I recall reading in a book years and years ago how many peasants would pay 70% or so of their income in taxes before Napoleon came to power but after his reforms the tax rate for them dropped to 30%.
Does anyone know? I thought there were various federal, local and religious taxes that he reduced or eliminated.
I’ve never heard that, but if they paid less in 1806, they were sure as hell paying a lot in 1814.
One reason they dumped him soon after.
As did the rest of Europe, whose unwilling tributes were purposed to relieve the French tax-payer, as later the imitative equally exploitative successor empire of the Nazis went easy on the German tax-payer whilst stealing from Europe. Maybe the early success of this policy, and it always goes well in the beginning ( just as do privatizations, something the Nazis excelled in ) — caused this legend.
It wasn’t Napoleon who did it.
Without getting into the complicated history, France before the Revolution was a complete patchwork mess of taxes. It was half-seriously joked that no two people in France had exactly the same tax rates. Some people paid virtually nothing; others paid way too much, which is one of the reason the Revolution occurred.
Early on (really, the events which started the Revolution), the king called the Estates-General, which kind-of sort-of by accident ended up cancelling half the privileges in France, which included a lot of local taxes. The later Revolutionary governments ended up abolishing many of the other taxes as well, although they substituted plundering and theft much of the time. Napoleon, although he certainly didn’t invent the practice, basically ran around trying to beat up region, create puppet governments, and had his cronies feed money and troops to his army. For much fo the Revolutionary period, taxes were pretty low, if only because often the state was too unstable to collect anything.
Essentially Napoleon (well, the Revolution before him) abolished tax farming. The way it used to go was, some local toff gave the King a wad of cash in return for the right to collect taxes over a given area. The idea was that the state got all its taxes up front and reliably no matter how good or bad the harvests went ; while the toff would repay himself over time. Typically the right to farm taxes was sold at a lower cost than the census indicated the region was supposed to earn, too.
Of course there was absolutely no incentive whatsoever for the toff to not collect his taxes two or three times over if he wished to, and the “fermiers généraux” would typically hire a bunch of tough guys with axe handles to explain to the locals exactly what they owed or why they owed it again. On top of that, local lords often had traditional rights to set taxes on this or that good, tolls, market taxes, marriage taxes and so forth, regal rights delegated by a King at some point in return for service to the crown to a noble family or a city. As **smiling bandit **rightfully says, it was a complete mess that successive administrations had tried unsuccessfully to reform until the whole thing went tits up.
It was not always a safe job though, tax farmer. Whenever the peasants had enough and rioted, the local tax farmer was typically the first guy they went to have a wee chat with, and he wound up nailed to barn doors as a warning to the next one. Barn doors plural. (for real - I have a contemporary testimony of such lying around somewhere where the peasants quite literally diced the guy)
The French Revolution was one of the two great turning points in modern history, the other being the Russian Revolution. The feudal system was based on land tenure, which was held by the feudal nobility. It collected and consumed the surplus produce of the peasants to support a life of idleness; surplus being defined as everything over a bare subsistence. Think of the enormous amount of labor represented by the chateaux. The nobility collected a bit of everything. It was impossible for anyone to accumulate a surplus.
The rising bourgeoisie had a serious problem with this. It wanted to hire labor, produce goods, sell them at a profit, and invest in more productive capacity, not squander the lot on castles and other accouterments of the feudal lifestyle. Everyone else, peasants, especially the peasants, tradesmen, and artisans were ready to overthrow the nobility too. The birth pains of the new system were really messy and lasted throughout 19th Century, but here we are.
Napoleon’s minister of finances, Martin-Michel-Charles Gaudin, completely overhauled the system of direct taxes, fixing national rates, using government-appointed inspectors rather than tax farmers and implementing a survey of all land. Many taxpayers saw their tax rates fall. But this was more than offset by a massive expansion in indirect taxes.
A previous thread on Napoleon’s governing skills: Just how bad a dictator was Napoleon? - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
That is almost, but not quite, entirely wrong from start to finish.
First, the feudal system was not at all about supporting a life of idleness; it was about supporting armies, ranging from small bands supporting a local knight to considerable hosts at the service of a Duke. Men with a title were generally perfectly fine with investing in businesses, or for that matter in their own lands. Nor were tax rates before the Revolution necessarily too high; they were just very uneven. And peasants in France, possibly the richest agricultural bounty in Europe at the time, were not usually skimming the edge of starvation (although with bad harvests it could happen.)
The “rising bourgousie” had already risen quite some time ago, and while they tended not to be as heavily invested in land, they aspired to get privileges for themselves. At no point did they particularly want to share anything with the peasantry, nor with the urban mob. Any coincidence in their goals were just that: coincidental. Your assessment of who stood where in the Revolution is so hilariously wrong that it doesn’t merit a response. But I shall give you one anyway: the Revolution split France down the middle, and where “the middle” lay wobbled wildly from year to year. At almost every point, however, large numbers of practically any class of people you could name were actively fighting on opposite sides.
Finally, at the end of the day the Revolution utterly failed. After having dragged France through unnecessary wars, vast bloodshed, and desperate poverty, it produced one of the nastier European dictatorships in history. It may have swept away the old order, but it ultimately left nothing in its wake and gave France a legacy of unstable government and violent repression.
Most of the peuple executed in the Terror were peasants.
At one point, Spanish nobility was banned from entering trades and doing merchant work - at the request of the merchants. That ban was later embroidered as “merchant/trade work being beneath a nobleman’s”, made to sound desirable, but that’s not how it started. It started as a way to reinforce cities vs. the noblemen.
Will no one think of the peuple?!?
I think the reality in 1789 fell in between.
The feudal system had been set up as a military support system. Nobles were given land to support them and they provided military service to the monarch in exchange.
From the monarch’s point of view, the long term problem with this system was that it gave the nobility too much power. A monarch that depended on his nobles for military strength was answerable to those nobles. As political and economic institutions developed, monarchs decided they’d rather collect taxes and pay for soldiers. That way, they would have direct control of the troops.
A problem was that the nobility was now entrenched by tradition even though it was no longer needed for its original role. So the nobility couldn’t just be abolished. In France, the solution that Louis XIV came up with was to turn the nobility into a class of idle courtiers. They got to keep all their money but they lost all their power.
It worked to disempower the nobility but it created long term problems. The rest of society looked at this group of privileged do-nothings that they had to support financially and grew increasingly resentful. The pot boiled over during the reign of Louis XIV’s successor, Louis XVI. (Side note: While Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI ruled in succession, they spanned six generations. Louis XV (1710-1774) was the great grandson of Louis XIV (1638-1715) and Louis XVI (1754-1793) was the grandson of Louis XV.)
If I recall some essay of Malcolm Gladwell’s (which probably incorporates a modicum of his well known hyperbole) he contrasts the farming of Chinese peasant rice farmer who was encouraged by shares of the profits to be as productive as possible, with French peasants who produced what they could and then had all but a subsistence amount taken by the aristocrats. He said as a result the French farmer spent much of the year as inactive as possible to survive, with no incentive to increase production.
Before the revolution, Louis also hired and fired several finance ministers in sequence to try to fix the economy. Each came to the same conclusion - tax the nobility, they have all the money; in turn Louis fired them rather than face that shitstorm.
Maybe eliminating the nobility helped.
Errr… no ? Like, not at all. Most of the people executed during the Terror were people who had the wrong opinion or had the wrong neighbours. Oh, and toffs, of course. Former toffs, future toffs, people who thought toffs were sort of OK really and so on.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
That is almost, but not quite, entirely wrong from start to finish.
First, the feudal system was not at all about supporting a life of idleness; it was about supporting armies, ranging from small bands supporting a local knight to considerable hosts at the service of a Duke.
[/quote]
True enough for the principle, but by the 18th century army building was only one part of the Ancien Regime. By then the nobility and upper bourgeoisie had moved on to financial adventures, be it the colonies or factories or pyramid schemes… The military was still of great interest, but more as a money-making scheme. You’d buy the right to raise a regiment, then “enlist” two thousand non-existent people, sweat to god you’d equipped them on your dime then present the bill to the king. Then, when the king called your regiment you’d hurriedly throw a mercernary company or some ragged band of peasants together and call it a day.
Yes. And that has a lot to do with regulation and deregulation, ironically. For hundreds of years, the prime farming regions had had heavy taxes on moving and shipping grain applied to them to make it all “even” with the poorer regions. Also to raise a lot of moolah. Then a new economics theory (called the physiocrats, look 'em up) came up and they successfully pushed to deregulate all grain commerce. Which, ultimately, would have been a good thing and a profit to the whole realm - the poor regions could buy grain cheap, the surplus and only the surplus would be exported, all that jazz. The issue was that as soon as the local taxes and tariffs were in talks of being lifted, speculators would jump in and hog up all the grain here or there, wherever it made the most sense short term. And then stored it until it made the most sense to sell. The result was twofold : famines on the one hand, and a widespread notion that the aristocracy was trying to starve and kill the peasantry for another.
That was nothing new by 1789 BTW - those phenomenons had appeared before. But the Revolution was, in many ways, the triumph of fear.
That’s sort of caricatural. The truth is, there was no great plan at any point. Yes, the bourgeoisie looked after itself, but they were also genuinely concerned about the mobs of starvelings rising here and there, and also the various foreign powers threatening France, and also the very cogent and popular orators arguing for drastic changes… it was a very messy and uncertain few years.
I don’t think the wars were wholly unnecessary, or at least that the decision to declare war on everyfuckingbody was unfounded. In 1792 the Elector of Brünswick, then leader of the entire German army, threatened to raze Paris if Louis XVI was not put back on the throne. England was also very threatening, and active on the propaganda front. It is quite conceivable that Revolutionary France could have been crushed militarily - at least its leaders thought so. And, hell, that was a hell of a lot more present a threat than Saddam’s WMDs, if you follow my meaning. There’s no doubt that the Convention played and instrumentalized the people’s fears and, in their own vocabulary “exaggerated” things, but the point is that those were *realistic *fears.
[Quote=Kobal2]
Errr… no ? Like, not at all. Most of the people executed during the Terror were people who had the wrong opinion or had the wrong neighbours. Oh, and toffs, of course. Former toffs, future toffs, people who thought toffs were sort of OK really and so on.
Reply With Quote
[/Quote]
With Wiki, The Reign of Terror…
Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8% were aristocrats, 6% clergy, 14% middle class, and 72% were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, or rebellion.
I’d call that most.
Although, it goes on:
The number of death sentences in Paris was 2639, while the total number during the Terror in the whole of France (including Paris) was 16,594. The Jacobins were meticulous in maintaining a legal structure for the Terror so clear records exist for official death sentences. However, many more people were murdered without formal sentences pronounced in a court of law.
The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them.
So I guess there’s a difference in proportions depending whether one restricts oneself to the legal stuff, or includes those killed ultra vires. Plus those Chouans whacked in la Vendée. Plus those killed by local mobsters turned patriots taking advantage of the possibilities, who turn up in most revolutions — Solzhenitsyn numbered off a lot of them for the October Revolution in, I think, the second Volume — however sheer probability ensures more poor folk get killed than rich folk.
Rich folk can afford to leave.
[ I always have a weakness for Taine. ]
Well, the Revolutionary Tribunals were one thing, but the victims of the Revolution (and the Terror) extend way past that. And, as usual, “Selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir” - read, it’s much easier to evade justice when one has the means to put a substantial bribe here or there.
But your quote re: the total victims of the Terror is important : there indeed were 2500 odd people who got to “put their heads into the window” throughout the entire Terror in Paris (the burning heart of it all) - which might seem high in absolute, but only represents some 15% of all accuseds, and a very tiny fraction of the population of Paris. Truth be told, while the Terror was all kinds of unjust, and while there was a very real message sent with those daily executions and the ritual that surrounded them, it never was that bad. It only got represented as that bad from 1794 onwards (and even moreso in the 19th century, after the Commune, which prompted a whole new historiography).
I mean, if you put the Terror next to Stalinist purges or Nazi cleansings, even if you restrict yourself to German political ennemies, the Terror was pretty tame. It wasn’t a massacre through kangaroo courts. The real massacres happened in the provinces and against civil war opponents - be it the royalist Vendée or various federalist uprisings which, while they didn’t oppose the spirit of the Revolution, argued with the particulars (and centralization first and foremost). Oh, and also in the prisons and against foreigners - but that’s part and parcel with foreign powers rattlings their sabres.
(oh, and wholeheartedly agreed on the proportion of killings and denunciations that merely fit within the whole “looking after number one” and settling scores context - but my teacher argues that those things are impossible to quantify or prove, so we shouldn’t talk about them 
)
Lafayette wrote a letter home to his wife that he had, simply by roaming the streets of Paris in a single day during the worst of the Terror, and intervening with mobs who recognized and still respected him, saved the lives of a half-dozen people who would otherwise have been lynched.