We are delighted to have Ben Trotter, adjunct professor of history at Columbus State Community College and co-author of A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State, participate in a Q&A with MQUP Editor Kyla Madden.

Together they discuss how the award-winning book “A World of Paper”, a collaboration between two generations of historians, Trotter and the late John C. Rule, came to be.

Q&A

KM: Tell us about the research and scholarship of Professor John C. Rule and how your own research interests came to intersect with his work, ultimately leading to this book.

BT: From the 1950s John Rule researched and pondered the diplomatic and administrative history of France during Louis XIV’s long reign (1643–1715). His many influential articles and chapters focused in particular on the reign’s final decades and the foreign ministry under Jean-Baptiste de Colbert, Louis’s last foreign secretary (1696-1715). Being a somewhat tidy and organized person, I was drawn to bureaucracy as an area of study during a sociology survey course, so given my own inclinations and John’s guidance I wrote my dissertation on the fortifications bureaucracy under the great military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban before 1691. In 2005 John’s health prevented him from completing the book manuscript on Torcy he had been working on for some years. When he asked that I take up this task as co-author, I came to it with a shared interest in the workings of bureaucracy, albeit from a perspective more attuned to military rather than diplomatic history.

Nevertheless, I shared John’s desire to get at how such administrative organizations operated on a daily basis, and this entailed a move beyond theoretical analysis to praxis. It also required a critical examination of both, not only under Louis XIV but also in the present. After graduate school I increasingly noticed the oddly overlapping jurisdictions and other irrationalities of modern bureaucratic units. I would point these out to John and we would laugh at the much-vaunted “rationality” of modern administration often used as a standard to belittle Louisquatorzian arrangements that were not, in fact, much different. I was struck by the fact that the Weberian model of bureaucracy was often taken for granted as a reflection of the modern world. A political scientist I knew directed me to some eye-opening studies, such as Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1991) and Alistair Cole’s Governing and Governance in France (2008), which I hope I put to good use in the book.

KM: Professor Rule collected and annotated an immense amount of primary and secondary source material. How did you approach his archive and what did it tell you about his understanding of history?

BT: I was eventually forced to discard my original notion that I would largely serve as editor of John’s manuscript. Its raw and incomplete state sent me back to the secondary and then primary sources he had originally used. In his study I discovered over sixty vintage exercise books, composition books, and ledgers with his notes and transcriptions from the sources he had looked at over nearly five decades of research in libraries throughout the US, France, Britain, and the Netherlands. Largely unnumbered but clearly old and familiar friends to John, these notebooks were a mystery to me and I had to create an inventory for each one in order to search them electronically. Once this was done, I was ready for a daunting wade through their voluminous contents.

I found other treasures in John’s study, including a thick notebook filled with lecture notes, sketches of the famous historians he heard and met, records of seminars and conferences attended, and a variety of clippings and notes. He started the notebook in Chicago on July 2, 1953, while on his way from Stanford to begin a PhD at Harvard. By September he was aboard the SS Flandre traveling to Europe as a Fulbright Fellow. After a stop in Paris, he journeyed to England to attend lectures and sniff out manuscript sources in the libraries there. In November 1953 he had an interview with Sir George N. Clark, the great historian of early modern European diplomacy, who at that time was provost of Oxford’s Oriel College. In their conversation as reported by John, Sir George “deplore[d] the unnecessary waste for looking at odds and ends rather than for the essentials of the [historical] problem” and thus regarded the writing of biographies of most officials as pointless “because [they have] an official existence – what he meant,” John added, “was, there is a problem to be searched for here, rather than a life.” Although only in his early twenties, John confided to his journal (as, by the way, Colbert de Torcy did centuries before to his!) that “I tend to disagree, being particularly fond of biography – because I think the problem can be fitted into the life – or the problems; the biography presents a well-rounded investigation – a beginning – birth and an end with death…. Too many historians in the United States are like Sir George and desire to set up the problem before ‘facing the facts.’ Of great importance of course is the need for steady investigation that is admittedly formless – not aimless – until some shape emerges from the documents.”

Obviously, John knew that the data he gathered remained mute without interpretation, but he also realized the value of catching as many “odds and ends” in his nets as possible always with the hope that unexpected things might turn up. Indeed, John made such discoveries over the years as he reviewed his notes, which gave firmer shape to his understanding of Torcy’s department and guided his subsequent research. Likewise, ploughing through his notebooks permitted me to confirm, correct, nuance, and even add to John’s earlier findings. Our chapters on Torcy’s preparation for office, his family circles, and the lives and connections of his secretaries and clerks in the foreign office foreground the human dimension that John always regarded as an important part even of administrative history.

KM: The word “information” has become ubiquitous. How would you describe “information” in terms of how Torcy understood it?

BT: On the radio recently I heard an NPR reporter discuss Russian intelligence efforts to gather information on the West that would help them undermine any cooperation against their recent and threatening foreign policy initiatives. Torcy shared this desire for knowledge of the activities, resources, plans, factions, and personalities of the enemy as well as of the friendly courts with which France interacted. He saw this information as instrumental – whether immediately or in the future – in achieving his monarch’s international goals. But in addition to enhancing his king’s power, Torcy also knew that information played a large part in maintaining and even enhancing the Colbert clan’s position within the state. Information had to be gathered by a wide web of agents scattered about Europe and beyond. It had to be processed – analyzed, summarized, prioritized, responded to – by the minister and his various clerical collaborators before being channelled selectively to the king and his advisors. As a record of the present and a fund of knowledge for the future, information had to be organized and preserved for ready access. Torcy sought to have the best-informed foreign ministry in Europe and to be the best-informed foreign affairs advisor to his king. Decisions about war and peace and his role in influencing or guiding them depended upon this.

The World of Paper was the winner of the Society for French Historical Studies David H. Pinkney prize (2015), and the winner of the American Historical Association Leo Gershoy Prize (2015).

Read more about The World of Paper.