aring
for those it governs. At Nevers and at Moulins,[5270] "all rich persons
find means to escape their turn to collect taxes by belonging to
different commissions or through their influence with the elus, to such
an extent that the collectors of Nevers, of the present and preceding
year, might be mistaken for real beggars; there is hardly any small
village whose tax collectors are solvent, since the tenant farmers
(metayers) have had to be appointed." At Angers, "independent of
presents and candles, which annually consume 2,172 livres, the public
pence are employed and wasted in clandestine outlays according to the
fancy of the municipal officers." In Provence, where the communities
are free to tax themselves and where they might be expected to show
some consideration for the poor, "most of the towns, and notably Aix,
Marseilles and Toulon,[5271] pay their impositions," local and general,
"exclusively by the tax called the "piquet." This is a tax "on all
species of flour belonging to and consumed on the territory;" for
example, of 254,897 livres, which Toulon expends, the piquet furnishes
233,405. Thus the taxation falls wholly on the people, while the bishop,
the marquis, the president, the merchant of importance pay less on their
dinner of delicate fish and becaficos than the caulker or porter on his
two pounds of bread rubbed with a piece of garlic! Bread in this country
is already too dear! And the quality is so poor that Malouet, the
intendant of the marine, refuses to let his workmen eat it!
"Sire," said M. de la Fare, bishop of Nancy, from his pulpit, May 4th,
1789, "Sire, the people over which you reign has given unmistakable
proofs of its patience. . . . They are martyrs in whom life seems to
have been allowed to remain to enable them to suffer the longer."
VIII. Complaints In The Registers [5272].
"I am miserable because too much is taken from me. Too much is taken
from me because not enough is taken from the privileged. Not only do the
privileged force me to pay in their place, but, again, they previously
deduct from my earnings their ecclesiastic and feudal dues. When, out
of my income of 100 francs, I have parted with fifty-three francs, and
more, to the collector, I am obliged again to give fourteen francs to
the seignior, also more than fourteen for tithes,[5273] and, out of the
remaining eighteen or nineteen francs, I have additionally to satisfy
the excise men. I alone, a poor man, pay two
|