THE FISCAL CONSENSUS BETWEEN GIRONDINS AND MONTAGNARDS

One of the very first acts of the Constituent Assembly in 1789 was to enshrine in the Declaration of Rights the cardinal principle of fiscal justice, namely that, while all citizens were deemed equally liable to taxation, its burden should be spread between them ‘in proportion to their faculties’. In giving prominence to the canon of fair proportion rather than equal sacrifice, and thus opening wide the door to progressive taxation, the Constituents were simply echoing the conclusions of the leading tax reformers of their age. The economist Boisguilbert and the abbé de Saint-Pierre, intent on putting an end to ‘arbitrary taxation’ (la taille arbitraire), were among the first at the beginning of the century to have highlighted the merits of graduation; Montesquieu and Rousseau, having meditated on the sumptuary prescriptions of antiquity, considered it to be the only reliable foil against the impropriety of excessive wealth; and the chevalier de Jaucourt and Jean-Louis Graslin had persuasively argued in its favour in their bitter polemic with the physiocrats. ‘The burden of taxation’, Jaucourt had written, ‘must be assessed in accordance with the principles of distributive justice.’