The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations

by Jacob Soll

In September 2008, just as I was finishing a book about the French King Louis XIV’s famed finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, I found something remarkable: Colbert commissioned miniature golden calligraphy account books for the Sun King to carry in his coat pockets. Twice a year, starting in 1661, Louis XIV would receive these new accounts of his expenditures, his revenues, and his assets. It was the first time a monarch of his stature had taken such an interest in accounting. Here, then, it seemed, was a starting point of modern politics and accountability: a king who carried his accounts so that at all moments he might have some reckoning of his kingdom. I was at least as startled to learn next just how short-lived this experiment was. For as soon as Colbert died, in 1683, Louis—consistently in the red due to his predilection for costly wars and palaces like Versailles—discontinued the account books. Rather than tools of administrative success, Louis came to see his account books as illustrations of his failings as a king. He had created a system of accounting and accountability, and now he began breaking up the central administration of his kingdom. This made it impossible to unify the accounts of each ministry into one clear, central register, as Colbert had done, and for any minister to effectively critique, let alone understand, the king’s financial management. If good accounting meant facing the truth when the news was bad, Louis, it seemed, now preferred ignor...

As it ever was.