Étienne de Silhouette

Étienne de Silhouette (5 July 1709 – 20 January 1767) was a French Ancien Régime Controller-General of Finances under Louis XV.

Sometimes said to be akin to the next Niccolò Machiavelli, he was born at Limoges where his father Chevalier Arnaud de Silhouette, of Biarritz or de Zulueta (in Basque), had been posted as a Bourbon administrator. De Silhouette studied finance and economics assiduously and spent a year in London learning about the economy of Britain.

He translated into French several works by Alexander Pope, Henry Bolingbroke, William Warburton's The Alliance between Church and State, (1736) as Dissertations sur l'Union de la Religion, de la Morale, et de la Politique (1742) and Baltasar Gracián's El político. The Prince of Condé's party later used his translations from English to criticize him, but Madame Pompadour's support and vision saw him awarded with the position of Controller-General on 4 March 1759; this was one of the most extensive administrative positions in the Ancien Régime, albeit a very unstable one. His task was to curb France's spiralling deficit and strengthen the finances for the Seven Years' War against Britain (1754–1763). Public opinion preferred his 72-million-livres public loan to the ferme générale, an outsourced tax collection system. He managed to curtail Royal household expenditure, revised state pensions and to encourage free trade he reduced some ancient taxes whilst establishing new ones in accordance with the vision of a unified French market.

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