Demonstrations

Gérard Nicoud, the owner of a small French “café-restaurant” in a village in Isère, became well known to the public when he came to embody the resistance to the 1966’s shopkeepers and craftsmen’s health-law insurances. During his first meeting, which rallied fifteen thousand people in Grenoble in February 1969, he focused his speech on the insurance and pension schemes to denounce the disadvantage for shopkeepers and craftsmen in comparison with other wage earners. From the very beginning, his speeches gave the names of the alleged culprits: the “Ministry’s technocrats” and other bureaucratic elites. Even though the tax issue was not among the claims of the movement, Gérard Nicoud chose for its first target what seemed to perfectly embody the state’s power—a tax office. As Stanley Hoffman has pointed out, “It is a law of French political life that the revolts against proletarization take the form of an insurrection against the state.”^{Footnote 11} On April 9, 1969, members of Nicoud’s movement, the Information and Defence Committee (CID), entered a tax office and took possession of many documents and archives that they kept as bargaining chips. Nicoud was held liable for what happened; he was sent to jail and released a few days later. However, meeting after meeting, his movement became more popular. On October 13, 1969, twenty thousand attended the meeting and even forty-five thousand on March 9, 1970. In fact, tax resistance became a major element of the movement, especially after the adoption of a new law, on January 6, 1970, which improved the health insurance system of the self-employed. The government’s goal was to forestall the revolt, but the movement continued and put tax reforms at the forefront.

Since then, Nicoud’s advocates systematically launched a series of actions that directly targeted tax offices and its employees. In Brittany, for instance, on March 25, 1970, a craftsmen and shopkeepers’ demonstration triggered an attempted petrol-can fire that aimed at the tax collector’s office of Bannalec.^{Footnote 12} Without actual coordination and organization supervision, threatening and violent operations multiplied during tax audits. False bomb threats, anonymous letter, and phone calls were used; some tax officers’ private homes were even broken into and tax collector’s offices were vandalized. Between 1969 and 1972, the General Tax Management Bureau estimated that 350 incidents had occurred, 82 of which were objections to tax audits and 265 were demonstrations.^{Footnote 13} Moreover, the Regional Tax offices listed other 150 misdemeanors, mainly in the Rhône-Alpes département, in Marseille, and in southwest France. On the whole, unrest areas resembled the voting zone of poujadism.

During this first antitax period, violent acts occurred with greater frequency, following a “parochial and patronized repertoire,” according to the words of Charles Tilly to describe French protests between 1650 and 1850.^{Footnote 14} Like the former French Jacquerie, the uprisings consisted of spontaneous and local meetings, which most of the time aimed to help a local shopkeeper grappling with the French tax administration.

The “patente Strike”

In 1971, the CID merged with the UNATI (the French national union for the self-employed), and became CID-UNATI. This new trade union committed itself to more peaceful mobilizations. The CID-UNATI sought to expand its influence by asking craftsmen, shopkeepers, and the self-employed middle class to start a “patente Strike”—(the patente was a business licence tax introduced just after the French Revolution. This form of mobilization, also implemented by Poujade twenty years earlier, was inspired by the labor movement, which had developed since the nineteenth century. Actually, denunciation of the workers’ exploitation was turned against the state authority and typical slogans of the Marxist phraseology twisted like this slogan proved it: “Taxpayers of all parties, unite!” The resemblance of this protest with the forms of mobilization and organization of the labor movement was undoubtedly a specific feature of the French antitax movement.

For the CID-UNATI, the patente was a means of extending the movement’s audience to every self-employed worker who denounced the discriminatory nature of the tax. Instead of attacking the French tax system as a whole, Nicoud demanded that local governments be financed by other levies.^{Footnote 15} In every French département, public meetings were attended by legal counselors who explained to the audience “how to legally use the law.”^{Footnote 16} Letter templates were given out to the attendees so that they could file personal claims for the years 1971–72. They were advised to indicate that the latest revision of the housing rental value dated back to 1941. Some farmers’ organizations, especially in the French département of Finistère, joined the movement. In the département of Hérault, on December 18, 1972, the Chamber of Commerce adopted a unanimous deliberation demanding the abolition of the patente.

As the administration refused to follow up the claims, the CID-UNATI asked self-employed people to file appeals to the court. However, this litigation campaign gathered fewer followers. As state authorities registered more than 5,600 applications for review, only 628 petitions were lodged with the Administrative Court. The CID-UNATI was thus forced to abandon the strike during the summer of 1973. In December, the Parliament passed the “Royer law” (for Jean Royer, the Minister of Commerce and Artisanry), which gave small businesses greater protection. And two years later, the patente was replaced by a professional tax that allowed artisans to pay 53 percent less than before. Then the audience of the CID-UNATI decreased. Gérard Nicoud tried to revive it with new violent actions, especially against tax officers.

Violence Against Tax Officers

In 1975, the CID-UNATI launched a new campaign against the increasing number of tax investigations. Indeed, between 1969 and 1975, the number of tax audits almost doubled from twenty-five thousand to forty-five thousand. Mom and Pop shops that did not keep their books of account were particularly targeted. The CID-UNATI used this escalation of tax audits to justify their use of violence. Between January and April 1975, thirty-four tax offices were attacked, either by angry protestors or through a series of bombs or Molotov cocktails.^{Footnote 17} From the destruction of tax offices, the movement quickly began to physically attack tax collectors. In Moselle, on April 24, 1975, the premises of a tax office were robbed, and a few days later hooded men broke into a tax officer’s private home, stole his files, and then sprayed the place with petrol and fled.^{Footnote 18} At that time, many tax officers did not have offices and were often forced to work in their own homes, but this situation enhanced confusion between the individuals they embodied and the state authority they represented. The target of the tax revolt was no longer restrained to tax offices. Violent acts were directly aimed at agents through anonymous telephone calls threatening themselves and their families. On May 14, 1975, about twenty protestors who claimed to belong to CID-UNATI entered a tax office and asked to see the tax inspector who audited one of their workmates. They beat him up and punched him in the face and destroyed a few files. A police investigation was opened, but as none of the participants could be identified, the case was dismissed and the tax administration did not appeal. At the same time, Gérard Nicoud advocated the creation of units in each département that could react immediately and strongly to tax-audit units—“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”^{Footnote 19} During a meeting in Brittany on October 6, 1976, he even declared that “from [then] on, we will hold tax officers exclusively liable for, either they are tax collectors, tax auditors etc, and not anymore the tax administration. Anonymity [was] now over.” Nicoud did not hesitate to compare tax officers’ working methods with those the Gestapo and announced the creation of antitax units.^{Footnote 20}

As the French government gave many artisans and shopkeepers with the Royer Law and the replacement of the patente what they wanted, it contributed to the decline of Gérard Nicoud’s movement. But the antitax atmosphere that developed in France in the 1970s was far from being limited to craftsmen and family business owners alone. Doctors, veterinarians, lawyers, and chartered accountants also reacted strongly to tax audits. In a 1977 report, the Inspection générale des finances, in charge of monitoring the whole tax administration, indicated that “numerous professionals [did] not accept to cooperate with tax officers and [justified] their refusal in the name of professional secrecy.”^{Footnote 21} Tax aversion spread during this time, reaching professions beyond shopkeepers. Furthermore, tax resistance was not limited to a conflict against the state’s intervention. On the one hand, the state authority was violently questioned; however, on the other hand, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and small-size company owners asked the state to protect them against the modernization of the French economy. This tense relationship, between protest against the state authority and official calls for state protection, was undoubtedly one of the major characteristics of the antitax movement in France.

High-Ranking Civil Servants and the Antitax Revolt

Whereas the Poujadist movements of the 1950s closely collaborated with the heads of the préfectures and tax-office representatives,^{Footnote 23} the strikes headed by the CID-UNATI triggered more uncertain reactions from the state’s representatives. The wrecking of the general tax office in the Aude département on March 17, 1975, was a clear illustration of the change. On the sidelines of a wine-grower demonstration in Carcassonne, a group of a hundred people managed to enter the tax office premises after breaking down one of the doors with a pile driver. The building’s windows were destroyed, the entrance hall ransacked, the furniture was damaged, and tax files were strewn about and burned. In a letter to the Home Office, the Ministry for National Economy was surprised that the police only arrived on the premises twenty minutes after the beginning of the attack, whereas many days before the march, the chief treasurer and paymaster had informed the préfet about how the demonstration was likely to end up. The Home Office’s answer spoke for itself: To prevent the demonstration from turning into a street riot, “the contingents of the police gathered along the route of the demonstration were not supposed to be seen by the demonstrators” and were thus forced to act discreetly. In other words, they maintained law and order by applying one rule for some and another rule for the rest.^{Footnote 24} Thus they tolerated some behavior from some social classes, allegedly the electoral fermenting base of the ruling power.

However, the reluctance to punish assaults against tax offices and their representatives spread even to tax high-ranking civil servants. During the nights of June 2 and 3, 1977, for instance, some files were stolen from the Tax Audit General Unit in Cannes, but the regional authorities refused to press charges and the affair did not go any further. When damages were larger, the French administration took civil actions: On August 15, 1976, for instance, a fire was started in the premises of the First Tax Audit General Unit in Paris and official files were destroyed. This time, a charge was pressed, but the case was closed because the perpetrators could not be identified. When one referred a matter to a court, the justice system also showed compassion regarding the antitax movement protagonists. The sanctions to punish the violent actions against tax officers were indeed very lenient, as Table 1 shows.

Table 1.

Judgments pronounced for unlawful deeds against tax officers

Source:

CAEF 1A 284/1.

An analysis of the main judgments against culprits of assaults against tax officers reveals that judges appeared to be quite lenient. Most of the time, the perpetrator was given a suspended prison sentence. Out of the twenty files, only four cases appealed the decision. In three cases, the decision was eventually upheld, and in the last one the sentence was lessened. The lightness of the sentences contrasted with those that were pronounced against the Poujadist followers fifteen years earlier. The comparison with the Calvados farmers’ case in October 1955 is blatant. Opponents of the tax ransacked a tax office and burned the files. As a result, they were condemned to up to eight months in prison and were then forced to appear before the Assises.^{Footnote 25} Against the Poujadist movement, the authorities launched charges, searched houses, and arrested people who sometimes only encouraged the nonpayment of tax.^{Footnote 26} For more serious misdemeanors, Nicoud’s supporters had their sanctions suspended more often.

From 1975 onward, assaults intensified, but sentences remained light. Thus, on November 23, 1976, a female tax inspector was hit on the head with a broken bottle after she discovered that a vehicle did not carry the automobile registration stamp. The perpetrator was condemned to an eight-month suspended sentence and had to pay damages to the plaintiff. Sometimes this tribunal leniency became more visible, through the judges responsible for overseeing the terms and conditions of a prisoner’s sentence, as in the case of this tax inspector, who was given a rough time:

Interviewed on this case, the ministry of justice explained the decisions given by the judge as “a will of appeasement” regarding “some socio-professional classes who publicly expressed their wishes for fiscal reforms that they considered necessary to the improvement of their working conditions.”^{Footnote 27}

When one raised the question about violence during debates in Parliament, politicians also proved to be very compassionate. Their reactions had nothing to do with the indignation triggered by the deeds of Poujadists twenty years earlier. Whereas actions against auditing civil servants became more violent and more systematic, the state representatives’ speeches evolved considerably, as this diatribe from Maurice Blin, a senator of the UDF Party (center-right) proved: “Why, for a while now, have tax inspectors adopted an inquisitorial and insulting tone when auditing the most modest companies? Some of them seem to voluntarily lead their examinations of accounts in a provocative way; to such a point that I am to ask myself if they do not seek, beyond the respect of the law, to arouse resentment in the business world, resentment which could, in the future, be capitalized on some other purposes.”^{Footnote 28}

In his claim, Senator Blin implicitly suggested that the incidents during tax audits were directly caused by tax inspectors themselves. Concerns to reassure some taxpayers in order to preserve—or acquire—voters whose ballots were necessary for parliamentary elections led some politicians to side against tax officers. On May 9, 1976, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac followed suit, and even stigmatized “the excessive zeal” displayed by tax officers. Moreover, he denounced the excessively fussy audits and their lack of goodwill to admit some arguments presented by audited taxpayers. Such an accusation was also made by Lucien Neuwirth, a Gaullist deputy, general secretary assistant of the UDR, and the writer of a pamphlet with an evocative title The Tax Plague. In this book, he argued that the voters had been deprived of their power by the French tax administration, especially because of “some tax officers and punchy political activists.”^{Footnote 29} In this controversy, left-wing party leaders, however, were far from standing for tax auditors in order not to cut themselves off from the self-employed middle classes. On February 12, 1976, at the socialist head office, a CID-UNATI delegation led by Gérard Nicoud met the opposition party leader François Mitterrand, who concluded the meeting with the wish that the two organizations remain in close contact.^{Footnote 30}

During President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s seven years in office, many key political players were suspicious of tax officers.^{Footnote 31} In addition to the centuries-old fear of the intrusion of the state in French private lives, one could then suspect that the political use of tax audits was made by inspectors who had fully adopted an antibusiness ideology.