Embezzlement and High Treason in Louis XIV's France: The Trial of Nicolas Fouquet. By Vincent J. Pitts.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. ix, 240. $44.95.

This smoothly written, readable book examines the trial of Nicolas Fouquet, the influential, experienced superintendent of finances whom King Louis XIV inherited when he began his personal reign in 1661. Elegant in style and manner, revered by his literary and artistic coterie, a wealthy man and ostentatious in his wealth, Fouquet fell like a meteor when the king had him arrested on 5 September 1661. He never knew another day of freedom, finally dying in 1680 in the Pinerolo fortress in northern Italy, then under French control. But the king had wanted him dead, either at the end of a rope or beneath the blade of an ax.

Fouquet had fallen to his main rival in the administration, the dogged Jean-Baptiste Colbert, now the king's ministerial favorite and thus victorious in this example of high-stakes office politics. In an ongoing display of malice and incompetence, the king and Colbert did their best to railroad their prisoner in a show trial, stacking the judicial deck (with apologies for these cliches). Colbert probably selected the twenty-eight judges of a special tribunal charged with the trial, serving judges who were committed to the royal administration or deemed likely to be influenced by it. (The length of the trial reduced the panel to twenty-two.) 

One of these was Colbert's uncle, Henri Pussort, an implacable exponent of the royal line; other Colbert clients shamelessly served as administrators for the panel. As the trial dragged on, the king and his loyalists tried to reinsure themselves, lobbying uncertain judges and threatening them with this or that or offering them professional advancement. At first, authorities kept Fouquet isolated and incommunicado in his prison, denying him counsel and access to his voluminous papers, all the while using those papers to build what became a largely circumstantial case against him. 

This was not difficult as Fouquet's main job had been to raise large sums of money for the government in wartime, and he had had to use freewheeling methods, not always observing all the formalities. Even so, royal agents had to tamper with the documents and bring false evidence into the court to help the case along.

The trial, including the preliminary interrogations, lasted from the autumn of 1661 until 20 December 1664, its very length an embarrassment for the king and Colbert. …