The Law Collection is an exemplary outgrowth of HNOC cofounder L. Kemper Williams’s abiding interest in French Louisiana. He began amassing French colonial maps, documents, and publications long before HNOC was formally established. Some of his early acquisitions include a fanciful hand-colored engraving by François Chéreau, made circa 1720, that depicts New Orleans fortified at the foreground of a stylized Gulf Coast (1959.210).

At the height of Law’s System, public thirst for information about Louisiana was high, and artists like Chereau were happy to quench it. Also of note is François-Gérard Jollain’s circa-1720 Le commerce que les Indiens du Mexique font avec les François au Port de Missisipi (1952.3), a propaganda piece distributed by Law’s representatives to stimulate immigration to the Gulf Coast. In 1964 Kemper acquired an excellent collection of royal French administrative acts concerning Louisiana (MSS 268), and around the same time he obtained a copy of the 1720 Dutch publication Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (The great mirror of folly, 60-63-RL), which details Law’s downfall.

Shares in Law’s Company of the Indies, which ran the Louisiana colony, peaked in December 1719 at over 10,000 livres, 20 times their original value—and almost 50 times what early investors had actually paid for them, and in January 1720 Law was named France’s controller-general of finances. During a two-year-long bull market, France had made long-overdue investments in its navy and colonial infrastructure. The establishment of New Orleans as Louisiana’s future capital, in 1718, was an essential part of the upgrade. But France’s share-buying frenzy had been stoked by official propaganda painting Louisiana as a paradise where planters and traders made their fortunes with ease. By 1720, failed colonists were returning to France with tales of famine, disease, and an insufferable climate, and some big investors began cashing in their shares.

The bubble burst. As share prices fell and the first of several sell-offs began, the Company’s stock office had to close its doors for several weeks that spring. When the office reopened, speculation was banned, but Law promised to buy back shares at a fixed price of 9,000 livres. At the same time, Law had to deal with his too-rapid expansion of the paper-money supply. In attempting to shore up share prices, his monetary policies became quixotic and self-contradictory, further eroding investor confidence. A number of the documents in the Law Collection detail the efforts of the Company to quell the turning tide.

Law spent the next six months fighting to preserve his System, trying hybrid schemes involving traditional sources of revenue, such as bonds and annuities. His enemies at court were successfully lobbying to bring the old ways back, as seen in royal edicts dated June 10 and July 11.

By mid-August the crown—led by the king’s regent, Philippe, duc d’Orléans—decided to gradually retire and burn Law’s paper currency. Law introduced a few new financial instruments and received some investment in them, but not nearly enough to save the System—or himself. By December he was forced to quit France forever, giving up numerous châteaux and other properties and monies to pay off his debts. He would die in poverty, less than ten years later, in Venice.

Two significant recent additions to the John Law Collection provide a rare look at the final days of the bubble and the climate following its demise. One is a bound recueil (collection) of documents related to Law’s banking system, and the other is a group of 19 arrêts (official state edicts) enacted between April and November of 1720, during the last eight months of the System’s existence.

Both acquisitions are extremely rare. The recueil is one of only two copies known to exist, and 11 of the 19 edicts have never been documented in the literature. Acts of French Royal Administration Concerning Canada, Guiana, the West Indies and Louisiana Prior to 1791 by Wroth and Annan (1930), which remains the definitive resource, lists only four of the items. Marmont du Hautchamp’s Histoire du système des finances sous la minorité de Louis XV (1739) lists four others.

This brings us to the recueil. Published in 1723 by the Paris house Seneuze, it compiles the System’s monetary and banking regulations, accompanied by a brief introduction. To today’s researcher, it presents a puzzle: why would any publisher release a straightforward compilation of banking laws for a system that had failed only two years prior?

The answer, according to Law historian Antoin Murphy, who connected HNOC to the recueil, is that Law’s exile was intended to be temporary. Despite the System’s demise, Law had retained the support of the duc d’Orléans, who planned to bring him back into the fold. The duke’s secretary at the time, Jean François Melon, detailed the scheme in his 1734 Essai politique sur le commerce: with the regent’s support, Law planned to regain control of the Company of the Indies and introduce a new credit system “confined within safe limits.”

However, Melon writes, “Death finished his big plans.” Orléans died in December 1723, and with that, so too did Law’s planned comeback. The Seneuze receuil was never circulated, hence the rarity of the copy HNOC now has in its collection.