What if Louis XIV had never expelled the Huguenots?
The myth of the Huguenot economic blunder, under the microscope: 200,000 exiles, yes, but France's real problem was political, not artisanal.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
The Huguenot exodus: a blunder that didn't sink France
The expulsion of the Huguenots was a colossal economic mistake. The nuance arrives just seconds later: colossal only in alternate-history textbooks. In the seventeenth century, heresy was not a human capital asset, it was a sustancia ilegal in the edifice of absolute monarchy. And the figures used to sell the story of a supposedly lost industrial boom are handled with more enthusiasm than rigor: between 150,000 and 200,000 exiles, depending on the estimate.
The price of orthodoxy
The "waste of talent" argument sounds modern, but the Sun King was not running a startup. The brain drain was real: weavers from Lyon, gunsmiths, sailors from La Rochelle. What the economistic reading ignores is that those same artisans were part of a community with its own military power and international interests. La Rochelle was a state within the state until Richelieu brought it to heel. In a monarchy worn out by the wars of religion, tolerating a center of organized dissent was an invitation to the next civil war. The comparison with the Spanish Moriscos, who destabilized the Crown through foreign alliances, is inevitable. Even fiction has weighed in: in the latest Captain Alatriste novel, the swordsman ends up helping the Huguenots against the power of Versailles.
The alternate history AI can't see
The scenarios sold by text generators paint a France that, without the exodus, would have dominated global textile manufacturing. It is the same fantasy that credits Prussia's military might to the arrival of the Huguenots. But France was de facto the leading power of the eighteenth century without the Calvinists, and their departure was above all a gift to its commercial rivals: Holland, England and Prussia received the artisan elite for free. Some go further and argue that a Huguenot presence would have accelerated the French Revolution, by strengthening the dissent that would later crystallize in enlightened anticlericalism.
If Louis XIV had been more pragmatic, France might have gained an edge in silk and watchmaking. But it would also have gained a political headache. The alternate history that AI sells is a mirror of our obsessions: the belief that talent solves what politics refuses to fix. In the seventeenth century, politics won. And no counterfactual can make it lose.
The expulsion of the Huguenots was a colossal economic mistake. The nuance arrives just seconds later: colossal only in alternate-history textbooks. In the seventeenth century, heresy was not a human capital asset, it was a sustancia ilegal in the edifice of absolute monarchy. And the figures used to sell the story of a supposedly lost industrial boom are handled with more enthusiasm than rigor: between 150,000 and 200,000 exiles, depending on the estimate.
The price of orthodoxy
The "waste of talent" argument sounds modern, but the Sun King was not running a startup. The brain drain was real: weavers from Lyon, gunsmiths, sailors from La Rochelle. What the economistic reading ignores is that those same artisans were part of a community with its own military power and international interests. La Rochelle was a state within the state until Richelieu brought it to heel. In a monarchy worn out by the wars of religion, tolerating a center of organized dissent was an invitation to the next civil war. The comparison with the Spanish Moriscos, who destabilized the Crown through foreign alliances, is inevitable. Even fiction has weighed in: in the latest Captain Alatriste novel, the swordsman ends up helping the Huguenots against the power of Versailles.
The alternate history AI can't see
The scenarios sold by text generators paint a France that, without the exodus, would have dominated global textile manufacturing. It is the same fantasy that credits Prussia's military might to the arrival of the Huguenots. But France was de facto the leading power of the eighteenth century without the Calvinists, and their departure was above all a gift to its commercial rivals: Holland, England and Prussia received the artisan elite for free. Some go further and argue that a Huguenot presence would have accelerated the French Revolution, by strengthening the dissent that would later crystallize in enlightened anticlericalism.
If Louis XIV had been more pragmatic, France might have gained an edge in silk and watchmaking. But it would also have gained a political headache. The alternate history that AI sells is a mirror of our obsessions: the belief that talent solves what politics refuses to fix. In the seventeenth century, politics won. And no counterfactual can make it lose.
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (18 replies).
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