The monstrous inequalities in levying one of the oldest and heaviest of the taxes, i.e., the salt tax, still better illustrates the strange disorder that existed in France in the eighteenth century. The government raised this tax by monopolizing the sale of salt and then charging a high price for it. There would have been nothing remarkable in this had the same price been charged everywhere, but as it was, the people in one town might be forced to pay thirty times as much as their neighbors in an adjacent district. The accompanying map shows how France was arbitrarily divided. To take a single example: at Dijon, a certain amount of salt cost seven francs; a few miles to the east, on entering Franche-Comté, one had to pay, for the same amount, twenty-five francs; to the north, in Burgundy, fifty-eight francs; to the south, in the region of the little salt tax, twenty-eight francs; while still farther off, in Gex, there was no tax whatever. The government had to go to great expense to guard the boundary lines between the various districts, for there was every inducement to smugglers to carry salt from those parts of the country where it was cheap into the land of the great salt tax.
The privileged classes.
210. Besides these unfortunate local differences, there were class differences which caused great discontent. All Frenchmen did not enjoy the same rights as citizens. Two small but very important classes, the nobility and the clergy, were treated differently by the state from the rest of the people. They did not have to pay one of the heaviest of the taxes, the notorious taille, and on one ground or another they escaped other burdens which the rest of the citizens bore. For instance, they were not required to serve in the militia or help build the roads.
Map showing the Amount paid in the Eighteenth Century for Salt in Various Parts of France[378]
The Church.
We have seen how great and powerful the mediæval Church was. In France, as in other Catholic countries of Europe, it still retained in the eighteenth century a considerable part of the power that it had possessed in the thirteenth, and it still performed important public functions. It took charge of education and of the relief of the sick and the poor. It was very wealthy and is supposed to have owned one fifth of all the land in France. The clergy still claimed, as Boniface VIII had done, that their property, being dedicated to God, was not subject to taxation. They consented, however, to help the king from time to time by a "free gift," as they called it. The church still collected the tithes from the people, and its vast possessions made it very independent. Those who did not call themselves Roman Catholics were excluded from some of the most important rights of citizenship. Since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes no Protestant could be legally married or have the births of his children registered, or make a legal will.
The clergy.
A great part of the enormous income of the church went into the pockets of the higher clergy, the bishops, archbishops, and abbots. These were appointed by the king,[379] often from among his courtiers, and they paid but little attention to their duties as officers of the church and were generally nothing but "great lords with a hundred thousand francs income." While they amused themselves at Versailles, the real work was performed—and well performed—by the lower clergy, who often received scarcely enough to keep soul and body together. We shall see that, when the Revolution began, the parish priests sided with the people instead of with their ecclesiastical superiors.[380]
The privileges of the nobility.