Taxes alone deprived them of three quarters of what they earned. On one side was the corvée, or the right of the lord to his peasants’ labour without paying for it; and the taille, or the tax on property, which exacted a certain sum from each village: so that if the rich would not pay, the poor must.
Add to this the toll-gates, so numerous that fish brought from Harfleur to Paris paid eleven times its value en route; the fines exacted when land was bought or sold; above all, the enormous tax upon salt, which soon was as the match to fire the gunpowder of the Revolution; the tithes exacted by the Church: the fees for masses for the dead, for burying, christening, and marrying, coupled with the bitter injustice that the clergy of that Church were themselves exempt from all taxation.
Add to these regular taxes the irregular ones.
On the accession of Louis XV. one was levied, called the Tax of the Joyful Accession. Joyful! The people who paid it lived in a windowless, one-room hut of peat or clay; clothed in the filthiest rags; ignorant, bestial, degraded; creatures who never knew youth or hope: who died in unrecorded thousands, of pestilence and famine; or lived, to their own cruel misery, a few dark years “on a little black bread, and not enough of that.”
Such were the fifty poor of Ferney as Voltaire found them, but not the twelve hundred he left.
Whatever his sins were—and they were many—he had one of the noblest and most difficult of virtues—a far higher conception of his duty to others than the men of his time. It was fashionable to talk philanthropy in the eighteenth century, but dangerous, as well as unmodish, to practise it.
“True philosophy ...” wrote the great Doer in the midst of the Dreamers, “makes the earth fertile and the people happier. The true philosopher cultivates the land, increases the number of the ploughs, and so of the inhabitants; occupies the poor man, and thus enriches him; encourages marriages, cares for the orphan; does not grumble at necessary taxes, and puts the labourer in a condition to pay them promptly.”
He had begun by getting back for the Ferney poor that tithe of which Ancian had deprived them, and by making the peasants mend and make roads—at fair wages. Later, he petitioned the King for “some privileges for my children”; and Gex was at last declared free from all the taxes of the farmers-general, and salt, which used to be ten sous the pound, came down to four.
His building operations at both the church and château gave occupation to many masons. Then the masons must have decent dwellings in which to live themselves; and here was more work.
In 1767, he could write that he had formed a colony at Ferney; that he had established there three merchants, artists, and a doctor, and was building houses for them. By 1769 he recorded with an honest pride that he had quadrupled the number of the parishioners, and that there was not a poor man among them; that he had under his immediate supervision two hundred workers, and was the means of life to everyone round him.