CHAPTER IX. THE LIBERAL REACTION AGAINST MERCANTILISM IN 17TH CENTURY FRANCE
1. THE CROQUANCE REBELLION
The kings and their minions did not impose an accelerating burden of absolutism without
provoking grave, deep and continuing opposition. Indeed, there were repeated rebellions by
by groups of peasants and nobles in France from the 1630s to the 1670s.
Generally, the focus of discontent and uprising was rising taxes, as well as the losses of
rights and privileges.
There were also similar rebellions in Spain in mid-century and in autocratic Russia throughout
the 17th century.
Here, for example, the remonstrances of the peasants in the first great French rebellion
of the 17th century, the Croquants, literally, Cruncher's Revolt, in 1636, in southwestern
France.
The Croquants' rebellion was precipitated by a sudden near doubling of direct taxes
upon the peasantry to raise funds for the war against Spain.
The Entendant La Force, sent to investigate the disturbances, reported on the peasants'
grievances and demands.
The peasants focused on the eternal and accelerating increases of taxation.
They pointed out that in the reign of Henry IV, more taxes had been collected than in
all previous reigns of the monarchy taken together, and that in but two years of the
In the reign of Louis XIII, they had paid more than in all the years of Henry IV.
The peasants also protested that the royal tax collectors carried off their cattle, clothes and tools merely to cover the costs of enforcement,
so that the principal of the tax debt could never be reduced.
The result was ruin.
Deprived of their means of labor, the peasants had been forced to leave their fields untilled, and even to leave their ancient lands and beg for bread.
In a letter to his superior, La Force feels compelled to endorse their complaints.
It is not, Monsignor, that I am not by natural feeling touched with very great compassion when I see the extraordinary poverty in which these people live.
The peasants protested that they were not subversives. They were willing to pay the
old customary taxes, provided the recent increases were repealed. New taxes should only be imposed
in extreme emergencies, and then only by the States General, which hadn't met since 1615
and was not to meet again until the eve of the French Revolution. Like diluted subjects
At all times and places, the peasants placed the blame for their ills not on the king himself,
but on his evil and tyrannical ministers who had led the sovereign astray.
The peasants insisted that they had had to revolt in order that their cries may reach
the ears of the king himself, and no longer just those of his ministers who advise him
so badly.
Whether a ruler be king or president, it is convenient for him to preserve his popularity
by deflecting protest and hostility to advisors or prime ministers who surround him.
But despite this unfortunate limitation, the croquants had the insight and the wit to zero
in on the public interest myth propounded by the royal ministers.
The needs of the state, the peasants declared, were only a pretext for enriching a few private
persons, the hated tax farmers who had bought the privilege from the crown of collecting
taxes which then went into their pockets, and the creatures of the man who rules the
state, that is, Richelieu and his entourage.
The peasants called for the abolition of courtiers' pensions as well as the salaries of all the
The Newly Created Officials
The following year, 1637, the croquants of the neighboring region of Perigor rose in
rebellion.
Addressing King Louis XIII, the commune of Perigor set forth its reasons for the revolt.
Sire, we have taken an unusual step in the way we have expressed our grievances, but
this is so that we may be listened to by your majesty.
Their overriding grievance was against the tax farmers and tax officials, who have set
among us a thousand thieves who eat up the flesh of the poor husbandmen to the very bones,
and it is they who have forced them to take up arms, changing their plowshares for swords
in order to ask your majesty for justice, or else to die like men.
And by the rebellion, the Crown organized its faithful servitors.
The Royal Printer, F. Mataille, published a statement by the inhabitants of the town
of Poitiers, denouncing the seditious commune of Paragore.
The Poitiers men declared that, We know, as Christians and loyal Frenchmen, that the glory
of kings is to command, while the glory of subjects, whoever they may be, is to obey,
in all humility and willing submission, following God's express commandment.
All the people of France know that the King is the life and soul of the state.
The King is directly guided by the Holy Spirit, and further, by the superhuman decisions of
your royal mind and the miracles accomplished in your happy reign, we perceive plainly that
God holds your heart in His hand.
There is therefore only one explanation for the rebellion, concluded the Poitiers loyalists.
The rebels must be tools of Satan.
Not all the Catholics agreed, nor even the Catholic clergy of France.
In 1639 an armed rebellion broke out in Normandy, resting on two demands, an opposition to oppressive
of Taxation and a call for Norman autonomy as against the centralized Parisian regime.
It was a multi-class movement of the relatively poor grouped together in an army of suffering
and calling themselves the Nupeds, the barefoot ones, after the salt-makers in the southwestern
Norman region of Avranches who walked barefoot on the sand.
The general of the army was a mythical figure named Jean Nupedes. The actual directorate
of the army consisted of four priests from the Avranche area, of whom the leader was
Father Jean Morel, parish priest of Saint-Gervais. Morel called himself Colonel Sandhills, but
he was a poet-propagandist as well as army commander. In his Manifesto of the High Unconquerable
General Captain Jean Newpedes, General of the Army of Suffering, directed against the
men made rich by their taxes, Father Morel wrote, And I, shall I leave a people languishing
beneath the heel of tyranny, and allow a crowd of outsiders, non-Normans, to oppress this
people daily with their tax farms?
The reference to outsiders shows the continuing strength of particularist or separatist national
movements in France, in this case Normandy.
The Norman and Crocosse movements were rising against centralizing Parisian imperialism
imposed only recently on independent or autonomous nations, as much as against the high taxes
themselves.
2. Claude Jolie and the Fronde
The most prominent rebellions in mid-seventeenth century France were those of the nobles and
the judges and known as the Fronde. The leading theoretician of the parliamentary, judges,
Fronde was Claude Jolie, whose Requeil de Maxime Veretable was published in 1653. Jolie's
The latest was a collection of constitutionalist maxims, remnants of a pre-absolutist age,
and included trenchant attacks on two contributions of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin to political
thought and practice in France.
One was the new notion that the king is rightly the master, in effect, the owner, of the persons
and property of all inhabitants of France.
The other was the Machiavellian view that successful public policy requires the systematic
use of immoral means.
The king's power, warned Jolie, is limited and not automatically sanctioned by divine
law.
Frenchmen possess just title to their lives and properties and are not the slaves of a
despot or tyrant.
The king's original divine power is mediated through the French people, Jolie added, and
the king cannot rightfully tax the French without the consent of the state's general.
The fact that Jolie was reviled by the king and his party as a rebel and a traitor, he
declared, shows that the old constitution has been overcome by new views holding the
3. A Single Tax
In the late 16th century, Jean Baudin and others had raised the question of removing
Inventing Many or All of the Crippling Network of Taxation and Substituting a Single Universal
Direct Tax Proportionate to Property or Income.
With taxes far higher and more oppressive by the mid-seventeenth century, the call for
a simpler single direct tax was heard once again.
Not only the people, but even the crown would benefit by eliminating a legion of unproductive
of Life and Parasitic Tax Farmers and Other Tax Officials.
One of the earliest of these tax reformers was Isaac Lopin, who published Les Mines Gallicants
in 1638.
The tract went through four editions, including one during the Fronde era in 1648, and directly
influenced later tax reformers.
L'Hopin explained how all members of society, from the poorest to the king, suffered from
the depredations of the tax officials, without accepting even the sacred person of his majesty.
There is not a single inhabitant of his kingdom who, from the top of his head to the soles
of his feet, does not carry some vestment or eat some food which is not burdened by
the said subsidies and imposts.
L'Hopin urged the abolition of all existing taxes and their replacement by a small fixed
tax per year on the wealthiest 10% of the population.
L'Hopin's pamphlet greatly influenced a one-time assistant to the Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs, the Sur de Bresson.
Bresson addressed a tract to King Louis XIV in 1675 entitled Propositions to the King.
He realistically denounced the tax officials and exactors as having no other goal than
their private interests.
He then pointed out that the King himself was at the mercy of the tax collectors and
repeated the above quotation from L'Hopin word for word.
Dresson divided up the wealthiest 10% or so of the non-privileged into 19 income classes
and suggested a single direct tax upon them, graduated by class.
In the meanwhile, in 1668, Gérard de Cote-a-Moy urged his own single tax plan upon the government.
In his Letter Concerning the Reform of State, Cordemois urged a single head tax payable
by everyone.
He set forth the plan in the form of a dream recounting an ideal state in a distant land,
a land enjoying such a single head tax, or capitation, paid by each person for the charges
and necessities of state.
Furthermore, in an unusual twist, Cordemois declared that such a head tax would be voluntary,
since everyone would know that he was much better off than he had been in the current
existing system.
An immensely popular work, written about the same time, was Paul Hay, Marquis du Chasselais's
Traité de la Politique de la France.
The Traité was written in 1667, with copies circulating throughout France until its publication
two years later.
Attacking the oppressive burden of taxation, Chassolet called for a tax on property extending
to the previously exempt estates of the nobility, and the transformation of the onerous salt
tax into a universal direct tax on income.
He also urged relief of the tax burden on the peasantry by accepting payment in kind
as a legal substitute for specie.
A more radical plan, originating in the late 1650s, was conceived by a marshal of France
and governor of the Principality of Sedan, Abraham de Faber.
Faber died in 1662, but in 1679 an unknown author presented the Faber Plan to the Chancellor
of France.
Faber had called for transformation of the salt tax into a graduated direct tax upon
the non-privileged members of society.
This plan was not designed as a single tax, but all new taxes could be abolished and other
Other taxes could be brought down to their original rates.
Reminiscent of Bresson, Faber's plan was to divide the non-privileged Frenchmen into
thirty income classes, the tax graduated by class.
Collection costs for enforcing the tax would be reduced to a minimum, and the king would
be liberated from one hundred thousand blood-sucking tax officials.
In 1684, a second edition of the Faber-based pamphlet added a substantial amount of statistical
backing to the plan.
4. Rising Opposition to Collectivism by Merchants and Nobles
The imposition of Colbert's regime of statism, monopoly and prohibitive tariffs, combined
with Louis XIV's High Taxation and Centralization, gave rise by the late 1660s to a growing tide
of opposition by merchants and nobility alike.
An important compendium of criticisms was the anonymous treatise, Memoir pour servir
à l'histoire, published in 1668.
The memoir comprises the first extended published polemic against Colbert and Colberism.
Politically, the author denounced Colbert for substituting centralizing innovations
for the old constitution, attacking Colbert's policies across the board, especially tariffs
and monopolies.
The book pointed out that the French refusal to purchase from the Dutch had induced the
The Dutch to Cease Purchasing from France.
On trade, the memoir made the important point that the Colberian ideal of national self-sufficiency
was contrary to natural law, since Providence had created a great diversity of natural resources
throughout the world, in order that mankind be united by the bonds of mutual interdependence
through international trade.
After an upsurge of denunciations of Colbert in the late 1660s, the Comptroller General
reacted by cracking down on all dissent.
In consequence, when Colbert died on 6 September 1683, there was intense joy throughout France
and especially in Paris.
In fact, only protection by the soldiery prevented the populace from demonstrating their attitude
by dragging Colbert's body through the streets of Paris.
Many oppressed Frenchmen exulted that a new dawn had arrived, taxes would cease and the
Golden Age would return.
Such was not to be, however, and absolutism and consequent economic distress became even
worse.
But the death of Colbert allowed a raft of dissent to arise once more, a torrent of hatred
poured out against Colbert's son, nephew, and other of his hand-picked successors.
The outpouring of opposition encouraged by official inquiries and investigations of the
Colberian past was not merely personal, however.
It was also in opposition to the mercantilism stifling the economy.
In May 1684, a nobleman accused Colbert of being responsible for the ruin of finance
Products and Trade.
The establishment of subsidized and privileged manufacturers has deprived commerce of liberty
and denied merchants the means to attract money from abroad.
The high protective tariffs, the unknown nobleman pointed out, crippled foreign demand for French
farm products and thereby reduced the French farmers to penury.
This line of attack on coal-bearism was developed in the following year by Gatien de Courtille
de Saint-Ras, Sur du Verger, who published a book on the new interests of the princes
of Europe.
Trying to bolster domestic producers, the French government had only succeeded in wrecking
them by crippling their export markets.
This popular work had gone into four editions by 1689.
In the same year, the famous collection of tracts, published in Amsterdam, Les Supiers
de la France Esclaves, the size of an enslaved France, also invade against protective tariffs
as leading to misery and the crushing of commerce.
Particularly eloquent in the Supier collection was the attack on Colberism by the merchant
Michel Levasseur, who wrote, The king, by the frightful and excessive taxes which he
levies on all goods, has drawn to himself all the money, and commerce has dried up.
There are no rigours and cruelties which have not been employed upon the merchants by the
farmers of the customs, a thousand trickeries to find grounds for making confiscations.
Because this, certain merchants, through the favor of the court, put commerce into monopoly,
and get privileges given to them to exclude all the others.
And finally, the prohibition of foreign goods, far from turning out well for commerce, is,
on the contrary, what has ruined it.
And all through this, the despotic and sovereign power, which prides itself on every whim,
and reordering everything and reforming all things by an absolute power.
During this depressed period, the directors of Colbert's French East India Company denied
in 1685 that they had caused the hard times by exporting species in order to import goods
from the Indies, arguing for freedom of trade in their response au memoir, when they really
only valued their own freedom to import from their privileged monopoly position, the directors
yet tapped an important vein of free trade thought.
Experience has shown that trade cannot be conducted without a total liberty and with
a mutual correspondence with foreign countries.
The moment we violated trade, the foreigners withdrew.
They attracted French workers and established our manufacturers in their country and have
dispensed with ours.
The directors also defended vigorously their practice of exporting species in exchange
for Asian imports.
They escalated their reply by pointing out that in Holland, always a country whose prosperity
Liberty and Trade was admired and envied during the seventeenth century. The ports are always
open for the entry and exit of specie with every possible liberty. Moreover, in Holland
the same liberty is accorded for the export of money in the coin of the country. It is
this great freedom which attracts abundance to the point where it is, and renders them,
The Dutch, Masters of All Trade
During the intense merchant agitation for freedom of trade and enterprise during the
1680s, Louis XIV's Entendants at Rouen reported on advice given him by two leading merchants
of the city.
On 5 October 1685, René de Mariac wrote to the Comptroller General that the two merchants
Merchants had declared, the greatest secret is to leave trade entirely free. Men are sufficiently
attracted to it by their own interests. Never have manufacturers been so depressed and trade
also since we have taken it into our heads to increase them by way of authority.
One of these two merchants, Thomas Legendre, was supposed to have been the first, during
The Great Late Eighteenth-Century laissez-faire thinker and statesman, Anne Robert Jacques
Turgot, reports as a family tradition that Legendre had told Colbert, laissez-nous faire,
leave us alone.
Turgot's affluent grandparents were close friends of the immensely wealthy Legendre
Thomas Legendre, 1638-1706, coiner of the phrase laissez-faire as applied to policies
and the economy, was the most eminent of a long line of merchant bankers traced back
to the early 16th century. A multi-millionaire, Legendre owned vast interests in Africa and
of the New World, was the leading importer of alum from the Levant, and was frequently
called upon to arbitrate disputes between merchants at home and abroad.
Despite his wealth, multinational commercial connections and public honors, Thomas Legendre
had what seemed to be only a negative rather than positive influence upon the French government.
Time and again the Crown refused to allow him permission to send vessels abroad or to
load merchandise onto foreign ships.
This treatment only changed in the 1690s when the government, engaged in war with Protestant
England and Holland, made use of Legendre and other ex-Protestants to trade with their
contacts in those countries while the war was going on.
Not only the merchants, but also some entendants were joining the laissez-faire camp during
the 1680s.
On 29 August 1686, the entendant in Flanders, Duguay de Banois, wrote a bitter protest against
a decree of the previous year levying a 20% tariff on imports from the Levant, except
for Goods Carried on French Ships from the Middle East that had entered the ports of
Marseille or Rouen.
Duguay pointed out that textile firms in northern France should not have to pay more for their
imported thread by being forced to buy it from inefficient French ships, and all to
subsidize Marseille merchants and shippers who could not compete successfully with the
English and Dutch in the Levant.
Duguay generalized this insight into a laissez-faire position.
Trade can flourish and subsist only when merchants are free to procure the merchandise they need
in the places where they are sold at the lowest price, and every time we wish to compel them
to buy in one place at the exclusion of all others, merchandise will become more expensive
and Trade Will Consequently Fall into Ruin.
5. The Merchants and the Council of Commerce
In June 1700, King Louis XIV, seeking advice from the nation's leading merchants,
established a Council of Commerce in which merchants of ten leading towns elected ten deputies
who would serve as a kind of advisory economic parliament.
The King soon came to regret this step, for the merchants' representatives seized the
occasion to unleash a torrent of attack against the mercantilist policies developed by the
Sun King.
In particular, the enraged merchants zeroed in on the grants of monopoly privilege bestowed
by the government on chartered companies.
Pointing out that such monopolies restrict trade and raise prices, a number of merchants
has declared, it is a most certain maxim that nothing but competition and liberty in trade
can render commerce beneficial to the state, and that all monopolies or traffic appropriated
to companies exclusive of others are infinitely burdensome and pernicious.
The most consistent and most radical of the merchants' voices was the deputy from the
The Western Port City of Nantes, Joachim de Cazaux du Hallé, a wealthy shipper and merchant
and former associate of Thomas Legendre.
Arguing vehemently against privileged monopolies that restrict trade, de Cazaux widened his
argument into a general plea for freedom and free competition.
Free competition, de Cazaux pointed out, benefits the public by supplying abundant goods at
at Low Prices. Even business losses, he declared perceptively, benefit the public since they
reflect plentiful production at low prices. Furthermore, Liberty causes innovations and
fuels the spirit of enterprise. Liberty is the sole and element of commerce. She excites
the genius and application of merchants who never cease to meditate on new methods to
to make discoveries and found enterprises.
Liberty kindles a perpetual movement which produces abundance everywhere.
The moment we limit the genius of merchants by restrictions, we destroy trade.
6.
Marshall Vauban, Royal Engineer and Single Taxer
The bluff, hearty, patriotic Maréchal Sebastien Leprestre Seigneur de Vauban, 1633 to 1707,
was scarcely a fervent or militant oppositionist to royal or Colberist policies.
The leading military engineer in France, the man who constructed the mighty military fortifications
was guarding the French state, ennobled by Louis XIV for his services, was scarcely an
opponent of the Crown. Although a loyal monarchist and absolutist, Vauban, after revocation of
the Edict of Nantes in 1685, grew deeply troubled at the policies of Louis XIV, especially
the crippling system of taxation as well as the oppression of the Huguenots. Upon the
In his revocation, the naïve Vauban, convinced that the good king was surrounded by evil or purblind advisors, wrote a memoir for the recall of the Huguenots addressed to the king.
Vauban pointed out that the revocation had disrupted trade and commerce and was causing opposition to the monarchy itself.
The heedlessness of the king did not daunt Vauban, who continued to write similar pleas to King Louis.
Finally, at the end of his life, in 1707, this man, who had risen from birth in poverty in Saint-Léger to become the land's greatest military engineer, a marshal and a nobleman, published his comprehensive treatise, Project for a Royal Tithe.
Boba proposed the abolition of most of the oppressive network of taxation and its replacement
by a single tax, a proportional tenth of the income of each subject.
The reasoning was that the state provided the people with the service of security and
that those who receive such service should pay accordingly.
One wonders, however, how anyone can demonstrate that those who receive such a service are
are enjoying the service in proportion to their income. Furthermore, every other service
on the market is paid for not in proportion to the buyer's income, but in a uniform single
price paid by one and all. The purchasers of bread or automobiles or stereo sets pay
a single price for each product, and not in proportion to their income or wealth. Why
Why then do so for the alleged service of security?
At any rate, Vauban was highly effective in pointing out that the impoverished producers
of the country were shouldering a large part of the burden of taxation and was eloquent
in urging their relief.
Vauban refused to publish the project for a royal tithe widely in 1707 and only circulated
and a small number of copies among friends.
This did not save the aged marshal from Louis XIV's wrath, however.
The king's censors and police condemned the book, and the publishers were hunted down
and punished.
General Vauban died on the day the King's Order was executed.