Who paid taxes in pre-Revolutionary France?

Source: Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution. Translated by R. R. Palmer (University of Princeton Press, 1947): 8-10, footnote 1.

The nobility enjoyed privileges, some “honorific,” such as the right to carry the sword, others “useful,” such as exemption from the tax known as the taille and from obligations of for road service and quartering troops; but [the nobility] was less favored than the clergy, not forming an organized body and being subject to the poll-tax and the twentieth-taxes.

The taille (the word originally meant the “cut” taken by the lord from the subject) was the basic tax of the French monarchy before the Revolution. It varied in both form and burdensomeness from province to province, and was never paid by anyone who because of class status, regional privilege or personal influence could obtain exemption, so that not to be taillable was one of the most common of privileges, and to be taillable was not only a financial expense but a social indignity. In general, the taille was paid only by the poor, especially the peasants. Louis XIV had created two additional direct taxes, payable in principle by all: (1) the capitation [head-tax], inadequately translated as the “poll-tax”… levied in rough correspondence to income; and (2) the vingtième or “twentieth,” originally conceived as a kind of 5 per cent tax on income; but influential groups—Church, nobility, … [members of the] bourgeoisie [or merchant class], had so successfully watered down these obligations (… by concealing the true amount of income or by other means) that these two taxes were also undermined by privilege… Also to be considered as direct taxes, though paid in service rather than in money, were the corvées royales consisting in (a) the transports militaires, by which civilians lent the use of carts, etc., to assist in troop movements, and above all (b) corvée des routes, by which people within five or ten miles of the through highways or routes royales were called upon to supply labor, teams and wagons to keep them in repair, usually being liable for from six to thirty days a year. Only peasants were subject to these corvées, though of course it was not mainly the peasants who benefited. …

The difficulty of the [French] monarchy in levying direct taxes arose from a fundamental weakness in the absolutist structure—that the government ruled without the express consent of influential groups within the country. The king’s government, unwilling or unable to allow participation of these groups in the formation of policy, persuaded them to accept its authority by assuring them “liberties,” such as immunities to taxation. Contrariwise, the influential groups—Church, nobility, etc.—took the position that if they were not represented in the government they were under no obligation to pay taxes to it. The tax exemptions of the Old Regime thus reflect, inversely, the well-known American principle of “no taxation without representation.” The result was that most direct taxes were paid by persons lacking the status or influence to bargain with the king’s officials, and that the king’s government could never raise by direct taxes a revenue at all proportionate to the real wealth of the country, or to its legitimate needs.

Hence the monarchy resorted heavily to indirect taxes, which in principle were paid by all classes, but which in effect, since they fell on articles of common consumption, were borne mainly by the least wealthy. Indirect taxes included (1) the customs duties, including internal customs duties; (2) the excises or aides on wines, liquors, playing cards, soap, etc., and (3) the government monopolies of tobacco, salt, etc., especially the salt monopoly or gabelle, by which the government required its subjects to purchase fixed amounts of salt at a figure far higher than the economic price. …The indirect taxes were “farmed,” i.e., collected by the private enterprise of concessionaries who made tax-farming a business. There were two general reasons for the [tax]-farming system: an administrative reason, in that the central government lacked the machinery for dealing with the millions of individuals on small matters; and a financial reason, in that the government, always hard-pressed for cash, obtained an immediate lump sum from the farmers, leaving them the right to make a profit by collecting over a period of time the whole amount legally due.