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3/6/25, 3:22 PM about:blank Tax and the French Revolution STUDIA HISTORICA GEDANENSIA TOM VI (2015) Gerri Chanel (York College, The City University of New York) Taxation as a Cause of the French Revolution: Setting! Ithe Record Straight Introduction “The French Revolution has become a modern fable written and rewritten for people who imagine they already know the story even before they have read it)” wrote historian J.M. Bosher in 1988". A core part of that fable goes as follows: a primary cause of the Revolution was onerous taxation of the commoners — pri- marily the peasantry — because the clergy and nobility were exempt. However, despite “a virtual rebirth of eighteenth-century political history”? and the work of economic historians such as Mathias, O’Brien, Kwass, White, Morineau, and others, “virtually all textbooks and most historians still subscribe to Marcel Mar- ion’s interpretation hich is that The Old Regime ...perished because its tax system struck only the inferior classes”? and that those taxes were oppressively high. Norberg made this observation in 1994, yet it still holds true in large part today. However, in reality, the clergy paid substantial sums in lieu of tax pay- ments, the nobility was only partially exempt, and taxes seem not to have been nearly as onerous as the fable goes, even on the peasantry. There is no question that taxation played a primary role in the Revolution, but it was largely for other reasons than the “common wisdom”. What the royal subjects of every social class appear to have passionately hated — far more than tax rates, onerous or not — was an inconsistent, arbitrary, byzantine, system plagued with incompetence and abuse of both taxpayers and the system itself. John Bosher, The French Revolution (New York: Norton, 1988), ix. 2 Kathryn Norberg, “The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution of 1789”, in. Fiscal Crises, Liberty and Representative Government, 1450-1789, edited by Philip Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 256. > Tbidem, 47