68 Chapter IV
“law” as the basis of authority, and they declared that certain fundamental laws, or
a certain constitution by which the royal and other powers were defined, already
existed in France. They forced a definition and justification of sovereign power.
They brought such key words as “citizen,” “nation,” “country,” and “natural and
imprescriptible rights” into the vocabulary of official debate. Increasingly they
claimed, hereditary and closed bodies though they were, to “represent” the French
people, and so raised the whole problem of the nature of political representation.
The royal enactments of 1763 were tax decrees.^3 One called for an indefinite
continuation of the vingtième, which had been expected to expire at the end of the
war. The vingtième was the most recent and modern tax of the French monarchy, in
principle a levy of a twentieth, or of one sou in the livre, of income, theoretically
paid on income from all property, in practice on income from ownership of land. It
was payable by nobles and commoners alike. The decree of 1763 also announced a
reassessment to ascertain real income as opposed to valuations currently on the tax
rolls. In France in the eighteenth century, as in the United States today, assess-
ments tended to become frozen or stereotyped, the difference being that the
mighty Bourbon monarchy lacked the flexibility in raising the rate that the small-
est American municipality enjoys. Another decree laid a one per cent tax on im-
meubles fictifs, “fictitious real property,” a legal term which included property in of-
fice. The parlementaires held their seats by virtue of property in office; as landowners
they benefited from low and obsolete assessments. The controller- general, Bertin,
justified the tax on offices by observing (like George Grenville explaining the
Stamp Act to the American colonies) that owing to the costs of the late war it was
necessary “to make sources that had not yet participated contribute to the public
burdens.”
The Parlements of Paris, Grenoble, Toulouse, and Rouen remonstrated strenu-
ously. Paris insisted that the vingtième be levied “on the now existing rolls, without
increase of valuation,” under penalty of prosecution by the courts.^4 Besides urging
the King to pay his debts without new taxes, and observing that half of what the
taxpayer paid never reached the treasury because of faulty administration, the Par-
lement of Paris added a long disquisition on the French constitution. It claimed
that in France there were fundamental laws, immutable by nature. By these laws
the parlement had the right to “verify” legislation, i.e., authenticate it before it
could take effect. By these same laws the King himself received his throne. To deny
these laws, the parlement ominously declared, “would be to shake the solidity of
the throne itself.” These “laws of the State” could not be violated without bringing
in doubt the very “power and authority of the said Lord King.” May it please God
3 For the parlementary crisis of the 1760’s see E. Glasson, Le Parlement de Paris: son role politique
depuis le règne de Charles VII jusqu’ à la Revolution (Paris, 1901), 11, 264–347; R· Bickart, Les parlements
et la notion de souveraineté nationale au 18e siècle (Paris, 1932); J. FIammermont, Remontrances du Par-
lement de Paris au 18e siècle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1898); J. Egret, Le parlement de Dauphini et les affaires pub-
liques (Grenoble and Paris, 1942), 1, 93–121, 252–287. There is a considerable literature on the other
provinces. Paul Beik, in A Judgment of the Old Regime (N.Y., 1944), a study of the Parlement of
Provence in the 1760’s, concentrates on their economic views (that the fiscal crisis was to be solved by
improvement of administration and productivity instead of new taxes) rather than their political ideas
or activities.
4 M. Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France (Paris, 1923), 557.