The Ancient Regime. Taine Hippolyte
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seventy-five curacies and confers ten male canonships. It appoints the municipal officers of the town, and, besides these, three lower and higher courts, and everywhere the officials in the jurisdiction over woods and forests. Thirty-two bishops, without counting the chapters, are thus temporal seigniors, in whole or in part, of their episcopal town, sometimes of the surrounding district, and sometimes, like the bishop of St. Claude, of the entire country. Here the feudal tower has been preserved. Elsewhere it is plastered over anew, and more particularly in the appanages. In these domains, comprising more than twelve of our departments, the princes of the blood appoint to all offices in the judiciary and to all clerical livings. Being substitutes of the king they enjoy his serviceable and honorary rights. They are almost delegated kings, and for life; for they not only receive all that the king would receive as seignior, but again a portion of that which he would receive as monarch. For example, the house of Orleans collects the excises,1222 that is to say the duty on liquors, on works in gold or silver, on manufactures of iron, on steel, on cards, on paper and starch, in short, on the entire sum-total of one of the most onerous indirect taxes. It is not surprising, if, having a nearly sovereign situation, they have a council, a chancellor, an organized debt, a court,1223 a domestic ceremonial system, and that the feudal edifice in their hands should put on the luxurious and formal trappings which it had assumed in the hands of the king.
Let us turn to its inferior personages, to a seignior of medium rank, on his square league of ground, amidst the thousand inhabitants who were formerly his villeins or his serfs, within reach of the monastery, or chapter, or bishop whose rights intermingle with his rights. Whatever may have been done to abase him his position is still very high. He is yet, as the intendants say, "the first inhabitant;" a prince whom they have half despoiled of his public functions and consigned to his honorary and available rights, but who nevertheless remains a prince.1224—He has his bench in the church, and his right of sepulture in the choir; the tapestry bears his coat of arms; they bestow on him incense, "holy water by distinction." Often, having founded the church, he is its patron, choosing the curate and claiming to control him; in the rural districts we see him advancing or retarding the hour of the parochial mass according to his fancy. If he bears a title he is supreme judge, and there are entire provinces, Maine and Anjou, for example, where there is no fief without the judge. In this case he appoints the bailiff; the registrar, and other legal and judicial officers, attorneys, notaries, seigniorial sergeants, constabulary on foot or mounted, who draw up documents or decide in his name in civil and criminal cases on the first trial. He appoints, moreover, a forest-warden, or decides forest offenses, and enforces the penalties, which this officer inflicts. He has his prison for delinquents of various kinds, and sometimes his forked gibbets. On the other hand, as compensation for his judicial costs, he obtains the property of the man condemned to death and the confiscation of his estate. He succeeds to the bastard born and dying in his seigniory without leaving a testament or legitimate children. He inherits from the possessor, legitimately born, dying intestate in his house without apparent heirs. He appropriates to himself movable objects, animate or inanimate, which are found astray and of which the owner is unknown; he claims one-half or one-third of treasure-trove, and, on the coast, he takes for himself the waif of wrecks. And finally, what is more fruitful, in these times of misery, he becomes the possessor of abandoned lands that have remained untilled for ten years. Other advantages demonstrate still more clearly that he formerly possessed the government of the canton. Such are, in Auvergne, in Flanders, in Hainaut, in Artois, in Picardy, Alsace, and Lorraine, the dues de poursoin ou de sauvement (care or safety within the walls of a town), paid to him for providing general protection. The dues of de guet et de garde (watch and guard), claimed by him for military protection; of afforage, are exacted of those who sell beer, wine and other beverages, whole-sale or retail. The dues of fouage, dues on fires, in money or grain, which, according to many common-law systems, he levies on each fireside, house or family. The dues of pulvérage, quite common in Dauphiny and Provence, are levied on passing flocks of sheep. Those of the lods et ventes (lord's due), an almost universal tax, consist of the deduction of a sixth, often of a fifth or even a fourth, of the price of every piece of ground sold, and of every lease exceeding nine years. The dues for redemption or relief are equivalent to one year's income, aid that he receives from collateral heirs, and often from direct heirs. Finally, a rarer due, but the most burdensome of all, is that of acapte ou de plaid-a-merci, which is a double rent, or a year's yield of fruits, payable as well on the death of the seignior as on that of the copyholder. These are veritable taxes, on land, on movables, personal, for licenses, for traffic, for mutations, for successions, established formerly on the condition of performing a public service which he is no longer obliged to perform.
Other dues are also ancient taxes, but he still performs the service for which they are a quittance. The king, in fact, suppresses many of the tolls, twelve hundred in 1724, and the suppression is kept up. A good many still remain to the profit of the seignior—on bridges, on highways, on fords, on boats ascending or descending, several being very lucrative, one of them producing 90,000 livres1225. He pays for the expense of keeping up bridge, road, ford and towpath. In like manner, on condition of maintaining the market-place and of providing scales and weights gratis, he levies a tax on provisions and on merchandise brought to his fair or to his market.—At Angoulême a forty-eighth of the grain sold, at Combourg near Saint-Malo, so much per head of cattle, elsewhere so much on wine, eatables and fish1226 Having formerly built the oven, the winepress, the mill and the slaughterhouse, he obliges the inhabitants to use these or pay for their support, and he demolishes all constructions, which might enter into competition with him1227. These, again, are evidently monopolies and octrois going back to the time when he was in possession of public authority.
Not only did he then possess the public authority but also possessed the soil and the men on it. Proprietor of men, he is so still, at least in many respects and in many provinces. "In Champagne proper, in the Sénonais, in la Marche, in the Bourbonnais, in the Nivernais, in Burgundy, in Franche-Comté, there are none, or very few domains, no signs remaining of ancient servitude. … A good many personal serfs, or so constituted through their own gratitude, or that of their progenitors, are still found."1228 There, man is a serf, sometimes by virtue of his birth, and again through a territorial condition. Whether in servitude, or as mortmains, or as cotters, one way or another, 1,500,000 individuals, it is said, wore about their necks a remnant of the feudal collar; this is not surprising since, on the other side of the Rhine, almost all the peasantry still wear it. The seignior, formerly master and proprietor of all their goods and chattels and of all their labor, can still exact of them from ten to twelve corvées per annum and a fixed annual tax. In the barony of Choiseul near Chaumont in Champagne, "the inhabitants are required to plow his lands, to sow and reap them for his account and to put the products into his barns. Each plot of ground, each house, every head of cattle pays a quit-claim; children may inherit from their parents only on condition of remaining with them; if absent at the time of their decease he is the inheritor." This is what was styled in the language of the day an estate "with excellent dues."—Elsewhere the seignior inherits from collaterals, brothers or nephews, if they were not in community with the defunct at the moment of his death, which community is only valid through his consent. In the Jura and the Nivernais, he may pursue fugitive serfs, and demand, at their death, not only the property left by them on his domain, but, again, the pittance acquired by them elsewhere. At Saint-Claude he acquires this right over any person that passes a year and a day in a house belonging to the seigniory. As to ownership of the soil we see still more clearly that he once had entire possession of it. In the district subject to his jurisdiction the public domain remains his private domain; roads, streets and open squares form a part of it; he has the right to plant trees in them and to take trees up. In many provinces, through a pasturage rent, he obliges the inhabitants to pay for permits to pasture their cattle in the fields after the crop, and in the open common lands, (les terres