Free Daily Life During the French Revolution by James M. Anderson

Farmers-General purchased the privilege of
collecting taxes and paying state debts for the various government departments.
Taxes thus passed through private hands, and some of it wound up in private
pockets. There was no central bank to provide economic stability, only a group
of businessmen who sought to find the best balance between a functioning government
and their own profits. The tax farmer advanced a specified sum of money to the
royal treasury and then collected a like sum in taxes. Given exceptional powers
to collect the money, tax farmers bore arms, conducted searches, and imprisoned
uncooperative citizens. The money collected over and above that specified in
the contract with the government went to the tax farm. Tax farmers were usually
rich men and hated by the general public.
    There were various kinds of taxes levied in different parts
of the country. The taille was a direct tax collected on property and goods;
the clergy and the nobility were exempt from this levy, and the peasants bore
the brunt. Indirect taxes included the gabelle , or salt tax, a duty on
tobacco, the aides, which were excise duties collected on the manufacture,
sale, and consumption of a commodity, and the traites, customs duties collected
internally. There was no uniformity, and some sections of the country bore
heavier tax burdens than others. The main direct tax, the taille, was levied by
the crown on total income in the northern provinces but only on income from
landed property in the south.
     
     
    SALT TAX
     
    The government monopoly on salt went back as far as the
thirteenth century; the salt was extracted from seawater ponds that were left
to dry out. The detested salt tax ( gabelle ) had become a leading source
of royal income and was levied at different rates in various parts of the
country. In some regions, everyone over eight years of age was required to
purchase seven kilos of salt each year at a fixed government price. In other
regions, people were required to purchase a fixed quantity of salt per
household. There were other areas where the salt tax did not apply ( pays
exempt ), such as the Basque country and Brittany. Fortunes were made in the
illegal transport of salt.
    The collectors and enforcers of the salt tax were often
crude, abusive men who were allowed to carry arms and to stop and search
whomever they pleased. They were not above looking for contraband by squeezing
the choicest parts of women who had no recourse but to suffer the humiliation.
Women sometimes did hide bags of salt in corsets and other places where they
hoped not to be squeezed; some concealed it in false rears of their dresses.
Salt rebellions were frequent, and battles sometimes erupted between smugglers
and tax collectors.
    The Loire River was notorious for the movement of
contraband, since it separated tax-free Brittany from heavily taxed Anjou; the
price for salt was 591 sous per minot (49 kilos) in Anjou but 31 sous in
Brittany, which was exempt from the tax thanks to an agreement reached with the
crown when Brittany became part of France. The large number of families working
the salt ponds there were in the best position to ferry the salt across the
river, so the government passed a no-fishing-at-night law to curb the illegal
trade and stationed troops along the banks of the river in an attempt to end
the smuggling. The gabelle was abolished by the revolution but was
reinstated 15 years later; it continued in force until 1945.
     
     
    3 - TRAVEL
     
    At
the end of the Seven Years War, swarms of English people visited France, and
some left accounts of their travels there. Later, hostilities between France
and England during the American War of Independence nearly dried up the flow of
English tourists to Paris and the provinces, but it still did not stop
entirely, and the return to peace in 1783 brought another influx of Britons to
French shores.
    Travelers to France, especially those from England, were
always surprised by the great distances