Even more grievous than the Corvée and the militia were the abuses which pervaded the whole system of taxation. The heaviest of all the taxes was the terrible burden of the Taille, a direct tax levied sometimes on property and sometimes on income, falling almost entirely on the poor—alike on the struggling landowner and on the landless labourer—assessed without order or method, constantly varying and constantly increased. Every year in the rural districts some unfortunate villager was selected to act as collector of the Taille. He alone had to decide how much each of his neighbours was worth, and how much he must extort from them to satisfy the Government, and if his efforts or his calculations failed, his own property and person were responsible for the amount. The opportunities for abuse in such a system, for the satisfaction of personal jealousies and grudges, are as obvious as its unfairness towards those on whom the office was inflicted. 'The office of collector,' cried Turgot, 'drives to despair and frequently to ruin all those on whom it is imposed.' In order to escape the Taille, the peasant strenuously concealed his savings. If, in spite of his Government, he prospered, he dared do nothing to give an air of comfort to his home. We find him in one case entreating his landlord not to tile the roof of his cottage, because such a sign of prosperity would mean for him an increase of taxation. It was the object of every man to seem desperately poor. Then besides the Taille, the peasant had to pay the accessory taxes, which in process of time had been assimilated with it; the Poll-tax and the Vingtièmes, imposts imposed by Louis XIV on all alike, but the weight of which the powerful classes had contrived to shift on to the shoulders of the weak; the road-tax, when the Corvées were abolished; the tax of the franc-fief, whenever he happened to own lands which had once been the lands of nobles; and always, apart from the demands of the Exchequer, his seigneur's dues and his pastor's tithe. Statistics may sometimes be misleading, but an able statistician has calculated, upon evidence which it is difficult to deny, that, allowing for all these direct charges, the peasant in many parts of France paid away four-fifths of his income to the Treasury, the seigneur, and the Church, and out of every hundred francs he earned, retained little more than eighteen francs himself[4].
But the record of his troubles did not end there. The Gabelle, perhaps the most exasperating impost ever devised by an empty Exchequer, compelled all citizens over seven years of age to purchase yearly seven pounds of salt from the agents of the State. But this salt was reserved for cooking and eating alone, and if salt for any other purpose were needed, the agents of the State had the right to make its subjects purchase more. The whole system of indirect taxation was conceived in the same spirit as this monument of fiscal folly. The face of the country was covered by barriers and custom-houses, occupied by an army of revenue officers, who purchased from the Government the right of collecting the customs and excise. Twelve hundred leagues of artificial frontiers separated the various provinces of France, impeded trade, and played havoc with prices. The small vine-growers were almost ruined by the excise levied upon wine, which even in those days was conspicuous for its severity and for the inquisitorial practices of those who enforced it. Calonne declared that the salt tax alone produced every year nearly four thousand sentences, of imprisonment, flogging, exile and the galleys. Under such auspices smuggling multiplied, and the Government retorted by heavy punishments. Bodies of armed banditti were organised in disturbed districts, and carried on for years together a guerilla war against the forces of the Crown. Unemployed labourers and ruined peasants found a livelihood in swelling the ranks of disaffection, and in the absence of any poor-law administration, mendicancy and vagabondage rapidly increased.
The records of the last years of the Ancien Régime are consequently full of evidence of alarming and growing disorder. Townspeople complained that the beggars, driven from the country, flocked into the cities for shelter. The Intendants reported to the Council that the chief highways of the kingdom were infested with dangerous vagrants. In vain the Government multiplied its corn-laws and arrests, and endeavoured to stifle the clamours of indigence by feeding some and by punishing others. In 1767, fifty thousand beggars were arrested; but in 1777, the numbers of that unfortunate class had risen to nearly a million and a quarter. In Paris the census of 1791 declared that out of a population of six hundred and fifty thousand, over one hundred and eighteen thousand were without the means of regular subsistence. It is easy to understand how, pressed by hunger, and pursued by a rigorous penal code, many of these wandering mendicants crossed the thin line which separates extreme want from crime, and how, when the Old Monarchy suddenly collapsed, and when in the search for freedom law was for the moment lost, this large group of miserable beings, armed with brief power and long-accumulated hatred, exacted a terrible revenge for the wrongs of the labouring community in France, from whose ranks they and their ancestors had been driven by a system politically and socially unjust.
Such, in the eighteenth century, were some of the conditions of life in France. Each class lived apart, entrenched in its own chilling traditions. 'Nobody,' cried Turgot, 'cares for any interest but his own.' Local patriotism, common intercourse, friendly feeling, no longer drew men of different ranks together. The sense of citizenship had generally died out. Below the others the peasant stood alone. His poverty clung to him as a garment of shame. His commonest impulses were want and fear. His love of legend made him superstitious. His ignorance made him credulous, bigoted, suspicious, easily persuaded to believe in evil. Isolated from the world, conscious of belonging to an inferior caste, encountering on all sides the privileges of his masters, and yet with no superior to care for him and no wise counsellor to guide him, blunted in feeling by long endurance, gentle, submissive, often gay, but more often brooding on the indignities which he suffered, and resenting the injustice even more than the hardship of his lot, he heard and welcomed with passionate illusion the new doctrine of human dominion, which proclaimed that men were equal, whatever their station, whatever their distress, and from that moment the attainment of equality, so easy to imagine, so hard to approach, became the commanding ideal of the poor.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It will be understood that in the Pays d'État, the powers of the Intendants, as regarded taxation and public works, were limited and controlled by the rights of the local assemblies.
[2] The expenses of the royal table amounted to nearly three hundred thousand pounds a year.
[3] I have taken all these figures from M. Taine's Ancien Régime, and have reduced them roughly to their equivalents in English money of our own day. I have, however, throughout calculated the livre at 10d., although Arthur Young puts it as high as 10-1/2d.; so that the amounts in the text are, if anything, understated.
[4] One part of the taille, that which fell upon the cultivator, reached the privileged orders indirectly through their farmers, but even then there were certain exemptions in their favour. The franc-fief was the tax of one year's revenue levied every twenty years on non-noble holders of noble lands. The calculation of income given here I take from the note on the subject contained in the appendix to M. Taine's volume on the Ancien Régime, which is founded on the procès-verbaux of the provincial assemblies. On an income of 100 francs, he estimates the taille (with its accessories), the poll-tax, and the road-tax together, at 42 fr. 15 c.; the two vingtièmes at 11 fr., the tithe at 14 fr. 28 c., and the feudal dues at 14 fr. 28 c.; total 81 fr. 71 c.