820 Appendix V
versal in Massachusetts, less common but not uncommon in France, and increas-
ingly rare in England.
The accompanying table converts all property qualifications into dollars. The
first United States dollars were authorized and defined in 1792, and the error will
not be too great if we assume that a dollar of 1792 equaled five Massachusetts shil-
lings of 1780, four English shillings, and five French livres. The money value of a
day’s unskilled labor in France, for determination of electoral qualifications, was set
locally according to local conditions, but, by a ruling of the Constituent Assembly,
it could nowhere be set for this purpose at less than half a livre or more than one
livre per day. A tax of “three days’ wages” thus meant a tax of between 1½ and 3
livres. In 1791 the Assembly replaced various old taxes with a direct tax of
300,000,000 livres on real and personal property, or rather on the income from
such property— land, farm equipment, business property, mechanics’ tools, etc. The
average mean incidence of this tax was thus about 12 livres per capita, or, assuming
as many as 6,000,000 taxpayers, about 50 livres per taxpayer; and, while this gives
no indication whatever of the distribution of property, it suggests that the livre of
taxes required for active citizenship, or the 5 to 10 livres required for electors, were
not actually very high. Indeed, even the marc d’argent, or the 54 livre tax required
to qualify as a national deputy, and which aroused such controversy, was not far in
amount from the probable mean average tax; according to one estimate expressed
in the Assembly on August 12, 1791, about 60,000 to 80,000 persons paid a direct
tax of at least a marc d’argent. One is led to conclude, if the total of men over 25
was about 6,500,000, that almost seventy of them in a hundred had the vote, about
fifty in a hundred could serve as electors, and one in a hundred could qualify as a
national deputy, before August 1791.
It is certain that the Constituent Assembly wished to reduce and screen the di-
rect impact of the mass of the population upon government; but only from a mod-
ern Marxist point of view can its work be meaningfully described as predomi-
nantly bourgeois; nor did Jaurès himself so describe it. Whatever the high hopes of
early democrats, political democracy seems to work best when little more is asked
of the voter than to pause briefly at a convenient polling place and mark his choice
among candidates on a ballot prepared beforehand. This requires a complex system
of decentralized polling places, and organized political parties which draw up lists
of candidates for the voter. Neither existed in any country in 1791. It was necessary
for voters to meet in assemblies where the names of candidates could be proposed
and their merits discussed. The electoral arrangements made by the Constituent
Assembly must be explained by mechanical and administrative needs as well as by
political objectives.