The multiplication of offices, especially of financial offices, is a cause of complaint at least from the time of Louis XI onwards. That King, regarding himself, in virtue of his consciousness of supreme political wisdom, as emancipated from all rules that experience teaches to small men, would, when anxious to reward a useful servant, create without scruple an office for his sake, as readily as he would alienate for him a portion of domain, or fix a charge upon a grenier of salt. The complaints of the Estates of 1484 suggest that the venality of offices, even judicial, had already begun. Certainly it was an evil day for France, when the sale of offices was first adopted as a financial expedient, whether by Louis XII in 1512, or by another sovereign.
The efficiency of the King’s officers throughout the land is chiefly shown by their zeal for his interests and their own. Under Louis XII a considerable improvement is evident in the matters of public order and police, but on this side very much still remains to be desired. The police is in the hands of the prevots and baillis assisted by their sergens. The prevot of Paris also exercised a singular police jurisdiction throughout the land; and Louis XI made extensive use of the summary jurisdiction of the prevot des marechaux, whose powers properly extended only over the military.
Complicated as is the financial system of France at the end of the Middle Ages, an effort to understand it is not wasted. The life of the Middle Ages for the most part escapes all quantitative analysis; and even the detail of anatomy and function must in great measure remain unknown. It is much then that we are permitted to know the main outlines of the scheme which supplied the means for the expulsion of the English, for the long struggle with Charles the Bold and Maximilian, and for the Italian campaigns, as well as for the not inconsiderable luxury and display of the French Court in this period. It is much that we are able to give approximate figures for the revenue, and to guess what was the weight of the public burdens, and how and on whom they pressed. Moreover, the financial institutions are themselves of rare historical interest; for each anomaly of the system is a mark left on the structure of the government by the history of the nation.
The history of French finance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can be summed up with relative accuracy in a few words. When Philip the Fair first felt the need of extraordinary revenue, he endeavoured to secure the consent of the seigneurs individually for the taxation of their subjects. Afterwards the Estates made grants of imposts, direct and indirect, to meet exceptional emergencies. As the result of masked or open usurpation, the Kings succeeded in making good their claim to levy those taxes by royal fiat over the greater part of the kingdom.
In the earlier half of the fifteenth century it was still usual to secure the consent of the provincial Estates of at least the centre of France for the taUle. Under Charles VII this impost, the last and the most important, became, definitely and finally, an annual tax, and the fiction of a vote by the Estates, whether general or provincial, was almost entirely given up in Languedoil. From that time till the reforms of Francis I no important change in method was introduced. The screw was frequently tightened, and occasionally relaxed. New provinces were added to the kingdom, and received exceptional and indulgent treatment. But the main scheme of finance was fixed. Many of its features, indeed, were to remain unaltered till the Revolution. The revenue, as collected in the latter half of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, is classed as ordinary and extraordinary. The ordinary revenue is the ancient heritage of the Kings of France, and comes from the domain lands and rights, being increased on the one hand by the acquisitions of the sovereigns, and diminished on the other by war and waste, extravagant donations, and from time to time by grants of appanages to the members of the royal house. A variety of profits accrue to the King from his position as direct proprietor of land, or as suzerain. Rents and fines, reliefs and escheats, sale of wood, and payments made in kind form one class of domain receipts; while the official seal required to authenticate so many transactions brings a substantial income, and the King still makes a profit by the fines and forfeitures decreed by his prevots and baillis in his local courts. The inheritance of foreigners (aubaine), and of bastards, is yet another valuable right. Regales, Jrancs-Jiefs, droits d’amortissements, are further items in a long list bristling with the technicalities of feudal law, as developed by the Kings with a single-minded attention to their own interest. Language, if not public feeling, still insists that this revenue is to be regarded as ordinary, while other revenue is in some sort extraordinary, if not illegitimate; but a King who should attempt to live upon his ordinary receipts would be poor indeed. The expenses of collecting the domaine are heavy, the waste and destruction of the Hundred Years’ War and the extravagant administration of successive Kings have reduced the gross returns, until under Charles VII the domaine is estimated at no more than 50,000 clear annual livres tournois*; and although under Louis XI it may have risen to 100,000, under Louis XII to 200,000 or more, the total is insignificant compared with the needs even of a pacific and economical King.
To his assistance come the aides, gabelle, and tattle. The aides are indirect taxes, formerly imposed by the Estates General, but levied since Charles V by royal authority. There is a twentieth levied on the sale of goods, and an eighth, sometimes a fourth, on liquors sold retail. There are many kinds of duties and tolls levied on goods in transit, not only on the frontiers of the kingdom, but at the limits of the several provinces and elsewhere. These imports, multiplex as they are, and oppressive as they seem, bring in, from the farmers who compound for them, no more than 535,000 livres tournois in 1461; and in 1514 their return has not risen above 654,000 l.t. Languedoc has its separate excise duty on meat and fish, known as the equivalent, and collected by the authority of the Estates.
The gabelle du sel, once a local and seigniorial tax, has, since the time of Philippe de Valois, become a perpetual and almost universal royal impost. As a rule the salt of the kingdom is brought into the royal warehouses, greniers, and left there by the merchants for sale, this taking place in regular turn. A fixed addition for the royal profit is made to the price of the salt as it is sold; and heads of houses are required to purchase a fixed annual minimum of salt. In Languedoc the tax is levied on its passage from the salt works on the sea coast, and the black salt of Poitou and Saiiitonge gets off with a tax of 25 per cent.; but the general principle is the same. From a quarter upwards is added to the price of a necessary of life, and the product is in 1461 about 160,000 l.t., rising in the more prosperous times and with the more accurate finance of Louis XII to some 280,000 l.t.
Finally there is the tattle, jbuage, hearth or land-tax. The gradual process by which the right of the seigneurs to levy tattle on their subjects had passed into the exclusive possession of the King is too long to admit of being followed here. Here as in other cases the Estates at first permitted what the King afterwards carried on without their leave. Under the agonising pressure of foreign and civil war Charles VII was allowed,—we can hardly say that he was authorised,—to transform the tattle into an annual tax levied at the King’s discretion. The normal total was fixed at 1,200,000 l.t.; but Charles VII established a precedent by imposing crues, or arbitrary additions to the tax, levied for some special emergency. The intervention of the Estates in Languedoil and Outreseine ceased; in Normandy it became a mere form; in Languedoc it was reduced to a one-sided negotiation between the province and the King, in which he might show indulgence, but the deputies could hardly show fight. Yet resistance was not infrequently tried, and was sometimes successful even with the inexorable Louis XI. On the other hand even in Languedoc a crue is sometimes ordered and paid without a vote, though never without protest. The tattle fell only on the roturiers, and spared the privileged orders of clergy and noblesse. In Languedoc the exemption followed the traditional distinction of tenements into noble and non-noble; in Languedoil the peasant paid if occupying a noble fief, the noble was exempt, although in actual possession of a villain holding.
Thus the clergy and the nobility escaped, except in a few cases, the direct burden of the principal tax. Speaking generally, they did not escape the burden of the aides and gabelle, though they had certain privileges. Royal officers for the most part escaped not only tattle but gabelle. Many of the principal towns also escaped the former. Such were Paris, Rouen, Laon, Reims, Tours, and many others. There were other inequalities and injustices.