Introducing double-entry bookkeeping in public finance: a French experiment at the beginning of the eighteenth century

Before the Revolution, tax-collecting was a very profitable private business. Using fiscal receipts, tax-collectors lent money to the Crown, instead of giving it without delay, so the State paid interest on public funds. To accelerate the receipts of the Royal Treasury and to diminish the interest paid by the King, in 1716 the French government introduced a reform based on a key technical innovation: double-entry bookkeeping was used to control tax-collectors' activities. The experiment was gradually extended to the various branches of the royal finances, but the scope provided by the new system for more effective supervision rapidly met with the hostility of the financiers. These attempts to rationalize public finance were interrupted in 1726 and the four Paris brothers who were the promoters of the reforms were distanced from royal finances. After relating these events, this paper tries to measure their significance. The interest of this accounting change goes further than the technical aspects, because it was linked with a fundamental organizational change. The Paris brothers attempted to replace a set of decentralized contractual relations with a centralized bureaucratic administration, conceiving of accounting as a sophisticated instrument of supervision, able to modify the behaviour of the financiers. This experiment can be seen as an eighteenth-century example of what Foucault referred to as the emergence of disciplinary technologies. It was the product of the ambition for scientific government, such as was to be found throughout Europe during the Enlightenment, and the Paris brothers' manuscripts may be ranked among the first manifestations of a literature which was soon termed the 'science of administration'.