Colbert is one of the large ministers who organized old France: endowed with an extraordinary activity, it joins together between its hands attributions of our marine and fine art, public works, trade, agriculture, interior, Ministers for Finance.

It is told that it worked sixteen hours per day.

Impassioned admiror of Richelieu, it faced like prejudged them to him and hatreds to destroy the abuses and to think only of the public property: he wanted that France had all glories.

Its death was a great loss for Louis XIV of which it was like the good genius (1683).

Louis XIV and Louvois had about the same age; they were all the two young people, burning, quarrelsome, impassioned for military glory; they were included/understood.

Louvois had happiness to always have the confidence of the king, and, sure of the following day, it could undertake one of these works which are not possible that under the long ministries.

Its task was difficult, but it was not wearied, and thanks to him the French Army could resist the coalitions and supplement our border by invaluable conquests.

After the death of Louvois (1691), the abuses reappeared, and France felt which man it had lost.

Born in 1633, died in 1707, Vauban is famous especially as military engineer: replacing the high stone walls by ground fortifications almost on the level of the countryside, it made a great revolution in art strengthen the places; it did one at the same time in art to take them, and directed itself of them the seat of a great number of cities.

It also worked as civil engineer with ports, channels, acqueducs.

Lastly, we should not forget that it disapproved the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and that it had courage to propose to Louis XIV useful reforms.

This is the maritime door of the channel of the South, which connects the Rhone to the Garonne, the Mediterranean in the Atlantic.

This is, like the channel, the work of Colbert and Riquet.

The uniform is not a business of parade: it develops the spirit of body and the military spirit, i.e.

the taste of the soldier for his profession; it makes sensitive to the eyes the equality of the same men rank: under the uniform, there are no more rich person, neither the poor, neither middle-class man, nor peasants; there are nothing any more but soldiers.

It was Louvois which gave to the army the uniform: the regiments of infantry accepted clothes with great skirts and felt hats on broad board; the behaviour of the French guards remained famous: she was composed of a white dress with galons of money, breeches and bottoms scarlet, of a black hat.