From Penury to Princess: How Olive Trant Benefitted from an Eighteenth Century Financial Bubble

Résumé En

In 1708, Olive Trant, daughter of the attainted Irish Jacobite Sir Patrick Trant, was impoverished, seeking cheap lodgings in a convent in Paris. By 1720, she was extremely wealthy and recently married to a dissolute prince, seeking to recover his fortune, a member of one of the leading French aristocratic families. It is reasonable to wonder what could have caused such a remarkable change in circumstances, particularly for a woman living an apparently marginal existence in what could be an extremely unforgiving city.Financial speculation, coupled with having useful connections, provides an answer; Olive Trant was an acquaintance of the Irish economic theorist Richard Cantillon, who was involved in banking in Paris from c. 1714 and who shortly thereafter engaged with the Scottish financier John Law. Law was de facto national banker of the French state and had created the Mississippi Share Scheme, which became one of the earliest known speculative financial bubbles, the ‘Mississippi Bubble’. In common with most, if not all, financial bubbles, the Mississippi Share Scheme burst with disastrous consequences for many speculators. Some, however, become incredibly wealthy and one of those lucky few was Olive Trant.My paper details one woman’s experience of poverty and wealth in the early modern period, including her use of financial markets; it looks at the risks of poverty for women in the Paris of the early 18th century and examines the importance of the networks available to Irish Jacobite exiles on the continent; it also examines how the Mississippi Bubble operated and ultimately failed. Finally, it also looks at the uses to which Ms Trant put her money, in terms of consumption but also in terms of her business interests and investments and, finally, her legacy.