It may be seen by a letter, addressed by a Commissary at the head of the police department of convict-gangs, to the Intendant, in 1761, that the peasants were compelled to cart the galley-slaves on their way; that they executed this task with very ill will; and that they were frequently maltreated by the convict-guards, ‘inasmuch,’ says the Commissary, ‘as the guards are coarse and brutal fellows, and the peasants who undertake this work by compulsion are often insolent.’
Note (LXI.)—Page [113], line 32.
Turgot has given descriptions of the inconvenience and hardship of forced labour for the transport of military baggage, which, after a perusal of the office papers, appear not to have been exaggerated. Among other things, he says that its chief hardship consisted in the unequal distribution of a very heavy burden, inasmuch as it fell entirely upon a small number of parishes, which had the misfortune of being placed on the high road. The distance to be done was often one of five, six, or sometimes ten and fifteen leagues. In which case three days were necessary for the journey out and home again. The compensation given to the landowners only amounted to one-fifth of the expense that fell upon them. The period when forced labour was required was generally the summer, the time of harvest. The oxen were almost always overdriven, and frequently fell ill after having been employed at the work—so much so that a great number of landowners preferred giving a sum of 15 to 20 livres rather than supply a waggon and four oxen. The consequent confusion which took place was unavoidable. The peasants were constantly exposed to violence of treatment from the military. The officers almost always demanded more than was their due; and sometimes they obliged the drivers, by force, to harness saddle-horses to the vehicles at the risk of doing them a serious injury. Sometimes the soldiers insisted upon riding upon carts already overloaded; at other times, impatient at the slow progress of the oxen, they goaded them with their swords, and when the peasants remonstrated they were maltreated.
Note (LXII.)—Page [113], line 38.
EXAMPLE OF THE MANNER IN WHICH FORCED LABOUR WAS APPLIED TO EVERYTHING.
A correspondence arising, upon a complaint made by the Intendant of the Naval department at Rochefort, concerning the difficulties made by the peasants who were obliged by the corvée to cart the wood purchased by the navy contractors in the different provinces for the purposes of shipbuilding, shows that the peasants were in truth still (1775) obliged to do this forced labour, the price of which the Intendant himself fixed. The Minister of the Navy transferred the complaint to the Intendant of Tours, with the order that he must see to the supply of the carriages required. The Intendant, M. Ducluzel, refused to authorise this species of forced labour, whereupon the Minister wrote him a threatening letter, telling him that he would have to answer for his refusal to the King. The Intendant, to this, replied at once (December 11th, 1775) with firmness, that, during the ten years he had been Intendant at Tours, he never had chosen to authorise these corvées, on account of the inevitable abuses resulting from them, for which the price fixed for the use of the vehicles was no compensation. ‘For frequently,’ says his letter, ‘the animals are crippled by the weight of the enormous masses they are obliged to drag through roads as bad as the time of year when they are ordered out.’ What encouraged the Intendant in his resistance seems to have been a letter of M. Turgot, which is annexed to the papers on this matter. It is dated on July 30th, 1774, shortly after his becoming Minister; and it says that he himself never authorised these corvées at Limoges, and approves of M. Ducluzel for not authorising them at Tours.
It is proved by some portions of this correspondence that the timber contractors frequently exacted this forced labour even when they were not authorised to do so by the contracts made between themselves and the State, inasmuch as they thus profited at least one-third in the economy of their transport expenses. An example of the profit thus obtained is given by a Subdélégué in the following computation: ‘Distance of the transport of the wood from the spot where it is cut to the river, by almost impracticable cross-roads, six leagues; time employed in going and coming back, two days; reckoning (as an indemnity to the corvéables) the square foot at the rate of six liards a league, the whole amounts to 13 francs 10 sous for the journey—a sum scarcely sufficient to pay the actual expenses of the small landowner, of his assistant, and of the oxen or horses harnessed to his cart. His own time and trouble, and the work of his beasts, are dead losses to him.’ On May 17th, 1776, the Intendant was served by the Minister with a positive order from the King to have this corvée executed. M. Ducluzel being then dead, his successor, M. l’Escalopier, very readily obeyed, and published an ordinance declaring that the Subdélégué had to make the assessment of the amount of labour to be levied upon each parish, in consequence of which the different persons obliged to statute labour in the said parishes were constrained to go, according to the time and place set forth by the syndics, to the spot where the wood might happen to be, and cart it at the price regulated by the Subdélégué.