Why were clergy and nobility exempt from taxes before the French Revolution?
How did the ancien régime justify its tax structure?
(“We have to hope that this game will soon end.” A peasant carries a prelate and a noble in a 1789 political cartoon; Wikimedia Commons)
This was a good question I received on r/AskHistorians, and one of my favorites to answer. It’s a common enough topic for a high school history class, and it let me delve a little into 18th century financial history, which is always fun (if you’re a big nerd like me). As the person who asked the question noted, it’s easy both morally and financially to justify a tax system that makes the rich pay more than the poor. They can afford to pay the money, and they have more money for the state to tax. Yet before the revolution, the French tax system worked the opposite way, granting exemptions from direct taxes to the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility) but not to the Third (everybody else). As I recall, textbooks tend to explain this as an unquestioned adherence to the medieval great chain of being, because why else would the French king allow aristocrats and the Church to amass wealth untaxed while trying to squeeze peasants out of all their sad little copper coins, King John in Robin Hood-style? Framing it this way makes it seem so blatantly unfair and illogical that the French Revolution looks inevitable in hindsight. While tradition had something to do with it, that reading misses the financial and political incentives that led the French kingdom’s tax system to operate this way, and it doesn’t explain why the Third Estate put up with this system all the way until 1789, both of which I tried to address in this answer.
Q: One of the characteristics of the tax structure in the Ancien Regime was that the nobility and clergy were exempted from paying most taxes, despite the fact that they enjoyed a disproportionate share of the benefits those taxes begat. It's commonly taught that this tax structure was one of the causes of the French Revolution, but one rarely hears about how it came to be and was justified.
Taxation under the Ancien Regime was obviously the exact opposite of the current prevailing method of progressive income taxation. There is an easy moral argument to be made in favor of progressive taxation (it is fair that those with more means should pay more taxes). What I am curious about is how the parliament justified the tax structure in the Ancien Regime. I can imagine the argument made in favor of exempting the clergy (men of God should be left to focus on spiritual matters and free from worldly concerns like taxes), but was there any moral, ethical or logical argument commonly made for exempting the nobility from paying taxes? Or did they not even bother with justifying the policies and just assumed that the lower classes would just do whatever they were told?
A: That's a great question. The story of the French Revolution is the story of people developing the language and politics to challenge an arbitrary and unfair system of privileges. Yet the privilege system had its own history, and there were both traditional and practical reasons for the nobility's exemption from taxes under the old regime.
Traditionally, medieval France was a threefold society, with each of the three orders contributing in their own way. The clergy prayed, the aristocrats fought, and the peasants worked. In short, the first two orders paid their dues to the king in other ways: the clergy prayed for the monarchy and tended to the people's souls, and the nobles spent their time training and fighting for the king on the battlefield. The Third Estate - everybody else - did the "actual" paying (which they usually paid "in kind" with agricultural produce rather than with coin). This seems like a pretty raw deal to us, but what is crucial to understand is that the system wasn't about fairness, but about a divine understanding of the world. The three orders reflected medieval Christian cosmology. Praying and fighting were both noble endeavors, so they counted for more than a peasant's labor. These were the symbolic reasons for tax exemptions and they remained central up until the end of the Old Regime - take a look at how the Parlement of Paris explained the tax system to King Louis XVI in 1776:
Every man in the kingdom is your subject, all are obliged to contribute to the needs of the State. But in this contribution one always finds order and harmony. The personal service of the clergy is to fulfill all the functions regarding instruction and religious worship, and to contribute to the relief of the unfortunate by means of its alms. The noble devotes his blood for the defense of the State and assists the sovereign with its council. The last class of the nation, which is not able to render such distinguished services to the State, discharges its duty to it through tributes, industry and physical work... These institutions are not those which chance has formed and that time can change.
Religion and politics were inseparable, but society did not always reflect this mythic interpretation of the world, and there were also more concrete, pragmatic reasons for tax exemptions. First of all, it was useful for the French monarchy to grant aristocrats with privileges because they ensured their obedience. Medieval France was a patchwork of different realms, and as the monarchy spread out from Paris and incorporated new provinces, it often granted their lords and residents with special privileges to secure their adhesion. Usually the king allowed places to preserve their traditional financial and administrative set-up. The system of financial exemptions was the glue that held France together. The nobles obeyed the king, and in turn he respected and protected their traditional rights. Similarly, we should note that these privileges extended beyond aristocrats, and could include the residents of a city, the members of a guild, or the members of a corporate body, such as the candle-makers of Paris, say. For example, the estates of Provence complained to King Louis XV in 1750 that a bevy of new taxes violated the ancient agreements between the province and the monarchy, "under the expressed conditions that the privileges, Liberties, conventions, Laws, Customs, rights, statutes, administration, and the way of life of the province would not be violated or infringed upon." Almost everybody outside the peasantry had at least some sort of special exemption or privilege. Although the traditional justification for not paying taxes was that aristocrats paid the nobler "blood tax" on the battlefield, the days of feudal knighthood were long gone by the 1700s, and many privileges were not feudal at all.
The monarchy also sold privileges. You could purchase an office in the state's administration, which would be inheritable and came with tax exemptions. The system of "venal offices" provided the monarchy with an army of functionaries, and in return provided the ambitious and wealthy a path to social mobility, perhaps even the purchase of an aristocratic title. Even more importantly, selling offices provided the monarchy with lump sums of cash. The privilege system essentially acted as a line of royal credit, and over time the monarchy sold more and more of these offices to pay for wars. By 1789 there were about 60,000 venal office holders in France. These "robe nobles" therefore provided a vital administrative and economic role which justified their privileges.
The hitch to the system of privileges was that France was locked into an arbitrary, complex, and inconsistent financial arrangement. It was very difficult to raise new taxes. Over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Bourbon monarchs had to raise universal taxes to pay for increasingly costly wars and a growing mountain of debt. These affected everyone, from dukes to peasants. These universal taxes were necessary to upholding the state, but at the same time they broke the traditional bonds which held the whole absolutist system together. The privileged orders were understandably unhappy, and called the new taxes into question - why should they have to pay taxes which they hadn't consented to? Hadn't they already paid their dues by serving in the military or in the administration? Ironically, these arguments meant to defend the system of privilege ended up calling it into question entirely. The king's privileged critics were advocating for a system of taxation based on consent and equality rather than on tradition. If the nobility was entitled to power over the taxes they paid, than shouldn't the vast majority of the French people who made up the Third Estate have a say too? And if everyone was expected to pitch in - as part of a nation they all held in common - than why should there be privileged orders at all?
Sources:
David Bien, "Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege Under the Ancien Regime," in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith Baker, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987: 89-114
Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Great overview. I've always thought that the "blood tax" argument was special pleading. After all, the men the nobles commanded on the battlefield also shed their blood.