FRENCH FOREIGN POLICY DURING THE ADMINISTRATION OF CARDINAL FLEURY, 1726-1743. A STUDY IN DIPLOMACY AND COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT.

By Arthur McCandless Wilson. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1936. 433 p. $4.50. [Harvard Historical Studies, XL.]

Professor Wilson has written an excellent monograph on a difficult subject. He has succeeded in rehabilitating the reputation of Cardinal Fleury as a shrewd diplomat who found France in a position of diplomatic dependence upon England and who made her the arbiter of Europe. The traditional picture of Fleury's weakness and vacillation is valid only for the few years just before his death at the opening of the War of the Austrian Succession. Indeed the author believes that the Cardinal simulated simplicity in order to deceive his contemporaries and that the pose has misled historians as well. Probably Fleury's masterpiece was the War of the Polish Election as a result of which Lorraine became a French possession. Professor Wilson has done far more, however, than merely to follow the maze of 18th century diplomacy, for he has, in two most interesting chapters, emphasized the economic progress of France under the administration of Fleury whom he believes to have been keenly aware of the importance of the growth of French foreign trade. This book should reinforce the arguments of those historians who have maintained that French commercial and industrial development was very rapid in the 18th century. The scholarliness of the work is attested by voluminous footnotes and by a remarkably thorough critical bibliography. The author has used French and English manuscripts and much contemporary pamphlet material as well as standard works and monographs by English, French and German historians. Several important letters of Fleury have been added as an appendix.