Merchant of death : Maximilien Titon (1632–1711) and the supply of arms in Louis XIV’s France

Abstract

From the early 1660s the government of Louis XIV, mindful of chronic supply shortages in weaponry during the Franco-Spanish war of 1635-59, began to build up what nowadays would be called a defence industrial base. This was done in a piecemeal and gradual fashion, with the impetus coming in part from below as prospective entrepreneurs saw a chance to improve their personal position by providing the king with weapons and munitions for his standing army and navy. When the scale of France’s armed forces grew over the 1670s-90s, the monarchy ramped up armaments and munitions orders to its contractors, but while huge quantities were successfully delivered it was at the expense of a great deal of control over the people, processes, finances, and quality of the actual weapons involved. This essay investigates the considerable principal-agent problems generated by the monarchy’s demand for weaponry by looking closely at Maximilien Titon and his family, who organised under contract the manufacture and delivery of muskets to the king’s land forces during Louis XIV’s ‘personal rule’ (1661-1715). Titon provides a case study of how essential contractors could and would exploit those beneath them and manipulate the state they worked for to retain their solvency. Concerned at the exploitation the Titon family had achieved, successor governments were far more careful not to allow themselves to be dominated by a single mobilising contractor.