A Memoir- the Testament

by Jean Meslier

  This is what a certain Author says of him, in the Esprit de Mazarin[676]:

  I no longer need to hide my feelings, I’m ready to tell the truth, since I no longer fear anyone. If King Louis XIV has indeed been proclaimed the Great, everyone will agree, as to what contributes to this degree of greatness to which we now see him elevated, which is the abolition of edicts, breaches of faith, the violation of oaths he swore on the Bible, the better to trick those who contracted with him, never having been a religious observer of his faith and his royal word, except when his interests required it. Indeed, if this Prince now bears the title Great, it’s only for having enfeebled the Empire of Spain, having first broken the Treaties he made with them. If this Prince is great for having extirpated the Huguenots from his kingdom, it’s only because he annulled the Edicts he had sworn to uphold on the day of his coronation, by breaking the faith of the Privileges that he and his Predecessors had so solemnly granted them in so many royal declarations, in which trust they had lived peacefully for more than a century and a half. And finally, if the King is great in the Kingdom, by his Mind and his gallant intrigues, it’s by falsifying his conjugal faith. Lady Maintenon, the Prince’s mistress, was compared[677] with the goddess Juno, and was described by one author as the darling of the Bourbon Jupiter. All that can be heard in all the provinces of France is cries and groans, because of the tyranny of usurpation, the theft and rapine which is carried on in France, which have reduced all the people to begging, and driven them to sell their clothes to keep one shirt, if that much; everyone flees, the Nobleman abandoning his lands, the peasant his field, and the city dwellers their professions. ...France now swells with extorters and tax-farmers, grinding the poor so much that I fear, lest, in the end, the King will lose his Rights. He should be advised never again to declare war so wickedly on his neighbors, to never again break a peace treaty without due cause, or the truce before it ended, by this means he will avoid his present trouble, to seek after peace; that he should no longer tyrannize over his poor people as he does, or use violence against them, forcing them to give what they don’t have; but on the contrary, that he should serve as their father, instead of heaping taxes and new impositions on them[678]; that he should grant all of them an honest liberty, without which one can only expect great revolutions in one’s Kingdom. The Kings, like Peoples, are equally subject to the laws, and it’s wrong for the Kings of France to consider themselves above all Laws, both divine and human. King Louis XIV[679], seeing the way Fortune favored him, happily allowed himself to be convinced that he was sent from Heaven to rule alone in the universe and to command the entire planet, and that, just as there was only one Sun in the firmament, so should there be only one single Monarch in the world; and in this hope, the King took this star for his symbol. If I dared address the King, I would gladly tell him the same thing that a pirate once told Alexander the Great[680], when this monarch rebuked him for his robberies: “I am,” said the Pirate, “a minor brigand, but you are a great one, for, not content with the Kingdom God has given you, you would invade the whole Earth.”

  “There is nothing,” said one foreign author, “as abject, as poor, or as contemptible as the French peasant, who only works for others and has great difficulty, by his own toil, to win bread for himself. In short,” he says, “the peasants of France are the absolute slaves of those whose land they work and who own the farms they work on[681]; they are no less oppressed by the public taxes and gabelles than by the particular burdens their Masters impose on them, without counting what the Clergy unjustly demand from these wretches. These vexations make them wish for the advent of a Revolution in the Government, in hopes that their condition will improve.” He also says that:

  The kings of France[682] seized all the salt in the Kingdom, they compelled their subjects to buy it from them at the prices they set. They have officers stationed everywhere to sell it, and this is called the Gabelle. It seems that they do this to keep their subjects from corruption, as if they were afraid they might rot while alive; for there is no man in their States who isn’t forced to accept the quantity that the King’s officers impose on him, with the exception of a few particular Provinces, which are exempted for reasons of state, or because they have a treaty. The revenue the King obtains from this Gabelle, amounts to nearly 3 million Ecus annually; he gets 8 million from another side, from the tax he placed on the peasants’ food, aside from the individual taxes on meat, wine, and other goods. However, he loses much of his revenue by farming it out to his subjects, or engaging with them in terms of war, for the sake of cash. There are no less than 30 thousand officers, there may presently be more than 40 thousand, who are all employed in the collection of these taxes. The wages for so many people reduce the crown’s revenues by more than half; such that, of the 80 million écus ripped from the masses every year, hardly 30 million make their way to the King’s coffers.

  “You'd be surprised”, he says, writing to his great Mufti[683]:

  At the impudence of these infidels and you would even condemn the tyranny and injustice which oppresses, plunders, and ruins those who provide them with all that men require to live, not to enrich themselves, but to also to enrich a pile of greedy caterpillars, for no other name would be suitable for those who collect the revenues for this State; things are not like this in the Ottoman Empire, where justice has raised its throne, where oppression would never dare raise its head.

  So says that writer.

  56. ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE TAXES.

  According to the author of the Journal Historique, Philippe, called the Tall, was the first who put a denier on every minot of salt. Philippe of Valois added a second one, Charles VI increased it by two further deniers, Louis XI pushed this tax up to 12 deniers. But François I, on the pretext of the war effort, multiplied this tax as far as 24 per muid, and since then it has been increased again on various occasions, until our own the times. It's often been said, he adds, that if the King wanted to fix his rights on the salt in the places where it's made, and then leave people free to trade it, his Majesty would make more from it than he does and would relieve his State from the expense of an infinity of officers, officials, and guards, who consume nearly half the product of these taxes.

  The first Kings of France had neither domaines, land-taxes, nor gabelles, but after having assembled the States of the Kingdom, they organized the expenditure that had to be made, both for their house and for the costs of war; they took note of the means of raising, on the incomes of their subjects, that which they thought should suffice them. Pepin, having attained the crown, annexed all the good lands he owned in Austasia and elsewhere, which were renamed the Domain of the Crown: the Kings of the Third Race[684] vastly increased this Domain, by the Arrangements they brought to the fiefs, which remained largely vacant due to the wars in the Holy Land, to which other Kings added additional lands which they owned before they were crowned, examples of which are Philippe de Valois, Louis XII, François I, and Henri IV. Others also increased with land taxes, Gabelles, and other charges, which are very numerous and so burdensome to the people. Although the first Domains of the crown were immense, since they were insufficient to provide the needs of the State and the costs of war, they were obliged to levy certain subsidies, which are called tailles, which were initially only levied for certain extraordinary and pressing needs. King St. Louis was the first to call the taxes tailles, which are imposed on each family, to raise money, granted by the results. Charles VII made them customary, without any distinction between war and peacetime, which facilitated the uprising, of nearly all of France against King Louis XI, his successor, led by the Duc of Berry, the King’s brother, and the Dukes of Brittany and Burgundy, who used the pretext of meaning to relieve the people of these charges, which were made what was extraordinary and free into something permanent; and for this they called this Rebellion by a highly specious epithet: the war for the Public Good. But King Louis XI found the means to satisfy the ambition of the Princes, and, having s
eparated them from each other, he had each of them punished, and after they were brought into conformity with reason, he also completed what he had previously begun, with respect to the subject of the tailles, which have been paid ever since without contradiction or without any need to assemble the Estates, nor in Languedoc, in Provence, in Burgundy, in Dauphine, and Brittany, which for this reason are called Pays d'états.

  The tallion was then introduced by King Henry II, in 1549, to raise the wages of the soldiers. The subsistence is yet another tax, the levy of which began a few years ago; it is so named because it is meant to keep the soldiers in their winter quarters, by which the people should be exempt from lodging the forces during Winter.

  King Charles VII, says the Sr. de Commines, was the first who won this point, i.e., imposing the tailles as he pleased, without the consent of the Estates of his Kingdom, and, he says, there was at that time plenty of substance, both to provide in the conquered Countries, as to give a portion to the gens de compagnies, who were pillaging the Kingdom. And the Seigneurs of France consented to this, in return for certain pensions promised to them, for the duties that were imposed on their lands; but of all that happened since then and ever will happen, he burdened his soul, along with that of his successors, heavily, and dealt a cruel wound to his Kingdom, which bled for a long time, and still now it bleeds more than ever, and by all appearances it will go on bleeding more and more, if nobody heals it. King Charles VII levied, at his death, 18 hundred thousand francs on everything in his Kingdom, and kept around 17 men in ordinance, for all the Constables, and those in all justice, in the guards of the Provinces of his Kingdom, which from long before his death had ceased riding the Kingdom (which gave the masses a time of peace) and at the death of King Louis XI, he levied 47 hundred thousand francs and had armed men some 4 or 5 thousand footmen, both for the field as for the dead, paid at above 25 thousand; thus, it’s no shock that he had many thoughts and imaginations, and that he thought he wasn’t wanted, and that he was greatly afraid in this matter, for surely it was a pity to see or understand the misery and poverty of the people. He took from the poor and gave to those who needed nothing. It’s certainly far worse in the state where now find ourselves in, and if, in those times, the misery and poverty of the masses were already ripe for pity and compassion, it should now bring far more pity and compassion, since the masses suffer incomparably greater burdens and tyranny in every way than in the year 1164. The King’s receipts were already in excess of 63 million, and now it is far beyond this sum, as will be seen below.

  57. ON THE STATE OF EUROPE IN THE YEAR 1694.

  This is what an author of the previous century[685] says about the conduct and the tyrannical government of our former Kings of France:

  There would be room for astonishment to see France offering peace in the midst of its victories, if the history of its Reigns didn’t show us, by gloomy experience, that peace helped it further its conquests, even more than war. So, it would be a miracle if some French Author didn’t lead us to note one day, with a false joke, that it would finally have achieved through peace and the rupture with the Universal Monarchy, towards which one finds it heading full sail. But what is even more outrageous in its conduct is that, not content to violate all its treaties, it made no more invasions without being accompanied with the worst sorts of cruelty, as if, after being placed above all rights, both divine and human, it thought itself entitled to follow with impunity all the fury and impiety inspired in it by its genius, iron, fire, desecration, and every imaginable irrepressible licentiousness of the warrior, are put to use to ruin the country where its Arms were able to penetrate, without consideration for age or sex, without regard to any dignity, ecclesiastical or secular, without respect to the sacred character of the places, or for what was considered most sacred in Religion: nothing could remain or be but what is sure to be kept, such that, if there is any peace to hope for with it, it can only be the sort mentioned by Tacitus: the unhappy effect of a general desolation: auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem fecerint pacem apellant[686]. It would be superfluous to go details on its devastation and cruelty, both because these examples are all recent, and because any relation of them could only give a very crude idea about them… The point here is the continual disorders in the heat of the action, as in all war. The court’s orders were precise, the generals were to preside over their execution, and if any were relaxed by the indignity of the crime, they were punished severely to make an example, which shows a deliberate aim to guide all its future conquests according to the guiding maxims of the most barbaric nations... I will not prolong the narration with the details of all the usurpations, or show their injustice and unworthiness, since others have done so previously, it’s sufficient to note here that the usurpation was so general and so fully authorized that there was nobody in the whole Kingdom to distinguish themselves in this respect.

  The men of the pen distinguished themselves through a thousand monstrous inventions of chicanery and violence, which appeared bearing the name of dependency and union, in which they acted so bravely, or, rather, so insolently, that they made all the laws, both ancient and modern, and this is what is still today called the conquests of the Parlement of Metz par excellence. The Churchmen did even more, in my opinion; for to do something striking in their own sphere, they attacked, with the Archbishop of Paris leading the way, the rights of the Holy See and of the Church, to sacrifice them to the vanity of the Government, and this was all that could be expected from them when it came to conquests. Then, could it not be said here from its heights and violence, in this time of petulance and rapine, friends, allies, enemies, all was treated the same way, and if there was any distinction made, it was only due to the difficulty of harming or the fear of a response. Nobody can reflect without shuddering on the enormity of the its conduct with respect to Pope Innocent II, for never was any persecution more atrocious, or more scandalous; the Holy Father provided aid to the Emperor and his Allies against the infidels, and this was his crime. But what is it not capable of, when, free from all fear, it measures its rights by its power; it is best conceived by these words from Jornandes: Optat mundi generale habere servitium, causas proelii non requirit, sed quidquid commiserit hoc putat esse legitimum ambitum suum, brachis metitur supertia, licentiam satiat, jus fasque contemnens hostem se exhibet natura cunctorum[687]. That is France, in sum, and so will it remain, as long as it retains the favor of fortune[688].

  It was during the reign of Louis XIII that the Monarchy of France began to make itself so formidable by its power and by its excursions to the exterior… It’s plain that it then maintained five large armed corps, one in Italy, one in The Netherlands, one in Germany, one in Roussillon, and the fifth inside the Kingdom to oppose the uprising which the restless Duke of Orleans stoked from time to time… If we add to this expense that of the Pensions that had to be paid promptly in Sweden, Holland, and various Princes of Germany and Italy, to keep them in line with his own interests[689], that of maintaining the Navy, which had become quite large in the two Seas and of an infinity of other creatures and emissaries, which were kept in all Courts, to be promptly informed about everything that occurred… These expenses and many others which I omit here, for the sake of brevity, rose to immense sums, and still the State didn’t fail to provide them, although the Revenue of the crown was then far from being as large as it now is, for it didn’t rise above 50 million livres, whereas Colbert grew them during this Reign to 80 million and more, aside from the numerous disturbances in the Administration, which have been rectified under the same Minister; in which we see that everything has become possible in France, after the Kingdom became subject to the arbitrary violence of its Kings.

  As for the Powerful and the bloodline Princes, even their credit is so depressed that they can only be considered as the most famous Slaves of the court; no authority in the Government, no prerogatives in the Provinces. It’s only by dint of servitude that they can aspire to a degr
ee of distinction...[690]. Cardinal Richelieu, the Prime Minister of Louis XIII and the greatest mind of his age, having resolved to make the monarchy flourish on the international scene, thought that this very petulance of the Nation, which had so long halted its progress, would be useful to it there, if all its animosity could be attached to that, and this led him to conceive a plan of Government that was quite different from before. He had observed that, of all the Monarchies, only the Ottoman one offered a more solid and consistent consistency, since not only had it always maintained its integrity, from its origins, but it had also never ceased to grow, whereas all the others had destroyed themselves by luxury, by a lack of discipline, and by the ambition of the Powerful, from the moment they had entered into a state of inaction or had yielded to a conqueror. Therefore, he wanted to form that of France on these principles, he didn’t want it to be purely military, like that one, because its extremities would have been too dangerous to seize in a Revolution, aside from the fact that he would have had to banish the arts, industry, and commerce from it, from which it would have to draw all its wealth. So, he found a middle path, which was to connect the Nobility with war, and all the idle people in the Kingdom, and reserve the masses for the exercises that I’ve just discussed… Thus, having formed this plan, he began to direct all his aims toward it and this is why his Ministry became so odious[691] in general, and why he was hated by all the Powerful, from their fear of the servitude into which they saw that they might fall. Nevertheless, having been clever enough to always put the King and the Good of the State by his side and to draw to himself, by this means, all the authority of the laws and Magistrates, he did not fail to raise it to such heights that it was easy for his successors to finish the job. In effect, Intendants were established in the Provinces, to draw to themselves, with the court’s backing, all the authority of the political and military Government, the King’s lieutenants, installed in all the fortresses, to share in commanding with the Governors and creatures of the Ministry, preferred in all appointments over the plots and recommendations of the Powerful and indeed over quality! Ultimately, when there were no more benefits to aspire to, outside of the court, all individual attachments had to be renounced in favor of complete devotion to it. These innovations were so many mortal blows against the prerogatives of those who cut the best figure in the State, because they saw that as their credit was running dry, they would lose all their importance. But arbitrary Power, having already taken root, and those who were the boldest were punished without exception, everyone found they had to submit to violence. It’s by these great springs and many others, which would take too long to discuss here, that France changed its form under King Louis XIII, into an instrument for the ambition of its Kings, as is only too evident under King Louis XIV. This change will be better understood by considering it in all its Members, by contrast with the past!