once questions of fashionability are admitted into management epistemology, all practices and distinctions become necessarily understood in terms ...

There is a growing literature which suggests that the 1980s witnessed significant, even unprecedented changes in the management of organizations. This paper contributes to that literature by providing questionnaire and interview-based evidence of senior managers' perceptions of recent changes in management practice in large and mediumsized firms in the UK. The findings cover three main areas: the changing context of management practice; change initiatives in the areas of human resource management (HRM) and management levels; and the degree of success in managing change. Our findings suggest that senior managers perceive rapid and continuous change within the UK corporate sector. We conclude by suggesting that the changes reported appear to be of degree rather than a radical break with past management practices, and that inconsistent means of facilitating change are seemingly being deployed.

This paper uses data derived from interviews carried out in a number of UK companies to explore the extent to which management concerns are driven by accounting practices, and also how accounting practices are mediated by the views that managers have of the role of accounting. The paper also analyses accounts given by UK managers of the ways in which changes in accounting are being managed. Two speci®c issues relating to accounting change are examined: (1) the impact of new information technology on accounting change, and (2) the competition between accounting and alternative bodies of expertise as mechanisms for change. In studying accounting in the context of wider organizational change, the paper focuses on a number of distinct, yet related, themes: (1) management accounting's power to reinvent itself; (2) the interface between management accounting practices and employee empowerment (as one example of`new' management practices); and, (3) contradictions in using management accounting calculi to facilitate the`new' organization.

I thought it might useful to provide some details about why I wrote this article about royal tokens produced by the Royal treasury and the other Treasury in charge of the Parties Casuelles, i.e, the revenue from the sale of offices and attached fees (in particular the tax known as the Paulette). 
At the time, I worked for the Comité pour l'Histoire Economique et Financière de la France, wihich was situated avenue de l'Opéra, where I had an office.  This was very close to the Bibliothèque Nationale. On my way between both places, I was used to grab a sandwich at a baker and eat it while looking at the windows of the local numismates shops. One day, I just saw a jeton or token of the Royal Treasury.  I was all the more surprised as so few documents have survived from this major institution. This was the start of a research  which benefited from a discussion with a PhD student who was working on a PhD about tokens under the Ancien Regime. I did quite some work on the tokens and looked at a number of very interesting manuscripts. But the most interesting part of the job has been to read the minutes of the sessions of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres which, every year, discussed the motto in latin and the figure to be represented on the royal tokens. The  discovery of the mottos and figures on the tokens struck each year created were an important event in the world of the learned because of their intertextuality - if I may put it this way, What is also interesting about jetons, which were fine art pieces, was the message they conveyed. True, silver jetons were  distributed to the small elite of officers attached to the royal administration  (usually given in pouches of 100 tokens as a reward fee for attendance). Ye,t the jetons carried an official message. As I show in my article, the jetons of the Parties Casuelles always carried the same message: by paying the paulette, the officers safeguarded the property of their offices which they could safely transmit to their heirs. This idea was depicted each year, in particular by use of very lovely images such as a bird taking some of his feather to make a nest, a ship in the middle of a tempest throwing off a few  boxes to save the precious cargo or poppies since they were used to help anxious people find a comforting sleep. This basic allegory has been engraved each year on the tokens but through a new image. In the case of the jetons du Trésor Royal , the allegory was mostly about circulation. Indeed, money was considered like blood and depicted as liquid (water, river). At times, the Royal treasury was depicted as the origins  of wealth, as the Nile whose floods fertilised Egypt.  Needless to say that, given the financial difficulties of the French monarchy, the allegory of plenty and circulation (while people often complained that circulation was interrupted because the king did not pay his bills on time) will sound like like sheer propaganda. However, there is the curious case of one token produced under Desmaretz. The session of the Académie des Inscriptions was hotly debated the figure to be represented on the jeton. For this reason, we known that the image of the Zodiac selected by the minister had special meaning. It meant that the government had decided to pay off its debts, It is hard to believe that anyone, regardless of their mastery of Antiquity or allegory, would draw this conclusion. One must therefore conclude that, even with the best intention and efforts, the past will always retain some element of mystery and remain unreadable. Needless to say that I thoroughly enjoyed writing this article. I have heard that  who have known of its existence liked it too and some even pursued my enquiry. Academia gives me the opportunity to rescue it from oblivion.

Cet article entend évaluer la pertinence de l’interprétation des origines antifiscales de l’opposition parlementaire au XVIIIe siècle. Il souligne d’abord que les contraintes qui pesaient sur la rédaction des remontrances interdisent une lecture purement littérale de ces textes. S’appuyant sur une série de documents relatifs aux projets financiers de Silhouette (1759), il montre ensuite que l’ambition du Parlement de Paris, jamais mentionnée dans ses remontrances, était de financer la guerre de Sept Ans par l’émission de billets de monnaie. Cette lecture met ainsi en évidence l’importance du modèle financier anglais, notamment en matière de crédit, dont Silhouette et les magistrats se sont directement inspirés. En dépit de ce point commun, les divergences entre le gouvernement et les magistrats sur les moyens de financer la poursuite de la guerre et la culture politique de la monarchie ont empêché de former un consensus solide et durable dans l’intérêt de la nation.

Mots-clés
Parlement de Paris, remontrances, politique financière, billets de monnaie, Étienne de Silhouette





The aim of this article is to reconsider the fiscal interpretation of opposition parlementaire to government policy. First, it suggests that the meaning of the remonstrances is blurred by specific constraints which make it very difficult to interpret these texts. Second, it analyses a variety of documents relating to Silhouette’s fiscal projects (1759) and shows that the real objective of the Parlement of Paris, which was never mentioned in its remonstrances, was to finance the Seven Years’ War by issuing paper-money. This reading reveals the influence of the British model of State finance, especially on the critical issue of credit, on both ministers and magistrates. In spite of this common reference, the government and the Parlement of Paris diverged in their reading of the fiscal crisis, and the political culture of the monarchy prevented the formation of a workable consensus.


Keywords
Parlement of Paris, remonstrances, financial politics, paper-money, Étienne de Silhouette

Profit, embezzlement, restitution. The role of the traitants in the Nine Years War and Chamillart’s tax on financial benefits

The aim of this article is to revisit the question of the financiers in Old Regime France. It starts with an analysis of the discourses about the financiers under the Absolute monarchy that underlines the complexity of their relationship with the government and the public. It then reviews the secondary literature and highlights the existence of competing historical interpretations (functional, political, utilitarian), which raise the question of their overall capacity to account for the role and impact of the financiers at different times. On this ground, the article focuses on a specific group of financiers, the so-called traitants d’affaires extraordinaires, during the Nine Years War. Further to a description of the specific role and scope of the activities of the various financiers responsible for helping the monarchy to raise the funds it needed to pay for its peace and wartime expenditure, the article examines the conditions and profits granted by the king in his contracts with the traitants whose services were hired for the purpose of selling royal offices in the public and advancing the revenue to the Treasury. It also explores the contractual arrangements of the companies established by the financiers to manage their operations as well as the rights and the responsibilities of their various stakeholders. These bases being laid, the article relies on the administrative correspondence relating to the traités during the Nine Years War to address a range of issues, in particular the extent to which these contracts, and other control procedures, were robust enough to deter fraud. The accounts of two traitants’ companies offer an opportunity to analyse and compare the structure of their income and expenditure (including the volume and cost of the promissory notes sold in the public to finance their payments to the Treasury), to explore the strategies of the contractors, to calculate their net profits and further discuss the problem of embezzlement. The article ends with the study of the context and debates which led to the introduction by finance minister Michel Chamillart, in 1700, of a shortfall tax on the financial profits of the gens d’affaires or traitants, the method used to determine its rate (50 % of the net benefits), its distribution among the various stakeholders (including the bailleurs de fonds or backers), and the related procedures. In total, the article argues that the relationship between the monarchy, society and the financiers under the Ancien Regime was not static and, therefore, suggests that the broad question of control and fraud must be examined against changing circumstances. With regard specifically to the Nine Years War, the article concludes that within the constraints of the Absolute monarchy, contractors offered valuable services by raising capital for the benefit of a king who ruled over a country which, at the time, was by far the wealthiest in Europe, and where ministers failed to foresee long wars of attrition and whose financial strategy was limited by the very existence of privilege. Overall, the traités were too costly to be a viable system of war financing. In these conditions, the substantial fortunes made by a handful of very successful traitants suffice to explain that the government easily gave in to public criticism against the wealth of the financiers and felt compelled, when peace resumed, to cancel the advantageous conditions offered in the treaties by taxing financial profits.

Resumen de La monarquía francesa y los financieros en el Antiguo Régimen. El ejemplo de los "traitants" durante la Guerra de los Nueve Años, 1689-1697

Joël Félix

Español
Este artículo estudia las relaciones entre el gobierno, la sociedad francesa y los financieros. Empieza analizando los discursos sobre financieros y los trabajos recientes de los historiadores. Prosigue con una presentación de los grupos de financieros. Estudia sucesivamente los contratos entre el rey y los asentistas para costear la Guerra de los Nueve Años, así como sus operaciones y beneficios. Muestra que el control ejercido por el gobierno era eficaz y que los traitans, dentro de los límites propios del Antiguo Régimen, ofrecían servicios esenciales aunque demasiado caros para ser viables.

English
This article explores the relationship between the Crown, the French society and the financiers. It starts with a brief review of the discourses on the financiers and a survey of the work done by historians. Further to a description of the various groups of financiers, it discusses the contracts passed between the king and the traitants to pay for the Nine Years War, as well as the latter’s activities and profits. The article argues that the government supervised effectively the traitants and that, given the constraints of the Old Regime, these financiers provided essential services, but too costly to be sustainable.

Français
Cet article étudie les relations entre le gouvernement, la société française et les financiers. Il commence par une analyse des discours sur les financiers et travaux récents des historiens. Il poursuit par une présentation des divers groupes de financiers. L’article étudie successivement les contrats passés entre le roi et les traitants pour financer la guerre de la Ligue d’Augsbourg, ainsi que leurs opérations et bénéfices. Il montre que les contrôles exercés par le gouvernement étaient efficaces et que les traitants, dans le cadre des contraintes propres à l’Ancien Régime, offraient des services essentiels mais trop coûteux pour être viables.

This is the introduction to Abbé de Saint-Pierre's Écrits sur la finance, in Écrits sur l’économie, les finances et la fiscalité, in Les écrits de l’abbé Castel de Saint-Pierre, Carole Dornier (éd.), Caen, Presses universitaires de Caen (Fontes & Paginæ – Sources modernes), 2018, en ligne : https://www.unicaen.fr/puc/sources/castel/doc/Economie/finances_intro.xml .