Jean Orry

Who was Jean Orry?

Jean Orry was a French economist whose broad financial and governmental reforms in early 18th-century Bourbon Spain helped to further the implementation of centralized and uniform administration in that country.

Jean Orry's career as a munitioneer for the army of Italy between 1690 and 1698, demonstrated his capacities.

Louis XIV of France, whose grandson had just succeeded to the Spanish throne as Philip V, sent Orry to Spain in 1701 to report on the finances of that kingdom, at the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession. Orry, working on information gathered during several residences at Madrid, drew up detailed memoranda advising not only the centralization of financial administration but also recommending a thoroughgoing reform of the basic governmental system on the French model; in Orry's proposals, political power would be transferred from the royal councils, dominated by nobles with strong vested interests, to a number of ministers, similar to the French secretaries of state, who would be loyal to the crown, from which all their authority would originate.

Under pressure because of the war, Philip first put Orry in charge of Spain's military finance. He reorganized and increased tax collection and devised various expedients to pay for troops and provisions for the war. He also instituted proceedings to recover stolen or alienated royal property. Shortly after May 1705 a position of secretary of war and finance was created, an initial step in Orry's reform program.