Colbert's Executive Dashboard
James Scott’s concept of legibility is both creative and highly generative. It opens up all kinds of questions and avenues of data civilizational research. (For more about legibility, please see his book, Seeing Like a State.) Today, I want to consider a concrete example – that of 17th-century France during the reign of Louis XIV.
In French history, Louis XIV is known as the “Le Roi Soleil” (The Sun King). He’s also famous for saying, “L’Etat c’est moi” (The state is me). Yes, the man had a massive ego, a rather expansive view of himself. But what else can we expect from the person who designed and built Versailles? While studying French in Europe many years ago, I visited Versailles during a multi-day field trip to Paris. It was a beautiful and breathtaking experience for a 21-year-old college student.
The future “Sun King” experienced a chaotic childhood with rebellious nobles wreaking havoc during his minority. This experience scarred Louis and left him with an enduring distrust of the French aristocracy. Once he assumed control of the government, Louis ordered his ministers to “seal no orders except by my command … I order you not to sign anything, not even a passport … without my command.” 1 He was now an absolute monarch in both name and deed. The buck stopped at the king’s desk, just as it did much later for Harry S. Truman. As Truman noted, a leader’s job is to decide, a sentiment Louis would have shared.
Making good decisions, however, assumes one has access to facts and data and an ability to make sense of them. As Roland Allen notes in his book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, the education Louis received from Cardinal Mazarin during his childhood was deficient in some key areas. The Cardinal had “taught the young king to strike deals, and dissemble when necessary, but had not thought it necessary to teach him any mathematics or finance.” 2 In today’s world, the equivalent would be a CEO who could not read a Profit and Loss (P&L) statement. Louis may have been an absolute monarch, but his situation remained precarious. Initially, he did not recognize these deficiencies but that soon changed.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the Elon Musk of 17th-century France. Born into a merchant family from Reims, Colbert believed in creating success the old-fashioned way through hard work and mastery of the details that make a nation run. The devil may be in the details, but Colbert knew how to make this devil dance to the Sun King’s favorite Ballet. (Louis XIV loved Ballet and played the Sun God Apollo in a production of the Ballet de la Nuit) What was Colbert’s secret? In a word, it was data. He had learned the art of data management as an accomplished bookkeeper. When Cardinal Mazarin, the king’s tutor, recognized Colbert’s data skills, he hired him immediately and later introduced him to the king.
At the time, the nation’s administrative systems were medieval, chaotic, and rife with corruption. As Colbert saw it, what France needed was a world-class data management system, not more aristocrats. His solution was a bookkeeping system that tracked the country’s revenues and expenditures. Louis XIV quickly saw the benefits of this new information system and devoted himself to acquiring a working facility with numbers. Each month, Colbert walked him through the books, calculated the balances, and then had him sign off on the work.
Louis developed a fondness for his new data management system. Even so, one problem remained. The king was busy – hunting, making love to his latest paramour, constructing Versailles, or leading a military campaign. He did not have time to summarize the data, figure out what it all meant, or visualize the bigger picture. Colbert devised the perfect solution for a man on the move: an executive dashboard fit for the most powerful monarch of that era. Enter the Golden Notebooks.
The page shown here categorizes all the ships in the French navy and then sums everything up at the bottom. With a quick glance, Louis could see what his navy had available for combat. At three-by-four inches, the golden notebooks fit snugly into his coat pocket. In each one, the nation’s key facts and figures were summarized for quick reference. Colbert even hired Nicolas Jerry, France’s best illuminator, to illustrate the notebooks, making the data more palatable to a king who saw himself as a fashion icon. France, at last, was legible. Yet the story doesn’t end here. In fact, it takes an interesting turn after Colbert’s death. That will be the subject of a future post.
Steingrad, Elena "Louis XIV - the Sun King: Absolutism". Way Back Machine from the original on 28 October 2013. Retrieved 17 February 2025.
Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Canada, Canadiana, 2023), 213.
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Fascinating. Thanks for the interesting trip.