strong horses dragging their vehicles and alternately helping each other, their horses hauling their carts out of ruts into which they had got stuck . . . In many places, I was grieved to see carts and wagons leaving the high-road and traversing, in spaces from 100 to 200 yards wide, the plowed ground, when each made his own road . . . . The carters sometimes make only three or four leagues from morning to night.” – Hence, a dearth of provisions at Brest. “We are assured that the people have long been on half-rations, or even quarter rations.” – And yet, ” There is now in the river, at Nantes, from four to five hundred boats loaded with grain; they have been there for months, and their number increases daily. Their cargoes are deteriorating and becoming damaged.”
[5] Ibid., preface and summary, p.41 (on the dikes and works of protection against inundations at Dol in Brittany, at Fréjus, in Camargue, in Lower Rhine, in Nord, in Pas-de-Calais, at Ostende and Blankenberg, at Rochefort, at La Rochelle, etc.). At Blankenberg, a gale sufficed to carry away the dike and let in the sea. “The dread of some disaster which would ruin a large portion of the departments of the Lys and of the Escaut kept the inhabitants constantly in a state of frightful anxiety.”
[6] Hence the additional centimes to the tax on doors and windows, the number of which indicates approximately the value of the rent. Hence also the additional centimes to the personal tax, which is proportionate to the rent, this being considered as the most exact indication of domestic expenditure.
[7] Hence the communal “additional centimes” to the tax on business licenses.
[8] Hence the ” additional centimes” to the land tax.
[9] Today, in 1999, we may in Denmark observe how the contemporary oligarchy of non-violent Jacobins, have transformed the local authorities into tools of the central government which through an all permeating administration, has replaced the authority of the father and the solidarity of the family with a communal care and supervision.(SR.).
[10] Syndicates of this kind are instituted by the law of June 25, 1865, “between proprietors interested in the execution and maintenance of public works: 1st, Protection against the sea, inundations, torrents, and navigable or non-navigable rivers; 2d, Works in deepening, repairing, and regulating canals and non-navigable water- courses, and ditches for draining and irrigation; 3d, Works for the drainage of marshes; 4th, Locks and other provisions necessary in working salt marshes; 5th, Drainage of wet and unhealthy ground.” – “Proprietors interested in the execution of the above-mentioned works may unite in an authorized syndical company, either on the demand of one or of several among them, or on the initiative of the prefect.” – (Instead of authorized, we must read forced, and we then find that the association may be imposed on all interested parties, on the demand of one alone, or even without any one’s demand.) – Like the Annecy building, these syndicates enable one to reach the fundamental element of local society. Cf. the law of September 26, 1807 (on the drainage of marshes), and the law of April 21, 1810 (on mines and the two owners of the mine, one of the surface and the other of the subsoil, both likewise partners, and no less forcibly so through physical solidarity.)
[11] See “The Revolution,” vol. I., passim. (Ed. Laff. I. pp. 315- 445).
[12] Two kinds of police must be distinguished one from the other. The first is general and belongs to the State: its business is to repress and prevent, outside and inside, all aggression against private and public property. The second is municipal, and belongs to the local society: its business is to see to the proper use of the public roads, and other matters, which, like water, air, and light, are enjoyed in common; it undertakes, also, to forestall the risks and dangers of imprudence, negligence, and filth, which any aggregation of men never fails to engender. The provinces of these two police forces join and penetrate each other at many points; hence, each of the two is the auxiliary, and, if need be, the substitute of the other.
[13] Rocquain, “l’État de la France au 18 Brumaire,” passim.
[14] Raynouard, “Histoire du droit municipal,”II., 356, and Dareste, “Histoire de l’administration en France,” I., 209, 222. (Creation of the posts of municipal mayor and assessors by the king, in 1692, for a money consideration.) “These offices were obtained by individuals, along with hereditary title, now attached to communities, that is to say, bought in by these,” which put in their possession the right of election. – The king frequently took back these offices which he had sold, and sold them over again. In 1771, especially, he takes them back, and, it seems, to keep them forever; but he always reserves the right of alienating them for money. For example (Augustin Thierry, “Documens sur l’histoire du tiers État,” III., 319), an act of the royal council, dated October 1, 1772, accepts 70,000 francs from the town of Amiens for the repurchase of the installment of its magistracies, and defining these magistracies, as well as the mode of election according to which the future incumbents shall be appointed. Provence frequently bought back its municipal liberties in the same fashion, and, for a hundred years, expended for this purpose 12,500,000 livres. In 1772, the king once more established the venality of the municipal offices: but, on the Parliament of Aix remonstrating, in 1774, he returned their old rights and franchises to the communities. – Cf. Guyot, “Répertoire de jurisprudence” (1784), articles, Echevins, Capitouls, Conseillers.
[15] Thibaudeau, p.72 (words of the First Consul at a meeting of the Council of State, Pluviôse 14, year X).
[16] Roederer, III., 439 (Note of Pluviôse 28, year VIII), ib., 443 “The pretended organic sénatus-consulte of Aug. 4, 1802, put an end to notability by instituting electoral colleges. . . The First Consul was really recognized as the grand-elector of the notability,”
[17] Any dictator or dictator’s draftsman will, upon reading this understand how easy it is to make a sham constitution and sham electoral systems for a de facto dictatorship.(SR.)
[18] Thibaudeau, 72, 289 (words of the First Consul at a meeting of the Council of State, Thermidor 16, year X).
[19] Ibid., p. 293. Sénatus-consulte of Thermidor 16, year X, and of Fructidor 19, year X.
[20] Decree of January 17, 1806, article 40.
[21] Aucoc, ” Conférence sur l’administration et le droit administratif,” §§ 101, 162, 165. In our legislative system the council of the arrondissement has not become a civil personality, while it has scarcely any other object than to apportion direct taxes among the communes of the arrondissement
[22] Sénatus-consulte of Thermidor 16, year X.
[23] Decree of May 13, 1806, title III., article 32.
[24] Thibaudeau, ibid., 294 (Speech of the First Consul to the Council of State, Thermidor 16, year X). “What has become of the men of the Revolution? Once out of place, they have been entirely neglected: they have nothing left; they have no support, no natural refuge. Look at Barras, Reubell, etc.” The electoral colleges are to furnish them with the asylum they lack. “Now is the time to elect the largest number of men of the Revolution; the longer we wait, the fewer there will be. . . . With the exception of some of them, who have appeared on a grand stage, . . . who have signed some treaty of peace . . . the rest are all isolated and in obscurity. That is an important gap which must be filled up . . . . It is for this reason that I have instituted the Legion of Honor.”
[25] Baron de Vitrolles, “Memoires,” preface, XXI. Comte de Villèle, “Memoires et Correspondance,” I., 189 (August, 1807).
[26] Faber, “Notice sur l’intérieur de la France” (1807), p.25.
[27] Supporters of the Sovereign king or of the legitimate royal dynasty. (SR.)
[28] The following document shows the sense and aim of the change, which goes on after the year VIII, also the contrast between both administrative staffs. (Archives Nationales, F 7, 3219; letter of M. Alquier to the First Consul, Pluviose 18, year VIII.) M. Alquier, on his way to Madrid, stops at Toulouse and sends a report to the authorities of Haute-Garonne: “I was desirous of seeing the central administration. I found there the ideas and language of 1793. Two personages, Citizens Barreau and Desbarreaux, play an active part then. Up to 1792, the first was a shoemaker, and owed his political fortune simply to his audacity and revolutionary frenzy. The second, Desbarreaux, was a comedian of Toulouse, his principal role being that of valets. In the month of Prairial, year III, he was compelled to go down on his knees on the stage and ask pardon for having made incendiary speeches at some previous period in the decadal temple. The public, not deeming his apology sufficient, drove him out of the theater. He now combines with his function of departmental administrator the post of cashier for the actors, which thus brings him in 1200 francs . . . The municipal councilors are not charged with lack of probity: but they are derived from too law a class and have too little regard for themselves to obtain consideration from the public. . . The commune of Toulouse is very impatient at being governed by weak, ignorant men, formerly mixed in with the crowd, and whom, probably, it is urgent to send back to it. . . . It is remarkable that, in a city of such importance, which provides so large a number of worthy citizens of our sort of capacity and education, only men are selected for public duties who, with respect to instruction, attainments, and breeding, offer no guarantee whatever to the government and no inducement to win public consideration.”
[29] “Correspondance de Napoléon,” No.4474, note dictated to Lucien, minister of the interior, year VIII.
[30] Cf. “Procés-verbaux des conseil généraux” of the year VIII, and especially of the year IX. “Many of the cross roads have entirely disappeared at the hands of the neighboring owners of the land. The paved roads are so much booty.” (for example, Vosges, p.429, year IX.) “The roads of the department are in such a bad state that the landowners alongside carry off the stones to build their houses and wall in their inheritance. They encroach on the roads daily; the ditches are cultivated by them the same as their own property.”
[31] Laws of February 29- March 9, 1804 And February 28 – March 10, 1805.
[32] Laws of July 23, 1802, and of February 27, 1811.
[33] “Correspondance de Napoléon,” No. 4474 (note dictated to Lucien).
[34] Decree of March 1, 1808: “Are counts by right, all ministers, senators, councilors of state for life, presidents of the corps Legislatif, and archbishops. Are barons by right, all bishops. May become barons, after ten years of service, all first presidents and attorney generals, the mayors of the thirty-six principal towns. (In 1811, instead of 36, there are 52 principal towns.) May also become barons, the presidents and members of the department electoral colleges who have attended three sessions of these colleges.”
[35] Decree of Thermidor 4, year X.
[36] Law of Pluviôse 28, year VIII.
[37] “Procés-verbaux des conseils généraux” of the years VIII and X. (The second series drawn up after those propounded by the minister Chaptal, is much more complete and furnishes an historical document of the highest importance.)
[38] ” Statistiques des préfets (from the years IX to XIII, about 40 volumes).
[39] Beugnot, “Mémoires,” I., 363.
[40] Faber, ibid., 127. – Cf. Charlotte de Sohr, “Napoleon en 1811” (details and anecdotes on Napoleon’s journey through Belgium and Holland).
[41] Beugnot, I., 380, 384. “He struck the good Germans dumb with admiration, unable to comprehend how it was that their interests had become so familiar to him and with what superiority he treated them.”
[42] Beugnot, ibid., I., 395. Everywhere, on the Emperor’s passage (1811), the impression experienced was a kind of shock as at the sight of a wonderful apparition.
[43] Thiers, ” Histoire du Consulat et l’Empire,” XVI., 246 (January, 1813). “A word to the prefect, who transmitted this to one of the municipal councilors of his town, was enough to insure an offer from some large town and have this imitated throughout the empire. Napoleon had an idea that he could get towns and cantons to offer him troops of horse, armed and equipped.” – In fact, this offer was voted with shouts by the Paris municipal council and, through contagion, in the provinces. As to voting this freely it suffices to remark how the annexed towns voted, which, six months later, are to rebel. Their offers are not the least. For instance, Amsterdam offers 100 horsemen, Hamburg 100, Rotterdam 50, the Hague 40, Leyden 24, Utrecht 20, Dusseldorf 12. – The horsemen furnished are men enlisted for money; 16,000 are obtained, and the sum voted suffices to purchase additionally 22,000 horses and 22,000 equipments. – To obtain this money, the prefect himself apportions the requisite sum among those in his department who pay the most taxes, at the rate of from 6oo to 1000 francs per head. On these arbitrary requisitions and a great many others, either in money or in produce, and on the sentiments of the farmers and landed proprietors in the South, especially after 1813, cf. the ” Mémoires de M. Villèle,” vol. I., passim.
[44] Comte Joseph d’Estourmel, “Souvenirs de France et d’Italie, 240. The general council of Rouen was the first to suggest the vote for guards of honor. Assembled spontaneously (meetings are always spontaneous), its members pass an enthusiastic address. “The example was found to be excellent; the address was published in the Moniteur, and sent to all the prefects . . . . The councils were obliged to meet, which generously disposed of other people’s children, and very worthy persons, myself first of all, thought that they might join in this shameful purpose, to such an extent had imperial fanaticism fascinated them and perverted consciences!”
[45] Archives nationales (state of accounts of the prefects and reports of the general police commissioners, F7, 5014 and following records. – Reports of senators on their senatoreries, AF, IV., 1051, and following records). – These papers disclose at different dates the state of minds and of things in the provinces. Of all these reports, that of Roederer on the senatorerie of Caen is the most instructive, and gives the most details on the three departments composing it. (Printed in his “uvres complètes,” vol. III.)
[46] The reader will find in the Archives nationales, the fullest and most precise information concerning local administration and the sentiments of the different classes of society, in the correspondence of the prefects of the first Restoration, of the hundred days, and of the second Restoration from 1814 to 1823 (Cf. especially those of Haute-Garonne, the Rhine, Côte d’Or, Ain, Loiret, Indre-et-Loire, Indre, Loire-Inférieure and Aisne.) The letters of several prefects, M. de Chabroe, M. de Tocqueville, M. de Remusat, M. de Barante, are often worth publishing; occasionally, the minister of the interior has noted with a pencil in the margin, ” To be shown to the King.”
[47] M. de Villèle, ibid., I., 248.
[48] Rocquam, “l’État de la France au 18 Brumaire,” reports of the councilors of state sent on missions, p.40.
[49] De Feville, “La France economique,” 248 and 249.
[50] Pelet de la Lozère, “Opinions de Napoléon au conseil d’Etat,” P. 277 (Session of March 15, 1806). – Decree of March 16, 1806, and of September 15, 1807.
[51] Ibid., 276. “To those who objected that a tax could only be made according to law, Napoleon replied that it was not a tax, since there were no other taxes than those which the law established, and that this one (the extra assessment of a quarter of the produce of timber) was established by decree. It is only a master, and an absolute master, who could reason in this way.”
[52] Law of March 20, 1813. (Woods, meadows, and pasture-grounds used by the population in common are excepted, also buildings devoted to public use, promenades, and public gardens.) – The law takes rural possessions, houses and factories, rented and producing an income. Thiers, XVI., 279. The five percents at this time were worth 75 francs, and 138 millions of these gave a revenue of 9 millions, about the annual income derived by the communes from their confiscated real estate.
[53] Aucoc, ibid., §§ 55 and 135.
CHAPTER II. Local society since 1830.
I. Introduction of Universal suffrage.
Local society since 1830. – Introduction of a new internal motor. – Subordinate to the external motor. – Advantageous under the system of universal suffrage.
Neither lips nor heart are capable of pronouncing the above invigorating and conclusive phrase after a silence of 30 years. That local society ought to be a private association, does not interest those who are concerned, while the legislator does not permit it. Indeed, after the year VIII (1799), the State (Napoleon) introduces into the machine the new motivation described above. After the revolution of 1830,[1] the municipal and general councilors become elective and are appointed by a limited suffrage; after the revolution of 1848, they are elected by universal suffrage.[2] After the revolution of 1870,[3] each municipal council elects its own mayor, while the council-general, whose powers are enlarged, leaves in its place, during its vacations, a standing committee who arrange with, and govern along with, the prefect. Here, in local society, is a superadded internal motor, working from below, whilst the first one is external and works from above; from now on, both are to work together and in accord. – But, in reality, the second (the council-general) remains subordinate; moreover, it does not suit the machine[4] and the machine does not suit it; it is only a superfluity, an inconvenient and cumbersome intruder, nearly always useless, and often mischievous. Its influence is feeble and of little effect; too many brakes are attached to it; its force diminishes through the complexity of its numerous wheels; it fails in giving action; it cannot but little more than impede or moderate other impulses, those of the external motor, sometimes as it should, and sometimes the contrary. Most frequently, even nowadays (1889), it is of no efficiency whatever. Three-quarters of the municipal councils, for three-fourths of their business, hold sessions only to give signatures. Their pretended deliberations are simply a parade formality; the incentive and direction continue to come from without, and from above; under the third Republic, as under the Restoration and the first Empire, it is always the central State which governs the local society; amid all the wrangling and disputes, in spite of passing conflicts it is, and remains, the initiator, mover, leader, controller, accountant, and executor of every undertaking, the preponderating power in the department as well as in the commune, and with what deplorable results we all know. – There is still another and more serious result. Nowadays, its interference is an advantage, for should it renounce its preponderance this would pass over to the other power which, since this has become vested in a numerical majority, is mere blind and brutal force; abandoned to itself and without any counter-weight, its ascendancy would be disastrous, we would see reappearing along with the blunders of 1789, the outrages, usurpations, and distress of 1790, 1791 and 1792.[5] – In any event, there is this advantage in despotic centralization, that it still preserves us from democratic autonomy. In the present state of institutions and minds, the former system, objectionable as it may be, is our last retreat against the greater evil of the latter.
II. Universal suffrage.
Application of universal suffrage to local society. – Two assessments for the expenses of local society. – The fixed amount of one should in equity be equal to the average sum of the other. – Practically, the sum of one is kept too low. – How the new régime provides for local expenditure. – The “additional centimes.” – How the small taxpayer is relieved in town and country. – His quota in local expenditure reduced to the minimum. – His quota of local benefits remains intact. – Hence the large or average taxpayer bears, beside his own burden, that of the relieved small taxpayer. – Number of those relieved. – The extra burden of the large and average taxpayer is alms-giving. – The relief of the small taxpayer is a levy of alms.
In effect, direct universal suffrage, counted by heads, is in local society a discordant element, a monstrous system, to which it is adverse. Constituted as this is, not by human judgment, but by the preponderance of numbers and their force, its mechanism is determined beforehand; it excludes certain wheels and connections.[6] That is why the legislator must write laws which reflect the nature of our existence, or, at least, translate this as closely as he can, without any gross contradiction. Nature herself presents him with ready-made statutes.[7] His business is to read these properly; he has already transcribed the apportionment of burdens; he can now transcribe the apportionment of rights.
So, we have seen, local society renders two distinct services[8], which, that the expenses of both may be met, require two distinct assessments, one personal and the other real, one levied on everybody and of which the amount is alike for all, and the other levied only on those whose amount is based on what he spends, on the importance of his business, and on the income from his real estate. – In strict equity, the amount of the former should be equal to the average amount of the latter; in effect, as has been shown, the services defrayed by the former are as many, as diverse, and as precious, still more vital, and not less costly than those of which the latter is the price. Of the two interests which they represent, each, did it stand alone, would be obliged to secure the same services, to take upon itself the whole of the work; neither would obtain more in the dividend, and each would have to pay the whole of the expense. Accordingly, each gains as much as the other in the physical solidarity which binds them together. Hence, in the legal bond which unites them they enter into it on an equal footing, on condition that each is burdened or relived as much as the other, on condition that if the latter assumes one-half of the expense the former shall assume the other half, on condition that if the latter quota on each one hundred francs expended against calamities and for public roads is 50 francs, the former quota shall also be 50 francs. – Practically, however, this is impossible. Three times out of four the former levy with this apportionment would not be returned; through prudence as well as humanity, the legislator is bound not to overburden the poor. Recently, in organizing the general tax and the revenue of the State, he has looked out for them; now, in organizing the local tax and the revenue of the department or of the commune, he looks out for them to a still greater extent.
In the new financial scheme, so many centimes, added to each franc of direct tax, form the principal resource of the department and commune, and it is through this extra charge that each taxpayer pays his quota of local expenditure. Now, there is no surcharge on the personal tax, no additional centimes. Under this heading, the laborer without any property or income, the workman who lives in lodgings, on his wages, and from day to day, contributes nothing to the expenses of his commune or department. In vain do “additional centimes” pour down on other branches of direct taxation; they are not grafted on this one, and do not suck away the substance of the poor.[9] – There is the same regard for the half poor, in relation to the artisan who furnishes his own room, but who lodges in an upper story, and in relation to the peasant whose hovel or cottage has but one door and one window.[10] Their rate of taxation on doors and windows is very low, purposely reduced, kept below one franc a year, while the rate of their personal tax is scarcely higher. “Additional centimes” may be imposed on so small a principal and be multiplied in vain, never will they reach more than an insignificant amount.-Not only are the destitute relieved of both principal and “additional centimes,” the verified poor, those who are registered and are helped, or should be, that is to say 2,470,000 persons;[11] but, again, others, by hundreds of thousands, whom the municipal council judges incapable of paying. – Even when people possess but a small piece of land, they are also relieved of the land tax and of the numerous additional centimes which increase it. Such is the case with those who are infirm or burdened with a family. The exchequer, so as not to convert them into beggars and vagabonds, avoids expropriation, selling out their concrete hovel, vegetable garden, and small field of potatoes or cabbages; it gives them receipts gratis, or, at least, refrains from prosecuting them.[12] In this way the poor peasant, although a land-owner, again exempts himself, or is exempted from his local indebtedness. In truth, he pays nothing, or nearly nothing, otherwise than by prestations (payments) in money or in kind; that is to say, by three days’ work on the district roads, which, if he pays in kind, are not worth more than 50 sous.[13] Add to this his portion, very small and often null, of the additional centimes on the tax on doors and windows, on the personal tax, and on the tax on real estate, in all 4 or 5 francs a year. Such is the amount by which the poor or half-poor taxpayer in the villages liberates himself toward his department and commune. -In the towns, he apparently pays more, owing to the octroi. But, at first, there are only 1525 communes out of 36,000 in which the octroi[14] has been established; while in the beginning, under the Directory and Consulate, it was revived only on his account, for his benefit, in behalf of public charity, to defray the expenses of asylums and hospitals ruined by revolutionary confiscation. It was then “an octroi for charity,” in fact as well as in name, like the surplus tax on theater seats and tickets, established at the same time and for the same purpose; it still to-day preserves the stamp of its first institution. Bread, the indispensable provision for the poor, is not subjected to the octroi nor the materials for making it, either grain or flour, nor milk, fruits, vegetables, or codfish, while there is only a light tax on butcher’s meat. Even on beverages, where the octroi is heavier, it remains, like all indirect taxes, nearly proportional and semi-optional. In effect, it is simply an increase of the tax on beverages, so many additional centimes per franc on the sum of indirect taxation, as warrantable as the impost itself, as tolerable, and for the same motives.[15] For the greater the sobriety of the taxpayer, the less is he affected by this tax. At Paris, where the increase is excessive, and adds to the 6 centimes paid to the state, on each quart of wine, 12 centimes paid to the city; if he drinks but one quart a day, he pays, under this heading, into the city treasury 43 francs 80 centimes per annum: but, as compensation for this, he is free of personal tax of 11 3/4 %, which this adds to the amount of each rental of the 11 3/4 %, whereby this would have added to his rent, and therefore 47 francs per annum as a rent of 400 francs. Thus what he has paid with one hand he gets back with the other. Now, at Paris, all rentals under 400 francs[16] are thus free of any personal tax; all rentals between 400 and 1000 francs are more or less free, and, in the other octroi towns, an analogous discharge reimburses to the small taxpayers a portion more or less great of the sum they pay to the octroi. – Accordingly, in the towns as in the country, they are favored at one time through fiscal relief and at another through administrative favor, now through compulsory deduction and now through total or partial reimbursement. Always, and very wisely, the legislator apportions the burden according to the strength of the shoulders; he relieves them as much as he can, at first, of the general tax, and next, which is still better, of the local tax. Hence, in local expenditure, their quota diminishes out of all proportion and is reduced to the minimum. Nevertheless, their quota of local benefit remains full and entire; at this insignificant price they enjoy the public highways and profit by all the precautions taken against physical ills; each profits by this personally, equally with any millionaire. Each personally receives as much in the great dividend of security, health, and convenience, in the fruit of the vast works of utility and enjoyment due to improved communications, which preserve health, assist traffic, and beautify the locality, and without which, in town as well as in the country, life would be impossible or intolerable.
But these works which cost so much, these defensive operations and apparatus against inundations, fires, epidemics, and contagions, these 500,000 kilometers of district and department roads, these dikes, quays, bridges, public gardens, and promenades, this paving, drainage, sweeping and lighting, these aqueducts and supplies of drinkable water, all this is paid for by somebody, and, since it is not done by the small taxpayer, it is the large or average taxpayer who pays for it. The latter then, bears, besides his obligatory weight, a gratuitous surplus burden, consisting of the weight of which the other is relieved.
Evidently the greater the number of the relieved, the heavier will be this overweight, and the relieved count by millions. Two millions and a half of declared poor[17] are relieved of any direct tax, and, therefore, of all the centimes which have just increased the burden. Out of 8 millions of real-estate owners,[18] 3 millions, considered as insolvent, pay neither the real estate tax nor the centimes which it comprises. In the octroi towns, it is not the minority but the majority of the inhabitants who are relieved in the way just described ; in Paris,[19] out of 685,000 rentals, 625,000, in other terms twelve out of thirteen lodgings, are exempt, wholly or in part, from the personal tax, the principal and “additional centimes.” On each franc of this principal there are 96 of these superadded centimes for the benefit of the town and department and because the department and the town expend a good deal, and because receipts are essential for the settlement of these accounts, this or that sum is noted beforehand in every chapter of receipts, and the main thing now is to have this paid in, and it must be paid by somebody; it matters little whether the peasants are few or numerous; if among thirteen taxable persons there is only one that pays, so much the worse for him, for he must pay for himself and the other twelve. Such is the case in Paris, which accounts for the “additional centimes” here being so numerous,[20] owing to there being less than 60,000 rentals for the acquittance of the entire tax, and, besides paying their own debt, they must discharge the indebtedness of 625,000 other rentals, the tax on which is reduced or null.- Frequently, before the Revolution, some rich convent or philanthropic seignior would pay the taxes of his poor neighbors out of his own pocket; willingly or not, 60,000 Parisians, more or less well lodged, now hand over the same sum, bestow the same charity, on 625,000 thousand badly or only tolerably lodged Parisians; among these 60,000 benefactors whom the exchequer obliges to be benevolent, 34,800 who pay from 1000 to 3000 francs rent, bestow, under this heading, a pretty large sum for charitable purposes, while 14,800, who pay more than 3000 francs rent, pay a very large one. Other branches of direct taxation, in the country as well as in the city, present the same spectacle: it is always the rich or the well- to-do taxpayers who, through their over-tax, more or less completely relieve the poor or straitened taxpayers; it is always the owners of large or small properties, those who pay heavy or average licenses, the occupants of lodgings with more than five openings,[21] and whose locative value surpasses 1000 francs, who in local expenditure pay besides their own dues the dues of others and, through their additional centimes, almost entirely defray the expenses of the department and commune.–This is nearly always the case in a local society, except when it chances to possess an abundant income, arising from productive real estate, and is able to provide for its wants without taxing its members; apart from this rare exception, it is forced to tax some in order to relieve others. In other words, the same as with other enterprises, it manufactures and sells its product but, just the reverse of other enterprises, it sells the product, an equal quantity of the same product, that is to say, equal protection against the same calamities, and the equal enjoyment of the same public highway, at unequal prices, very dear to a few, moderately dear to many, at cost price to a large number, and with a discount to the mass; to this last class of consumers the discount goes on increasing like the emptiness of their purse; to the last of all, extremely numerous, the goods are delivered almost gratis, or even for nothing.
But to this inequality of prices may correspond the inequality of rights, and compensation will come, the balance may be restored, distributive justice may be applied, if, in the government of the enterprise, the parts assigned are not equal, if each member sees his portion of influence growing or diminishing along with the weight of his charge, if the regulations, graduating authority according to the scale of the levies, assigns few votes to those who pay the lowest quotas of expense and receive alms, and many votes to those who give alms and pay the largest quotas of the expenditure.
III. Equity in taxation.
Possible compensation in the other side of the scale. – What the distribution of rights should be according to the principle of distributive justice. – In every association of stock-owners. – In local society confined to its natural object. – In local society charged with supplementary functions. – The local statue in England and Prussia. – The exchange equitable when burdens are compensated by rights.
Such is the rule in every association of interests, even in stock companies in which the distribution of charges allows of no favor or disfavor to any associate. It must be noted that, in these companies, co-operation is not compulsory, but voluntary; the associates are not, as in the local society, conscripts enlisted under the constraint of physical solidarity, but subscribers bound together under the impulsion of a deliberate preference, each remaining in its of his own free will just as he entered it; if he wishes to leave it he has only to sell his stock; the fact of his keeping this confirms his subscription, and, thus holding on to it, he daily subscribes anew to the statute. Here, then, is a perfectly free association; its is accordingly perfectly equitable, and its statute serves as a model for others.
Now this statute always makes a distinction between the small and the large stockholders; it always attributes a greater share of authority and influence to those who share most largely in the risks and expenses; in principle, the number of votes in confers on each associate is proportionate to the number of shares of which he is the owner or bearer. – All the stronger is the reason why this principle should be embodied in the statutes of a society which, like the local community, diminishes the burden of the small taxpayer through its reductions, and increases by its extra taxation the burden of the large or average taxpayer; when the appointment of managers is handed over to universal suffrage, counted by heads, the large and average taxpayers are defrauded of their dues and deprived of their rights, more so by far and more deeply wronged than the bearer or owner of a thousand shares in an omnibus or gas company if, on voting at a meeting of stockholders, his vote did not count for more than that of the owner or bearer of a single share. –
How is it then when a local society adds to its natural and unavoidable purpose an optional and supplementary purpose;
* when, increasing its load, it undertakes to defray the cost of public charity and of primary education;
* when, to support this additional cost, it multiplies the additional centimes;
* when the large or average taxpayer pays alone, or nearly alone, for this benevolent work by which he does not benefit;
* when the small taxpayer pays nothing, or next to nothing, to this benevolent work by which he does benefit;
* when, in voting for the expense thus apportioned, each taxpayer, whatever the amount of his contribution, has one vote and only one?
In this case, powers, benefits, reductions, and exemptions, all the advantages are on one side, that of the poor and half-poor forming the majority and who if not restrained from above, will persistently abuse their numerical force to augment their advantages, at the increasing expense of the rich or well-do-do minority. In the future, in the local society, the average or large taxpayer is no longer an associate but a victim; were he free to choose he would not enter into it; he would like to go away and establish himself elsewhere; but were he to enter others, near or remote, his condition would be no better. He remains, accordingly, where he is, physically present, but absent in feeling; he takes no part in deliberate meetings; his zeal has died out; he withholds from public affairs that surplus of vigilant attention, that spontaneous and ready collaboration which he would have contributed gratis; he lets matters go along without him, just as it happens; he remains there just what he is, a workable, taxable individual in capricious hands, in short, a passive subject who gives and has become resigned. – For this reason, in countries where an encroaching democracy has not yet abolished or perverted the notion of equity, the local statute applies the fundamental rule of an equitable exchange; it lays down the principle that
he who pays commands, and in proportion to the sum he pays.[22]
In England, a surplus of votes is awarded to those most heavily taxed, even six votes to one voter; in Prussia, local taxation is divided into thirds, and, accordingly, the taxpayers into three groups, the first one composed of heavy taxpayers, few in number, and who pay the first third, the second composed of average taxpayers, average in number, and who pay the second third, and the third composed of the great number of small taxpayers, who pay the last third.[23] To each of these groups is assigned the same number of suffrages in the commune election, or the same number of representatives in the commune representation. Through this approximate balance of legal burdens and of legal rights, the two sides of the scales are nearly level, the level which distributive justice demands, and the level which the state, special interpreter, sole arbiter and universal minister of distributive justice, should establish when, in the local community, it imposes, rectifies, or maintains the articles in accordance with which it derives its income and governs.
IV. On unlimited universal suffrage.
How unlimited universal suffrage found its way into local society. – Object and mode of the French legislator.
If the government, in France, does just the opposite, it is at the height of a violent and sudden revolution, forced by the party in power and by popular prejudice, through deductive reasoning, and through contagion. According to revolutionary and French usage, the legislator was bound to institute uniformity and to make things symmetrical; having placed universal suffrage in political society, he was likewise determined to place it in local society. He had been ordered to apply an abstract principle, that is to say, to legislate according to a summary, superficial, and verbal notion which, purposely curtailed and simplified to excess, did not correspond with its aim. He obeyed and did nothing more; he made no effort outside of his instructions. He did not propose to himself to restore local society to its members, to revive it, to make it a living body, capable of spontaneous, co-ordinate, voluntary action, and, to this end, provided with indispensable organs. He did not even take the trouble to imagine, how it really is, I mean by this, complex and diverse and inversely to legislators before 1789, and adversely to legislators before and after 1789 outside of France, against all the teachings of experience, against the evidence of nature, he refused to recognize the fact that, in France, mankind are of two species, the people of the towns and the people of the country, and that, therefore, there are two types of local society, the urban commune and the rural commune. He was not disposed to take this capital difference into consideration; he issued decrees for the Frenchman in general, for the citizen in himself, for fictive men, so reduced that the statute which suits them can nowhere suit the actual and complete man. At one stroke, the legislative shears cut out of the same stuff, according to the same pattern, thirty-six thousand examples of the same coat, one coat indifferently for every commune, whatever its shape, a coat too small for the city and too large for the village, disproportionate in both cases, and useless beforehand, because it could not fit very large bodies, nor very small ones. Nevertheless, once dispatched from Paris, people had to put the coat on and wear it; it must answer for good or for ill, each donning his own for lack of another better adjusted; hence the strangest attitudes for each, and, in the long run, a combination of consequences which neither governors nor the governed had foreseen.
V. Rural or urban communes.
No distinction between the rural and the urban commune. – Effects of the law on the rural commune. – Disproportion between the intelligence of its elected representatives and the work imposed upon them. – The mayor and the municipal council. – Lack of qualified members. – The secretary of the mayoralty. – The chief or under chief of the prefectorial bureau.
Let us consider these results in turn in the small and in the great communes; clear enough and distinct at the two extremities of the scale, they blend into each other at intermediate degrees, because here they combine together, but in different proportions, according as the commune, higher or lower in the scale, comes nearer to the village or to the city. – On this territory, too, subdivided since 1789, and, so to say, crumbled to pieces by the Constituent Assembly, the small communes are enormous in number; among the 36,000, more than 27,000 have less than 1000 inhabitants, and of these, more than 16,000 have less than 500 inhabitants.[24] Whoever has traveled over France, or lived in this country, sees at once what sort of men compose such purely rural groups; he has only to recall physiognomies and attitudes to know to what extent in these rude brains, rendered torpid by the routine of manual labor and oppressed by the cares of daily life, how narrow and obstructed are the inlets to the mind; how limited is their information in the way of facts; how, in the way of ideas, the acquisition of them is slow; what hereditary distrust separates the illiterate mass from the lettered class; what an almost insurmountable wall the difference of education, of habits, and of manners interposes in France between the blouse and the dress-coat; why, if each commune contains a few cultivated individuals and a few notable proprietors, universal suffrage sets them aside, or at least does not seek them out for the municipal council or the mayoralty. – Before 1830, when the prefect appointed the municipal councilors and the mayor, these were always on hand; under the monarchy of July and a limited suffrage, they were still on hand, at least for the most part; under the second Empire, whatever the elected municipal council might be, the mayor, who was appointed by the prefect, and even outside of this council, might be one of the least ignorant and least stupid even in the commune. At the present day (1889), it is only accidentally and by chance that a noble or bourgeois, in a few provinces and in certain communes, may become mayor or municipal councilor; it is, however, essential that he should be born on the soil, long established there, resident and popular. Everywhere else the numerical majority, being sovereign, tends to select its candidates from among the average people: in the village, he is a man of average rural intelligence, and, mostly, in the village a municipal council which, as narrow- minded as its electors, elects a mayor equally as narrow-minded as itself Such are, from now on, the representatives and directors of communal interests; except when they themselves are affected by personal interests to which they are sensitive, their inertia is only equaled by their incapacity[25]
Four times a year a bundle of elaborately drawn papers, prepared by the prefecture, are submitted to these innately blind paralytics, large sheets divided into columns from top to bottom, with tabular headings from right to left, and covered with printed texts and figures in writing – details of receipts and expenses, general centimes, special centimes, obligatory centimes, optional centimes, ordinary centimes, extra centimes, with their sources and employment; preliminary budget, final budget, corrected budget, along with legal references, regulations, and decisions bearing on each article. In short, a methodical table as specific as possible and highly instructive to a jurist or accountant, but perfect jargon to peasants, most of whom can scarcely write their name and who, on Sundays, are seen standing before the advertisement board[26] trying to spell out the Journal Officiel, whose abstract phrases, beyond their reach, pass over their heads in aerial and transient flight, like some confused rustling of vague and unknown forms. To guide them in political life, much more difficult than in private life, they require a similar guide to the one they take in the difficult matters of their individual life, a legal or business adviser, one that is qualified and competent, able to understand the prefecture documents, sitting alongside of them to explain their budget, rights and limits of their rights, the financial resources, legal expedients, and consequences of a law; one who can arrange their debates, make up their accounts, watch daily files of bills, attend to their business at the county town, throughout the entire series of legal formalities and attendance on the bureaus, – in short, some trusty person, familiar with technicalities, who they might choose to select. – Such a person was found in Savoy, before the annexation to France, a notary or lawyer who, practicing in the neighborhood or at the principal town, and with five or six communes for clients, visited them in turn, helped them with his knowledge and intelligence, attended their meetings and, besides, served them as scribe, like the present secretary of the mayoralty, for about the same pay, amounting in all to about the same total of fees or salaries.[27] – At the present time, there is nobody in the municipal council to advise and give information to its members; the schoolmaster is their secretary, and he cannot be, and should not be, other than a scribe. He reads in a monotonous tone of voice the long financial enigma which French public book-keeping, too perfect, offers to their divination, and which nobody, save one who is educated to it, can clearly comprehend until after weeks of study. They listen all agog. Some, adjusting their spectacles, try to pick out among so many articles the one they want, the amount of taxes they have to pay. The sum is too large, the assessments are excessive; it is important that the number of additional centimes should be reduced, and therefore that less money should be expended. Hence, if there is any special item of expense which can be got rid of by a refusal, they set it aside by voting No, until some new law or decree from above obliges them to say Yes. But, as things go, nearly all the expenses designated on the paper are obligatory; willingly or not, these must be met, and there is no way to pay them outside of the additional centimes; however numerous these are, vote them they must and sanction the centimes inscribed. They accordingly affix their signatures, not with trust but with mistrust, with resignation, and out of pure necessity. Abandoned to their natural ignorance, the twenty-seven thousand petty municipal councilors of the country are no more passive, more inert, more constrained than ever; deprived of the light which, formerly, the choice of the prefect or a restricted suffrage could still throw into the darkness around them, there remains to them only one safe tutor or conductor; and this final guide is the official of the bureaus, especially this or that old, permanent chief, or under clerk, who is perfectly familiar with his files of papers. With about four hundred municipal councils to lead, one may imagine what he will do with them: nothing except to drive them like a flock of sheep into a pen of printed regulations, or urge them on mechanically, in lots, according to his instructions, he himself being as automatic and as much in a rut as they are.
VI. The larger Communes.
Effects of the law on the urban commune. – Disproportion between the administrative capacity of its elected representatives and the work imposed on them. – Lack of a special and permanent manager. – The municipal council and the mayor. – The general council and the intermediary committee. – The prefect. – His dominant rule. – His obligatory concessions. – His principal aim. – Bargains between the central authority and the local Jacobins. – Effect on this on local government, on the officials, and in local finances.
Let us now look at the other side of the scale, on the side of the large urban communes, of which there are 223, with above 10,000 inhabitants, 90 of these above 20,000 inhabitants, 9 of the latter above 100,000 inhabitants, and Paris, which has 2,300,000.[28] We see at the first glance cast upon an average specimen of these human anthills, a town containing from 40,000 to 50,000 souls, how vast and complex the collective undertaking becomes, how many principal and accessory services the communal society must co-ordinate and unite together in order to secure to its members the advantages of public roads and insure their protection against spreading calamities:
* Maintenance and repairs of these roads, the straightening, laying- out, paving, and drainage, the constructions and expense for sewers, quays, and rivers, and often for a commercial harbor;
* the negotiations and arrangements with departments and with the state for this or that harbor, canal, dike, or insane asylum; the contracts with cab, omnibus, and tramway companies and with telephone and house-lighting companies; the street-lighting, artesian wells and aqueducts;
* the city police, supervision and rules for using public highways, and orders and agents for preventing men from injuring each other when collected together in large assemblies in the streets, in the markets, at the theater, in any public place, whether coffee-houses or taverns;
* the firemen and machinery for conflagrations; the sanitary measures against contagion, and precautions, long beforehand to insure hygiene during epidemics;
* and, as extra burdens and abuses, the establishment, direction and support of primary schools, colleges, public lectures, libraries, theaters, hospitals, and other institutions which should be supported and governed by different associations; at the very least, the appropriations to these establishments and therefore a more or less legitimate and more or less imperative intervention in their internal management.
Such are the great undertakings which form a whole, which bear alike on the present, past, and future budget of the commune, and which, as so many distinct branches of every considerable enterprise, require, for proper execution, to have their continuity and connection always present in the thoughtful and directing mind which has them in charge.[29] Experience shows that, in the great industrial or financial companies, in the Bank of France, in the Crédit Lyonnais, and in the insurance, navigation, and railroad companies, the best way to accomplish this end is a permanent manager or director, always present, engaged or accepted by the administrative board on understood conditions, a special, tried man who, sure of his place for a long period, and with a reputation to maintain, gives his whole time, faculties, and zeal to the work, and who, alone, possessing at every moment a coherent and detailed conception of the entire undertaking, can alone give it the proper stimulus, and bring to bear the most economical and the most perfect practical improvements. Such is also the municipal administration in the Prussian towns on the Rhine. Then, in Bonn, for instance,[30] the municipal council, elected by the inhabitants “goes in quest” of some eminent specialist whose ability is well known. It must be noted that he is taken wherever he can be found, outside the city, in some remote province; they bargain with him, the same as with some famous musician, for the management of a series of concerts. Under the title of burgomaster, with a salary of 10,000 francs per annum, he becomes for twelve years the director of all municipal services, leader of the civic orchestra, solely entrusted with executive power, wielding the magisterial baton which the various instruments obey, many of these being salaried functionaries and others benevolent amateurs,[31] all in harmony and through him, because they know that he is watchful, competent, and top quality, constantly occupied with am overall view, responsible, and in his own interest, as a point of honor, wholly devoted to his work which is likewise their work, that is to say, to the complete success of the concert.
Nothing in a French town corresponds to this admirable type of a municipal institution. Here, also, and to a much greater extent in the village, the effect of universal suffrage has been to discredit the true notables and to incite the abdication or insure the exclusion of men who, by their education, the large proportion of the taxes they pay, and still greater influence or production on labor and on business, are social authorities, and who should become legal authorities. In every country where conditions are unequal, the preponderance of a numerical majority necessarily ends in the nearly general abstention or almost certain defeat of the candidates most deserving of election. But here the case is different; the elected, being towns-people (citadins) and not rural, are not of the species as in the village. They read a daily newspaper, and believe that they understand not only local matters but all subjects of national and general importance, that is to say, high level economy, philosophy and law; somewhat resembling the schoolmaster who, being familiar with the rules of arithmetic, thinks that he can teach the differential calculus, and the theory of functions. At any rate, they talk loud and argue on every subject with confidence, according to Jacobin traditions, being, indeed, so many budding Jacobins. They are the heirs and successors of the old sectarians, issuing from the same stock and of the same stamp, a few in good faith, but mainly narrow- minded, excited, and bewildered by the smoke of the glittering generalities they utter. Most of them are mere politicians, charlatans, and intriguers, third-class lawyers and doctors, literary failures, semi-educated stump-speakers, bar-room, club, or clique orators, and vulgar climbers. Left behind in private careers, in which one is closely watched and accepted for what he is worth, they launch out on a public career because, in this business, popular suffrage at once ignorant, indifferent, is a badly informed, prejudiced and passionate judge and prefers a moralist of easy conscience, instead of demanding unsullied integrity and proven competency. Nothing more is demanded from candidates but witty speech-making, assertiveness and showing off in public, gross flattery, a display of enthusiasm and promises to place the power about to be conferred on them by the people in the hands of those who will serve its antipathies and prejudices. Thus introduced into the municipal council, they constitute its majority and appoint a mayor who is their figurehead or creature, now the bold leader and again the docile instrument of their spite, their favors, and their headlong action, of their blunders and presumption, and of their meddlesome disposition and encroachments. – In the department, the council general, also elected by universal suffrage, also bears the marks of its origin; its quality, without falling so low, still descends in a certain degree, and through changes which keep on increasing: politicians install themselves there and make use of their place as a stepping-stone to mount higher; it also, with larger powers and prolonged during its vacations by its committee, is tempted to regard itself as the legitimate sovereign of the extensive and scattered community which it represents. – Thus recruited and composed, enlarged and deteriorated, the local authorities become difficult to manage, and from now on, to carry on the administration, the prefect must come to some understanding with them.
VII. Local society in 1880.
Present state of local society. – Considered as an organism, it is stillborn. – Considered as a mechanism, it gets out of order. – Two successive and false conceptions of local government. – In theory, one excludes the other. – Practically, their union ends in the actual system. – Powers of the prefect. – Restrictions on these through subsequent changes. – Give and take. – Bargaining. – Supported by the government and cost to the State.
Before 1870, when he appointed the mayors and when the council general held its sessions only fifteen days in the year, the prefect was almost omnipotent; still, at the present day, (1889), “his powers are immense,”[32] and his power remains preponderant. He has the right to suspend the municipal council and the mayor, and to propose their dismissal to the head of the state. Without resorting to this extremity, he holds them with a strong hand, and always uplifted over the commune, for he can veto the acts of the municipal police and of the road committee, annul the regulations of the mayor, and, through a skillful use of his prerogative, impose his own. He holds in hand, removes, appoints or helps appoint, not alone the clerks in his office, but likewise every kind and degree of clerk who, outside his office, serves the commune or department,[33] from the archivist, keeper of the museum, architect, director, and teachers of the municipal drawing-schools, from the directors and collectors of charity establishments, directors and accountants of almshouses, doctors of the mineral springs, doctors and accountants of the insane asylums and for epidemics, head-overseers of octrois, wolf-bounty guards, commissioners of the urban police, inspectors of weights and measures, town collectors, whose receipts do not exceed thirty thousand francs, down to and comprising the lowest employees, such as forest guards of the department and commune, lock-keepers and navigation guards, overseers of the quays and of commercial ports, toll-gatherers on bridges and highways, field-guards of the smallest village, policemen posted on the corner of a street, and stone- breakers on the public highway. When things and not persons are concerned, it is he, again, who, in every project, enterprise, or proceeding, is charged with the preliminary examination and final execution of it, who proposes the department budget and presents it, regularly drawn up, to the council general, who draws up the communal budget and presents that to the municipal council, and who, after the council general or municipal council have voted on it, remains on the spot the sole executor, director, and master of the operation to which they have assented. Their total, effective part in this operation is very insignificant, it being reduced to a bare act of the will; in reaching a vote they have had in their hands scarcely any other documents than those furnished and arranged by him; in gradually reaching their decision step by step, they have had no help but his, that of an independent collaborator who, governed by his own views and interests, never becomes the mere instrument. They lack for their decision direct, personal, and full information, and, beyond this, complete, efficient power; it is simply a dry Yes, interposed between insufficient resources, or else cut off, and the fruit of which is abortive or only half ripens. The persistent will of the prefect alone, informed, and who acts, must and does generally prevail against this ill-supported and ill-furnished will. At bottom, and as he stands, he is, in his mental and official capacity, always the prefect of the year VIII.
Nevertheless, after the laws lately passed, his hands are not so free. The competency of local assemblies is extended and comprises not only new cases but, again, of a new species, while the number of their executive decisions has increased five-fold. The municipal council, instead of holding one session a year, holds four, and of longer duration. The council general, instead of one session a year, holds two, and maintains itself in the interim by its delegation which meets every month. With these increased authorities and generally present, the prefect has to reckon, and what is still more serious, he must reckon with local opinion; he can no longer rule with closed doors; the proceedings of the municipal council, the smallest one, are duly posted; in the towns, they are published and commented on by the newspapers of the locality; the general council furnishes reports of its deliberations. – Thus, behind elected powers, and weighing with these on the same side of the scales, here is a new power, opinion, as this grows in a country leveled by equalized centralization, in heaving or stagnant crowd of disintegrated individuals lacking any spontaneous, central, rallying point, and who, failing natural leaders, simply push and jostle each other or stand still, each according to personal, blind, and haphazard impressions – a hasty, improvident, inconsistent, superficial opinion, caught on the wing, based on vague rumors, on four or five minutes of attention given each week, and chiefly to big words imperfectly understood, two or three sonorous, commonplace phrases, of which the listeners fail to catch the sense, but the sound which, by din of frequent repetition, becomes for them a recognized signal, the blast of a horn or a shrieking whistle which assembles the herd and arrests or drives it on. No opposition can make head against this herd as it rushes along in too compact and too heavy masses. – The prefect, on the contrary, is obliged to cajole it, yield to it, and satisfy it; for under the system of universal suffrage, this same herd, besides local representatives, elects the central powers, the deputies, the government; and when the government sends a prefect from Paris into the provinces, it is after the fashion of a large commercial establishment, with a view to keep and increase the number of its customers, to stay there, maintain its credit, and act permanently as its traveling-clerk, or, in other terms, as its electoral agent, and, still more precisely, as the campaign manager of coming elections for the dominant party and for the ministers in office who have commissioned and appointed him, and who, from top to bottom, constantly stimulate him to hold on to the voters already secured and to gain fresh ones. – Undoubtedly, the interests of the state, department, and commune must be seriously considered, but, first and above all, he is the recruiting officer for voters. By virtue of this position and on this he treats with the council general and the standing committee, with the municipal councilors and mayors, with influential electors, but especially with the small active committee which, in each commune, supports the prevailing policy and offers its zeal to the government.
Give and take. These indispensable auxiliaries must obtain nearly all they ask for, and they ask a great deal. Instinctively, as well as by doctrine and tradition, the Jacobins are exacting, disposed to regard themselves as the representatives of the real and the ideal people, that is to say, as sovereigns by right, above the law, entitled to make it and therefore to unmake it, or, at least, strain it and interpret it as they please. Always in the general council, in the municipal council, and in the mayoralty, they are tempted to usurp it; the prefect has as much as he can do to keep them within the local bounds, to keep them from meddling with state matters and the general policy; he is often obliged to accept their lack of consideration, to be patient with them, to talk to them mildly; for they talk and want the administration to reckon with them as a clerk with his master; if they vote money for any service it is on condition that they take part in the use of the funds and in the details of the service, in the choice of contractors and in hiring the workmen; on condition that their authority be extended and their hands applied to the consecutive execution of what does not belong to them but which belongs to the prefect.[34] Bargaining, consequently, goes on between them incessantly and they come to terms. – The prefect, it must be noted, who is bound to pay, can do so without violating the letter of the law. The stern page on which the legislator has printed his imperative text is always provided with an ample margin where the administrator, charged with its execution, can write down the decisions that he is free to make. In relation to each departmental or communal affair, the prefect can with his own hand write out what suits him on the white margin, which, as we have already seen, is ample enough; but the margin at his disposition is wider still and continues, beyond anything we have seen, on other pages; he is chargé d’affaires not only of the department and commune, but again of the State. Titular conductor or overseer of all general services, he is, in his circumscription, head inquisitor of the republican faith[35], even in relation to private life and inner sentiments, the responsible director of orthodox or heretical acts or opinions, which are laudable or blamable in the innumerably army of functionaries by which the central state now undertakes the complete mastery of human life, the twenty distinct regiments of its vast hierarchy – with the staff of the clergy, of the magistracy, of the preventive and repressive police, of the customs; with the officials of bridges and highways, forest domains, stock-breeding establishments, postal and telegraph departments, tobacco and other monopolies; with those of every national enterprise which ought to be private, Sévres and Gobelins, deaf and dumb and blind asylums, and every auxiliary and special workshop for war and navigation purposes, which the state supports and manages. I pass some of them and all too many. Only remark this, that the indulgence or severity of the prefecture in the way of fiscal violations or irregularities is an advantage or danger of the highest importance to 377,000 dealers in wines and liquors; that an accusation brought before and admitted in the prefecture may deprive 38,000 clergymen of their bread,[36] 43,000 letter-carriers and telegraph messengers, 45,000 sellers of tobacco and collecting-clerks, 75,000 stone-breakers, and 120,000 male and female teachers;[37] directly or indirectly, the good or ill favor of the prefecture is of consequence, since recent military laws, to all adults between 20 and 45 years, and, since recent school laws, to all children between 6 and 13 years of age. According to these figures, which go on increasing from year to, calculate the breadth of the margin on which, alongside of the legal text which states the law for persons and things in general, the prefect in his turn gives the law for persons and things in particular. On this margin, which belongs to him, he writes what he pleases, at one time permissions and favors, exemptions, dispensations, leaves of absence, relief of taxes or discharges, help and subventions, preferences and gratuities, appointments and promotions, and at another time disgrace, hardship, legal proceedings, dismissals, and special favors. To guide his hand in each case, that is to say, to spread all the favors on one side and all the disfavors on the other, he has, among the local Jacobins, special informers and important applicants. If not restrained by a very strong sentiment of distributive justice and very great solicitude for the public good he can hardly resist them, and in general when he takes up his pen it is to write under the dictation of his Jacobin collaborators.
Democracy in France in 1889, Summary.
Thus has the institution of the year VIII deviated (The France of the revolution corrected and decreed by Napoleon), no longer attaining its object. The prefects, formerly appointed to a department, like a pacier of the Middle Ages, imposed on it from above, ignorant of local passions, independent, qualified and fitted for the office, was, during fifty years, in general, able to remain the impartial minister of the law and of equity, maintaining the rights of each, and exacting from each his due, without heeding opinions and without respect to persons. Now he is obliged to become an accomplice of the ruling faction, govern for the advantage of some to the detriment of others, and to put into his scales, as a preponderating weight, every time he weighs judgment, a consideration for persons and opinions. At the same time, the entire administrative staff in his hands, and under his eye, deteriorates; each year, on the recommendation of a senator or deputy, he adds to it, or sees, intruders there, whose previous services are null, feeble in capacity and of weak integrity who do poor work or none at all, and who, to hold their post or get promoted, count not on their merits but on their sponsors. The rest, able and faithful functionaries of the old school, who are poor and to whom no path is open, become weary and lose their energy; they are no longer even certain of keeping their place; if they stay, it is for the dispatch of current business and because they cannot be dispensed with; perhaps to-morrow, however, they will cease to be considered indispensable; some political denunciation, or to give a political favorite a place, will put them by anticipation on the retired list. From now on they have two powers to consult, one, legitimate and natural, the authority of their administrative chiefs, and the other illegitimate and parasite, consisting of democratic influence from both above and below. For them, as for the prefect, public welfare descends to the second rank and the electoral interest mounts upward to the first rank. With them as with him self-respect, professional honor, the conscientious performance of duty, reciprocal loyalty go down; discipline relaxes, punctuality falters, and, as the saying goes, the great administrative edifice is no longer a well-kept house, but a barracks.
Naturally, under the democratic regime, the maintenance and service of this house becomes more and more costly;[38] for, owing to the additional centimes, it is the rich and well-to-do minority which defrays the larger portion of the expense. Owing to universal suffrage, the poor or half-poor majority which dominate the elections so that the large majority with impunity can overtax the minority. At Paris, the parliament and the government, elected by this numerical majority, contrive demands in its behalf, force expenditure, augment public works, schools, endowments, gratuities, prizes, a multiplication of offices to increase the number of their clients, while it never tires in decreeing, in the name of principles, works for show, theatrical, ruinous, and dangerous, the cost of which they do not care to know, and of which the social import escapes them. Democracy, above as well as below, is short-sighted; it seizes whatever food it comes across, like an animal, with open jaws and head down; it refuses to anticipate and to calculate; it burdens the future and wastes every fortune it undertakes to manage, not alone that of the central state, but, again, those of all local societies. Up to the advent of universal suffrage, the administrators appointed above or elected below, in the department or in the commune, kept tight hold of the purse-strings; since 1848, especially since 1870, and still later, since the passage of the laws of 1882, which, in suppressing the obligatory consent of the heaviest taxed, let slip the last of these strings, this purse, wide open, is emptied in the street. – In 1851,[39] the departments, all together, expended 97 millions; in 1869, 192 millions; in 1881, 314 millions. In 1836, the communes, all together, save Paris, expended 117 millions, in 1862, 450 millions, in 1877, 676 millions. If we examine the receipts covering this expenditure, we find that the additional centimes which supplied the local budgets, in 1820, with 80 millions, and, in 1850, with 131 millions, supplied them, in 1870, with 249 millions, in 1880, with 318 millions, and, in 1887, with 364 millions. The annual increase, therefore, of these superadded centimes to the principal of the direct taxes is enormous, and finally ends in an overflow. In 1874,[40] there were already 24 departments in which the sum of additional centimes reached or surpassed the sum of the principal. “In a very few years,” says an eminent economist,[41] “it is probable that, for nearly all of the departments,” the overcharge will be similar. Already, for a long time, in the total of personal taxation,[42] the local budgets raised more than the state, and, in 1888, the principal of the tax real property, 183 millions, is less than the total of centimes joined with it, 196 millions. Coming generations are burdened over and beyond the present generation, while the sum of loans constantly increases, like that of taxation. The indebted communes, except Paris, owed, altogether, in 1868, 524 millions francs[43] , in 1871, 711 millions, and in 1878, 1322 millions francs.[44] Paris, in 1868, already owed 1326 millions, March 30, 1878, it owed 1988 millions. In this same Paris, the annual contribution of each inhabitant for local expenses was, at the end of the first Empire, in 1813, 37 francs per head, at the end of the Restoration,[45] francs, after the July monarchy, in 1848, 43 francs, and, at the end of the second Empire, in 1869, 94 francs. In 1887,45 it is 110 francs per head. [46]
VIII. Final result in a tendency to bankruptcy.
Such, in brief, is the history of local society from 1789 down to 1889. After the philosophic demolition of the Revolution and the practical constructions of the Consulate, it could no longer be a small patrimony, something to take pride in, an object of affection and devotion to its inhabitants. The departments and communes have become more or less vast lodging-houses, all built on the same plan and managed according to the same regulations one as passable as the other, with apartments in them which, more or less good, are more or less dear, but at rates which, higher or lower, are fixed at a uniform tariff over the entire territory, so that the 36,000 communal buildings and the 86 department hotels are about equal, it making but little difference whether one lodges in the latter rather than in the former. The permanent taxpayers of both sexes who have made these premises their home, have not obtained recognition for what they are, invincibly and by nature, a syndicate of neighbors, an involuntary, obligatory and private association, in which physical solidarity engenders moral solidarity, a natural, limited society whose members own the building in common, and each possesses a property right more or less great, according to the greater or lesser contribution he makes to the expenses of the establishment. Up to this time no room has yet been found, either in the law or in minds, for this very plain truth; its place is taken and occupied in advance by the two errors which, in turn or both at once, have led the legislator and opinion astray.
Taking things as a whole, it is admitted up to 1830 that the legitimate proprietor of the local building is the central state, that it may install its delegate therein, the prefect, with full powers; that, for better government, he consents to be instructed by the leading interested and most capable parties on the spot; that he should fix the petty rights he concedes to them within the narrowest limits; that he should appoint them; that, if he calls them together for consultation, it is from time to time and generally for form’s sake, to add the authority of their assent to the authority of his omnipotence, on the implied condition that he shall not give heed to their objections if he does not like them, and not follow their advice if he does not choose to accept it. – Taking things as a whole, it is admitted that, since 1848, the legitimate proprietors of the building are its adult male inhabitants, counted by heads, all equal and all with an equal part in the common property, comprising those who contribute nothing or nearly nothing to the common expenditure of the house, the numerous body of semi-poor who lodge in it at half price, and the not less numerous body to whom administrative charity furnishes house comforts, shelter, light, and frequently provisions, gratuitously. – Between both these contradictory and false conceptions, between the prefect of the year VIII, and the democracy of 1792, a compromise has been effected; undoubtedly, the prefect, sent from Paris, is and remains the titular director, the active and responsible manager of the departmental or communal building; but, in his management of it he is bound to keep in view the coming elections, and in such a way as will maintain the parliamentary majority in the seats they occupy in parliament; consequently, he must conciliate the local leaders of universal suffrage, rule with their help, put up with the intrusion of their bias and cupidity, take their advice daily, follow it often, even in small matters, even in payments day by day of sums already voted, in appointing an office-clerk, in the appointment of an unpaid underling, who may some day or other take this clerk’s place.[47] – Hence the spectacle before our eyes: a badly kept establishment in which profusion and waste render each other worse and worse, where sinecures multiply and where corruption enters in; a staff of officials becoming more and more numerous and less and less serviceable, harassed between two different authorities, obliged to possess or to simulate political zeal and to neutralize an impartial law by partiality, and, besides performing their regular duties, to do dirty work; in this staff, there are two sorts of employees, the new- comers who are greedy and who, through favor, get the best places, and the old ones who are patient and pretend no more, but who suffer and grow disheartened; in the building itself, there is great demolition and reconstruction, architectural fronts in monumental style for parade and to excite attention, entirely new decorative and extremely tiresome structures at extravagant cost; consequently, loans and debts, heavier bills at the end of each year for each occupant, low rents, but still high, for favorites in the small rooms and garrets, and extravagant rents for the larger and more sumptuous apartments; in sum, forced receipts which do not offset the expenses; liabilities which exceed assets; a budget which shows only a stable balance on paper, – in short, an establishment with which the public is not content, and which is on the road to bankruptcy.
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Notes:
[1] Laws of March 21, 1831, and July 18, 1837, June 22, 1833, and May 10, 1838. The municipal electors number about 2,250,000 and form the superior third of the adult masculine population; in the choice of its notables and semi-notables, the law takes into account not only wealth and direct taxation but likewise education and services rendered to the public. – The department electors number about 200,000, about as many as the political electors. The reporter observes that “an almost complete analogy exists between the choice of a deputy and the choice of a department councilor, and that it is natural to confide the election to the same electoral body otherwise divided, since the object is to afford representation to another order of interests.”
[2] Laws of July 3, 1848.
[3] Laws of Aug. 12, 1876, March 28, 1882, and April 5, 1884; law of Aug. 10, 1871.
[4] The prefect, who is directed and posted by the minister of the Interior in Paris.
[5] “The Revolution,” vol. I., book VIII. (Laff. I. pp. 467-559.)
[6] And in 1880 it certainly excluded the female side of human nature. (SR.)
[7] It must have been evident that nature gives to each worker, hunter, farmer or fisherman in accordance with their competence and industry. (SR.)
[8] Construction of roads, canals, sewers, highways etc and protection against calamities.
[9] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “Traité de la science des finances,” 4th edition, I., p. 303: “The personal tax, levied only as principal, oscillates between the minimum of 1 fr. 50 and the maximum of 4 fr. 50 per annum, according to the communes. – Ibid., 304: “In 1806 the personal tax produced in France about sixteen millions of francs, a little less than o fr. 50 per head of the inhabitants.”
[10] Ibid., I., 367 (on the tax on doors and windows). According to the population of the commune, this is from 0 fr. 30 to 1 fr. for each opening, from 0 fr. 45 to 1 fr. 50 for two openings, from 0 fr. 90 to 4 fr. 50 for three openings, from 1 fr. 60 to 6 fr. 40 for four openings, and from 2 fr. 50 to 8 fr. 50 for five openings. The first of these rates is applied to all communes of less than 5000 souls. We see that the poor man, especially the poor peasant, is considered; the tax on him is progressive in an inverse sense.
[11] De Foville, “La France Economique” (1887), p.59: “Our 14,500 charity bureaux gave assistance in 1883 to 1,405,500 persons; . . . . as, in reality, the population of the communes aided (by them) is only 22,000,000, the proportion of the registered poor amounts to over six per cent.”
[12] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ” Essai sur la répartition des richesses,” p.174, et seq. – In 1851, the number of land-owners in France was estimated at 7,800,000. Out of these, three millions were relieved of the land tax, as indigent, and their quotas were considered as irrecoverable.
[13] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “Traité de la science des finances,” p.721.
[14] De Foville, p.419. (In 1889.)
[15] Cf ante, on the characteristics of indirect taxation.
[16] Here it is the estimated rent, which stands to the real rent as four to five ; an estimated rent of 400 francs indicates a real rent of 500 francs.
[17] De Foville, p.57.
[18] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu,” Essai sur la répartition de richesses,” p. 174.
[19] Ibid., p.209: In 1878, in Paris, 74,000 houses with 1,022,539 rentals, 337,587 being for trade and commerce, and 684,952 for dwelling purposes. Among the latter, 468,641 have a locative value inferior to 300 francs a year; 74,360 are between 500 and 750 francs ; 21,147 are between 750 and 1000 francs. All these lodgings are more or less exempt from the personal tax: those between 1000 and 400 francs pay it with a more or less great reduction: those under 400 francs pay nothing. Above 1000 francs, we find 17,202 apartments from between 1000 and 1250 francs ; 6198 from between 1250 and 1500 francs; 21,453 from 1500 to 3000 francs. These apartments are occupied by more or less well-to-do people. – 14,858 apartments above 3000 francs are occupied by the richer or the wealthy class. Among the latter 9985 are from 3000 to 6000; 3040 are from 6000 to 10,000; 1443 are from 10,000 to 20,000; 421 are above 20,000 francs. These two latter categories are occupied by the really opulent class. – According to the latest statistics, instead of 684,952 dwelling rentals there are 806,187, of which 727,419 are wholly or partly free of the personal tax. (“Situation au 1ère Janvier, 1888,” report by M. Lamouroux, conseiller-municipal.)
[20] The following appropriations for 1889 are printed on my tax-bill: “To the State, 51 %.; to the Department, 21 % ; to the commune, 25 %.” On business permits: “To the State, 64 %.; to the Department, 12 %.; to the commune, 20 %. The surplus of taxes is appropriated to the benevolent fund and for remission of taxes.”
[21] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “Traité de la science des finances,” I., pp. 367-368: “In communes under 5000 inhabitants the principal of the tax on doors and windows is, for houses with one opening, 0 fr. 30 per annum ; for those with four openings, 1 fr. 60.” Now, “a house with five openings pays nearly nine times as much as a house with one opening.” The small taxpayers are accordingly largely relieved at the expense of those who pay heavy and average taxes, the magnitude of this relief being appreciable by the following figures: In 1885, out of 8,975,166 houses, 248,352 had one opening, 1,827,104 two openings, 1,624,516 three openings, and 1,165,902 four openings. More than one- half of the houses, all of those belonging to the poor or straitened, are thus relieved, while the other half, since the tax is an impost, not a quota, but an apportionment, is overcharged as much.
[22] One result of this principle is, that the poor who are exempt from taxation or who are on the poor list have no vote, which is the case in England and in Prussia. – Through another result of the same principle, the law of May 15, 1818, in France, summoned the heaviest taxpayers, in equal number with the members of the municipal council, to deliberate with it every time that “a really urgent expenditure” obliged the commune to raise extra additional centimes beyond the usual 0 fr. 05. “Thus,” says Henrion de Pancey (“Du pouvoir municipal,” p.109), “the members of the municipal councils belong to the class of small land-owners, at least in a large number of communes, voted the charges without examination which only affected them insensibly.” – This last refuge of distributive justice was abolished by the law of April 5, 1882.
[23] Max Leclerc, “Le Vie municipale en Prusse.” (Extrait des “Annales de l’Ecole libre des sciences politique,” 1889, a study on the town of Bonn.) At Bonn, which has a population of 35,810 inhabitants, the first group is composed of 167 electors: the second, of 471; the third, of 2607, each group elects 8 municipal councilors out of 24.
[24] De Foville, “La France économique,” p. 16 (census of 1881). – Number of communes, 36,097; number below 1000 inhabitants, 27,503; number below 500 inhabitants, 16,870. – What is stated applies partly to the two following categories: 1st, communes from 1000 to 1500 inhabitants, 2982; 2nd, communes from 1500 to 2000 inhabitants, 1917. – All the communes below 2000 inhabitants are counted as rural in the statistics of population, and they number 33,402.
[25] See Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “L’État moderne et ses fonctions,” p. 169. “The various groups of inhabitants, especially in the country, do not know how to undertake or agree upon anything of themselves. I have seen villages of two or three hundred people belonging to a large scattered commune wait patiently for years and humbly petition for aid in constructing an indispensable fountain, which required only a contribution of 200 or 300 francs, 5 francs per head, to put up. I have seen others possessing only one road on which to send off their produce and unable to act in concert, when, with an outlay of 2000 francs, and 200 or 300 francs a year to keep it in order, it would easily suffice for all their requirements. I speak of regions relatively rich, much better off than the majority of communes in France.”
[26] In French villages, on one of the walls of a public building on the square are notices of all kinds, of interest to the inhabitants, and among these, in a frame behind a wire netting, the latest copy of the government official newspaper, giving authentic political items, those which it thinks best for the people to read. (Tr.)
[27] On the communal system in France, and on the reforms which, following the example of other nations, might be introduced into it, cf. Joseph Ferrand (formerly a prefect), “Les Institutions administratives en France et à l’étranger”; Rudolph Gneist, “Les Réformes administratives en Prusse accomplies par la legislation de 1872,” (especially the institution of Amtsvorsteher, for the union of communes or circumscriptions of about 1500 souls); the Duc de Broglie, “Vues sur le gouvernement de la France” (especially on the reforms that should be made in the administration of the commune and canton), p. 21. – “Deprive communal magistrates of their quality as government agents; separate the two orders of functions; have the public functionary whose duty it is to see that the laws are executed in the communes, the execution of general laws and the decisions of the superior authority carried out, placed at the county town.”
[28] De Foville, ibid., p. 16. – The remarks here made apply to towns of the foregoing category (from 5000 to 10,000 souls), numbering 312. A last category comprises towns from 2000 to 5000 souls, numbering 2160, and forming the last class of urban populations; these, through their mixed character, assimilate to the 1817 communes containing from 1500 to 2000 inhabitants, forming the first category of the rural populations.
[29] Max Leclerc, “La Vie municipale en Prusse,” p 17. – In Prussia, this directing mind is called “the magistrate,” as in our northern and northeastern communes. In eastern Prussia, the “magistrate” is a collective body; for example, at Berlin, it comprises 34 persons, of which 17 are specialists, paid and engaged for twelve years, and 17 without pay. In western Prussia, the municipal management consists generally of an individual, the burgomaster, salaried and engaged for twelve years.
[30] Max Leclerc, ibid., p.20. – “The present burgomaster in Bonn was burgomaster at Münchens-Gladbach, before being called to Bonn. The present burgomaster of Crefeld came from Silesia . . . . A lawyer, well known for his works on public law, occupying a government position at Magdeburg,” was recently called “to the lucrative position of burgomaster ” in the town of Münster. At Bonn, a town of 30,000 inhabitants, “everything rests on his shoulders he exercises a great many of the functions which, with us, belong to the prefect.”
[31] Max Leclerc, ibid., p. 25. – Alongside of the paid town officers and the municipal councilors, there are special committees composed of benevolent members and electors “either to administer or superintend some branch of communal business, or to study some particular question.” “These committees, subject, moreover, in all respects to the burgomaster, are elected by the municipal council.” – There are twelve of these in Bonn and over a hundred in Berlin. This institution serves admirably for rendering those who are well disposed useful, as well as for the development of local patriotism, a practical sense and public spirit.
[32] Aucoc, p. 283.
[33] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “L’administrateur locale en France et en Angleterre,” pp.26, 28, 92. (Decrees of March 25, 1852, and April 13, 1861.)
[349 J. Ferrand, ibid., p. 169, 170 (Paris, 1879): “In many cases, general tutelage and local tutelage are paralyzed . . . . Since 1870- 1876 the mayors, to lessen the difficulties of their task, are frequently forced to abandon any rightful authority; the prefects are induced to tolerate, to approve of these infractions of the law. . . . For many years one cannot read the minutes of a session of the council general or of the municipal council without finding numerous examples of the illegality we report . . . . In another order of facts, for example in that which relates to the official staff, do we not see every day agents of the state, even conscientious, yield to the will of all-powerful political notabilities and entirely abandon the interests of the service? ” – These abuses have largely increased within the past ten years.
[35] See “La République et les conservateurs,” in the Revue des Deux Mondes of March 1, 189, p.108. – “I speak of this de visu [from experience, (SR.)]: I take my own arrondissement. It is in one of the eastern departments, lately represented by radicals. This time it was carried by a conservative. An attempt was first made to annul the election, which had to be given up as the votes in dispute were too many. Revenge was taken on the electors. Gendarmes, in the communes, investigated the conduct of the curés, forest-guard, and storekeeper. The hospital doctor, a conservative, was replaced by an opportunist. The tax-comptroller, a man of the district, and of suspicious zeal, was sent far into the west. Every functionary who, on the even of the election, did not have a contrite look, was threatened with dismissal. A road-surveyor was regarded as having been lukewarm, and accordingly put on the retired list. There is no petty vexation that was not resorted to, no insignificant person, whom they disdained to strike. Stone breakers were denounced for saying that they ought not to have their wages reduced. Sisters of charity, in a certain commune, dispensed medicine to the poor; they were forbidden to do this, to annoy the mayor living in Paris. The custodians of mortgages had an errand-boy who was guilty of distributing, not voting-tickets, but family notices (of a marriage) on the part of the new deputy; a few days after this, a letter from the prefecture gave the custodian notice that the criminal must be replaced in twenty-four hours. A notary, in a public meeting, dared to interrupt the radical candidate; he was prosecuted in the court for a violation of professional duties, and the judges of judiciary reforms condemned him to three months ‘suspension.’ This took place, “not in Languedoc, or in Provence, in the south among excited brains where everything is allowable, but under the dull skies of Champagne. And when I interrogate the conservatives of the West and the Center, they reply: “We have seen many beside these, but is long since we have ceased to be astonished!”
[36] Ibid., p.105 : “Each cantonal chief town has its office of informers. The Minister of Public Worship has himself told that on the first of January, 1890, there were 300 curés deprived of their salary, about three or four times as many as on the first of January, 1889.”
[37] These figures are taken from the latest statistical reports. Some of them are furnished by the chief or directors of special services.
[38] Taine could hardly have imagined how costly the modern democracy would, 100 years later, become. How could he have imaged that the “Human Rights” should become the right to live comfortably and well at the expense of an ever more productive society.
[39] DeFoville, pp.412, 416, 425, 455; Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “Traité de la science des finances,” I., p.717.
[40] “Statistiques financières des communes en 1889”: – 3539 communes pay less than 15 common centimes; 2597 pay from 0 fr. 15 to 0 fr. 30; 9652 pay from 0 fr. 31 to 0 fr. 50; 11,095 from 0 fr. 51 to 1 franc, and 4248 over 1 franc. – Here this relates only to the common centimes; to have the sum total of the additiona1 local centimes of each commune would require the addition of the department centimes, which the statistics do not furnish.
[41] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ibid., I., pp.690, 717.
[42] Ibid.: “If the personal tax were deducted from the amount of personal and house tax combined we would find that the assessment of the state in the product of the house tax, that is to say the product of the tax on rentals, amounts to 41 or 42 millions, and that the share of localities in the product of this tax surpasses that of the state by 8 or 9 millions (Year 1877.)
[43] Between 1805 and 1900 the French franc was tied to the gold standard. A 20 francs coin thus weighed 7,21 grams. Its price is today in 1998 1933.- francs. Taine’s figures have to be multiplied by app. ten in order to compare with today’s prices. No real comparison can, however, be made since production per capita has multiplied by a large factor and so have taxes.
[44] “Situation financière des department et des communes,” published in 1889 by the Minister of the Interior. Loans and indebtedness of the departments at the end of the fiscal year in 1886, 630,066,102 francs. Loans and indebtedness of the communes Dec. 30, 1886, 3,020,450,528 francs.
[45] De Foville, p.148; Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ” L’État moderne et ses fonctions,” p. 21.
[46] During the 110 years since Taine wrote his somber previsions the French have had to pay the same penalty as other ill managed Democracies; Bankruptcies direct or indirect with galloping inflation and enormous devaluations with as a consequence impoverishment of naive depositors and credulous pension fund participants, wars for which France was badly prepared with millions of dead and prisoners and with occupation of France as a result. The culprits, the elected politicians, have either died or anyhow lived out their lives comfortably on the indexed retirements which the oligarchy generally reserves for themselves. (SR.)
[47] Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, “L’Administration locale en France et en Angleterre,” p. 28. (Decrees of March 25, 1852, and April 13, 1861.) List of offices directly appointed by the prefect and on the recommendation of the heads of the service, among others the supernumeraries of telegraph lines and of the tax offices.
End of The Modern Regime, Volume 1 [Napoleon]