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Chapter One Origins of the Procès des Tailles 4 War, source of all taxation. —Jean-Joseph-Pierre Pascalis, Mémoire sur la contribution des trois ordres aux charges publiques et communes de la province (1787) The notion that provinces that levied taxes directly on property, the pays de taille réelle, were more harmonious than those in which privileged individuals enjoyed personal tax exemption (pays de taille personnelle) has had a long life. Already in the sixteenth century, political thinkers were praising the taille réelle as an antidote to the spread of divisive personal exemptions. Jean Bodin, for one, applauded the system for making “the rich and poor, the noble and commoner, the priest and laborer” all bear their share of the fiscal burden and deplored the system of personal tax exemption for forcing productive farmers to pay for “benefice-holders, gentilshommes [nobles of established ancestry], and magistrates.”1 As the fiscal burden grew, so too did interest in the taille réelle, because by spreading the tax burden more equitably and broadly, it seemed to offer the possibility of increasing taxes and tax revenue. On the initiative of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s government even considered extending this fiscal regime to the entire kingdom, and in 1679 it actually assembled a committee of jurists from the principal taille réelle provinces to draft a plan of implementation.2 17 1. To address the disadvantages of noble tax exemption, he wrote, “the Ancients had wisely ordained, and wisely executed, the following ordinance: tax would be real and not personal, as is done in the pays of Languedoc and also for several years in Provence provisionally, following the disposition of the law.” Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la République (Paris, 1583; reprint Paris: Scientia, 1961), book 6, ch. 2, 887. 2. Bibliothèque municipale de Montpellier, Manuscrit 75, “Code Lauriol avec la rellation 18 Origins of the Procès des Tailles Observers writing after the French Revolution echoed the Old Regime’s positive assessments. Alexis de Tocqueville even argued that, had the taille réelle been generalized throughout the kingdom, the social tension bred by the northern French system of personal exemption for nobles might have been alleviated and the Revolution avoided.3 Although there have been few recent studies of tax exemption under either the taille réelle or taille personnelle , the handful of historians who have ventured comments on the subject tend to concur with Tocqueville’s glowing assessment.4 Closer investigation , however, reveals that the taille réelle was also a major source of conflict, albeit of a somewhat different nature.5 Because the weight of taxation was borne collectively by a finite number of properties whose relative fiscal liability was strictly defined, a reduction on one parcel necessarily increased the burden on all the others. This ensured that royal tax demands, far from promoting unified provincial resistance, actually exercised a profoundly divisive influence by creating a fiscal tug-of-war that was played out at many different levels, from within the village to the sphere of international relations. The Procès des Tailles, which pitted the seigneurial nobility of Provence against the Third Estate of the province from the midsixteenth century to the Revolution, arose from this context of generalized, fiscally motivated conflict. War and Taxes The outlines of the Provençal fiscal system had already emerged with some clarity by 1481, when the last Angevin count, Charles III, bequeathed the province to his Valois cousin Louis XI.6 The system had two distinct de tout ce qui s’est passé lors de la reception des titres du present livre pour les matieres des aydes” (n.d.). 3. Tocqueville, “Appendix: Des pays d’états et en particulier du Languedoc,” L’Ancien régime , 325–38. 4. See, for example, George Frêche, Toulouse et la région Midi-Pyrénées au siècle des lumi ères (vers 1670–1789) (Paris: Editions Cujas, 1976), 405–6. An exception is P. M. Jones, Politics and Rural Society: The Southern Massif Central c.1750–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 158. 5. The same is true for Languedoc, although its taille réelle regime differed in some important ways from that of Provence. For a summary, see the Receuil de Loix et Autres pieces, relatives au Droit public et particulier de la province de Languedoc, en matiere de nobilité ou roture des Fonds de terre (Paris, 1765). 6. This brief summary of the Angevin...

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