On December 16, 1651, the temperature in northern France plummeted and snow fell, and a thick layer of ice formed on the surface of the canal that runs from the south of France to the northwest. At this point, the road from the waterway to Paris was blocked, and as a last resort, Frank and Condin had to take a horse-drawn carriage to Paris.

Riding in a horse-drawn carriage without a shock absorbing system on a road in poor condition was nothing short of a disaster for travelers, and today Contin, Frank and others are in the midst of this disaster. The potholed road stretched to the end of the sky, leaving everyone who passed through it hungry and resentful, but they could only curse in vain the officials who managed the once well-behaved artery, and cursed them to be taken to prison and judged by justice along with Mazaran.

"There is a joke in Paris that Viscount Tibury, who was in charge of the construction of the roads, once asked the Prime Minister Mazarin for funds to maintain the potholed roads, and the Prime Minister gave him 80,000 livres. Haha, God, in a great country with an annual income of 100 million livres, less than a percent of the money is spent on the road. Although Frank's youngest daughter has married his old friend, Mo Ming, the eldest son of the president of the Southern Railway Company, he was still embarrassed by the chaos in his homeland, so he can only use a joking tone to point out that the road situation is so poor that he still has no money after all.

Condin also smiled when he heard this, of course he knew that he couldn't do anything with eighty thousand livres. You must know that when the war is going on to this day, both France and the Habsburgs are exhausted, poor and poor, and the exchange rate of France's main currency, the Livre, in the Amsterdam market has fallen sharply - the current Livre is no longer the "franc" that was strictly minted before the outbreak of the war (at that time, 1 livre was about 4-5 East Coast silver dollars, commonly known as francs), and the inferior currency minted by the abbey of Tours in recent years (commonly known as Tourliver) has become popular. The silver content of each Turlivere has plummeted to a shameful sum of 4.5-5 grams.

So, now you can easily understand what kind of concept Bawan Turlivo is. And what about the actual financial capacity of the Kingdom of France, which earns 100 million Tourlivo a year! The so-called 100 million "livres" is only 20 million "yuan" at best, and in the East Coast Republic, where government revenues have exceeded 4 million yuan (the vast majority of which is trade income). An annual income of 20 million yuan is really nothing. Today, the Spaniards still ship back 50 million yuan worth of gold and silver bars from the American continent every year. 20 million yuan? Hehe!

France is really enough for this country, although it did not end directly in the first half of the Thirty Years' War, it also kept giving money and materials in the rear, acting as a big financier behind the scenes; When the time was ripe in the second half, he took the initiative to defeat Spain in one fell swoop, and greatly pushed the border in the eastern region forward.

Of course, it corresponds to the French army's infinite scenery on the battlefield. It is a countryside that is increasingly dilapidated because it has been drained by the war. As Condin and others have seen along the way, the land of the provinces of Brittany has begun to be eroded by the nobility, hereditary gentry, and new gentry. The land that they had usurped by all means, which had been mostly in the hands of the small gentry and yeoman farmers more than thirty years ago, was now in the hands of the aristocracy, the church, the old gentry, and the new gentry who had been given rise by the war economy on a larger and larger scale, which, unfortunately, was largely never taxed or only a very small part of the tax, which was obviously not good news for the French finances.

The situation of small landowners and yeoman farmers in France is really becoming more and more difficult now, and they are burdened with taxes that have been repeatedly increased by the war, such as the "measurement tax" that has been increased when buying and selling. They are powerless against the vicious tax collectors. Many were forced to sell their ancestral property and use the proceeds to rent large plots of land to grow (apparently the land in the hands of the aristocracy was taxed very little), or simply to go into commerce - but in France, where the economy was declining and trade was still dominated by Dutch merchants. Getting into business is also a risky action.

"Lately there have been a lot of 'freedmen' everywhere -- landless freedmen -- as has appeared in some parts of England, and these people are now either going to join the army to fight, or to try their luck, or to become sailors, and of course some remain in the country as beggars, and in any case society is much more chaotic now than it was thirty years ago." Frank looked at the beggars he often saw on both sides of the road, sighed, and said, "But there are some people who are happy about this, such as some artisans. Because it means that they can hire workers at a much lower price than before. Richelieu - well, he's dead - and Mazarin would have been very happy at this time. They're going to say, aha. Look, the French industry is strong, their costs are so low, and they produce so many products, that this is the source of wealth......"

Truth be told, two generations of French prime ministers - Richelieu under Louis XIII and Mazarin under Louis XIV - have always been very interested in the development of French industry, and they have given great tax incentives to the capitalists who responded to the government's call for the development of artisanal workshops, while also helping them solve some of the raw material problems, and even raising import tariffs on foreign goods to protect their own industries. As a result of this multi-pronged approach, French industry finally stumbled up and is now concentrated in Paris (munitions, leather production, leather goods processing, luxury goods manufacturing), Calais (woolen textiles), Nantes (mill mills, salt), Saint-Malo and Cherbourg (shipbuilding), La Rochelle (cotton textiles, seafood processing), Le Havre (cotton textiles, food processing) and other cities.

And these former yeoman farmers, who have gone bankrupt and lost their jobs for various reasons, have obviously injected a shot in the arm for these artisanal workshops, which require a lot of labor. What's more, there are some small landowners who have sold their ancestral property and have invested in the handicraft industry with a large amount of money, which has injected fresh money into the country's industry - capital and labor are available, and now there is a shortage of technology, right?

"Today's artisanal workshop owners are not very interested in new technologies." Frank thought about it for a while, and then said helplessly.

His family had close ties with the East Coast, and he himself went to the East Coast twice by boat, which was one of the few people in France who "opened his eyes to the world" in this era. He was well aware that the success of the industry in the Eastern Republic was largely due to the massive adoption of new technologies (he had not yet recognized the profound influence of the national industrial policy and the industrial climate of the society on the process of industrialization), and therefore he felt that it was completely wrong for the French capitalists to abandon innovative technologies.

At the same time, however, he admits that as the land annexation in France becomes more and more severe, and the agriculture in the countryside becomes more and more depressed, a large number of bankrupt peasants must provide these factory owners with a large number of cheap labor, which more or less offsets some of the disadvantages of French industrial technology - but he also believes that this is not the right way after all, and that the right way is to invest heavily in scholars and renowned craftsmen to develop new technologies, as the Dutch did. While cracking the various ready-made technologies that have been flowing out of the East Coast (the East Coast seems to have a proper term for this, "reverse engineering", because they also often "reverse engineer" advanced technologies from the Old World that they do not know about), the results have been fruitful.

However, the Dutch also have a disadvantage, that is, their labor costs are too high. In the Netherlands, where the land is narrow and the people are poor and the business is developed, if the profit margin of a certain industrial product is not large enough, it is actually difficult to recruit enough workers to produce, because the income of the workers who do any work is better than working in the factory. And if the factory owners wanted to raise wages to attract workers, their products would soon be defeated in competition with their foreign counterparts - the Dutch wholesalers were notoriously unscrupulous, and they did not advocate the purchase of their own goods as England and France did.

On the whole, if Dutch technology, ample capital, and vast sales channels are combined with the cheap labor of France, it will be able to burst out of its own competitive position, sweeping out of its own market for all kinds of foreign industrial goods, which can even be wrestled with the goods of the East coasters with the help of high tariffs, and allowing itself to enjoy the intoxicating profits of industry.

"The mills in the Netherlands are better than ours, and they are said to have imported your gears and tried to produce them themselves. Their scholars have been studying your technology more and more, and some time ago they rebuilt a road to the Breda Fortress, which made extensive use of your hydraulic machinery, which was quite effective and much less expensive. This is a sensation in the Netherlands, even the consuls have heard of it, and now that many people are starting to take your breath seriously, please be prepared for a large number of spies, haha. At the end, Frank said in a half-joking, half-admonishing tone.

Kang Ding was also silent for a while when he heard this, and he had already begun to think about reporting this matter to Mo San in Istanbul.

The weather was also surprisingly good in the following days, and Contin, Frank and others were on their way except for some days delayed by the war, and finally arrived at Orleans, a river node city south of Paris, on December 29, 1651. (To be continued)