请将“For anyone visited by the tax controllers, seeking smuggled salt or other goods liable to tax, the status guarantees of the tax farmers were somewhat incidental. What was relevant for them was that the agents of the tax farmers could not only call on them at any time with military support, but were also empowered to imprison people, without even having to provide a judicial decision.110
From the mid-eighteenth century, critical views on the tax farm piled up in political writings, for example Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. But, because the tax farmers had a private interest in the level of the tax yield, and indirect taxes made up a good third of tax income at this time, the prospect of reform was almost non-existent. The tax farm was not only protected by its close connections at court, but also by the interests of many participants great and small whose hopes lay in its profits. In 1780, Necker made the first encroach-ment on the tax farm, withdrawing certain taxes from its remit, in particular excise duties. The opposition provoked by this measure, and others in the same sense, led to his downfall, and even to a restoration of some of the tax farm's lost remit. Though the crown continued in 1787 the policy begun by Necker of restricting private profit from its power of taxation, residues of the ferme générale persisted until 1792.
Tax farmers were not the crown's only creditors engaged in its tax system. Far more so were those officials responsible for the various distinct royal trea-suries or for the collection of taxes in the pays d'état. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Daniel Dessert has estimated the number of finan-ciers, i.e. the tax farmers and those officials who ‘did business with the king's money' at around 3,000, including 534 who in his view enjoyed great influence and were integrated into the clientele structure of the power élite.111
In order to grasp the mode of operation of this financial business, we have first to bear in mind that only a small part of the tax collected was sent to the capital. The structure of expenditure was decentralised. There were separate funds for the different expenditures of the crown, e.g. the army, navy, roads and bridges, and the maintenance of royal buildings. The managers of these had the task of collecting the revenues allocated to them and making certain payments. This led to a situation in which surpluses could exist in certain funds while others were unable to meet their obligations. The contrôleur général - the description of whose office derived from the intended double bookkeeping by contre rôle - had no opportunity of obtaining an overview of the actual financial situation of the crown. Reports might be sent in, but the manager of the naval fund, for example, did not deliver a single account between 1771 and 1787.112
The crown also gave out pensions to the nobility, not in the form of a claim on the central treasury, but for example a claim to the income derived from a certain mill on the basis of its local monopoly. It was then up to the pensioner to make good his claim vis-à-vis the fund responsible for collecting this income. As we have explained above, this could be a lengthy process, and often unsuccessful. The pensioners therefore sold their claims to financiers who had entered this particular business, for sums that might be far less than those they were entitled to, but were at least secure.
So that the crown could use its own administration as a credit system, the highest financial offices were only sold to individuals who already possessed great wealth. (In the case of offices acquired by inheritance, this precondition was ensured by long-term family strategies.) The office-holders used the money they received for investment, especially in the tax farm. As long as the amounts were recorded, this was not corruption but normal business and official practice. They would then give the crown short-term credit in time of need, i.e. during the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They also issued paper money, the convertibility of which was actually secured not by the crown as such, but by its 'financier officials'. The creditworthiness of this group was high, resting as it did on the security of future tax collection. (Only in 1788, when tax income was leased out for three years in advance, did these financiers find hardly any takers.)
Until the seventeenth century, the king had chiefly resorted to banks for credit, but bankers stopped acting as financiers after the crisis of the banking centre of Lyon, caused by the Italian campaigns. This brought the influence of foreign lenders to an end. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the government used banks principally if French troops were fighting in the ter-ritory of its allies, and so could not be supplied by means of an occupation regime. In these cases, provisions had to be obtained in foreign currency, and banks were regularly approached for transactions of this kind. Otherwise, the crown's real financiers were either tax farmers or finance officials.
Of the 534 financiers who according to Daniel Dessert possessed great influ-ence in the reign of Louis XIV, 422 were noble. It is true that more than half of these had been ennobled in their lifetime, while 104 were second-generation nobles and 69 third-generation.113 But even the newly ennobled were not social climbers in the general sense of the term. For the tricky business of a financier did not just suppose considerable personal wealth and an extended introduction to the legal and institutional finesse of this branch of business that was carefully organised by his family; it required above all the patronage of influential persons. Without powerful supporters, it was not just impossible to get anywhere in the business of the king's fiscal power, but one was exposed without protection to ministerial strategies of repression that had to be expected at the end of each war. Just like all other forms of participation in centralised rule, the private exploitation of state debt was practised en famille, and in a context of clientele groups engaged in mutual conflict.
The course of the ancien régime saw both long-term structural change in the financial system, and typical conjunctural fluctuations in business conditions. The first of these included the attempt made to expand the competence of direct taxation to the pays d'état. The crown only had direct taxation power in the so-called pays d'éléction, those districts governed by royal officials. These were divided into généralités, each being subject to a général. The subdivisions of généralités were the éléctions, called after the élus, the financial officials responsible for them. In the pays d'état, on the other hand, those districts represented by (variously composed) estate assemblies, the crown charged the governor it appointed with agreeing the level of contributions to be provided in negotiations with the assembly. In these districts the crown controlled neither the form of taxation nor the tax administration. It had to resort to diplomatic strategies, and quite often found itself forced to confirm old privileges or bestow new ones, in return for agreement to the sums it requested. Apart from the fact that the sums promised were by no means always delivered, being reduced by all kinds of factors from hailstorms to the billeting of troops, the tax collection in the pays d'état was simpler than in the pays d'éléction because local opposition was expressed in the negotiations with the governor, and there was generally no further resistance once an appropriate compromise had been reached. By extending the direct tax administration in this sense, the crown could even expect a better yield, but the route to this lay through the sale of more offices. (In the 1620s and 30s, new offices were created almost entirely for financial reasons.) This led to violent protests.
In Aix, for example, the parlement, along with local nobles, artisans and members of the lower orders, opposed the introduction of élus in 1630. The uprising that these protests provoked was led by the parlement, until the poor people began to wear symbolic little bells or cascavoux after which the uprising was subsequently named. These bells were a warning to all who profited from taxation or expected to do so. When the lower orders of the town, along with the peasants from the surrounding area, eventually took action against a landlord with the reputation of being particularly unjust, a civil war broke out, at the end of which the more well-to-do inhabitants of the town willingly opened the gates to the king's régiments. The town paid its contribution, and the administrative reform was abandoned.
The course of one particular revolt, taken here from the work of René Pillor- get,114 is exemplary, and makes immediately clear why a protracted scholarly dispute could break out over the interpretation of the pre-Fronde. Porshnev, 
who was the first to study systematically the many tax revolts in the first half of the seventeenth century, saw these as a conflict between rich and poor - a class struggle. Mousnier, the main representative of a critical counter-position, stressed the unity of local urban resistance against the claims of the crown. A number of excellent studies were subsequently provoked by this dispute, and have made clear - sometimes against their author's intention - that the events were marked by both structures of conflict.
As the direct appropriation of landlords had to compete with that of the crown, given the existing structures of production, many landlords supported the uprisings. Local officials for their part defended their rights and appro-priation authority against the attempt to reduce both of these by a change in administrative organisation. Where indirect taxes were levied in regions that had previously been exempt from them, or where urban exemptions from the taille were abolished, there was general resistance under the leadership of those who had most to lose. The same also went for those towns where after 1634 troops were permanently billeted because of the war, so that the privilege of exemption from this plague was not honoured. Everywhere, however, the common resistance against the crown fragmented if it was radicalised by the common people and threatened no longer just the tax collectors, but all lords and their agents. The conflicts of interest among the better-off, and the competition between centralised and direct appropriation, lost their impor-tance as soon as the entire structure of appropriation was endangered. This was then shored up by regiments summoned by the royal government. This shows how, despite all the competitive relations, the most general social basis of the ancien régime consisted in an interest of the better-off in regulated condi-tions of appropriation that transcended estate limitations.
In the period of the pre-Fronde, this interest was the precondition for the establishment of a militarised system of tax collection under the control of the intendants. This was, in turn, one of the reasons why, apart from isolated resistance movements, especially that of the tard avisés (‘belatedly notified') in the early eighteenth century, the heyday of tax revolts came to an end with the Fronde. The second reason is to be seen in the change of social structure in the countryside. The great tax revolts of the peasants, such as the croquants upris-ing in the province of Guyenne that began in 1635, the Périgord uprising two years later, and the revolt of the nu-pieds in Normandy in 1639, were however still marked by the organised resistance of entire villages. ”翻译为中文