A History of Taxation in the Kingdom of France (Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries): Policies, Rules and Practices

Abstract

Since the end of the nineteenth century, significant work has focused on the history of taxation in France. The development of a royal tax system was the subject of renewed interest in the mid-twentieth century on the part of American historians. New perspectives were proposed in the 1990s that stressed the importance of the fiscal dimensions of the origins of the modern state (Jean-Philippe Genet: “a modern State is a State whose material basis is public taxation accepted by public society (on a wider territorial scale than the city-state) and which involves all subjects”). The historiography of taxation has experienced a revival for various territorial spaces and from various sources (royal legislation, writings of theologies and jurists, urban statutes, mirrors of princes, pragmatic writings, iconography, etc.). Among these possible complementary approaches (documentary, economic, political, social, religious, etc.), this chapter examines the normative and legal dimension of the royal and city taxes. Both were essential to the development of tax systems, with historian Bernard Chevalier presenting them as “concurrent and connected”. After recalling the major stages in the history of taxation in the kingdom of France, this chapter has two objectives. On the one hand, it specifies the place of taxes within princely and urban norms. Theologians questioned the tax at the end of the thirteenth century, while the right to tax and justifications for taxation were also of interest to lawyers. Potestas imponendi asserted itself in the context of the development of potestas statuendi. The king’s law and the urban statutes inform the right to tax. They benefited from scholarly reflection and the circulation of ideas. On the other hand, this chapter analyses the content of the tax norm more particularly in the cities in the south of the kingdom where policies and practices co-existed, making the city a “fiscal laboratory” in Albert Rigaudière’s words. Issues and techniques were expressed in relation to tax allocation and collection operations while debate and conflicts raised the question of the definition of the taxpayer.