Wine and Taxation in Ancien Régime France

In the France of Louis XVI, wine was everywhere — and so were the taxes on it. A tangle of royal excise, town tolls and feudal dues made wine dearer, enriched the hated tax-farmers who collected them, and even walled off the entire city of Paris to catch a smuggled cask. The system bred a whole culture of cheap suburban drinking just beyond the taxman’s reach — and when the Revolution came in 1789, the tax barriers around the capital were among the very first things the crowd burned. Wine tax is woven right through the fall of the Ancien Régime. (Part of the great turning points in wine history.)

A kingdom that ran on wine — and taxed it

Wine was the everyday drink of Bourbon France, safer than much of the water and central to trade, and the crown taxed it accordingly. The fiscal system of the Ancien Régime was a patchwork of overlapping levies that varied wildly from province to province, so that a single barrel might be taxed several times over on one journey to market¹.

The aides and the Farmers-General

The chief levy on wine was the aides, an excise on drink. Rather than collect it directly, the crown “farmed” its indirect taxes out to a private syndicate, the Ferme générale, whose Farmers-General advanced money to the treasury and then kept whatever they could squeeze from the public².

It was a licence to grow rich at the nation’s expense, and it made the Farmers-General among the most despised men in France — a resentment that would, in time, prove fatal to them.

The wall around Paris

To stop wine and other goods slipping into Paris untaxed, the Farmers-General took an extraordinary step: between 1784 and 1791 they built a wall right around the city. The Mur des Fermiers généraux ran some 24 kilometres and was pierced by around sixty grand toll-houses, the barrières³.

These were no mere gatehouses. The fashionable architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux designed them as monumental neoclassical pavilions — he grandly called them the “propylaea of Paris” — and the expense and arrogance of it all, purely to squeeze duty from Parisians’ wine and food, made the wall detested from the day it went up⁴.

Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant. — “The wall walling Paris makes Paris murmur.”— a Parisian pun of the 1780s⁵

Cheaper wine beyond the gates

The wall had a delicious loophole. Because duty was charged only at the barrières, wine was markedly cheaper the moment you stepped outside them — and Parisians voted with their feet. Just beyond the wall, in villages like Belleville, Ménilmontant and above all La Courtille, a whole industry of open-air taverns sprang up: the guinguettes, named for a cheap green local wine, where a litre cost a fraction of the city price⁶.

On Sundays and holidays, working Parisians streamed out through the gates to eat, drink and dance in the untaxed suburbs. The tax wall did not just take money from wine drinkers — it reshaped where and how a whole city drank.

Seigneurial dues on the vine

Royal taxes were only part of the burden. On top of them lay the dead weight of feudalism. The banvin gave a lord the right to sell his own wine first, for a set period, before his tenants could sell theirs; the Church took its dîme, or tithe, on the grape harvest. For a small grower, the state, the seigneur and the Church could each take a cut before a single sou reached his pocket⁷.

Taxes, wine and revolution

All that resentment turned to fire in July 1789. In the days of 12–13 July — a day or two before the storming of the Bastille — Parisian crowds attacked and burned the customs barrières around the city, wrecking dozens of them. It was one of the Revolution’s first mass acts of destruction, and its target was not a prison or a palace but the wall that taxed the people’s wine and bread⁸.

The hated octroi was abolished in 1791, and though it would later creep back, the message of those burning toll-gates was unmistakable: the fiscal machinery of the old regime, wine tax and all, had lost its legitimacy.

The reckoning: the guillotine for the tax-farmers

For the Farmers-General, the reckoning was terrible. In 1794, at the height of the Terror, the Ferme générale was put on trial and its members sent to the guillotine⁹.

Among them was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived: Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry — who had also been a Farmer-General and had helped design and build the despised Paris wall. He was executed on 8 May 1794, condemned not as a scientist but as a tax-farmer¹⁰.

A fellow mathematician is said to have lamented that it took only a moment to sever that head, and that a hundred years might not produce another like it. Whether or not the words were ever spoken, they capture the grim irony: the wine taxes of the Ancien Régime helped consume both a system and one of its most brilliant servants¹¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Wine, war and the state
• A history of French wine
• Napoleon and wine

References

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ancien Régime. www.britannica.com ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Farmers-General. www.britannica.com ↩
3. Structurae — Mur des Fermiers Généraux. structurae.net ↩
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. www.britannica.com ↩
5. Rodama: a blog of 18th-century and Revolutionary France — The Wall of the Fermiers généraux. rodama1789.blogspot.com ↩
6. VisitParisRegion — Guinguettes of the Paris Region. www.visitparisregion.com ↩
7. Encyclopaedia Britannica — French Revolution. www.britannica.com ↩
8. World History Encyclopedia — Storming of the Bastille. www.worldhistory.org ↩
9. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Antoine Lavoisier. www.britannica.com ↩
10. Science History Institute — The Trials of Lavoisier. www.sciencehistory.org ↩
11. History Today — Antoine Lavoisier Guillotined. www.historytoday.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
Sets wine’s taxes and trade in the sweep of its history.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on wine, society and the state in early-modern Europe.

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