The octrois of towns.—The poor the greatest sufferers.
One word more to complete the picture. People seek shelter in the towns and, indeed, compared with the country, the towns are a refuge. But misery accompanies the poor, for, on the one hand, they are involved in debt, and, on the other, the closed circles administering municipal affairs impose taxation on the poor. The towns being oppressed by the fisc, they in their turn oppress the people by passing to them the load which the king had imposed. Seven times in twenty-eight years5264he withdraws and re-sells the right of appointing their municipal officers, and, to get rid of "this enormous financial burden," the towns double their octrois. At present, although liberated, they still make payment; the annual charge has become a perpetual charge; never does the fisc release its hold; once beginning to suck it continues to suck. "Hence, in Brittany," says an intendant, "not a town is there whose expenses are not greater than its revenue."5265They are unable to mend their pavements, and repair their streets, "the approaches to them being almost impracticable." What could they do for self-support, obliged, as they are, to pay over again after having already paid? Their augmented octrois, in 1748, ought to furnish during a period of eleven years a total of 606,000 livres; but, the eleven years having lapsed, the tax authorities, in spite of having been paid, still maintains its exigencies, and to such an extent that, in 1774, they have contributed 2,071,052 livres, the provisional octroi being still maintained.—Now, this exorbitant octroi bears heavily everywhere on the most indispensable necessities, the artisan being more heavily burdened than the bourgeois. In Paris, as we have seen above, wine pays forty-seven livres a hogshead entrance duty which, at the present standard of value, must be doubled. "A turbot, taken on the coast at Harfleur and brought by post, pays an entrance duty of eleven times its value, the people of the capital therefore being condemned to dispense with fish from the sea."5266At the gates of Paris, in the little parish of Aubervilliers, I find "excessive duties on hay, straw, seeds, tallow, candles, eggs, sugar, fish, faggots and firewood."5267Compiegne pays the whole amount of its taille by means of a tax on beverages and cattle5268. "In Toul and in Verdun the taxes are so onerous that but few consent to remain in the town, except those kept there by their offices and by old habits."5269At Coulommiers, "the merchants and the people are so severely taxed they dread undertaking any enterprise." Popular hatred everywhere is profound against octroi, barrier and clerk. The bourgeois oligarchy everywhere first cares for itself before caring for those it governs. At Nevers and at Moulins,5270"all rich persons find means to escape their turn to collect taxes by belonging to different commissions or through their influence with the élus, to such an extent that the collectors of Nevers, of the present and preceding year, might be mistaken for real beggars; there is hardly any small village whose tax collectors are solvent, since the tenant farmers (métayers) have had to be appointed." At Angers, "independent of presents and candles, which annually consume 2,172 livres, the public pence are employed and wasted in clandestine outlays according to the fancy of the municipal officers." In Provence, where the communities are free to tax themselves and where they might be expected to show some consideration for the poor, "most of the towns, and notably Aix, Marseilles and Toulon,5271pay their impositions," local and general, "exclusively by the tax called the "piquet." This is a tax "on all species of flour belonging to and consumed on the territory;" for example, of 254,897 livres, which Toulon expends, the piquet furnishes 233,405. Thus the taxation falls wholly on the people, while the bishop, the marquis, the president, the merchant of importance pay less on their dinner of delicate fish and becaficos than the caulker or porter on his two pounds of bread rubbed with a piece of garlic! Bread in this country is already too dear! And the quality is so poor that Malouet, the intendant of the marine, refuses to let his workmen eat it!
"Sire," said M. de la Fare, bishop of Nancy, from his pulpit, May 4th, 1789, "Sire, the people over which you reign has given unmistakable proofs of its patience. . . . They are martyrs in whom life seems to have been allowed to remain to enable them to suffer the longer."
"I am miserable because too much is taken from me. Too much is taken from me because not enough is taken from the privileged. Not only do the privileged force me to pay in their place, but, again, they previously deduct from my earnings their ecclesiastic and feudal dues. When, out of my income of 100 francs, I have parted with fifty-three francs, and more, to the collector, I am obliged again to give fourteen francs to the seignior, also more than fourteen for tithes,5273and, out of the remaining eighteen or nineteen francs, I have additionally to satisfy the excise men. I alone, a poor man, pay two governments, one the old government, local and now absent, useless, inconvenient and humiliating, and active only through annoyances, exemptions and taxes; and the other, recent, centralized, everywhere present, which, taking upon itself all functions, has vast needs, and makes my meager shoulders support its enormous weight."
These, in precise terms, are the vague ideas beginning to ferment in the popular brain and encountered on every page of the records of the States-General.
"Would to God," says a Normandy village,5274"the monarch might take into his own hands the defense of the miserable citizen pelted and oppressed by clerks, seigniors, justiciary and clergy!"
"Sire," writes a village in Champagne,5275"the only message to us on your part is a demand for money. We were led to believe that this might cease, but every year the demand comes for more. We do not hold you responsible for this because we love you, but those whom you employ, who better know how to manage their own affairs than yours. We believed that you were deceived by them and we, in our chagrin, said to ourselves, If our good king only knew of this!. . . We are crushed down with every species of taxation; thus far we have given you a part of our bread, and, should this continue, we shall be in want. . . . Could you see the miserable tenements in which we live, the poor food we eat, you would feel for us; this would prove to you better than words that we can support this no longer and that it must be lessened. . . . That which grieves us is that those who possess the most, pay the least. We pay the tailles and for our implements, while the ecclesiastics and nobles who own the best land pay nothing. Why do the rich pay the least and the poor the most? Should not each pay according to his ability? Sire, we entreat that things may be so arranged, for that is just. . . . Did we dare, we should undertake to plant the slopes with vines; but we are so persecuted by the clerks of the excise we would rather pull up those already planted; the wine that we could make would all go to them, scarcely any of it remaining for ourselves. These exactions are a great scourge and, to escape them, we would rather let the ground lie waste. . . . Relieve us of all these extortions and of the excisemen; we are great sufferers through all these devices; now is the time to change them; never shall we be happy as long as these last. We entreat all this of you, Sire, along with others of your subjects as wearied as ourselves. . . . We would entreat yet more but you cannot do all at one time."
Imposts and privileges, in the really popular registers, are the two enemies against which complaints everywhere arise5276.
"We are overwhelmed by demands for subsidies,. . . we are burdened with taxes beyond our strength,. . . we do not feel able to support any more, we perish, overpowered by the sacrifices demanded of us. Labor is taxed while indolence is exempt. . . . Feudalism is the most disastrous of abuses, the evils it causes surpassing those of hail and lightning. . . . Subsistence is impossible if three-quarters of the crops are to be taken for field-rents, terrage, etc. . . . The proprietor has a fourth part, the décimateur a twelfth, the harvester a twelfth, taxation a tenth, not counting the depredations of vast quantities of game which devour the growing crops: nothing is left for the poor cultivator but pain and sorrow."
Why should the Third-Estate alone pay for roads on which the nobles and the clergy drive in their carriages? Why are the poor alone subject to militia draft? Why does "the subdelegate cause only the defenseless and the unprotected to be drafted?" Why does it suffice to be the servant of a privileged person to escape this service? Destroy those dove-cotes, formerly only small pigeon-pens and which now contain as many as 5,000 pairs. Abolish the barbarous rights of "motte, quevaise and domaine congéable5277under which more than 500,000 persons still suffer in Lower Brittany." "You have in your armies, Sire, more than 30,000 Franche-Comté serfs;" should one of these become an officer and be pensioned out of the service he would be obliged to return to and live in the hut in which he was born, otherwise; at his death, the seignior will take his pittance. Let there be no more absentee prelates, nor abbés-commendatory. "The present deficit is not to be paid by us but by the bishops and beneficiaries; deprive the princes of the church of two-thirds of their revenues." "Let feudalism be abolished. Man, the peasant especially, is tyrannically bowed down to the impoverished ground on which he lies exhausted. . . . There is no freedom, no prosperity, no happiness where the soil is enthralled. . . . Let the lord's dues, and other odious taxes not feudal, be abolished, a thousand times returned to the privileged. Let feudalism content itself with its iron scepter without adding the poniard of the revenue speculator."5278
Here, and for some time before this, it is not the Countryman who speaks but the procureur, the lawyer, who places professional metaphors and theories at his service. But the lawyer has simply translated the countryman's sentiments into literary dialect.
5201 (return)[ "Collection des économistes," II. 832. See a tabular statement by Beaudan.]
5202 (return)[ "Ephémérides du citoyen," IX. 15; an article by M. de Butré, 1767.]
5203 (return)[ "Collection des économistes," I. 551, 562.]
5204 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'assemblée provinciale de Champagne" (1787), p. 240.]
5205 (return)[ Cf., "Notice historique sur la Révolution dans le département de l'Eure," by Boivin-Champeaux, p. 37.—A register of grievances of the parish of Epreville; on 100 francs income the Treasury takes 22 for the taille, 16 for collaterals, 15 for the poll-tax, 11 for the vingtièmes, total 67 livres.]
5206 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'assemblée provinciale de Ile-de-France" (1787), p. 131.]
5207 (return)[ "Procèx-verbaux de l'ass. prov de la Haute-Guyenne" (1784), II. 17, 40, 47.]
5208 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne" (1787), p. 253.—Doléances, by Gautier de Biauzat, member of the council elected by the provincial assembly of Auvergne. (1788), p.3.]
5209 (return)[ See note 5 at the end of the volume.]
5210 (return)[ "Théron de Montaugé," p. 109 (1763). Wages at this time are from 7 to 12 sous a day during the summer.]
5211 (return)[ Archives nationales, procès-verbaux and registers of the States-General, V. 59, p. 6. Memorandum to M. Necker from M. d'Orgeux, honorary councilor to the Parliament of Bourgogne, 25 Oct. 1788..]
5212 (return)[ Ibid. H, 1418. A letter of the intendant of Limoges, Feb. 26, 1784.]
5213 (return)[ Turgot, II. 259.]
5214 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 426 (remonstrances of the Parliament of Brittany, Feb. 1783).]
5215 (return)[ Mercier; XI. 59; X. 262.]
5216 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 1422, a letter by M d'Aine, intendant of Limoges (February 17, 1782) one by the intendant of Moulins (April, 1779); the trial of the community of Mollon (Bordelais), and the tables of its collectors.]
5217 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne," p. 266.]
5218 (return)[ Albert Babeau, "Histoire de Troyes," I. 72]
5219 (return)[ "Procés-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry" (1778), I. pp.72, 80.]
5220 (return)[ De Tocqueville, 187.]
5221 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 1417. (A letter of M. de Cypièrre, intendant at Orleans, April 17, 1765).]
5222 (return)[ "Traité de Population," 2d part, p.26.]
5223 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 1417. (A letter of M. de Cypièrre, intendant at Orleans, April 17, 1765).]
5224 (return)[ Ibid. H, 1418. (Letter of May 28, 1784).]
5225 (return)[ Ibid. (Letter of the intendant of Tours, June 15, 1765.)]
5226 (return)[ Archives Nationales, H, 1417. A report by Raudon, receiver of tailles in the election of Laon, January, 1764.]
5227 (return)[ "Procèx-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry" (1778), I. p.72.]
5228 (return)[ Champfort, 93.]
5229 (return)[ "Procèx-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry," I. 77.]
5230 (return)[ Arthur Young, II. 205.]
5231 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux of the ass. prov. of the generalship of Rouen" (1787), p.271.]
5232 (return)[ Letrosne (1779). "De l'administration provinciale et de Ia reforme de l'impôt," pp. 39 to 262 and 138.—Archives nationales, H. 138 (1782). Cahier de Bugey, "Salt costs a person living in the countryside purchasing it from the retailers from 15 to 17 sous a pound, according to the way of measuring it."]
5233 (return)[ Floquet, VI. 367 (May 10, 1760).]
5234 (return)[ Boivin-Champeaux, p.44. (Cahiers of Bray and of Gamaches).]
5235 (return)[ Arthur Young, II. 175-178.]
5236 (return)[ Archives nationales, G, 300; G, 319. (Registers and instructions of various local directors of the Excise to their successors).]
5237 (return)[ Letrosne, ibid. 523.]
5238 (return)[ Octroi: a toll or tax levied at the gates of a city on articles brought in. (SR.)]
5239 (return)[ Archives Nationales, H, 426 (Papers of the Parliament of Brittany, February, 1783).]
5240 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Soissonnais" (1787), p.45.—Archives nationales, H, 1515 (Remonstrances of the Parliament of Metz, 1768). "The class of indigents form more than twelve-thirteenths of the whole number of villages of laborers and generally those of the wine-growers." Ibid. G, 319 (Tableau des directions of Chateaudon and Issoudun).]
5241 (return)[ Albert Babeau, I. 89. p. 21.]
5242 (return)[ "Mémoires," presented to the Assembly of Notables, by M. de Calonne (1787), p.67.]
5243 (return)[ Here we are at the root of the reason why democratically elected politicians and their administrative staffs are today taxed even though such taxation is only a paper-exercise adding costs to the cost of government administration. (SR.)]
5244 (return)[ Gautier de Bianzat, "Doléances," 193, 225. "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Poitou" (1787), p.99.]
5245 (return)[ Gautier de Bianzat, ibid..]
5246 (return)[ Archives nationales, the procès-verbaux and cahiers of the States-General, V. 59. P. 6. (Letter of M. Orgeux to M. Necker), V. 27. p. 560-573. (Cahiers of the Third-Estate of Arnay-le-Duc)]
5247 (return)[ In these figures the rise of the money standard has been kept in mind, the silver "marc," worth 59 francs in 1965, being worth 49 francs during the last half of the eighteenth century.]
5248 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Ile-de-France," 132, 158; de l'Orléanais, 96, 387.]
5249 (return)[ "Mémoire," presented to the Assembly of Notables (1787), p. 1.—See note 2 at the end of the volume, on the estate of Blet.]
5250 (return)[ "Procès-verbeaux de l'ass. prov. d'Alsace" (1787), p. 116;"—of Champagne," 192. (According to a declaration of June 2, 1787, the tax substituted for the corvée may be extended to one-sixth of the taille, with accessory taxes and the poll-tax combined). "De la généralité d'Alençcon," 179; "—du Berry," I. 218.]
5251 (return)[ Archives nationales, G, 322 (Memorandum on the excise dues of Compiègne and its neighborhood, 1786)]
5252 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de l'Ile-de-France," p. 104.]
5253 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Berry, I. 85, II. 91. —de l'Orléanais, p. 225." "Arbitrariness, injustice, inequality, are inseparable from the taille when any change of collector takes place."]
5254 (return)[ "Archives Nationales," H. 615. Letter of M. de Lagourda, a noble from Bretagne, to M. Necker, dated December 4, 1780: "You are always taxing the useful and necessary people who decrease in numbers all the time: these are the workers of the land. The countryside has become deserted and no one will any longer plow the land. I testify to God and to you, Sir, that we have lost more than a third of our budding wheat of the last harvest because we did not have the necessary man-power do to the work."]
5255 (return)[ Ibid. 1149. (letter of M. de Reverseau, March 16, 1781); H, 200 (letter of M. Amelot, Nov. 2, 1784).]
5256 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de la généralite de Rouen," p.91.]
5257 (return)[ Hippeau, VI. 22 (1788).]
5258 (return)[ D'Argenson. VI. 37.]
5259 (return)[ Archives nationales, H. 200 (Memoir of M. Amelot, 1785).]
5260 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. d'Auvergne," 253.]
5261 (return)[ Boivin-Champeaux, "Doléances de la parvisse de Tilleul-Lambert" (Eure). "Numbers of privileged characters, Messieurs of the elections, Messieurs the post-masters, Messieurs the presidents and other attachés of the salt-warehouse, every individual possessing extensive property pays but a third or a half of the taxes they ought to pay."]
5262 (return)[ De Tocqueville, 385.—"Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. de Lyonnais," p. 56]
5263 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 1422. (Letters of M. d'Aine, intendant, also of the receiver for the election of Tulle, February 23, 1783).]
5264 (return)[ De Tocqueville, 64, 363.]
5265 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 612, 614. (Letters of M. de la Bove, September 11, and Dec. 2, 1774; June 28, 1777).]
5266 (return)[ Mercier, II. 62.]
5267 (return)[ "Grievances" of the parish of Aubervilliers.]
5268 (return)[ Archives nationales, G, 300; G, 322 ("Mémoires" on the excise duties).]
5269 (return)[ "Procès-verbaux de l'ass. prov. des Trois-Evêchés p. 442.]
5270 (return)[ Archives nationales, H, 1422 (Letter of the intendant of Moulins, April 1779).]
5271 (return)[ Archives nationales, H. 1312 (Letters of M. D'Antheman procureur-général of the excise court (May 19, 1783), and of the Archbishop of Aix (June 15, 1783).)—Provence produced wheat only sufficient for seven and a half months' consumption.]
5272 (return)[ Abbreviation for the "cahier des doléances", in English 'register of grieviances', brought with them by the representatives of the people to the great gathering in Paris of the "States-Généraux" in 1789. (SR.)]
5273 (return)[ The feudal dues may be estimated at a seventh of the net income and the dime also at a seventh. These are the figures given by the ass. prov. of Haute-Guyenne (Procès-verbaux, p. 47).—Isolated instances, in other provinces, indicate similar results. The dime ranges from a tenth to the thirteenth of the gross product, and commonly the tenth. I regard the average as about the fourteenth, and as one-half of the gross product must be deducted for expenses of cultivation, it amounts to one-seventh. Letrosne says a fifth and even a quarter.]
5274 (return)[ Boivin-Champeaux, 72.]
5275 (return)[ Grievances of the community of Culmon (Election de Langres.)]
5276 (return)[ Boivin-Champeaux, 34, 36, 41, 48.—Périn ("Doléances des paroisses rurales de l'Artuis," 301, 308).—Archives nationales, procès-verbaux and cahiers of the States-Géneraux, vol. XVII. P. 12 (Letter of the inhabitants of Dracy-le Viteux).]
5277 (return)[ Motte: a mound indicative of Seigniorial dominion; quevaise; the right of forcing a resident to remain on his property under penalty of forfeiture; domaine congéable; property held subject to capricious ejection. (TR)]
5278 (return)[ Prud'homme, "Résumé des cahiers," III. passim, and especially from 317 to 340.]
Intellectual incapacity.—How ideas are transformed intomarvelous stories.
To comprehend their actions we ought now to look into the condition of their minds, to know the current train of their ideas, their mode of thinking. But is it really essential to draw this portrait, and are not the details of their mental condition we have just presented sufficient? We shall obtain a knowledge of them later, and through their actions, when, in Touraine, they knock a mayor and his assistant, chosen by themselves, senseless with kicks from their wooden shoes, because, in obeying the national Assembly, these two unfortunate men prepared a table of taxes; or when at Troyes, they drag through the streets and tear to pieces the venerable magistrate who was nourishing them at that very moment, and who had just dictated his testament in their favor. Take the still rude brain of a contemporary peasant and deprive it of the ideas which, for eighty years past, have entered it by so many channels, through the primary school of each village, through the return home of the conscript after seven years' service, through the prodigious multiplication of books, newspapers, roads, railroads, foreign travel and every other species of communication.5301Try to imagine the peasant of the eighteenth century, penned and shut up from father to son in his hamlet, without parish highways, deprived of news, with no instruction but the Sunday sermon, continuously worrying about his daily bread and the taxes, "with his wretched, dried-up aspect,"5302not daring to repair his house, always persecuted, distrustful, his mind contracted and stinted, so to say, by misery. His condition is almost that of his ox or his ass, while his ideas are those of his condition. He has been a long time stolid; "he lacks even instinct,"5303mechanically and fixedly regarding the ground on which he drags along his hereditary plow. In 1751, d'Argenson wrote in his journal:
"nothing in the news from the court affects them; the reign is indifferent to them. . . . . the distance between the capital and the province daily widens. . . . Here they are ignorant of the striking occurrences that most impressed us at Paris. . . .The inhabitants of the country side are merely poverty-stricken slaves, draft cattle under a yoke, moving on as they are goaded, caring for nothing and embarrassed by nothing, provided they can eat and sleep at regular hours."
They make no complaints, "they do not even dream of complaining;"5304their wretchedness seems to them natural like winter or hail. Their minds, like their agriculture, still belong to the middle ages. In the environment of Toulouse,5305to ascertain who committed a robbery, to cure a man or a sick animal, they resort to a sorcerer, who divines this by means of a sieve. The countryman fully believes in ghosts and, on All Saints' eve, he lays the cloth for the dead.—In Auvergne, at the outbreak the Revolution, on a contagious fever making its appearance, M. de Montlosier, declared to be a sorcerer, is the cause of it, and two hundred men assemble together to demolish his dwelling. Their religious belief is on the same level.5306"Their priests drink with them and sell them absolution. On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale: so much for a lieutenant's place under St. Peter!—If the peasant hesitates in his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants run it up fast enough."—To intellects in a primitive state, barren of ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols in heaven. "No doubt whatever existed in my mind," says Rétit de la Bretonne,5307"of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought as I did."5308There is no room in minds of this description for abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive to it and that is all. "The mass of the people," writes Governor in 1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; these are the beings who, led on by drunken curates, are now on the high road to liberty, and the first use they make of it is to rebel on all sides because there is dearth."5309
How could things be otherwise? Every idea, previous to taking root in their brain, must possess a legendary form, as absurd as it is simple, adapted to their experiences, their faculties, their fears and their aspirations. Once planted in this uncultivated and fertile soil it vegetates and becomes transformed, developing into gross excrescences, somber foliage and poisonous fruit. The more monstrous the greater its vigor, clinging to the slightest of probabilities and tenacious against the most certain of demonstrations. Under Louis XV, in an arrest of vagabonds, a few children having been carried off willfully or by mistake, the rumor spreads that the king takes baths in blood to restore his exhausted functions, and, so true does this seem to be, the women, horrified through their maternal instincts, join in the riot; a policeman is seized and knocked down, and, on his demanding a confessor, a woman in the crowd, picking up a stone, cries out that he must not have time to go to heaven, and smashes his head with it, believing that she is performing an act of justice5310. Under Louis XVI evidence is presented to the people that there is no scarcity: in 1789,5311an officer, listening to the conversation of his soldiers, hears them state "with full belief that the princes and courtiers, with a view to starve Paris out, are throwing flour into the Seine." Turning to a quarter-master he asks him how he can possibly believe such an absurd story. "Lieutenant," he replies, "'tis time—the bags were tied with blue strings (cordons bleus)." To them this is a sufficient reason, and no argument could convince them to the contrary. Thus, among the dregs of society, foul and horrible romances are forged, in connection the famine and the Bastille, in which Louis XVI., the queen Marie Antoinette, the Comte d'Artois, Madame de Lamballe, the Polignacs, the revenue farmers, the seigniors and ladies of high rank are portrayed as vampires and ghouls. I have seen many editions of these in the pamphlets of the day, in the engravings not exhibited, and among popular prints and illustrations, the latter the most effective, since they appeal to the eye. They surpass the stories of Mandrin5312and Cartouche, being exactly suitable for men whose literature consists of the popular laments of Mandrin and Cartouche.