One
Louis XIV Builds a Peasant Kingdom

The harvest was a disaster in 1661, the year that Louis XIV began his personal reign. In that year and the next, the French endured the worst famine of the seventeenth century. Despite the famine, the king increased taxes in some areas and eliminated long-established exemptions and fiscal privileges in others. The response of his subjects was fierce. In the Boulonnais alone, the king had to send thirty-eight companies of troops to quell the riots of thousands of peasants.^[1] Those troops left a trail of blood behind them; they had ordered the hanging of many rioters and sent four hundred to the galleys for life. These disturbances made only a slight impression on the young king. Louis scarcely mentioned famine or riots in his memoirs, written nine years later for the education of his son. He even remarked that in the first years of his reign, there was "no unrest or the fear or appearance of unrest." Nevertheless, between 1661 and 1675, hardly a year went by without popular demonstrations, all of which were rapidly put down by royal troops. Because of such harsh repression, Louis earned a reputation for indifference to the sufferings of the common people. It was a reputation that he

[1] Before Louis XIV, the Boulonnais had been exempt from most forms of royal taxation.

did not shun, for he noted in his memoirs that the swift repression of "anything that ever so slightly approached disobedience . . . was the greatest kindness I could do my people."

Louis was also insensitive to the hardships caused by economic depression. The misery endured by the peasantry during the five years following the famines of 1661 and 1662 did not receive mention in the king's memoirs either. Amid economic depression and fiscal disorder, the young king pursued what he regarded as a more important goal: France's preeminence in Europe. Attainment of this goal required money and the vigilant monitoring of fiscal resources, and its quest had led the crown to bankruptcy by 1661. That detail did find a place in Louis's account of those first years.

Louis's ambitions in the realm of foreign policy were territorial, commercial, and dynastic, and they could only be achieved through conflict or war. First, he sought to acquire safe, easily defended borders. Twice during his childhood, Paris had been threatened by enemy troops, and foreign troops had been on French soil frequently during the preceding centuries. Second, Louis desired colonies and a greater share in Europe's growing maritime commerce. Louis, like many in his day, believed that the wealth of Europe was fixed; therefore, France's share could only be increased at its neighbors' expense. For France to be first in commerce, Louis considered it essential to crush Europe's leading commercial nation, Holland. Third, Louis wanted France to succeed Hapsburg Spain as the dominant power in Europe. Shortly after Spain's king died in 1700, leaving no heir, Louis led his exhausted subjects into a thirteen-year war involving all the nations of Europe. There were strong economic incentives for participating in that war, and nothing could have pleased the aging monarch more than to see the heirs of Francis I finally prevail over the descendants of Charles V.

It has been said that when Louis was not at war he was preparing for war. His ambitions involved France in war about one year in every two during his fifty-four-year personal reign. The wars commenced in 1667 when the king invaded the Spanish Netherlands and the Franche-Comté; Holland, England, and Sweden allied against him. In 1672, Louis took the one truly decisive move of his reign when he declared war on Holland.

That year was critical not only because French troops crossed the Rhine but also because expenditures began to exceed revenues and continued to do so for the remainder of his reign. The Dutch War expanded in 1673–1674, when the Hapsburgs and all the nations in their empire entered it. The war ended in 1678; however, Louis continued his policy of expansion by initiating réunions, or annexations (such as Strasbourg in 1681). By 1688–1689, France was fighting again on all fronts. This series of wars ended in 1697, but in 1701 France entered the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713–1714, shortly before the king's death.

Louis's ambitious foreign policy made necessary large-scale military deployments and extensive diplomatic efforts and required inordinate expenditures. It also required an enormous sacrifice by the French people. Peasants were annually conscripted to construct the king's roads that carried supplies and troops; this was only one of the many new demands placed on them. The militia was created in 1688, and by 1702 the crown was conscripting peasants to serve for seven-year terms. By 1715, some 200,000 Frenchmen had been conscripted. No single innovation was more loathsome to the peasantry than conscription, but lodging the king's troops on a campaign—a traditional peasant responsibility—was by far the most odious burden of all.

Despite a stagnant economy, taxes were increased. Many questioned the soundness of such a fiscal policy. In their letters to the king, his agents evoked mortality, mendicity, and famine. But with revenues anticipated for the next several years already spent, there was no hope of easing the tax load. The taille, the principal direct tax, was increased by almost a third;^[2] that increase was borne by fewer taxpayers, for the population was declining. To further increase revenues, the king introduced many new indirect taxes, so that the taille became a much

[2] This increase came after 1683. Colbert did not significantly increase the per capita weight of the direct taxes, but he increased the yield substantially. Before Colbert the charges on the revenues were equal to about two-thirds of the taille . Enormous progress was made under Colbert in reducing collection costs and lowering interest rates. In effect, he cut interest charges of all kinds by repudiating the debt. That, more than anything else, is what increased net revenues. Colbert tripled the crown's revenues without demanding much more than Richelieu or Mazarin had. See Pierre Chaunu, "L'état," in F. Braudel and C. E. Labrousse, eds., Histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris, 1970), 1:191.

smaller percentage of total income. All kinds of public offices, as well as titles of nobility, were sold, but this did not sufficiently increase revenues. The king then established two new direct taxes, the capitation (1695) and the dixième (1710). Both were intended to supplement the taille . In principle, both new taxes were supposed to tap the income of persons who did not pay the taille .^[3] They were to be paid in proportion to the income received by French of every class, including the tax-exempt nobility. The nobility soon found ways to buy exemptions, however, so that the onus of paying the new taxes fell on the peasantry. Therefore, the new taxes became, in effect, additions to the taille . Louis's subjects paid dearly to support an army that at one point totaled 400,000 men.

Before beginning his quest for victories in the field, Louis undertook to enforce a number of measures calculated to achieve order and ensure obedience at home. Most notable were his measures aimed at domesticating the great families, who had a long tradition of sedition. In 1648, only thirteen years before Louis began his personal reign, a large segment of the nobility and the parlements, led by members of those families, revolted in an effort to control the monarchy. The lessons of four years of civil war had affected the young Louis deeply. He would never forget how in 1649 the royal household had to flee Paris in the middle of the night and how, one month later, the English Parliament sent his uncle Charles to the block. Following a course that had been set by Capetian monarchs in the four preceding centuries, Louis XIV made every possible effort to bring his fractious subjects to heel. But Louis went further than his ancestors in attempting to domesticate the magnates: They were given no important positions in his councils and were denied administrative posts in the provinces—in short, they were offered no role in governing the realm. Only careers in the army and in the domestic service of the king were available to them. To remove the magnates from their provincial seats of power and to divert their attention from local affairs, the king required their continual attendance at court. Not to be seen regularly by the king was to

[3] The capitation was suppressed in 1698 but was reestablished permanently in 1701. The dixième was introduced despite famines in 1709 and 1710.

lose any hope of promotion and to forgo all sinecures. In moving the court to Versailles, Louis spared no expense and oversaw all details. The brilliant court life there required borrowing and left some families crippled with debt. At court, the fortunes of the great came increasingly to depend on his majesty's generosity and on their skill in pleasing him. Thereafter, instead of fomenting rebellion in the provinces, the king's gentlemen fought for the honor of handing him his shirt in the morning, or his napkin at dinner.

There was one area, however, in which these men were invited to participate, at least covertly: Louis welcomed their involvement in state finance. As Daniel Dessert has shown, much of the capital raised through borrowing to support the king came from old, landed families. Using financiers as intermediaries, members of these families could secretly invest in short-term loans to the king at high interest rates and obtain substantial quick profits.^[4] In the short run, there were significant political advantages for the monarchy in having such families share in fiscal profits. It was an ingenious way for the monarchy to gain access to their wealth without making political concessions to them. In a curious way, the large private fortunes were being linked to those of the regime. Many of the established families thus had an investment in the success of the absolutist state, yet they had no formal or institutional mechanisms for influencing the crown's policies.

Nothing, however, forced the monarchy to keep the faith of creditors whose links to the regime were purely personal, dependent on contacts with or networks around a particular minister. Consequently, investors were extremely vulnerable to a change in ministers. A new king or minister of finance could and generally did repudiate the debts of his predecessors. With no institutional means of exerting their will or of protecting themselves, the king's creditors were subject to constant fleecing. Eventually holders of capital came to resent this vulnerability and demanded political reforms. The monarchy frequently lost the

[4] Daniel Dessert, "Finances et société au XVIIe siècle: A propos de la Chambre de Justice de 1661," Annales E.S.C., vol. 29 (July–Aug. 1974); Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet, "Le lobby Colbert," Annales E.S.C., vol. 30 (Nov.–Dec. 1975).

confidence of lenders and had difficulty raising new funds by borrowing.^[5]

The financial arrangements that had long-term effects were, in fact, often designed to deal with short-term emergency situations. One such arrangement had particularly important implications for the nobility. The monarchy had transformed into a permanent right the temporary concession, made by the Estates General in 1439, that permitted the king to tax the peasantry directly without convoking the Estates General.^[6] That the king could act independently of this body decisively influenced the form monarchical government was to take in France. This right tended to prevent political participation by the nobility, for the monarchy could raise money without consulting the seigneurs. Thus, lacking opportunities to demand political concessions from the crown, the nobility was reduced to staging futile revolts and committing treason in order to maintain a political role. Tax-exempt nobles had no chips with which to bargain for political representation, and without an institutional body to represent them, they could wrest few real concessions from the king.

The fiscal reforms of Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of finance, are an example of measures that were taken to deal with an immediate financial crisis and that would shape the future. Historians have often judged those reforms by their long-term results and therefore have credited Colbert with wanting to restructure the French economy and system of finance, and to extend permanently the crown's political authority. Such assumptions are pure speculation. We cannot penetrate fully Col-

[5] In the late seventeenth century, there were more opportunities to make substantial quick profits from short-term loans to an increasingly bankrupt monarchy than from investments in the depressed land and produce markets. Some might argue that it was because of the appeal of quick and easy profits in state finance that wealth was diverted from long-term investments in agricultural productivity. But as we shall see in Chapter 4, the problem was more complex: technical innovations in agriculture were also blocked by the strength of peasant collective traditions.

[6] Because each province had its own privileges and its own special relationship to the crown, and because all provinces paid taxes on a different basis, the Estates General could not effectively negotiate general rates or establish principles of taxation that would have satisfied all provinces. For the same reason, the Estates General could not arrive at a consensus broad enough to enable it to represent the entire nation before the king.

bert's motives. His reforms, however, do make sense from a much narrower perspective. All the measures he took to restructure the kingdom's financial system were necessary to overcome the existing crisis. Colbert had been appointed finance minister of a monarchy on the verge of bankruptcy. To get the funds necessary to rescue the monarchy from financial ruin, Colbert had to assure creditors—the private investors upon whom he depended to finance the public debt and to collect taxes—that the king was a worthy credit risk and that collecting the king's taxes would be sound; consequently, investing in loans to the monarchy would be a lucrative activity. Colbert's rise to power also marked the rise to power of a tightly knit group of financial families and interests—a network of personal clients whose ties often included marriage alliances. These financial families represented a larger clientele of potential investors. On the basis of their personal credit, which was often based on their assets, or projected profits, as the king's tax collectors, they borrowed money for loans to the king. Before they would risk their own fortunes and those of their friends and relatives, financiers needed assurances from the monarchy. Since Colbert's success as the king's finance minister depended on how effectively he could use the resources of such groups, he sought to assure investors that tax collection would proceed in an orderly manner, so that they would be payed both the capital and the interest owed to them.

To develop his financial programs, the king required greater control over local administration. Most important, more thorough royal supervision over tax collection was necessary to restore confidence among lenders. Since the lenders were generally exempt from taxes, they did not personally fear intensified supervision over tax collection. Unable to trust the provincial nobility to carry out his orders and to ensure that villagers could carry the tax burden, Louis needed administrators who were loyal to him alone. The crown took a major step toward increasing fiscal efficiency by assigning an intendant to the already existing units of fiscal administration, called généralités . The intendants were to represent the king permanently in the provinces, and all of the généralités were to become intendancies.^[7]

[7] See Marcel Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1923), p. 257.

Supervising the collection of taxes was the intendants' first and foremost function.

The use of intendants was not a new idea, for Richelieu had also relied on them. Richelieu's intendants, however, were stationed in the provinces only sporadically and on particular assignments, usually military. Thus Louis XIV had made one of Richelieu's intermittent practices a permanent institution.^[8] Unlike the bureaucrats of earlier French kings, the intendants were not officiers, that is, they served on a commission basis and did not own their offices.^[9] The king could revoke their powers in the provinces at any time. Selection of intendants did not depend on their having a local clientele or a local patronage. The individuals chosen generally had no roots in the provinces where they served, and they could be rotated from one province to another as it pleased the king.

As the crown's representatives, the intendants were armed with royal arrêts —orders or decrees issued by the king or in the king's name. The arrêts did not need the approval of the parlements or other intermediaries, nor could the arrêts be set aside on the basis of provincial custom or law. In this sense, the intendant's authority was not founded on the legal customs of the province where he served; it reflected the will of the sovereign. Moreover, the intendant was not accountable to provincial authorities, since the decrees and sentences he issued could be appealed only in the King's Council.^[10]

[8] Louis XIV institutionalized and made permanent many of the ideas developed by Richelieu. But the two differed radically in that Richelieu attempted to create a state more in line with the views of the older aristocracy. Louis's policies were aimed at limiting the political authority of the magnates.

[9] Intendants did own offices in the King's Council, but not in the intendancy. There was no incentive for the holders of venal offices to remain loyal to the king since no advancement or transfer of the holder was permitted once an office was purchased, and revocation was unlikely since it required reimbursement.

[10] As the king's direct representative, the intendant had superiority over all other officeholders in the realm, including the parlementaires. As the maître des requêtes, the intendant was a member of the King's Council and could not be summoned before the sovereign courts. Any member of the sovereign courts, however, could be called to appear before the King's Council. Consequently, the installation of the intendant undermined the administrative hierarchy—the parlement could no longer be considered the chief administrative power in the province. Since the intendant's administrative decrees superseded the decisions of the parlement, the royal administrators would henceforth have priority in any public matter over which the king wished to exercise exclusive jurisdiction. All this, the parlement insisted, violated the customary territorial rights that were the basis of the province's attachment to the crown.

Louis had formulated the new arrangements in 1661, just after attaining his majority. He issued a decree ordering the sovereign courts "to defer to the decrees of his councils forbidding [the courts] to take cognizance of affairs and proceedings that his majesty retains and reserves for himself and for his councils." In 1665, to demonstrate further his intention to limit the parlements' participation in affairs of state, Louis began referring to the parlements as cours supérieures rather than cours souveraines . The king's efforts to establish the supremacy of his council in Burgundy had a direct and practical effect on the work of that court. In Dijon, they led to a new distinction between the parlement's judicial and administrative functions, which had traditionally overlapped. Not merely a law court, the parlement had exercised public authority by enforcing its own arrêts, which constituted a body of local administrative law. But as we have seen, with the installation of the provincial intendant, the monarchy began to rule by administrative decrees that took precedence over provincial laws. The parlement was left with undisputed jurisdiction only in cases concerning private law. Henceforth, it could function effectively only as a court.^[11] This growing separation of the parlement's judicial and administrative functions was particularly noticeable in the area of village finance.

The Village and the King

If we consider how the crown developed ties with the peasantry, the close relationship between bureaucratic growth and state finance will become much clearer. Those ties assumed a new importance as the king increasingly attempted to circumvent the nobility and the parlement. For some time, peasant communities had provided a large part of royal revenues, and because the royal treasury depended on the villages' effectiveness in providing specified sums annually, it was essential for Louis to protect the communal structures that ensured tax collection.

[11] The division between the parlement's administrative and judicial functions was far from absolute. The parlement still possessed jurisdiction in areas of local administration (road construction, hospitals, and charity), but its authority over municipal and village finance had been assumed by the intendant.

Reinforcing those structures and exerting direct authority over peasant communities became the focus of the crown's drive for more efficient taxation.

The local nobility could not be trusted to supervise communal finances since they would be the first to profit from the village's financial instability, for it would allow them to buy the village's commons and forests. In addition, seigneurs often acted to shield communities from royal taxation, which they viewed as competing with the collection of seigneurial dues. Not surprisingly, protection of the crown's long-established right to tax the peasantry directly became the intendant's task. This responsibility, as we shall see, involved the intendant with the peasant communities but not with the individual peasants. This limitation was initially a source of strength; it allowed for more effective tax collection despite the weakness of the administration and the traditions of the village. Administrators simply did not have the resources to deal with taxpayers on an individual basis, nor was there any precedent or record of the crown attempting to detect or discipline delinquent taxpayers. Furthermore, peasants had always been liable for, and paid, taxes as a community.

To understand the advantages administrators gained from collective responsibility, let us shift the focus from royal to seigneurial administration. Those advantages are explicitly stated in the correspondence, in 1756, between the lord of Etaules (the monastery of Saint-Chapel de Dijon) and an expert on seigneurial administration (a feudiste ) hired by the monastery to organize and to renew its seigneurial titles. The lord had written to ask the feudiste his opinion of a request from the village's wealthiest inhabitant for permission to pay his share of the cens, the most substantial feudal due collected at Etaules, directly to the monastery, even though traditionally the village inhabitants paid the cens as a collectivity. This arrangement had an obvious advantage for the wealthy inhabitants: they could use their influence to reduce their share so that the poor ended up paying a disproportionate part of the total. However, the arrangement also had an advantage for the collector of the cens . If the village defaulted on an undivided cens, the lord could sue the wealthiest inhabitants and confiscate the sum from their personal estates. This was why, the feudiste pointed out, it was very com-

mon for wealthy inhabitants to request release from the solidary unit. To permit wealthy inhabitants to make individual payments was extremely risky, he warned the monastery. Further investigation of this argument will illustrate why the undivided cens was common in the eighteenth century, and why, even in an age of individualism, seigneurs insisted on maintaining the unity of the cens .

As the feudiste reminded the monastery, in the law of the manor all peasants were equal in their relationship to the seigneurie and therefore were subject to the same laws. This meant that if one peasant were liberated from the collective cens, all could request to be. As a result, the cens would soon be splintered into individual payments, with each inhabitant paying the lord directly. How difficult it would then be for the monastery to adjust the cens to each mutation in ownership. Thus, the feudiste asserted, by dividing the cens into individual portions, "one makes collection even more difficult and more irksome. Although collection is assured when you assess the whole group, . . . when you divide it into individual portions you turn collection into a base task—the lowness of the task will lead to negligence, and as the inconveniences multiply, the yield will be annihilated." The feudiste further pointed out that the key to tax collection was that the wealthiest paid for the group in cases of default. "It is always easier to collect the cens if there are a number of censitaires because one can always hold the wealthiest responsible for the group." In addition, "if all are co-liable the payment will be more certain because each of those who is 'co-liable' has an interest in betraying his fellow villagers in the fear of increasing his own part of the payment by hiding them." Certainly that was a better way to ensure payment than negotiating with households separately. Besides, he added, "it is well known how powerful self-interest is in men, and especially in the country-dwellers, who make it a crime to pay for others."^[12] The wisdom of this feudiste reveals why the monarchy insisted on maintaining communal responsibility.

[12] G-1372, 1756 (unsigned mémoire ). Division of the cens in proportion to what an individual owns is called égalation . M. Violet was the inhabitant who requested the égalation . He was described as the most "solvent" of Etaule's inhabitants.

Royal officials in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries insisted upon collective tax responsibility, as seigneurial officials had earlier, for essentially three reasons. First, detecting whether individuals had cheated on their taxes was very costly. Administrators could see the differences in wealth between one village and another, but they could not as easily determine the relative wealth of individuals, since information about individual wealth was hard to procure. The inhabitants, however, knew who owned what. With collective responsibility, if one individual did not pay his share, the burden on the others would be increased, thus providing incentives for the inhabitants to disclose tax evaders. Furthermore, by insisting upon collective tax payments, the crown could avoid the cost of keeping track of changes in individual wealth. Second, collective responsibility allowed authorities to additionally cut the costs of information gathering. Because royal officials were not able to maintain records of individual fortunes, the cheapest way for them to prevent village defaults on loans and contracts was to confiscate the wealth of the richest inhabitants. It was relatively easy to ascertain who belonged to that group. Third, the expense of collecting the assessed sum household by household would inevitably have diminished returns. Bargaining over assessments with each household separately was also time-consuming, and the crown simply did not have the means to do so. In sum, collective responsibility was necessary because of the scarcity of information on individuals and the rudimentary level of administrative specialization. Collecting the same information about individuals that was available on communities would have further increased expenses.^[13] The need for administrators to reduce information costs was especially acute in France because French politics made the cheapest solution—trusting the local nobility to collect taxes—impossible.

This communal responsibility was not a vestige of village traditions with regard to redistributing wealth and protecting the village poor. Nor did such communal practices persist because of a "precapitalist" predilection of the peasants to look

[13] See Richard A. Posner, "A Theory of Primitive Society, with Special Reference to Law," Journal of Law and Economics 23 (Oct. 1980):54, for a discussion of such costs of gathering information in premodern societies.

after each other. Rather, collective responsibility persisted because authorities insisted on it. Collective responsibility reduced information costs, as the feudiste explained, because peasants were willing to betray each other and provide the tax collector information about their neighbors in order to reduce their own portion.

The importance of the communities' collective responsibility for taxes under the Old Regime is particularly evident in Burgundy. There, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the provincial estates were annually presenting a lump-sum assessment to the village as a corporation. The village in turn chose one of its residents to divide the assessment equally among the individual inhabitants. Thus the villages handled their obligations to the state in much the same way that they handled their day-to-day expenses for such items as church repairs, ditch and road maintenance, public fountains, and court cases. Although these expenses were routine, they were inevitably incurred in emergencies: a flood could destroy existing ditches; passing soldiers might confiscate the church bell to make cannon; a church wall might unexpectedly collapse. Since villages seldom had funds put aside in advance, they needed access to credit.

From the perspective of the crown, these day-to-day expenses were important because they impinged on the village's ability to meet its obligations to the crown. The sums villages needed for emergencies could be enormous; their current expenditures had already stretched their resources to the limit. Villages often had to resort to borrowing. Potential creditors, however, might want assurances in the form of assets that could be entailed before they would lend money. Villages used their collectively owned fields, meadows, and forests as collateral.^[14] Once a community lost its collective properties, however, it had to tax individuals the next time it needed emergency funds. Such internal taxes

[14] AN, H-193/163, fol. 1. In a mémoire on communities (1770), the Estates of Burgundy defined communal properties as follows: "Les biens que possèdent les communautés n'appartiennent pas aux membres qui les composent, considérés comme particuliers. Personne ne peut en distraire aucune portion pour son usage particulier; chacun a seulement un droit de jouissance indivisé sur la totalité par concurrence avec les autres; il n'est pas même permis aux habitants de partager entr'eux les biens communs, ils doivent les user en communauté."

left less for royal tax officials to collect. The monarchy, therefore, did not want communities to lose their collective assets.

When Louis XIV came to power in 1661, the debts of communities were large. In Burgundy, many villages had already lost or alienated their communal properties. Beginning with the Wars of Religion in 1562 and continuing through the Thirty Years' War, almost a century of war was waged on Burgundian soil. On their way to Germany, campaigning troops wintered in the province and pillaged when they could not buy the supplies they needed. Since soldiers were seldom paid on time, they often resorted to living off the land. To feed themselves, they might decimate entire village herds or force communities to yield their next harvest's supply of seed. In some instances, soldiers spitefully burned entire villages when they found that the inhabitants had hidden grain or cattle.^[15] Even when soldiers were not guilty of theft or other offenses, the cost of billeting troops could exhaust the resources of a village. To recover from such war-related burdens, villages often sacrificed communal properties as collateral for loans, or sold them outright.

Fiscal concerns—chiefly the desire to keep the profits of agriculture in the countryside where they could be taxed directly by the crown—moved the king to protect peasant properties. Contemporary economic circumstances favored urban interests and thus made tax collection especially difficult. Large profits were being made by townsmen who procured supplies for the armies. Once having made their fortunes in war speculation, however, they were likely to seek safer, more lasting investments in land, especially because tax exemptions made land ownership very profitable for urban dwellers.^[16] At a time when the well-being of the peasantry was at a low ebb, the influx of capital from tax-exempt townsmen threatened to alter land ownership patterns.

[15] Peasants commonly fled to the forests or to the lord's château with their cattle and grain until the soldiers had passed. In the late seventeenth century, the intendants restricted the looting and destruction by the private armies that had previously roamed the countryside, uncontrolled by any governmental authority.

[16] See Philip T. Hoffman, "Taxes and Agrarian Lands in Early Modern France: Land Sales, 1550–1730," Journal of Economic History 46 (March 1986): 37–55. Hoffman argues that on account of tax exemptions, land in the country was cheaper for town dwellers than for peasants.

The townsmen leased their new properties to peasants but kept some of the profits in the form of rent. The crown wanted to prevent townsmen from expropriating the lands of indebted communities or of individuals because urban investors, unlike the peasants, did not pay direct taxes on their landed income. In short, the takeover of the land by such investors threatened to diminish the crown's tax revenues.

For several reasons, then, the crown launched a campaign to allow villages to recover alienated communal properties. The king, calling himself the protector of communal rights and properties, issued numerous edicts (the first in 1662) to verify all communal debts. The entire verification process and responsibility for subsequent efforts to liquidate debts were placed under the intendant's exclusive jurisdiction. In the 1662 edict, the king ordered the Estates of Burgundy to proceed with "the acknowledgment and verification of debts of towns and communities of the said province, the regulation of ordinary expenditures, the rectification of abuse introduced by the disorders of the war, or otherwise, the listing of the subject for which the said debts were created, and their use."^[17] The edict of October 1662 charged the intendant in Burgundy with the verification of all communal debts; a second edict (February 1665) authorized the intendant to oversee the liquidation of those debts. As a result of this legislation, the intendants acquired tutelle over communities, that is, they became guardians of communal properties and rights.

The Parlement of Dijon attempted to block the intendant's investigation. It did not believe that royal officials were entitled to this kind of information and insisted that the verification process interfered with its own jurisdiction over communal properties. In several towns there was violent opposition to the investigation, and the intendant accused the parlement of inciting the disturbances. Because the parlement would not cooperate, in 1665 the king permitted the intendants to appoint subdelegates to continue the investigation. In an arrêt of August 16, 1666, he detailed how the investigation should be conducted.

[17] Printed collections of this royal legislation can be found in AN, H-140, or BM, Fonds Saverot, vol. 47, no. 9.

In 1667 the crown intensified its attack on usurpers of communal property by issuing an edict that forbade "all persons, of whatever quality or condition, from interfering with, or troubling, the inhabitants of the said communities in the whole and entire possession of their common goods, and the said inhabitants from alienating anew their usages and commons."^[18] This edict was aimed at tax-exempt parlementaires and noblemen. The monarchy wanted communal lands to produce taxable income. Therefore, it did not want those lands to pass from the peasants, who paid taxes, into the hands of those who could not be taxed. The king further ordered that communities "recover, without any formality of justice, the properties, meadows, pastures, woods, lands, usages, common pasture lands and wastelands, rights, and other common goods sold or mortgaged by them since 1620."^[19] He asserted that communal rights were fundamental to the constitution and the governmental structure of the kingdom and that seizure of communal property by individuals was an intolerable violation of communal rights. Those who had acquired communal properties would be reimbursed by the community for their original investment in ten yearly payments. The reimbursement would be "levied on all and each of the inhabitants of the said communities."^[20]

On December 12, 1670, Controller General Colbert instructed the intendants that "the settlement of the communities' debts being critical for the succor of the people, there is nothing to which you should give more care and application than to the conclusion of this affair."^[21] Still dissatisfied with the progress of the verifications, the king told the Estates of Burgundy in October 1671 that "there still exist some of the said debts to settle, and our intention is that communities be and remain wholly and entirely discharged of all debts of whatever nature and quality."^[22] The monarchy again insisted on its right to regulate disposition of, and to intervene in questions concerning, communal property. Despite the commission of 1671, efforts to re-

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Pierre Clément, ed., Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Colbert (Paris, 1861–1883), 4:50.

[22] BM, Fonds Saverot, vol. 47, no. 9.

cover alienated communal properties met with strong resistance. The fiscal pressures of the Dutch War led the king to issue a general edict in 1677 stating that as a result of the acquisition of common properties by individuals, communities had been deprived of the "assistance they could derive from their properties and rights for supporting the charges of the war. It is very fair that the holders of their lands contribute some part of the enormous expenses to which we are necessarily obligated in order to repulse the efforts of our enemies."^[23] The edict pertained to all holders and users of properties that had been given, sold, alienated, exchanged, usurped, or mortgaged since 1555.^[24] It called for an investigation to distinguish acquirers "in good faith from those who had seized [properties] without legitimate title." Possessors lacking legitimate title could hold community lands for fifteen years, providing they restored to the state the profits, "fruits [taxes], and revenues of thirty years."^[25] At the end of the fifteen-year period, the lands would be returned to the communities. Those who could not raise the required sum would forfeit their lands. The edict did not prevent attainment of the crown's fiscal objectives, but it did delay achievement of the stated goal of returning alienated properties to communities. Since the acquirers of communal properties were often townspeople or seigneurs, this edict can be viewed as a means to extract money from those who were exempt from taxes.

Colbert continued to insist on the necessity of the verification process. In February 1680 he wrote to all the intendants reminding them that "the principal and most important diligence that his Majesty desires from you consists in the settlement and payment of communities' debts in all the generalities of his kingdom; for that, he does not doubt at all that you work with the care and industriousness necessary to such a large undertaking—so wished for by him and so useful for the relief of the people. He orders me to add that he wants you to examine carefully the means to prevent communities from becoming indebted in the future."^[26]

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Clément, Lettres, 4:138. Thirteen months earlier, Colbert had written to the intendant of Rouen: "As for the debts of communities, the king wishes all intendants to apply themselves to this task in order to deliver communities of this vermin that gnaws at them continually, [so that they will] be able to bear more easily the charges of the state." Georges Bernhard Depping, ed., Correspondance administrative sous le règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1850–1855), 3:279.

The objectives of the verification program were never realized. Few communities actually received back the communal lands they had lost or alienated. But the edicts did arrest the process of debt accumulation and prevent communities from alienating communal properties in the future. The monarchy achieved several important political and administrative gains as well. With each edict, the intendant further consolidated his authority over communal properties and over the community. In 1683 the intendant was assigned the function of approving all village expenses. In April 1685 and August 1687, the intendant was granted the power to authorize communal lawsuits. In 1691 the intendant was authorized to review and to verify all communal accounts. Thus, the verification process ultimately provided the intendant with almost complete jurisdiction over village finance.

As noted earlier, the reforms, at least initially, had had another goal. Colbert was searching for credit. To keep the war effort going required continuous outlays that only borrowing could sustain. Fiscal reforms and exercise of control through the intendancies were essential for restoring confidence among lenders. The reforms permitted Colbert and his associates to assure investors that royal administrators were armed with the power to prevent villages from accumulating new debts. Village solvency was critical because the crown's credit depended to a large extent upon the security of tax revenues that came from the villages.

Although Colbert's concern was with solving the immediate crisis, the edicts the king issued eventually served as a blueprint for the dramatic assertion of his authority in the provinces. In appointing himself protector of communal rights, the king established two principles that were to become the juridical basis of the intendant's political authority over communities. First, the royal legislation protecting communities from the loss of communal properties established the rural community as mineur and the king as its tuteur . The earliest expression of the idea that "the communities are considered minors" is found in a

royal ordinance of June 22, 1659 (pertaining to the généralité of Châlon), which forbade communities to alienate their rights and properties without the king's permission.^[27] After 1659, the term mineur was applied to all French communities. Second, the monarchy declared that the rights and powers that inhabitants had collectively possessed since medieval times were public rights and powers and therefore subject only to royal jurisdiction. This second principle became the primary justification for the exercise of royal administrative power in the provinces because it enabled the crown, as guarantor of the public weal, to administer a wide range of village affairs. Most important, it allowed the king to dominate the institution responsible for governing peasant communities—the village assembly. Thus, what began as a program to regularize village finance had great, although originally unforeseen, political and administrative significance.^[28]

Increasing Importance of Collective Responsibility

Those corporate institutions that could serve to guarantee communal solvency were reinforced in the villages. One such institution—contrainte solidaire —was critical. Contrainte solidaire meant that the community was collectively responsible for the obligations of its individual members, and individuals could be made responsible for the obligations of the entire community. In other words, individual liability and collective liability were merged. Contrainte solidaire had a long history; it had been the key to the seigneur's coercive power over the village. By con-

[27] In the early 1660s, however, the Parlement of Dijon had begun to dispute openly both the community's reputed puérilité and the monarchy's claim that communal goods and rights were public. The parlement asserted that communal goods were neither biens de mineurs nor choses publiques . They "belonged to the community as a legal person, and just as properties belonging to any person could be sold, leased, or willed, properties belonging to communities could be alienated" (see AD, B-11600/37, 11600/38). The Estates of Burgundy, which were responsible for paying the province's taxes and dividing the yearly assessment among the villages, did not object as strongly as the parlement to the intendant. (In fact, they welcomed the intendant's assistance in tax matters.) For this reason, they lost to the Parlement of Dijon their traditional reputation as principal defenders of provincial liberty.

[28] Copies of the legislation can be found in Code rurale ou maximes et règlements concernant les biens de campagne (Paris, 1762), 2:708–14.

sidering the village as having a single will, the seigneur eliminated the necessity of making difficult and time-consuming settlements with individuals. Thus, he protected himself against rebellion and evasions of seigneurial dues and regulations. If the village failed to pay its dues or to meet other contractual obligations, the seigneur could confiscate the property of the four leading inhabitants, and they would have to recover their loss from the community as a whole.^[29] Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, the solidité once so valuable to seigneurial authority became equally valuable to royal authorities. In 1650, and again in 1666, the Parlement of Dijon agreed that the monarchy had the right to enforce contrainte solidaire when villages failed to pay royal taxes. Communities, formerly collectively responsible for seigneurial dues, were now held collectively responsible for royal taxes.

The importance of contrainte solidaire for the future became particularly clear in 1683 when, as part of a broader program designed to prevent communities from falling back into financial disorder, the monarchy began to prohibit villages from selling, leasing, or mortgaging their communal goods and properties.^[30] According to the new royal legislation, communities could raise funds only by taxing themselves or by using the revenues from communal properties. Henceforth, communities should no longer count on using their communal goods and properties as surety for loans, or on selling their properties or assigning the revenues anticipated from them. Since communal goods and properties were declared inalienable, communities had to find another way to secure loans. In the future, the surety for communal loans would be the collective liability of the community's inhabitants. Contrainte solidaire was a guarantee to creditors that a community would pay its debts. Thus, the ancient

[29] Contrainte solidaire is mentioned in the earliest seigneurial documents; therefore, its practice must have antedated such documents. The idea was referred to in seventeenth-century jurisprudence as solidité . In his codification of Burgundian custom (Coutumes générales du pays et duché de Bourgogne [Dijon, 1698]), Taisand stated it simply: "L'action du cens est solidaire." The notion of solidité was applied not only to the payment of seigneurial dues but to payments for the charters of enfranchisement as well. Generally, in Burgundy, the village negotiated such charters in common and all inhabitants were bound to fulfill the established obligations.

[30] Edict of April 1683; see BM, Fonds Saverot, vol. 47, no. 9.

practice acquired a renewed importance. Creditors could now do what royal and seigneurial authorities had done. Contrainte solidaire also contributed to an increase in the intendant's control over communities. Only the intendant could authorize a creditor to entail the property of the community's four leading inhabitants when that community defaulted on a loan. No other authority could sanction the application of contrainte solidaire .

Although the monarchy did not acquire the right to enforce contrainte solidaire as part of the campaign to verify debts, restoring the credit and solvency of communities would have been much more difficult without contrainte solidaire. Contrainte solidaire was an effective way for the intendant to safeguard communal properties. Finding another mechanism to guarantee that communities would reimburse their creditors would not have been easy, considering the limited means of coercion and supervision available to the intendant.

Conclusion

Most of the powers exercised by the Burgundian intendant before the Revolution can be traced to the campaign to verify debts. In 1683 Intendant Harlay (1683–1689) explained: "There are few affairs [for the intendant] in this province, fewer than in any other. The royal tailles and the reimbursement of post houses, as well as the repair of the king's roads, are in the hands of the estates. At present, the principal affair of this province's intendancy is what remains of the verification of debts."^[31]

In 1743 the monarchy stopped renewing the commissions to verify debts, which it had done every year since 1662. But that cessation did not mean that the crown had lost interest in the matter, or its power to act. It meant that the commissions were no longer necessary because administrative routines were now firmly established. When, in 1764, the controller general asked the intendant, Joly de Fleury, if renewal of the commissions would be useful, Fleury responded that there was no need for them. "The intendant's authority and rights being so well estab-

[31] 20 Sept. 1683. A. de Boislisle, ed., Correspondance des contrôleurs généraux de finances avec les intendants des provinces (Paris, 1874–1897), 1:1.

lished in the Provinces, a special commission would add nothing. In fact, the intendants continue to exercise the powers, which consist of verifying communal debts."^[32]

By that time, the rights assigned to the intendant by the commission were no longer vulnerable. The Estates of Burgundy, in 1764, could declare: "The competence of the intendant is clearly demonstrated and easy to know. It is based on this principle: the interests of communities are only to be expressed [stipulé ] under his authority."^[33] In 1785 the intendant, Amelot, reported to the controller general, Calonne, that "the work of the Burgundian intendant can be reduced to the surveillance and administration of communities and communal rights."^[34]

In 1787 a lawyer, M. de Goron, proposed to the Estates of Burgundy that he write a history of administration in Burgundy. Goron identified the intendant's public power in Burgundy as control of all matters that could be termed "collective." He wrote that "the administration of communal goods and business is attributed directly to the intendant; it is he who authorizes and sanctions all acts that are collective in nature."^[35] Burgundian intendants never interfered in matters concerning relations between individuals or attempted to resolve questions of private property. Even as late as 1789, when two inhabitants of the village of Senailly petitioned the intendant to arbitrate a conflict over the distribution of the barley that they had jointly harvested on communal properties, the intendant refused to act; he reminded them that "it is an affair that concerns only individuals." Since the affair involved private and not collective property, the intendant concluded that "it is not within the competence of my office."^[36] But collective affairs were quite another matter.

Louis XIV's relationship with the peasantry is one of the great

[32] AN, H-200/173, fol. 8: Projet de travail de M. Amelot, intendant de Bourgogne, avec M. de Calonne, contrôleur général. 17 Dec. 1785. This document refers to correspondence of 1764 and summarizes earlier reports and correspondence from the intendants. See also AN, H-140, for additional reviews of intendants' correspondence.

[33] AD, C-4401: Reported in the mémoire of M. de Goron, 1787, p. 2.

[34] AN, H-200/173, fol. 6.

[35] AD, C-4401: Mémoire of M. de Goron, p. 1.

[36] AD, C-1402, Senailly, 14 Nov. 1788 to 13 Aug. 1789: Procès-verbal; correspondence between subdelegate and intendant.

ironies in the history of the French nation. The king openly and willfully pursued policies that were detrimental to the peasantry's well-being. He made it known by his actions that he would not sacrifice his reputation, his gloire, for his subjects' happiness. And yet the survival of the villages was a result of Louis's policies. In creating the position of intendant and establishing the commission to verify debts, Louis provided the peasant community with a source of protection. Although not always benevolent, the intendant could help communities resist the exactions and abuses of seigneurs, tax collectors, and campaigning troops. True, Louis acted to protect his share of what the peasantry produced. But the long-term effect was to prevent the further decline of the peasant community. Inadvertently, Louis linked the fate of the French monarchy to the collective traditions of the village.