From the point of view of the municipal finances, the 'good old times' of the Empire may well have a charm for the taxpayers of Amiens.
In 1870 Amiens, with 61,063 inhabitants, raised and spent a municipal revenue of rather more than a million and a half of francs, or, in round numbers, about 25 francs, or 20 shillings, per capita of the population. A public loan, made in 1854, had been almost wholly paid off, and the city treasury still held 600,000 francs of a loan of 1,600,000 francs made in 1862 for certain public improvements. The municipal government cost 372,000 francs, and 180,000 francs were spent on the public schools. Of the municipal income, 987,802 francs were derived from four forms of direct taxation, and 770,000 francs from the octroi. This gave an average of a little less than 13 francs per capita as the burden of the octroi upon the population.
In 1886 the population had increased to 74,000. The direct taxes brought in 1,184,724 francs, and the octroi, 1,498,459, making the average burden of the octroi per capita 20 fr. 20 c., or an increase of about 50 per cent. in the pressure of that form of tax upon the population, as compared with 1870. As the octroi is imposed upon food and beverages of all kinds—fuel, forage, and building materials—this tax is regarded in France as a measure for estimating the general well-being of the inhabitants. Thus measured, there would seem to be a falling off in the general well-being of the people of Amiens since 1883. For, while the pressure per capita of the octroi is much greater than it was in 1870, the actual receipts from the octroi were less with a population of 74,000 in 1886, than they were in 1883. In 1883 the octroi yielded 1,533,140 francs. In 1886 it yielded only 1,498,459 francs. The falling off was in the receipts from beverages, from provisions, from forage, and from building materials. The tariff of the octroi meanwhile has remained substantially without change from 1873 to the present time. It is an expensive tax to collect, the costs of collection in 1886 amounting to 11.85 per cent. of the receipts.
Adding together now the receipts from the direct taxes and the octroi of Amiens in 1886, we have a sum of 2,683,183 francs, or in round numbers about 1,100,000 francs more than in 1870. But while, as I have stated, in 1870 the receipts equalled and balanced the expenses of the municipal government, this is no longer the case.
In 1886 Amiens, with an income of 2,683,183 francs, spent 4,162,294 francs, giving an average municipal outlay of 56 fr. 10 c. per capita and an excess of expenditure over revenue of no less than 1,479,111 francs, or very nearly the total income and outlay of the city under the Empire. No wonder that the public debt of the department of the Somme, of which Amiens is the capital, seems in 1886 to have amounted to 18,303,496 francs! What inequalities of pressure upon the people of the department this involves may be estimated from the fact that, while there are in the Somme 836 communes, only 404, or less than half of these communes, are authorised to raise money by loans, and one-eighth of them to raise money by octrois. Yet we are constantly told that all inequalities and privileges were abolished throughout France by a stroke of the pen in the annus mirabilis 1789![5] The taxation in 20 communes is estimated at 15 centimes, or less; in 87, at from 15 to 30; in 268, at from 31 to 50; in 428, at from 51 to 100; and in 33, at 100 centimes and upwards. These are the communal taxes. To these must be added 51 centimes for the departmental taxes, ordinary and extraordinary; 2 centimes for the land-tax; 19 centimes for the personal tax and taxes on personal property; 18.8 centimes for the doors and windows tax; and 39.6 centimes for licences. For Amiens these fractions taken together mount up to 119-4/10 centimes.
I have no wish to weary myself or my readers with figures. But these figures tell the story of the difference between the government of France under the much reviled Empire and under the present government, which is represented to us as the natural and admirable 'evolution' of republican institutions in this country. In 1870, as I have stated, the receipts and expenditure of the city of Amiens balanced one another. The city paid its way, and lived up to, not beyond, its means.
With the war came upon it, of course, heavy and unexpected burdens: German local exactions, its share of the general German ransom of France, local war expenses, and its share of the general war expenditure. For three years the citizens left their affairs, thus disturbed and encumbered, to be managed by a municipal council trained in the methodical habits of the imperial administration, with the result that in 1874 the expenses of Amiens amounted to 2,479,802 francs, and its revenues to 2,016,130 francs, leaving thus a deficit of 463,672 francs, substantially accounted for by the necessary payments on a loan of 5,000,000 francs negotiated in Brussels by M. Dauphin at the very high rate of 7½ per cent. The affairs of Amiens were arranged three years afterwards by a municipal Commission, which turned them over, in 1878, to the 'Republicans of Gambetta,' with a budget involving an expenditure of 2,686,660 francs, against a revenue from taxation of 2,249,245 fr. 52 c., showing a reduced deficit of no more than 437,405 francs.
By 1880 the expenditure had risen to 3,156,616 francs, while the revenue stood at 2,531,762, showing a deficit of 624,854 francs, being an increase of nearly fifty per cent, in two years! From that time the gulf has gone on widening between the receipts and the expenditure of the ancient capital of Picardy, until the figures laid before me, as taken from the official reports, show during the seven years 1880-86, a total of 18,530,477.01 francs of receipts against a total of 24,551,977 francs of expenditure, leaving a deficit for these seven years of 5,021,500 francs, or more than the amount of the Dauphin loan incurred by Amiens as a consequence of the German occupation, and of the exactions of Count Lehndorff!
What has been done during the past three years can only as yet be conjectured. The accounts are made up at the mayoralty office, and thence sent to the préfecture, and they do not get within range of the taxpayer for at least a twelvemonth afterwards.
But M. Fleury assures me that between the years 1884 and 1888 the city expended in buildings, chiefly 'scholastic palaces' erected as batteries of aggressive atheism from which to beat down the temples of religion, no less than 1,700,000 francs; so that the total of deficit of the budget of Amiens, from 1880 to the present time, in all probability exceeds six millions of francs.