Let us take the most invidious of all these privileges, that of exemption from taxation.[38] It is easy to perceive that from the fifteenth century until the French Revolution, this privilege was continually increasing, and that it increased with the rapid progress of the public burdens. When, as under Charles VII., only 1,200,000 livres were raised by the taille, the privilege of being exempted from it was but small; but when, under Louis XVI., eighty millions were raised by the same tax, the privilege of exemption became very great. When the taille was the only tax levied on the non-noble classes, the exemption of the nobility was little felt; but when taxes of this description were multiplied a thousandfold under various names and shapes—when four other taxes had been assimilated with the taille—when burdens unknown in the Middle Ages, such as the application of forced labour by the Crown to all public works or services, the militia, &c.—had been added to the taille with its accessories, and were distributed with the same inequality, then indeed the exemption of birth appeared immense. The inequality, though great, was indeed still more apparent than real, for the noble was often reached through his farmer by the tax which he escaped in his own person; but in such matters as this the inequality which is seen does more harm than that which is felt.
Louis XIV., pressed by the financial difficulties which overwhelmed him towards the end of his reign, had established two common taxes—the capitation tax and the twentieths; but, as if the exemption from taxation had been in itself a privilege so venerable that it was necessary to respect it in the very act by which it was infringed, care was taken to render the mode of collection different even when the tax was common. For one class it remained harsh and degrading, for the other indulgent and honourable.[39]
Although inequality under taxation prevailed throughout the whole continent of Europe, there were very few countries in which it had become so palpable or was so constantly felt as in France. Throughout a great part of Germany most of the taxes were indirect; and even with respect to the direct taxes, the privilege of the nobility frequently consisted only in bearing a smaller share of the common burden.[40] There were, moreover, certain taxes which fell only upon the nobles, and which were intended to replace the gratuitous military service which was no longer exacted.
Now of all means of distinguishing one man from another and of marking the difference of classes, inequality of taxation is the most pernicious and the most calculated to add isolation to inequality, and in some sort to render both irremediable. Let us look at its effects. When the noble and the middle classes are not liable to the same tax, the assessment and collection of each year’s revenue draws afresh with sharpness and precision the line of demarcation between them. Every year each member of the privileged order feels an immediate and pressing interest in not suffering himself to be confounded with the mass, and makes a fresh effort to place himself apart from it.[41]
As there is scarcely any matter of public business that does not either arise out of or result in a tax, it follows that as soon as the two classes are not equally liable to it, they can no longer have any reason for common deliberation, or any cause of common wants and desires; no effort is needed to keep them asunder; the occasion and the desire for common action have been removed.
In the highly-coloured description which Mr. Burke gave of the ancient constitution of France, he urged in favour of the constitution of the French nobility, the ease with which the middle classes could be ennobled by acquiring an office: he fancied that this bore some analogy to the open aristocracy of England. Louis XI. had, it is true, multiplied the grants of nobility; with him it was a means of lowering the aristocracy: his successors lavished them in order to obtain money. Necker informs us, that in his time the number of offices which conferred nobility amounted to four thousand. Nothing like this existed in any other part of Europe, but the analogy which Burke sought to establish between France and England on this score was all the more false.
If the middle classes of England, instead of making war upon the aristocracy, have remained so intimately connected with it, it is not specially because the aristocracy is open to all, but rather, as has been said, because its outline is indistinct and its limit unknown—not so much because any man could be admitted into it as because it was impossible to say with certainty when he took rank there—so that all who approached it might look upon themselves as belonging to it, might take part in its rule, and derive either lustre or profit from its influence.
Whereas the barrier which divided the nobility of France from the other classes, though easily enough passed, was always fixed and visible, and manifested itself to those who remained without, by striking and odious tokens. He who had once crossed it was separated from all those whose ranks he had just quitted by privileges which were burdensome and humiliating to them.
The system of creating new nobles, far from lessening the hatred of the roturier to the nobleman, increased it beyond measure; it was envenomed by all the envy with which the new noble was looked upon by his former equals. For this reason the Tiers-Etat, in all their complaints, always displayed more irritation against the newly-ennobled than against the old nobility; and far from demanding that the gate which led out of their own condition should be made wider, they continually required that it should be narrowed.
At no period of French history had it been so easy to acquire nobility as in 1789, and never were the middle classes and the nobility so completely separated. Not only did the nobles refuse to endure, in their electoral colleges, any one who had the slightest taint of middle-class blood, but the middle classes also as carefully excluded all those who might in any degree be looked upon as noble. In some provinces the newly-ennobled were rejected by one class because they were not noble enough, and by the other because they were too much so. This, it is said, was the case with the celebrated Lavoisier.