Rafe Blaufarb's excellent book shows just how much early modern political conflict in France revolved around the question of noble tax exemption. His focus is a single judicial proceeding, the Procès des Tailles, or land tax trial (with local variants and offshoots), spanning more than 250 years in Provence. Beginning in the 1540s and ending in the 1830s, this was a province-wide contest between two of the three corps (or bodies) that constituted the absolutist social order: the nobility and the Third Estate. Blaufarb provides a vivid image of what historians of the Old Regime mean when they speak of the society of corps that prevailed in France before the revolution.
At the origin of the contest lies a 1549 quid pro quo limiting the scope of the land tax exemption that nobles enjoyed under royal law. That year, the Paris Parlement held that the land tax in Provence attached to properties rather than persons. Provençal nobles could claim exemption not by right of their personal status, but only because of the seigneurial jurisdiction they exercised over a particular piece of land. They accepted this limitation in exchange for the right of compensation, which permitted a lord who wished to alienate some of his noble (tax-exempt) property to shift the tax exemption he enjoyed on that property to an equivalent parcel of roturier (non-noble and thus taxable) property that he owned: in effect, a system of transferable tax exemptions.
The controversies that flowed from this arrangement—as localities in Provence fought to claim taxes from nobles on land of disputed status, while nobles demanded fees from these same communities for use of the bread-baking ovens located on noble estates—generated rhetorical claims that would come to play an especially salient role in revolutionary-era debates. Already in the mid-sixteenth century, attorneys for the noble cause were decrying the “pernicious equality” that would ensue from stripping feudal land of its exemption (55). By the later eighteenth century, advocates for non-noble Provençal communities (such as the jurist Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis) were denouncing noble tax immunity for separating the aristocratic corps from “the body of the nation,” in violation of the latter's right to consent (149, 155).
Blaufarb aims to use the Procès des Tailles to unseat two key claims in the historiography on the origins of the French Revolution. First, he takes aim at the allegedly prevailing notion that monarchy and nobility were united in defense of Old Regime privilege under Bourbon rule. Instead, says Blaufarb, aristocrats were the victim of an alliance between the monarchy and Third Estate elites who found common cause in the campaign to undo noble fiscal immunity and expand the base of taxable land. Second, the author suggests that administrative centralization under the Bourbons—Alexis de Tocqueville's great theme in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856)—was the product rather than the cause of royal tax policy. Having created the conflict over noble tax exemption in the first place, the monarchy extended its authority ever more deeply into the French countryside by brokering periodic (and increasingly complicated) compromises in the Procès des Tailles. Mundane tax litigation undermined the established order as much as did Enlightenment critiques of privilege or political pornography targeting the court.
These are large and fascinating claims, if somewhat difficult to sustain in light of Blaufarb's distinctive focus on the fiscal situation in Provence. The paradoxes and ironies of the Provençal story alone, ingeniously narrated by Blaufarb, lend this book more than enough heft. The nobility's use of the right of compensation proved self-defeating; once exempted from taxes by this means, roturier land could never again serve as the basis of compensation. Over the course of the early modern period “noble tax exemption had been dying a lingering death through the smooth, routine operation of the right of compensation” (129). The French Revolution produced even more glaring contradictions. After the abolition of feudalism on August 4, 1789, advocates for the Third Estate suddenly began insisting that properties they would earlier have characterized as roturier were now noble: an all-too convenient volte-face given the elimination of feudal titles. Blaufarb shows that an elaborate Old Regime juridical culture of arbitration and compromise continued to shape contests over the land tax well into the early nineteenth century. The Napoleonic reaction removed the fight from the province of revolutionary politics and returned it to the absolutist judicial sphere.
The technical nature of the subject matter yields references to such things as the “preservative character of emphyteotic leases” (236), and Blaufarb sometimes hews a little too closely to the language and perspective of his sources. But this book brilliantly shows how litigation over fiscal privilege in early modern France “defined the channels through which the new revolutionary political culture flowed” (270).
