The national Crown

But in France, whilst the national authority had passed from the lord of the fief to the national Crown, the legal privileges, the personal and local exemptions, were preserved intact. The peasant remained for many practical purposes a serf, even whilst he owned his own farm. A series of dues were payable to the lord; personal services were still exacted; special rights were in full vigour.

The peasant, proprietor as he was, still delved the lord’s land, carted his produce, paid his local dues, made his roads. All this had to be done without payment, as coivte, or forced labour tax. The peasants were in the position of a people during a most oppressive state of siege, when a foreign army is in occupation of a country. The foreign army was the privileged order. Everything and every one outside of this order was the subject of oppressive requisition. The lord paid no taxes on his lands, was not answerable to the ordinary tribunals, was practically exempt from the criminal law, had the sole right of sporting, could alone serve as an officer in the army, could alone aspire to any office under the Crown. In one province alone during a single reign two thousand tolls were abolished. There were tolls on bridges, on ferries, on paths, on fairs, on markets.

There were rights of warren, rights of pigeon-houses, of chase, and fishing. There were dues payable on the birth of an heir, on marriage, on the acquisition of a new property by the lord, dues payable for fire, for the passage of a flock, for pasture, for wood customized tours istanbul. The peasant was compelled to bring his corn to be ground in the lord’s mill, to crush his grapes at the lord’s wine-press, to suffer his crops to be devoured by the lord’s game and pigeons.

Transfer of the property

A heavy fine was payable on sale or transfer of the property; on every side were due quit-rents, rent- charges, fines, dues in money and in kind, which could not be commuted and could not be redeemed. After the lord’s dues came those of the Church, the tithes payable in kind, and other dues and exactions of the spiritual army. And even this was but the domestic side of the picture. After the lord and the Church came the king’s officers, the king’s taxes, the king’s requisitions, with all the multiform oppression, corruption, and peculation of the farmers of the revenue and the intendants of the province.

Under this manifold congeries of more than Turkish misrule, it was not surprising that agriculture was ruined and the ‘country became desolate. A fearful picture of that desolation has been drawn for us by our economist, Arthur Young, in 1787, 1788, 1789.

Every one is familiar with the dreadful passages wherein he speaks of haggard men and women wearily tilling the soil, sustained on black bread, roots, and water, and living in smoky hovels without windows; of the wilderness presented by the estates of absentee grandees; of the infinite tolls, dues, taxes, and impositions, of the cruel punishments on smugglers, on the dealers in contraband salt, on poachers, and deserters. It was not surprising that famines were incessant, that the revenue decreased, and that France was sinking into the decrepitude of an Eastern absolutism. ‘For years,’ said d’Argenson, ‘ I have watched the ruin increasing. Men around me are now starving like flies, or eating grass.’ There were thirty thousand beggars, and whole provinces living on occasional alms, two thousand persons in prison for smuggling salt alone. Men were imprisoned by lettres de cachet by the thousand.