More definite taxes--demanded in cash when the peasants could pay, otherwise in kind--were the seigneurial taxes on fires; on the right of trade (the sale of wine, bread or meat); the _vingtaine_, whereby the peasant gave up a twentieth of his produce to the seigneur; and such oddities as a tax on the first kiss of the newly married; bardage, a sort of turnpike road duty for the privilege of singing certain songs; and on all manner of foolish fancies.
After the taxation by the seigneurs there came that by the clerics, who claimed their "ecclesiastical tenth," a tax which was levied in France just previous to the Revolution with more severity, even, than in Italy.
Finally the people rose, and the French peasants delivered themselves all over the land to a riot of evil, as much an unlicensed tyranny as was the oppression of their feudal lords. One may thus realize the means which planted feudal France with great fortresses, châteaux and country houses, and the motives which caused their destruction to so large an extent.
It was the tyranny of the master and the cruelty of the servant that finally culminated in the Revolution. Not only the petty seigneurs had been the oppressors, but the Crown, represented by the figurehead of the Bourbon king in his capital, put the pressure on the peasant folk still harder by releasing it on the nobles. The tax on the people, that great, vague, non-moving mass of the population, has ever produced the greatest revenue in France, as, presumably, it has elsewhere. In the days before the Revolution it was _le peuple_ who paid, and it was the people who paid the enormous Franco-German war indemnity in 1871.
The feudality in France, in its oppressive sense, died long years before the Revolution, but the aristocracy still lives in spite of the efforts of the Assembly to crush it--the Assembly and the mob who sang:
_"Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,_ _Les aristocrates à la lanterne!_ _Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,_ _Les aristocrates on les pendra!"_
And the French noblesse of to-day, the proud old French aristocracy, is not, on the whole, as bad as it has frequently been painted. They may, in the majority, be royalists, may be even Bonapartists, or Orléanists, instead of republicans, but surely there's no harm in that in these days when certain political parties look upon socialists as anarchists and free-traders as communists.