The other direct taxes were the poll tax, i.e., a certain sum which everybody alike must pay, and the income tax, usually a twentieth part of the income. Finally, there were indirect taxes, such as the salt gabelle. Thus, in certain provinces every person had to buy seven pounds of salt a year from the government salt-works at a price ten times its real value. Road-making, too, was the duty of the peasant, and the corvée, or labor on roads, often took several weeks in a year.
[Sidenote: Burden of Taxation on Peasants]
All these burdens—dues to the lord, tithes to the church, taxes to the king—left the peasant but little for himself. It is so difficult to get exact figures that we can put no trust in the estimate of a famous writer that dues, tithes, and taxes absorbed over four-fifths of the French peasant's produce: nevertheless, we may be sure that the burden was very great. In a few favored districts of France and England farmers were able to pay their taxes and still live comfortably. But elsewhere the misery of the people was such as can hardly be imagined. With the best of harvests they could barely provide for their families, and a dry summer or long winter would bring them to want. There was only the coarsest of bread—and little of that; meat was a luxury; and delicacies were for the rich. We read how starving peasants in France tried to appease their hunger with roots and herbs, and in hard times succumbed by thousands to famine. One-roomed mud huts with leaky thatched roofs, bare and windowless, were good enough dwellings for these tillers of the soil. In the dark corners of the dirt-floors lurked germs of pestilence and death. Fuel was expensive, and the bitter winter nights must have found many a peasant shivering supperless on his bed of straw.
True, the gloom of such conditions was relieved here and there by a prosperous village or a well-to-do peasant. But, speaking in a general way, the sufferings of the poorer European peasants and serfs can hardly be exaggerated. It was they who in large part had paid for the wars, theaters, palaces, and pleasures of the courts of Europe.
COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Growth of Towns]
Let us now turn our eyes from the country to the city, for in the towns are to be found the bourgeoisie, the class in which we are most interested. The steady expansion of commerce and industry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been attended by a remarkable development of town life. Little villages had grown, until in 1787 there were 78 towns of over 10,000 inhabitants each. London, the greatest city in Europe, had increased in population from about half a million in 1685 to over a million in 1800. Paris was at least half as large; Amsterdam was a great city; and several German towns like Hamburg, Bremen, and Frankfort were important trading centers.
The towns had begun to lose some of their medieval characteristics. They had spread out beyond their cramping walls; roomy streets and pleasant squares made the newer sections more attractive. The old fortifications, no longer needed for protection, served now as promenades. City thoroughfares were kept cleaner, sometimes well paved with cobbles; and at night the feeble but cheerful glow of oil street- lamps lessened the terrors of the belated burgher who had been at the theater or listened to protracted debates at the great town hall.
[Sidenote: Industry Gild Regulation]
The life of the town was nourished by industry and commerce. Industry in the eighteenth century meant far more than baking bread, making clothes, cobbling shoes, and fashioning furniture for use in the town; it meant the production on a large scale of goods to sell in distant places,—cloth, clocks, shoes, beads, dishes, hats, buttons, and what not. Many of these articles were still manufactured under the regulations of the old craft gilds. For although the gild system was pretty well broken up in England, it still maintained its hold on the Continent. In France the division of crafts had become so complicated that innumerable bickerings arose between cobblers' gilds and shoemakers' gilds, between watch-makers and clock-makers. In Germany conditions were worse. The gilds, now aristocratic and practically hereditary corporations, used their power to prevent all competition, to keep their apprentices and journeymen working for little or nothing, to insure high profits, and to prevent any technical improvements which might conceivably injure them. "A hatter who improved his wares by mixing silk with the wool was attacked by all the other hatters; the inventor of sheet lead was opposed by the plumbers; a man who had made a success in print-cloths was forced to return to antiquated methods by the dyers."