1685 created additional economic problems: of the more than 200,000 Huguenot refugees who fled France for Prussia, Switzerland, England, Ireland, United Provinces, Denmark, South Africa and eventually America, many were highly educated skilled artisans and business-owners who took their skills, businesses, and occasionally even their Catholic workers, with them. Both the expansion of French as a European lingua franca in the 18th century, and the modernization of the Prussian army have been credited to the Huguenots. The wars and the weather at the end of the century brought the economy to the brink. Warfare accounted for three quarters of government expenditure between 1689 and 1697, while overall government expenditure doubled. Conditions in rural areas were grim from the 1680s to 1720s. To increase tax revenues, the taille was augmented, as too were the prices of official posts in the administration and judicial system. The government also resorted to currency devaluation - there were around 40 changes in the legal value of French coinage, while the Livre tournois lost one third of its metal value over a 20-year period. There was also a short-lived experiment with a paper currency, billets de monnaie, which were issued in 1701. They immediately declined in value and were withdrawn in 1710. With the borders guarded due to war, international trade was severely hindered. The economic plight of the vast majority of the French population — predominantly simple farmers — was extremely precarious, and the Little Ice Age resulted in further crop failures. Bad harvests caused starvation—killing a tenth of the people in 1693–94. Unwilling to sell or transport their much-needed grain to the army, many peasants rebelled or attacked grain convoys, but they were repressed by the state. Meanwhile, wealthy families with stocks of grains survived relatively unscathed; in 1689 and again in 1709, in a gesture of solidarity with his suffering people, Louis XIV had his royal dinnerware and other objects of gold and silver melted down. An economic divergence between Britain and France began in the second half of the 17th century. Eighteenth century France was large and rich and experienced a slow economic and demographic recovery in the first decades following the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Birth rates were high and the infant mortality rate was in steady decline. The overall mortality rate in France fell from an average of 400 deaths per 10,000 people in 1750, to 328 in