Liberte, egalite, fiscalite: Taxation, privilege, and political culture in eighteenth-century France.

Abstract

In the past decade intellectual and cultural historians have associated the coming of the French Revolution with the formation of a new political culture under the old regime. Although they have succeeded in identifying and describing that culture, historians have been less successful in explaining why it emerged and how it developed. Bridging social and cultural history, this dissertation uses the problem of taxation to examine how transformations in the relationship between state and society helped to generate new and ultimately revolutionary political ideas and language. In its final century, the old regime monarchy radically altered its approach to social hierarchy by attempting to dismantle fiscal privilege and redistribute the burden of taxation more equally. The result of this project was mixed: the crown did manage--for the first time--to tax privileged elites, but it also increased taxes on commoners. This new distribution of taxation provoked severe disputes at all levels of society, and by exploring the discursive space in which those disputes unfolded, it is possible to observe changes in political culture. In an effort to resist the encroachments of the crown, superior courts of law, provincial estates, men of letters, and ordinary taxpayers each employed a distinct rhetoric of opposition that played on key themes of justice, liberty, natural law, and citizenship. As the issue of taxation became increasingly politicized, the language of dispute permeated the public sphere and encouraged royal subjects to reconceive their political existence. By 1789 the politics of taxation had galvanized two movements for revolutionary change. On the one hand, all taxpayers, nobles as well as commoners, sought to protect their liberty from what they saw as an overextended state by demanding representation in a constitutional government. On the other hand, the third estate and its allies radicalized this constitutional revolution by appropriating the language of taxation and representation and extending it to advance claims to political equality. In the end, it was the convergence of these two movements that gave the Revolution its extraordinary force.