Elster Jon, Goldhammer Arthur. Tocqueville: The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution (ENG)
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Notes
25
According to the same presidial, which seems to have been animated
by extreme jealousy of the municipal corporation, and which I strongly
suspect found fault with the town constitution only to the extent that it
deemed its own privileges insufcient, “the general assembly, which is
too large and made up in part of not very intelligent individuals, should
be consulted only in cases involving alienation of the communal estate,
loans, establishment of tariffs, and election of municipal ofcers. All
other affairs could be deliberated in a smaller assembly, composed solely
of notables. Membership in this assembly could be limited to the lieu-
tenant general of police, the royal prosecutor, and twelve other notables
chosen from six corporations – the clergy, the magistracy, the nobility,
the university, commerce, and the bourgeoisie – and others not belonging
to said corporations. The choice of notables could be left initially to the
general assembly and subsequently to the assembly of notables or to the
corporation from which each notable is to be drawn.”
All these state ofcials, who joined the municipal corporations of the
Ancien Régime as owners of ofces or notables, resembled the ofcials of
today as to the titles of the functions they exercised, and sometimes even
the nature of those functions, but differed profoundly as to position – a
circumstance to which careful attention must always be paid in order to
avoid drawing erroneous conclusions. Nearly all were, in fact, notables of
the city before being invested with public functions, or else they coveted
public functions in order to become notables. They had no idea of leav-
ing their ofces and no hope of rising to higher positions, and, because
of these two facts alone, they were quite different from the ofcials with
whom we are familiar today.
Report of municipal ofcials. From the report, we learn that the munic-
ipal corporation was created by Louis XI in 44 on the ruins of the
town’s old democratic constitution, and already on the model described
previously, in that most political rights were limited to the middle class,
the popular element was excluded or enfeebled, the number of ofcials
was large so that more people would have a stake in the reform, and the
segment of the bourgeoisie that took part in town administration was
rewarded with lavish grants of hereditary nobility and privileges of
all sorts.
The same report contains letters patent issued by Louis XI’s succes-
sors, who recognized the new constitution and further restricted the
power of the people. We learn that in 45, letters patent issued for that
purpose by Charles VIII were attacked before parlement by residents of
Notes
26
Angers, in exactly the same way that one might bring suit in an English
court if a dispute arose involving a town charter in England. In 60, it
was again a decree of parlement that dened the political rights created
by the royal charter. From that time on, however, the report refers only
to the King’s Council.
The report reveals that not just the position of mayor but all other
positions in the municipal corporation were lled by the king, who chose
from among three candidates presented by the general assembly under
the provisions of a council decree of June 22, 3. It is also revealed
that in virtue of council decrees of 33 and 4, the merchants of the
town had the right to a post of alderman or councilor (as the permanent
aldermen were known). Finally, we learn that in those days, the munici-
pal corporation was charged with apportioning the amounts to be raised
from the capitation, military equipment tax, military lodging tax, and
assessments for poor relief, troops, coast guards, and foundlings.
This is followed by a very long list of the duties of municipal ofcials,
which in their eyes fully justied their privileges and life tenure – favors
that we can see they were very afraid of losing. Several of the justications
they gave of their activities are rather odd, including this one: “Their
most essential occupation is to audit the ever more numerous nancial
issues connected with the constant expansion of sales taxes, salt taxes,
stamp and registry fees, illegally collected registry fees, and francs-efs.
Because the activities of the nancial companies provoke constant chal-
lenges to the various taxes, town ofcials have been forced to argue cases
on behalf of the town before various jurisdictions, including parlement
and the King’s Council, in order to resist the oppression to which they
have been subjected. Thirty years’ experience and service have taught
them that a lifetime is scarcely sufcient to learn to avoid the traps and
pitfalls that the various agents of the tax farms are forever putting in the
way of citizens in order to preserve their commissions.”
What is curious is that all these things were written to the comptroller
general himself, to win his favor for maintaining the privileges of those
who wrote them, so habituated were they to viewing the companies
charged with collecting taxes as an adversary that could be attacked from
every angle without raising anyone’s hackles. As this habit spread and
gained in intensity, it ultimately cast the royal treasury itself in the light
of an odious and deceitful tyrant – not the agent of all but everyone’s
common enemy.
Notes
2
The report continues: “All ofces were combined in the municipal
corporation for the rst time by a council decree of Sept. 4, 64, in
exchange for a sum of 22,000 livres,” meaning that the ofces were then
redeemed for that sum. By a decree of April 26, 23, the municipal
ofces created by the edict of May 24, 22, were added to the town
corporation. In other words, the town was allowed to purchase them. Yet
another decree, of May 24, 23, allowed the town to borrow 20,000
livres to acquire the aforementioned ofces. Another decree of July 26,
2, allowed the town to borrow 50,000 livres to purchase the ofces of
the town registrar and secretary. According to the report, “the town paid
these sums to preserve its free elections and ensure that its elected of-
cials could enjoy the various prerogatives associated with their ofces for
two years in some cases and for life in others.” Because some municipal
ofces were reestablished by the edict of November 33, the council, at
the request of the mayor and aldermen, issued a decree on January ,
35, whereby the redemption price was set at 0,000 livres, for the pay-
ment of which the town was permitted to extend the collection of local
customs duties for a period of fteen years.
This is a fair sample of town administration in the Ancien Régime.
Towns were induced to take on debt and then authorized to levy special
temporary taxes to liquidate that debt. And then later these temporary
taxes were made permanent, as I frequently discovered, and the central
government, of course, claimed its share.
The report continues: “Town ofcials were not deprived of the impor-
tant judicial powers granted to them by Louis XI until royal courts were
established. Before 6 they had jurisdiction over disputes between
masters and workers. An accounting of local customs fees was delivered
to the intendant, as specied in all the decrees creating and extending
such fees.”
The report also shows that the deputies of the sixteen parishes
discussed earlier, who participated in the general assembly, were chosen
by companies, guilds, and communities and were strictly representatives
of the group that chose them. They received binding instructions on
every issue.
Finally, the entire report demonstrates that in Angers as everywhere
else, expenditures of any kind had to be authorized by the intendant
and council. Clearly, when the administration of a town is given to cer-
tain individuals as their own property, and those men, instead of being
Notes
2
remunerated for their services in specied amounts, are granted privi-
leges that exempt them personally from any consequences that their
administration may have on the private fortunes of their fellow citizens,
administrative oversight may be seen as a necessity.
The whole report, besides being badly done, reveals an extraordinary
fear on the part of ofcials of seeing any change in the existing state of
affairs. They advance a host of reasons, both good and bad, in the interest
of maintaining the status quo.
The subdelegate’s report. The intendant, after receiving these two
contradictory reports, sought the advice of his subdelegate. He, too, pre-
pared a report.
“The municipal councilors’ report is not worth dwelling on,” he wrote.
“Its only purpose is to justify the privileges these ofcials enjoy. The
report of the presidial contains useful information, but there is no reason
to grant these magistrates all the prerogatives they are asking for.”
According to this subdelegate, the town’s constitution had long been
in need of improvement. In addition to the immunities with which we
are already familiar and which the municipal ofcials of Angers pos-
sessed, he tells us that the mayor, while in ofce, was entitled to housing
worth at least 600 francs in rent, plus 50 francs in salary and 00 francs
in franking privileges, plus attendance fees. The prosecutor syndic also
received housing, as did the town clerk. In order to exempt themselves
from sales taxes and local customs fees, an estimated level of consump-
tion was established for each municipal ofcial. Each of them was entitled
to import so many barrels of wine per year without paying any fees, and
the same privilege applied to all other items of consumption.
The subdelegate did not propose that municipal councilors be deprived
of their tax exemptions, but he did suggest that the intendant set the
amount of their capitation each year instead of leaving it xed at a very
inadequate level. He also felt that the same ofcials should be subject,
as other citizens were, to the “free gift,” from which they had exempted
themselves on the basis of who knows what precedent.
The report further states that municipal ofcials are responsible for
drawing up the capitation rolls for the town’s inhabitants. Because they
are careless and arbitrary in performing this task, the intendant is annu-
ally besieged with a large number of claims and petitions for relief. It
would be desirable if, in the future, this assessment were made by the
members of each company or community in their own interest and in
Notes
2
accordance with xed general rules. Municipal ofcials would retain
responsibility only for assessing the capitation of bourgeois and others
who are not members of any organized body, such as certain artisans and
the domestic servants of all the privileged.
The subdelegate’s report conrmed what the municipal ofcials had
already said: that the town had redeemed its municipal ofces in 35 for
the sum of 0,000 livres.
Letter from the intendant to the comptroller general. With all these docu-
ments in hand, the intendant wrote to the minister. “It is important,” he
said, “for the sake of the residents and the public good to reduce the size
of the municipal corporation, whose superuity of members is an enor-
mous burden on the public owing to the privileges they enjoy.”
“I am struck,” he added, “by the enormous sums that were paid at
various times to redeem Anger’s municipal ofces. Had these sums been
put to productive use, they would have redounded to the prot of the
town, which instead has felt only the burden of authority and of the privi-
leges of these ofcials.”
“The internal abuses of this administration deserve the council’s full
attention,” the intendant went on. “Apart from attendance fees and the
candle allowance, which consume an annual total of 2,2 livres [this
was the sum indicated for these types of expenses in the normal budget,
which the king periodically imposed on the towns], public monies have
been wasted and put to clandestine uses at the whim of these ofcials,
and the royal prosecutor, who has owned his ofce for the past thirty
or forty years, so dominates the administration, whose inner workings
only he knows, that the residents have been unable at any time to obtain
the slightest information about the use of the communal revenues.” The
intendant therefore asked the minister to reduce the town council to a
mayor who would serve for four years, six aldermen who would serve six
years, a royal prosecutor who would serve eight years, and a clerk and tax
collector, who would serve permanently.
What is more, the same intendant proposed the same constitution for
the town of Tours. In his view, the following steps were necessary:
. Preserve the general assembly, but only as an electoral body charged
with electing the municipal ofcials;
2. Create an extraordinary council of notables, which would have to ful-
ll all the functions that the edict of 64 appeared to assign to the
Notes
220
general assembly. This council was to consist of twelve members, who
would be elected for a term of six years not by the general assembly
but by the twelve so-called notable bodies (each body electing its own
representative). He listed the following notable bodies:
The presidial.
The university.
The élection [which conducted annual visitations of each locality to
ensure fair assessment of taxes].
The ofcials of the Department of Waters and Forests.
The salt warehouse.
The tax collectors.
The mint.
The attorneys and prosecutors.
The judge consuls.
The notaries.
The merchants.
The bourgeois.
Clearly, nearly all these notables were public ofcials, and all public of-
cials were notables, from which it follows, as is also clear from a thousand
other places in the records, that the middle class was as avid for public
ofce then as it is today, and as little inclined to look elsewhere for its live-
lihood. The only difference, as I wrote in the text, was that then people
purchased what little importance such jobs could confer, whereas today’s
job seekers ask to be given it free of charge.
This proposal makes it clear that all real municipal power lay with the
extraordinary council, which allowed a very small bourgeois coterie to
capture the town government. The only assembly in which common peo-
ple still had a voice had no function other than to elect municipal ofcials
and was no longer permitted to offer those ofcials its advice. Note, too,
that the intendant was more restrictive and antipopular than the king,
who seemed in his edict to bestow the main functions of government
on the general assembly, while the intendant was much more liberal and
democratic than the bourgeoisie, to judge at least by the report that I
cited in the text, a report in which the notables of another town sought to
exclude the people even from the election of municipal ofcials, a power
that the king and intendant were willing to grant.
The reader will have noticed that the intendant uses the terms bour-
geois and merchants to refer to distinct categories of notables. It is
Notes
22
perhaps worth pausing to give precise denitions of these two words in
order to show how the bourgeoisie was sliced up into many small pieces
and vexed by many small vanities.
The word bourgeois had a general meaning and a more narrow
meaning: it indicated members of the middle class, and, in addition, it
designated a certain group of people within that class. “The bourgeois
are those enabled by birth and fortune to live decently without engaging
in gainful employment,” according to one of the reports generated by
the survey of 64. The remainder of the report shows that “bourgeois”
was not meant to apply to anyone who was a member of an industrial
company or guild, but to say precisely to whom it did apply is more dif-
cult. “For,” the same report notes, “among those who claimed the title of
bourgeois, one often nds individuals to whom it applies solely by virtue
of their idleness, while in other respects they are without fortune and
leading uncultivated, obscure lives. By contrast, the bourgeois should
always be distinguished by fortune, birth, talents, manners, and way of
life. The artisans who make up the guilds have never enjoyed the rank of
notables.”
In addition to the bourgeois, the merchants were a second type of
person who did not belong to either a company or guild. But what were
the limits of this tiny class? The report continues: “Should we classify
merchants of low birth and retail commerce along with wholesalers?”
To resolve these difculties, the report proposed having the aldermen
draw up a list of notable merchants every year, which list would then be
given to their leader or syndic so that he might invite only those included
therein to join in deliberations at the town hall. Care would be taken to
ensure that this list would not include any domestic servants, peddlers,
carters, or others engaged in lowly trades.
Page 50, line 20
One of the most prominent characteristics of eighteenth-century town
government was not so much the abolition of all public representation
and intervention in town affairs as it was the extreme variability of the
rules to which such government was subjected, because powers were
granted, rescinded, restored, increased, reduced, and modied in a myr-
iad of ways, and constantly. There is no better indication of how debased
these local liberties had become than the perpetual uidity of the law,
to which no one seems to have paid attention. This uidity alone would
have sufced to preclude any distinctive local ideas, any attachment to the
Notes
222
past, and any local patriotism in the institution that was most apt to foster
these things. This laid the groundwork for the vast destruction of the past
that the Revolution would carry out.
Page 50, line 2
a v
i L L a G e Go v e r n m e n t i n t h e ei G h t e e n t h ce n t u r y , dr a w n
f r o m t h e Pa P e r s o f t h e in t e n d a n c y o f L’ÎL e -d e -fr a n c e
The affair of which I am about to speak was chosen from among many
others as an example of some of the forms adopted by parish administra-
tions, in order to understand why the workings of parish government
were often so slow and to show what the general assembly of a parish
looked like in the eighteenth century.
The issue was one of repairing the rectory and steeple of a rural church
in Ivry, Île-de-France. To whom could one turn to get such repairs done?
How was the apportionment of expenditures determined? How was the
necessary sum to be raised?
. The parish priest petitioned the intendant, informing him that the
steeple and rectory were in urgent need of repair, and that his prede-
cessor, having attached useless additions to the rectory, had completely
altered and deformed it, so that it was up to the residents of the village,
who had allowed this to be done, to bear the cost of putting things
back in order, unless they could collect the sum from the heirs of the
previous priest.
2. His Excellency the intendant issued an order (on August 2, 4)
instructing the syndic to convene a general assembly to deliberate on
the need for the requested repairs.
3. The residents, upon due deliberation, declared that they were not
opposed to repairing the rectory but were opposed to repairing the
steeple, which stood above the choir, and the priest, as the recipient
of the tithe, was responsible for repairs to the choir. [A council decree
from the end of the previous century (April 65) did indeed assign
responsibility for repairs to the choir to the person entitled to the par-
ish tithe, the parishioners themselves being responsible only for the
maintenance of the nave.]
4. A new order from the intendant, who, in view of the contradictory facts
of the case, sent an architect, Sieur Cordier, to inspect the rectory and
steeple, prepare an estimate of needed repairs, and conduct an inquiry.
5. A report of these efforts indicated that a number of people who owned
land in Ivry appeared before the representative of the intendant. Among
Notes
223
them were apparently nobles, bourgeois, and peasants of the village,
who wished to go on record either for or against the priest’s claims.
. [sic] A further order from the intendant indicated that the estimates
of repairs drawn up by the architect representing him should be pre-
sented to a new general assembly of landowners and residents, to be
convened by the syndic.
. A new parish assembly was convened as a result of this order, during
which the residents stood by what they had said previously.
. An order issued by His Excellency the intendant prescribed the fol-
lowing: ) that contracts should be awarded for the work indicated in
the estimates, with the award to be made by his subdelegate in Corbeil,
at his ofcial residence, in the presence of the priest, syndic, and prin-
cipal residents of the parish, and 2) that in view of the fact that the
church was in danger of collapse, a tax would be levied on all the resi-
dents, except that those who continued to believe that the steeple was
part of the choir and should be repaired by the recipient of the tithe
would be allowed to appeal this decision before the regular courts.
0. All parties were summoned to the home of the subdelegate in Corbeil
for an auction and award of contracts.
. The parish priest and several residents petitioned that the fees for
the administrative procedure not be assigned to the contractor, as
would normally be the case, because these fees were very high and
would make it impossible to nd a contractor.
2. The intendant ordered that the fees incurred in the award of the
contract be reckoned by the subdelegate, so that this amount might
be included in the contract fee and tax.
3. Certain notable residents granted Sieur X the power to attend the
award of the contract and give his consent in keeping with the archi-
tect’s estimates.
4. The syndic certied that the usual announcements and advertise-
ments had been made.
5. A copy of the contract:
Amount of repairs to be done ………………… 4 l.
Expenses incurred in awarding the contract .. 23 l. s. 6 d.
6. Finally, a council decree was issued (on July 23, 4) authorizing a
tax to cover this sum.
The reader may have noticed that the parish assembly was convened sev-
eral times in the course of this procedure. Here are the minutes of one
Notes
224
of these assemblies, as an example of how such meetings were generally
conducted. It is a notarized document:
Today, at the conclusion of the parish mass, in the usual and custom-
ary place, after the ringing of the bell, there appeared in the assembly
convened by the residents of said parish, in the presence of X, notary
of Corbeil, undersigned, and the witnesses named hereafter, Sieur
Michaud, vintner, syndic of said parish, who had the intendant’s
order read to the assembly and commanded that its instructions be
complied with.
At this point a resident of said parish appeared, who stated that the
steeple was erected above the choir and therefore the responsibility
of the priest. Several others also appeared [and the names of several
other individuals prepared to grant the priest’s request were duly
noted].… Then fteen peasants, laborers, masons, and vintners came
forward in support of what the previous witnesses had said. Sieur
Rambaud, vintner, also appeared, and said that he was entirely pre-
pared to accept whatever His Excellency the intendant decided. Sieur
X, doctor of the Sorbonne and priest, also appeared and maintained
what he had previously stated and requested in his petition. Of which,
as of all the foregoing, those in attendance took note. Done and heard
at Ivry, opposite the cemetery of said parish, in the presence of the
undersigned, who was engaged in the drafting of the present docu-
ment from in the morning until 2 in the afternoon.
We see that this parish assembly was nothing but an administrative
inquiry but with the formalities and costs of a judicial inquiry. It never
resulted in a vote and thus in an expression of the will of the parish. It
included only individual opinions and in no way constrained the will of the
government. Indeed, we know from many other documents that the parish
assembly was intended to inform the intendant’s decision, not to block it,
even though the issue involved only the interests of the parish itself.
The same documents tell us that this affair resulted in three separate
inquiries: one before the notary, another before the architect, and a third
before two notaries in order to determine whether or not the residents
stood by their previous statements.
The tax of 524 livres 0 sous imposed by the decree of July 23, 4,
was to be borne by all property owners, privileged and nonprivileged
alike, as was almost always the case in expenditures of this sort, but the
basis used to determine the share of each group was different. Those
subject to the taille were taxed in proportion to their taille, while the