The Failure of the French Revenue Farms, 1600–60¹

Standardizing the Fiscal State: Cabal Tax Farming as an Intermediate Institution in Early-Modern England and France

“…The first occurred in the aftermath of the failure of the Grand Parti de Lyon in 1559 and culminated in the unification of the gabelles taxes in 1578 and then again in 1598 so that by the middle of the seventeenth century there was a single salt tax for vast center of the country known as the Cinq Grosses Fermes. Similarly the royal Customs taxes (traites) were also consolidated for the Cinq Grosses Fermes in 1598 and the same thing was done for sales taxes (the aides) in 1604 (Bonney, 1979). By the first half of the seventeenth century, the tax farms were far more consolidated than in the previous century and, as a consequence, competitive auctions of the contracts played less of a role in their allocation.…”

“…farms became inconsistent with lending. Johnson (2006a), Bonney (1979), andBayard (1988) show that during the late sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth century, contracts on the tax farms were frequently breached. For example, between 1598 and 1655, only about a third of tax farm leases went for their entire contracted length.…”

“…A number of papers study the use of tax farming to overcome the costs of tax collection in the preindustrial world (see Bonney, 1979;Goldsmith, 1987;Kiser and Schneider, 1994;Kiser and Linton, 2001;Maurer and Gomberg, 2004;White, 2004;Allen, 2005Allen, , 2012Johnson, 2006a,b;Coşgel and Miceli, 2009;Balla and Johnson, 2009), and there is an extensive literature on how monarchs in early modern Europe struggled to secure access to credit (see North and Weingast, 1989;Root, 1989;Epstein, 2000;Drelichman and Voth, 2011a;Stasavage, 2011). However, this is the first paper to build a model that shows how these two processes were interconnected.…”