Capitalism by Candlelight — How Huguenot Refugees Taught Europe to Count
The Protestant work ethic met the balance sheet and never looked back.
By BananaKing for PastGoneNuts — history for readers who suspect Excel had ancestors.
When Louis XIV expelled the Huguenots in 1685, he didn’t just lose a few dissenters; he lost France’s most efficient accountants.
The same artisans who once embroidered royal drapes suddenly found themselves recalculating interest rates in London and Amsterdam.
In one stroke, the Sun King swapped salvation for spreadsheet literacy — and Europe quietly learned to budget.
When Faith Became Finance
Calvinists treated time as sacred, thrift as a calling, and precision as virtue.
Give that worldview a few printing presses and trade routes, and you get something astonishingly close to capitalism.
In exile, the Huguenots didn’t preach prosperity; they practiced it.
They ran banks that trusted contracts over titles, insurers who understood risk without theology, and factories that preferred punctuality to prayer.
They didn’t just believe in divine order — they itemized it.
The Birth of the Portable Enterprise
Cut off from France’s guilds, Huguenots improvised a new kind of business: portable, private, and personal.
Their families doubled as firms; their correspondence became capital flows.
They carried reputation instead of royal favor — a currency accepted from Berlin to Bristol.
This was the first truly European network economy, built not on conquest but competence.
By the time the Enlightenment arrived, the descendants of these exiles were running Europe’s credit, trade, and taste.
Why It Mattered More Than Gold
The irony still glows centuries later: a monarch obsessed with control triggered the rise of self-reliant enterprise.
Louis XIV wanted one faith; he created a continent of freelancers.
The Huguenots proved that security doesn’t require sovereignty — only trust, skill, and a double-entry ledger.
When their ships left French harbors, they carried more than goods.
They exported a mindset: work hard, plan ahead, pray quietly.
Takeaway
• When talent crosses borders, wealth follows.
• Exile builds innovation faster than empire.
• Sometimes progress needs a passport stamp.