cles administering municipal
affairs impose taxation on the poor. The towns being oppressed by the
fisc, they in their turn oppress the people by passing to them the load
which the king had imposed. Seven times in twenty-eight years[5264] he
withdraws and re-sells the right of appointing their municipal officers,
and, to get rid of "this enormous financial burden," the towns double
their octrois. At present, although liberated, they still make payment;
the annual charge has become a perpetual charge; never does the fisc
release its hold; once beginning to suck it continues to suck. "Hence,
in Brittany," says an intendant, "not a town is there whose expenses
are not greater than its revenue."[5265] They are unable to mend their
pavements, and repair their streets, "the approaches to them being
almost impracticable." What could they do for self-support, obliged, as
they are, to pay over again after having already paid? Their augmented
octrois, in 1748, ought to furnish during a period of eleven years a
total of 606,000 livres; but, the eleven years having lapsed, the
tax authorities, in spite of having been paid, still maintains its
exigencies, and to such an extent that, in 1774, they have contributed
2,071,052 livres, the provisional octroi being still maintained.--Now,
this exorbitant octroi bears heavily everywhere on the most
indispensable necessities, the artisan being more heavily burdened than
the bourgeois. In Paris, as we have seen above, wine pays forty-seven
livres a hogshead entrance duty which, at the present standard of value,
must be doubled. "A turbot, taken on the coast at Harfleur and brought
by post, pays an entrance duty of eleven times its value, the people
of the capital therefore being condemned to dispense with fish from
the sea."[5266] At the gates of Paris, in the little parish of
Aubervilliers, I find "excessive duties on hay, straw, seeds, tallow,
candles, eggs, sugar, fish, faggots and firewood."[5267] Compiegne
pays the whole amount of its taille by means of a tax on beverages and
cattle[5268]. "In Toul and in Verdun the taxes are so onerous that but
few consent to remain in the town, except those kept there by their
offices and by old habits."[5269] At Coulommiers, "the merchants and
the people are so severely taxed they dread undertaking any enterprise."
Popular hatred everywhere is profound against octroi, barrier and clerk.
The bourgeois oligarchy everywhere first cares for itself before c