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In what were the problems of a new intendant? It has been recently argued that after royal power began to weaken. He seemed inclined to reduce the powers of the intendants, and his edicts on municipal reform of —65 can be seen in this light. But if the central direction of the royal administration seemed to flag, the actual apparatus expanded as if by laws of its own. The debate over the grain trade dominated the decade. Thus, at the same moment the royal intendants found themselves challenged by local estates and parlements, the duties of the post expanded into the entire area of public welfare.
It was no longer enough to be the guardian of law and order in the provinces; an intendant was expected to be an active public improver.
However long the seventeen years in Paris may have seemed, the thirteen in Moulins were equally interminable. The intendancy was coterminous with the old province of Bourbonnais, a region of gravelly soil useful for road-building but not much else. There was no parlement, no provincial estates, no military governor.
There was not even a cathedral chapter or a university. There was only a presidial court and a bureau des finances; in this respect it resembled La Rochelle. Moreover, even the poverty of the province had some advantages. The resident nobility was reasonably docile; there were no powerful mercantile interests and not too many lawyers.
