Peasant burdens

Most French people were peasants — men and women who farmed the land. By the 1780s, most were not serfs owned by a lord; many owned or rented small plots. But their lives were pressed by a stack of overlapping burdens that were hard to escape.

A peasant family typically paid three different masters. To the state, they owed taxes such as the taille and the hated gabelleA deeply unpopular tax on salt, an essential item that everyone had to buy., a tax on salt. To the Church, they owed the tithe, a share of their crop. And to their local lord, they still owed seigneurial duesPayments and duties peasants owed to their local lord, left over from the medieval past. — old obligations left over from the medieval past, such as fees, a share of the harvest, or the corvéeUnpaid labour peasants owed, often days spent repairing roads.: unpaid days of labour repairing roads.

None of these on its own destroyed a family. Together, in a bad year, they could. When the harvest failed and bread prices climbed, the same peasants who had the least were still expected to pay the state, the church, and the lord.

What made the seigneurial dues especially resented was that they often felt pointless. A lord might collect a fee simply because his ancestors always had, offering little in return. For a hungry family, paying for the privileges of the past — on top of everything else — was hard to accept. That resentment would erupt dramatically once revolution began.