The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s-1830s politics of fiscal privilege in Provence, 1530s -1830s

3. Compensation, 1702–89

Chapter Three Compensation, 1702–89 4 This jurisprudence which . . . destroys fiefs and ruins the fortunes of all the lords by carrying trouble and uncertainty into the bosom of their families. —The comte de Vence, syndic d’épée, corps de la noblesse (5 August 1764) Although the arrêt of 1702 provided a robust framework for exercising the right of compensation, one that would endure down to the abolition of noble tax exemption in 1789, it did not end conflict over the divisive seigneurial prerogative. Rare was the village in eighteenth-century Provence that never experienced a trial with its lord over compensation. Entangled with an array of other contentious issues pitting the community against the seigneurie (feudal dues, usage rights, and the like), these grassroots struggles over compensation were a focus of local political life. Most turned on minor points of fact and did not raise questions about the meaning of the existing legislation on compensation. Those occasional local trials that did, however, unfailingly provoked the intervention of the province (on behalf of both the community and the general interests of taxable land) and the Noblesse (for the lord as well as the defense of the principle of seigneurial fiscal privilege). Once transformed into direct confrontations between these two great corps, these trials generally ended up before the royal council. There the litigants sought less to obtain a victorious ruling on the original local issues at stake than to nudge the jurisprudence in a direction favorable to the opposing interests they respectively represented. The rise of royal taxation seems to have increased the frequency of these trials in the second half of the eighteenth century. The growing fiscal needs 93 94 Compensation of the state, moreover, had an even more consequential effect: to prompt the royal council to issue rulings that began to tip the balance of jurisprudence in favor of the province—which is to say, in favor of the interests of taxable, roturier property. By the 1760s, this tendency had become evident to the Noblesse, bringing it to a state of desperation that would have dramatic political consequences in the crisis of the late 1780s. Compensation in Its Local Context The arrêt of 1702 marked a turning point in the history of seigneurial fiscal privilege in Provence. To appreciate the ruling’s impact, it is first necessary to examine how the right of compensation had been put into practice on the local level during the century and a half before its promulgation. Compensations had always been complex affairs because they were usually stipulated within transactions, notarized agreements governing the whole range of relations between lords and communities. Serving as de facto constitutions regulating the respective rights and obligations of community and seigneurie , transactions generally took the form of sweeping compromises, in which lordly concessions over feudal dues, usage rights, and the like were matched by municipal concessions on issues of taxation, public works, and other matters of general interest. Compensation—bringing with it the related issues of back taxes and future tax liabilities for the parcels of land it concerned— was one of the elements that commonly entered into these transactions. In the 1671 transaction between the seigneur of Eyragues and his community, for example, the lord obtained permission to apply the right of compensation to two mills in exchange for a 300-livre annual payment. Several years later, when the seigneur began to demand new feudal dues from the community , this arrangement broke down. It was replaced in 1689 with a new transaction that gave the lord the right to collect the dues (albeit at a lesser rate than he had originally sought), but revoked the compensation that had been applied to the mills and restored them to the tax rolls. This second transaction broke down in 1701 when the community, encouraged by the contestation then pending before the royal council between the province and the Noblesse, insisted that the lord pay back taxes for lands that he claimed were exempt. There followed a veritable flood of litigation, surveying, arbitration, and compromise that ended only in 1772 . . . with a new transaction.1 1. The documents on this long-running contestation fill four fat dossiers, BDR AC 110 E FF 15–18. A succinct description of the early stages of the dispute can be found in BDR, AC 110 Compensation 95 In practice, therefore, compensation was not a discrete issue; rather, it was woven...