But these colonies had but a precarious and transitory existence; fisheries alone succeeded, and French commerce continued insignificant, circumscribed, and domestic, notwithstanding the increasing requirements 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it forbade the higher classes from engaging in mercantile pursuits under penalty of having their privileges of nobility withdrawn from them.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 Germanic Guild.—­Colleges.—­Teutonic Associations.—­The Paris Company for the Transit of Merchandise by Water.—­Corporations properly so called.—­Etienne Boileau’s “Book of Trades,” or the First Code of Regulations.—­The Laws governing Trades.—­Public and Private Organization