Henri-Léonard Bertin

Henri-Léonard Bertin , oil painting by the Swedish portrait painter Alexandre Roslin (third half of the eighteenth century).

Henri-Léonard-Jean-Baptiste Bertin (born March 24, 1720 in Périgueux , † September 16, 1792 in Spa ) was a French statesman and in the last three years of the Seven Years' War General Controller of Finance under Louis XV. After the end of the war in 1763, Bertin resigned from this office and until 1780 was in charge of a specially created state ministry, the petit ministère (“small ministry”). He then retired to an estate near Chatou , where he had agricultural experiments carried out - especially for growing potatoes . Two years after the outbreak of the French Revolution , Bertin emigrated to Aachen and died in 1792 while staying at the Belgian spa resort of Spa.

Life

Henri-Léonard Bertin came from a family of the French official nobility from the Périgord in south-west France. After training at a Jesuit school , he worked as a lawyer in Bordeaux from 1741 . As protégé of the general controller of finances Philibert Orry and the chancellor Henri François d'Aguesseau , he succeeded his father in 1745 in the office of Maître des requêtes . In 1749 he held the office of chairman of the Grand Conseil and was involved in the acquittal of La Bourdonnais' . From 1749 Bertin was director of the province of Roussillon , from 1754 director of the Lyonnais . Between 1757 and 1759 he was Lieutenant General de la Police in charge of the Paris Police .

In October 1759, at the instigation of the Marquise de Pompadour , Bertin was appointed as the successor to Étienne de Silhouette as General Controller of Finance. The financial situation of the French state was extremely tense due to the Seven Years War and Bertin tried to solve the problem by taking out government bonds and introducing new taxes. In particular, the creation of new taxes earned him opposition from the Parlement de Paris and some provinces, which eventually led to his resignation in 1763.

Since he had the trust of Louis XV. and had acquired the sympathies of the Marquise de Pompadour, Ludwig created a new Ministry of State specially tailored to Bertin on December 14, 1763. In this role, Bertin had a diverse hodgepodge of responsibilities: among other things, he was responsible for the French East India Company , the porcelain factories , agriculture, public transport, the construction of canals as well as the state lotteries and archives . For lack of a more appropriate designation, Bertin's Ministry was titled "Department of Monsieur Bertin" ( département de Monsieur Bertin ); in court circles it was called the "small ministry" ( petit ministère ).

Until the accession of Louis XVI. Bertin played a major role at the French court, although he lacked the political means to assert his ideas in the field of finance. Bertin paid particular attention to the areas of agriculture and mining. During his tenure, he set up the first veterinary schools in France (together with Claude Bourgelat ), set up a number of societies to promote agriculture and set up a mining school in Paris. For his services he received honorary memberships of the Académie des sciences (1761) and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1772).

In 1780 Bertin resigned from his office and retired to an estate near Chatou that had been acquired in 1762 . Here he dedicated himself in particular to the cultivation of potatoes , of which he was one of the proponents together with Antoine Parmentier . In addition, he laid out extensive ornamental and vegetable gardens , for which he developed a complex irrigation system. He commissioned his friend, the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot , with building plans for a nymphaeum and with the construction of a new castle ( called Château Neuf to distinguish it from the old castle of the lords of Chatou ).

Two years after the outbreak of the French Revolution , Bertin emigrated to Aachen and died in 1792 while staying at the Belgian spa resort of Spa .

literature

• Françoise Bayard / Joël Felix / Philippe Hamon: Dictionnaire des surintendants et contrôleurs généraux des finances , Paris 2000, ISBN 2-11-090091-1 ( extracts of the entry on Bertin are available online on the website of the Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique (IGPDE) , Vincennes . It contains further information on Bertin's work as General Controller of Finance.).
• Guy Penaud: Le ministre Bertin - un homme peu ordinaire , in: Journal du Périgord No. 131, available online at dordogne-perigord.com.

Web links

Commons : Henri-Léonard Bertin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Secrétariat d'État de Bertin - inventory of archival materials from the time of Bertins petit ministère in the Archives nationales , Paris.

predecessor	Office	successor
Etienne de Silhouette	Controllers General of Finance November 23, 1759 - December 14, 1763	Clément Charles François de Laverdy