The State of Society in France Before the Revolution of 1789 / And the Causes Which Led to That Event

by Alexis de Tocqueville

The whole sum to be paid by each parish was fixed every three years. It perpetually varied, as the minister says, so that no farmer could foresee a year beforehand what he would have to pay in the year following. In the internal economy of each parish any one of the peasants named by the collector was entrusted with the apportionment of the tax on the rest.

I have said I would explain what was the condition of this collector. Let us take this explanation in the language of the Assembly of the Province of Berri in 1779, a body not liable to suspicion, for it was entirely composed of privileged persons, who paid no taille, and were chosen by the King. ‘As every one seeks to evade this office of collector,’ said this Assembly, ‘each person must fill it in turn. The levy of the taille is therefore entrusted every year to a fresh collector, without regard to his ability or his integrity; the preparation of each roll of assessment bears marks, therefore, of the personal character of the officer who makes it. The collector stamps on it his own fears, or foibles, or vices. How, indeed, could he do better? He is acting in darkness, for who can tell with precision the wealth of his neighbour or the proportion of his wealth to that of another? Nevertheless the opinion of the collector alone is to decide these points, and he is responsible with all his property and even his person for the receipts. He is commonly obliged for two whole years to lose half his days in running after the taxpayers. Those who cannot read are obliged to find a neighbour to perform the office for them.’

Turgot had already said of another province, a short time before, ‘This office of collector drives to despair, and generally to ruin, those on whom it is imposed; by this means all the wealthier families of a village are successively reduced to poverty.’

This unhappy officer was, however, armed with the most arbitrary powers;[61] he was almost as much a tyrant as a martyr. Whilst he was discharging functions by which he ruined himself, he had it in his power to ruin everybody else. ‘Preference for his relations,’ to recur to the language of the Provincial Assembly, ‘or for his friends and neighbours, hatred and revenge against his enemies, the want of a patron, the fear of affronting a man of property who had work to give, were at issue with every feeling of justice.’ Personal fear often hardened the heart of the collector; there were parishes in which he never went out but escorted by constables and bailiffs. ‘When he comes without the constable,’ said an Intendant to a Minister, in 1764, ‘the persons liable to the tax will not pay.’ ‘In the district of Villefranche alone,’ says the Provincial Assembly of Guienne, ‘there were one hundred and six officers constantly out to serve writs and levy distraints.’

To evade this violent and arbitrary taxation the French peasantry, in the midst of the eighteenth century, acted like the Jews in the Middle Ages. They were ostensibly paupers, even when by chance they were not so in reality. They were afraid to be well off; and not without reason, as may be seen from a document which I select, not from Guienne, but a hundred leagues off. The Agricultural Society of Maine announced in its Report of 1761, that it proposed to distribute cattle by way of prizes and encouragements. ‘This plan was stopped,’ it adds, ‘on account of the dangerous consequences to be apprehended by a low jealousy of the winners of these prizes, which, by means of the arbitrary assessment of the public taxes, would occasion them annoyance in the following year.’

Under this system of taxation each tax-payer had, in fact, a direct and permanent interest to act as a spy on his neighbours, and to denounce to the collector the progress of their fortunes. The whole population was thus trained to delation and to hatred. Were not such things rather to be expected in the domains of a rajah of Hindostan?

There were, however, at the same time in France certain districts in which the taxes were raised with regularity and moderation; these were called the pays d’état.[62] It is true that to these districts the right of levying their own taxes had been left. In Languedoc, for example, the taille was assessed on real property, and did not vary according to the means of the holder. Its fixed and known basis was a survey which had been carefully made, and was renewed every thirty years, and in which the lands were divided, according to their fertility, into three classes. Every taxpayer knew beforehand exactly what his proportion of the charge amounted to. If he failed to pay, he alone, or rather his land alone, was liable. If he thought the assessment unjust, he might always require that his share should be compared with that of any other inhabitant of the parish, on the principle of what is now termed in France an appeal to proportionate equality.

These regulations are precisely those which are now followed in France; they have not been improved since that time, but they have been generalised: for it deserves observation, that although the form of the public administration in France has been taken from the Government anterior to the Revolution, nothing else has been copied from that Government. The best of the administrative forms of proceeding in modern France have been borrowed from the old Provincial Assemblies, and not from the Government. The machine was adopted, but its produce rejected.

The habitual poverty of the rural population had given birth to maxims little calculated to put an end to it. ‘If nations were well off,’ said Richelieu, in his Political Testament, ‘hardly would they keep within the rules.’ In the eighteenth century this maxim was modified, but it was still believed that the peasantry would not work without the constant stimulus of necessity, and that want was the only security against idleness. That is precisely the theory which is sometimes professed with reference to the negro population of the colonies. It was an opinion so generally diffused amongst those who governed that almost all the economists thought themselves obliged to combat it at length.

The primary object of the taille was to enable the King to purchase recruits so as to dispense the nobles and their vassals from military service; but in the seventeenth century the obligation of military service was again imposed, as we have seen, under the name of the militia, and henceforth it weighed upon the common people only, and almost exclusively on the peasantry.