Life of Being a Crown Prince in France

（Due to some urgent matters today, I came back late and have not yet finished coding this chapter. I deeply apologize to the readers! Please refresh and read again in half an hour, dear readers.）

Suburbs of Paris.

In the interrogation room on the second floor of the National First Prison, a man covered with tattoos from neck to arm hung his head and anxiously exclaimed, "I swear, it was Mr. Barna who told me to do it!

"Those fake documents were also procured by him; I just followed his orders and handed the fake documents to the Tax Bureau…"

"But the documents handed over to the Tax Bureau were all signed by you," the police officer opposite him said coldly, "Forging tax documents could result in a prison sentence of five to ten years."

"No…" The tattooed man suddenly startled and hurriedly said, "I can testify against Barna, oh, and my subordinates can also vouch!"

"You mean Recquillart Malherbe de Barna, right?"

"Yes, that's him."

"Where is he now?"

"He should be in…"

The intelligence officer standing nearby immediately whispered to his subordinates, "Bring him here."
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"Yes, sir!"

As the interrogation continued, more and more high-level Tax Farmers were exposed, and the General Prison quickly filled up.

At the same time, all assets of the implicated Tax Farmers were seized.

This was the verdict rendered by the High Court—the case of forgery was clear, and it necessarily involved tax accounts, so seizing assets was entirely reasonable.

Elsewhere, the Tax Farming Bureaus throughout France were also being sealed by the police, and almost all the tax collectors were arrested.

Local areas did not concern themselves with public image as much as Paris, aiming to arrest as few as possible.

The local Tax Bureaus were only worried about how next year's tax revenue might be impacted, so they arrested all they could at first—later, if they found no issues, they could simply release them.

Just two days later, as more and more high-level Tax Farmers confessed, the "document forgery" case began to spread to the giants of the Tax Farmers Association.

One of the giants of the Tax Farmers Association, Barrot, with a grim expression, alighted from his carriage, quickly walked towards the entrance of the Palace of Versailles, accompanied by only one servant.

Just the day before yesterday, he had been planning for when he would collect the salt and liquor taxes from provinces like Reims and Champagne, how to adjust the scale of the Tax Farming Bureaus, and increase illegal liquor transactions to maintain the original profit levels, when he received the news that his two most important Tax Farmers had been arrested for forging documents.

He knew that he was about to be exposed as well.

Although forgery was not a serious crime for him and he needed only to pay a sum—which should not exceed 250,000 francs—to obtain bail, it would inevitably involve the inconvenience of appearing in court and would certainly affect his other businesses.

At that moment, Barrot felt somewhat envious of Morrel and Godemid, whose businesses were mostly abroad; if things turned sour, they could simply abandon their tax farming operations in France and ignore these cases.

However, he was a native Frenchman with all his roots here; by now, he no longer thought of tax farming, only hoping to get rid of the current troubles.

After waiting for over two hours in the corridor outside the Finance Minister's office, Barrot finally met Chief Minister Brian.

————

Tax Farmers and bankers, these financial magnates, influenced the state's fiscal revenues immensely through their tax farming leases. This was something beyond the reach of ordinary industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. These wealthy individuals settled in Paris, built magnificent mansions in places like the Royal Palace Gardens and Elysee Avenue, and owned extensive real estates collecting substantial rents. Many nobles were their tenants. Many financiers also engaged in other businesses and companies, such as life and fire insurance companies, the Paris water company, etc. Some families of these magnates still held significant positions in society in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Perrère family of great bankers, directors of the savings banks that replaced discount cashiers during the Directorate period, who also purchased the Anzin Coal Mining Company. Members of their family had held positions such as Prime Minister during the July Monarchy, ministers in the Thiers government, and presidents during the Third Republic.

The rapid development of financial capital was a prominent feature of the development of French capitalism. On par with the financial bourgeoisie were some Liberal nobles. Their economic activities were also integral to the development of capitalism. Ever since the era of Louis XIV, decrees had been issued allowing nobility to engage in commercial activities without stripping them of their noble titles. Consequently, a considerable number of nobles operated plantations in the colonies, while more involved themselves in mining and metallurgy.

In agriculture, as a part of the entire feudal system, the feudal landownership had considerably disintegrated. Accompanying the disintegration of the serfdom from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, a peasant landownership system had significantly developed by the eighteenth century. Particularly during government policies promoting land reclamation and tax reductions, about 305,000 hectares of land were newly reclaimed between 1760 and 1780. On the eve of the Revolution, the distribution of land in France was approximately as follows: nobles owned a quarter of the national arable land, the Church owned one-tenth, the bourgeoisie a quarter, peasants one-third, and public lands about five percent.

Legally speaking, France still upheld the principle of "no land without a lord," and the farmers' lands belonged to the lord. However, these lands evolved from serf plots into perpetual tenant farms. Peasants could freely operate them, pass them down through generations, or even sell or lease them, though they needed to pay a sum to the lord during the transfer. Lords could not reclaim perpetual tenant farms. Perpetual tenant farmers had to pay a monetary tribute to the lord every year, with some areas adding some kind of physical rent, while also bearing other feudal obligations.

Since the tribute was a fixed amount of monetary rent, with centuries of rising prices, by the eighteenth century, the tribute no longer constituted a heavy burden for peasants. In most regions, like the Walloon region in the Nord department, tribute only accounted for four to five percent of peasants' total income, and in some places even less. The tithe collected by the Church was also far less than one-tenth, often reduced to between one-twentieth to one-fortieth. In addition, peasants also had to pay taxes to the government. Despite such burdens, the condition of French peasants compared to those in other European countries was not the most miserable.

It was among these perpetual tenant farmers with characteristics of independent peasants that capitalism arose. Some peasants expanded their operations through renting or buying land, hiring day laborers and short-term workers, engaging in commodity production, becoming capitalists in nature. Compared to the capitalist farms in England, this was a type of small-farm capitalism. Although there were also some larger farms in northern France, they were very few, and in the most developed capitalist province of Nord, they only accounted for twelve percent of all arable land. The largest number were still rich farmer economies.