"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."
---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge

"Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing
royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long
overdue and compelling."
---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles

"Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."
---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

"Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."
---Keith Baker, Stanford University

When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines.

Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.

This book assesses how and to what extent the governments of Cardinal Mazarin and Louis XIV controlled the Parlement of Paris in the two decades after the civil wars known as the Fronde. The history of this prestigious court of law bears directly on the broader issue of the growth of “royal absolutism.” Few historians have examined the resurgence of royal authority after the Fronde from the vantage point of traditional institutions, and no other scholarly work deals extensively with the activities of Parlement during this controversial period. This study reveals the methods, achievements, and limitations of absolutism associated with the Sun King.
    The book investigates the impact of royal policies on the way the judges acquired and transmitted their posts, the sources of their wealth, the social composition of their court, and their judicial and administrative authority. Parlement's political activities and its conflicts with the crown over issues of judicial, financial, and religious importance also receive thorough treatment.
The author's extensive archival research indicates that many widely held assumptions about declining importance of Parlement after the civil war are unwarranted. Although Parlement's political activities gradually declined, this transformation was neither as complete nor as irreversible as historians have asserted. Parlement retained some voice in affairs of state, and most of the administrative machinery it could employ to oppose royal policy remained intact. Moreover, the crown failed to attack the sources of parlementaire wealth, and the judges freely enhanced their court's status as a social corporation.