of luxury at court. This luxury contented itself with the use of the
merchandise which arrived from the Low Countries, Spain, and Italy.
National industry did all in its power to surmount this ignominious
condition; she specially turned her attention to the manufacture of silks
and of stuffs tissued with gold and silver. The only practical attempt of
the government in the sixteenth century to protect commerce and
manufactures was to forbid the import of foreign merchandise, and to
endeavour to oppose the progress of luxury by rigid enactments.

Certainly the government of that time little understood the advantages
which a country derived from commerce when it forbade the higher classes
from engaging in mercantile pursuits under penalty of having their
privileges of nobility withdrawn from them. In the face of the examples of
Italy, Genoa, Venice, and especially of Florence, where the nobles were
all traders or sons of traders, the kings of the line of Valois thought
proper to make this enactment. The desire seemed to be to make the
merchant class a separate class, stationary, and consisting exclusively of
bourgeois, shut up in their counting-houses, and prevented in every way
from participating in public life. The merchants became indignant at this
banishment, and, in order to employ their leisure, they plunged with all
their energy into the sanguinary struggles of Reform and of the League.

[Illustration: Fig. 200.--Medal to commemorate the Association of the
Merchants of the City of Rouen.]

It was not until the reign of Henry IV. that they again confined
themselves to their occupations as merchants, when Sully published the
political suggestions of his master for renewing commercial prosperity.
From this time a new era commenced in the commercial destiny of France.
Commerce, fostered and protected by statesmen, sought to extend its
operations with greater freedom and power. Companies were formed at Paris,
Marseilles, Lyons, and Rouen to carry French merchandise all over the
world, and the rules of the mercantile associations, in spite of the
routine and jealousies which guided the trade corporations, became the
code which afterwards regulated commerce (Fig. 200).

[Illustration: Fig. 201.--Standard Weight in Brass of the Fish-market at
Mans: Sign of the Syren (End of the Sixteenth Century).]

Guilds and Trade Corporations.

Uncertain Origin of Corporations.--Ancient Industrial Associations.--The
Ge