Nicolas Fouquet
Fouquet was a supporter of Cardinal Mazarin and gained through him two posts that increased his wealth and power considerably. Firstly, in 1650, Mazarin allowed him to purchase the post of Procureur-Général to the Parlement of Paris. Three years later, in 1653, Fouquet was appointed superintendent of finance.
The finances of the French government at this time were extremely complicated and allowed Fouquet to conduct the transactions of his office in an irregular manner. He used his own wealth and lines of credit to lend funds to the treasury, growing ever richer on the returns. Many of these transactions were carried out with the approval of Mazarin.
Much of this new wealth was spent on the creation of a castle at his estate of Vaux le Vicomte between 1657 and 1661. This magnificent building and the gardens surrounding it were created by the finest artists of the day. The three central designers, the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the landscape gardener André Lenôtre, all contributed to the first phase of the Palace of Versailles after 1661.
When Mazarin died in 1661, Fouquet thought he should succeed him as Chief Minister. But Louis XIV did not trust Fouquet’s ambition and so announced that he would be his own Chief Minister. This distrust was fuelled in part by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who sought to destroy Fouquet’s reputation and secure the position of superintendent of finance for himself.
Fouquet was arrested in September 1661 and tried for embezzlement. During the three-year trial public opinion swung in Fouquet’s favour due to his competent defence, but papers that would have shown Mazarin’s approval for the transactions in question were suppressed by Colbert.
Fouquet was found guilty on 20 December 1664 and sentenced to banishment. But Louis XIV was determined to see him locked away and so overruled the court and increased the sentence to life imprisonment. Fouquet was incarcerated at Pignerol for over fifteen years and died there on 23 March 1680.
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