An administrative bureau during the old regime

This scholarly work throws light on the qualities of the French royal administration during the reign of Louis XVI, which was one of the most enduring legacies of the French monarchy to later regimes, and on the relations of that administration to the French economy and people. In the Controller General's department, the Bureau of Commerce was the center of administrative thought about the relations of the French royal government to French industry. Through a flow-of-activity, flow-of-consciousness narrative, author Harold T. Parker seeks to discover and to communicate how the Bureau's four executive intendants of commerce, individually and collegially, operated during twenty-nine months in routine performance and in the management of two major crises: the mass mutiny of most French textile artisans against the Bureau's new textile regulations and the developing surge of British inventions, productivity, and competitiveness, especially in textiles and iron and steel.^ This book thus bears on the nature of the royal administration on the eve of the French Revolution. It tends to confirm and illustrate the thesis advanced in other monographs that, except in the realm of financing the