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Updated: June 15, 2025
For my part, if I were the government this is a secret between you and me, mind I would look out for something else to stand in the place of the salt-tax. It is not well to interpose between man and the gratuities of Dame Nature, and to make him pay more heavily for the blood's chosen friend than she meant him to be charged.
Under Louis XIV. the smuggling of salt alone caused annually thirty- seven hundred domiciliary seizures, two thousand arrests of men, eighteen hundred of women, sixty-six hundred of children, eleven hundred seizures of horses, fifty confiscations of carriages, and three hundred condemnations to the galleys. And this, observes the historian, was the result of one tax alone, the salt-tax.
The officials attached to each member of the royal family were almost incredible in number, and all paid by the taxes. The old gabelle, or salt-tax, had gone on ever since the English wars, and every member of a family had to pay it, not according to what they used, but what they were supposed to need. Every pig was rated at what he ought to require for salting.
The impost they had voted, notably the salt-tax, had met with violent opposition. "When the news thereof reached Normandy," says Froissart, "the country was very much astounded at it, for they had not learned to pay any such thing.
Yet he had to pay a house-tax of five piastres, a war-tax of five piastres, a camel-tax of five piastres, a palm-tax of five piastres, a salt-tax of nine piastres, a poll-tax of thirty piastres, a land-tax of ninety piastres. The canal for which he was taxed gave his feddan of land no water, for the Pasha, the friend of the Government, took all the water for his own land."
In 1548, hardly a year after the accession of Henry II., and in the midst of the rejoicings he had gone to be present at in the north of Italy, he received news at Turin to the effect that in Guienne, Angoumois, and Saintonge a violent and pretty general insurrection had broken out against the salt-tax, which Francis I., shortly before his death, had made heavier in these provinces.
They disputed the continuation of the salt-tax, and the bill for enabling the king to apply the sum of one million out of the sinking fund for the service of the current year, though success did not attend their endeavours.
From this very primitive salt deposit the greater part of India and Central Asia is still supplied; and the Indian Government makes a pretty penny out of the dues in the shape of the justly detested salt-tax a tax especially odious because it wrings the fraction of a farthing even from those unhappy agricultural labourers who have never tasted ghee with their rice.
"Sacré Dieu! not here; it's too near the Big Hog." "The Big Hog does not worry us at Morlaix. Since the salt-tax is raised four sous in the pound we are all in the Brittany marshes, passing salt into Maine. In Maine a poor man can eat no meat because he can have no brine. You can guess that where the people squeal so there is room for our profit.
What may be expected from them is illustrated by the fact that when the finances were thrown by the Mutiny into confusion, many protested against an income tax, and some of high position proposed that the finances should be rectified by an increase of the salt-tax!
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