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116 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January in a complete differentiation between the fiscal apparatus of the royal household and that of the state. Yet by the early fourteenth century it had attained an elaboration almost approaching that of its English counterpart, and thenceforth* offers interesting points of comparison and contrast with our own system. Unluckily the materials for the history of French state finance, never perhaps quite as complete as the records of our exchequer, have suffered terribly from neglect, from dispersion, from the ravages of fire, and from wanton destruction during the Revolu- tion. Hence there are no long and continuous series like our great exchequer enrolments. However, sufficient samples of various types of financial records still survive, to enable scholars painfully to trace the development and explain the nature of the system. Accordingly, when historians set to work on the subject their first object was to reproduce its general features. Such efforts have resulted in the publication of such books as MM. Petit and Gavrilovitch's Essais de Restitution des plus anciens Memoriaux de la Chambre des Comptes and M. C. V. Langlois's edition of Robert Mignon's Liber de Inventorio Compotorum Ordinariorum et Aliorum. From these we can gather the nature of the general process of French finance, and learn what sort of account-books and records were at one time preserved of the financial operations of the later Capetians. Their publication has been followed by some of the actual accounts them- selves. When more of these have been made accessible in print, the atmosphere of conjecture and controversy which has until lately sur- rounded the history of this branch of the French administration will in some respects be cleared up. Already Colonel Borelli de Serres has done much to plot out the ground. The work of M. Jules Viard will afford much material for a more detailed and definitive survey of the field of French finance. By the early fourteenth century three organizations stood out clearly in the confusion. There was the camera denariorum, now definitely the financial authority of the royal household. There was the camera com- potorum, already sedentary in Paris and the supreme controlling authority in all matters of finance. There was also the thesaurus regis, itself become stationary at Paris, with its separate staff of two treasurers, a changer, a treasury clerk, and subordinate officials, who jointly formed a corpora- tion, the familia thesauri. This organization was distinct from the chambre des comptes, though it had intimate relations with it, acted in common with it, and was to a considerable extent subordinate to and dependent upon the higher body. If comparisons were not misleading when conditions, though analogous, were so different, we should not go far wrong in saying that the French treasury stood to the chambre des comptes in something like the relation that our ' exchequer of receipt ' stood to our ' exchequer of account '. The main difference is that, while the English bureaucracy proudly emphasized the unity of the exchequer, French officials seem to have considered treasury and ' chamber of accounts ' as two separate organizations. The treasury, like our exchequer of receipt, had its own sets of books, and prominent among these were the treasury journals, which formed, as Colonel Borelli de Serres has well said, ' le premier element de toute la