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Updated: May 20, 2025
Taillable, roturier, were terms of social ostracism impatiently borne by thousands. Other direct taxes were the capitation, bringing in over 50 millions, the dixiéme, the don gratuit. But more important than any of these was the great Government indirect tax, the monopoly on salt, or gabelle.
"He is what you call 'noble," replied Lord Taunton "that is, what we call a 'gentleman; his name is Maltravers. He lately came of age; and has, I believe, rather a good property." "Monsieur Maltravers; only Monsieur?" repeated Madame de Ventadour. "Why," said the French minister, "you understand that the English gentilhomme does not require a De or a title to distinguish him from the roturier."
Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil, could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste solved the problem by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble.
In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere roturier.
There was nothing of the roturier, nothing of a Jean Duval, in this polished man of the world who had thought out this subtle scheme for ingratiating himself in the eyes of his lady fair.
"That must be a marquis at least," whispers Lankin, who consults me on points of society, and is pleased to have a great opinion of my experience. I burst out in a scornful laugh. "THAT!" I say; "he is a captain of dragoons, and his father an attorney in Bedford Row. The whiskers of a roturier, my good Lankin, grow as long as the beard of a Plantagenet.
A wealthy marriage; even if it must be a 'mesalliance. I think at your age, with your appearance, that your name is worth at least two million francs in the eyes of a rich 'roturier' with an ambitious daughter." "Alas!" said the young man, rising, "I see I shall have to go back to Rochebriant. I cannot sell my castle, I cannot sell my creed, and I cannot sell my name and myself."
A wealthy marriage; even if it must be a 'mesalliance. I think at your age, with your appearance, that your name is worth at least two million francs in the eyes of a rich 'roturier' with an ambitious daughter." "Alas!" said the young man, rising, "I see I shall have to go back to Rochebriant. I cannot sell my castle, I cannot sell my creed, and I cannot sell my name and myself."
The noble has gone down on the social ladder, and the roturier has gone up; the one descends as the other rises. Every half-century brings them nearer to each other, and they will very shortly meet. Nor is this phenomenon at all peculiar to France. Whithersoever we turn our eyes, we shall discover the same continual revolution throughout the whole of Christendom.
As far back as they could look, they saw only the tyranny of one class and the degradation of another, Frank and Gaul, knight and villein, gentleman and roturier. They hated the monarchy, the church, the nobility. They cared nothing for the States or the Parliament. It was long the fashion to ascribe all the follies which they committed to the writings of the philosophers.
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