Turgot’s Reforms of the Corvee and the Milice
More than half a century ago, I wrote in my master of economics thesis on the economics of Turgot, that Turgot’s administrative activities in seeking to abolish the corvee and reforming the milice were two closely related reform policies.
Both these reforms were designed to prevent disturbances to the ordinary activities of the peasant by enabling him to concentrate more fully on his agricultural tasks. If responsibilities for road making and military transport were taken out of his hands, and the system of conscription were more orderly conducted, it would be the peasant and his income that benefited. At the same time, roads would become of better quality since skilled labor was used in constructing them, while military transports would be more efficiently organized by paid servants of the state, and conscripts would be selected with the least amount of disorientation for the rural community.These tax reforms reduced the hardship suffered by the peasant by abolishing those taxes that peasants traditionally paid with their own labor time. Their abolition therefore came clearly within the scope of agricultural reform in general. The removal of these imposts, as Turgot explained, enhanced the efficiency of the peasant, by enabling peasants to concentrate on their agricultural activity without having their labor sidetracked by its compulsory contribution to road works as well as the provision of military services. More positively, the abolition of these taxes could be said to increase the welfare of society by raising agricultural output.
This statement about the objectives of Turgot’s reforms of the corvee and the milice failed to mention the analytical foundations on which they rested. These were the advantages from upholding a rigid division of professions to enable peasants to concentrate on their agricultural work without the disruption of periodical road service, and the use of their carts, draft animals and their labor for military transports, and the temporary removal of peasants from their land when they attempted to avoid the risk of being conscripted for military service under the milice.
A sample of Turgot’s administrative writings on these policies needs to be briefly examined to assess the extent to which he himself explicitly relied on this type of theoretical argument to justify his approach in his policy statements on reforming the corvee and the milice.iTake first the milice. Turgot wrote several memoranda and letters on this imposition during the early 1770s. One set of observations together with a letter to the appropriate minister on this subject (October 1, 1771) have unfortunately been lost, according to Anne-Robert-Jacques Du Pont in the notes he inserted when editing the set that was preserved (Turgot, 1773, 115fn2 and 120fn2). This was a letter (datedJanuary 8, 1773) to the Marquis de Monteyard as minister of war in which Turgot set out his many objections to administering this levy and the steps to be taken to secure its real reform. Inequities in its implementation that arose from indivisibilities in the tax base (that is, the local community from which military conscripts were to be secured by means of a so-called lottery) was one such critical observation offered by Turgot (1773, 117). Moreover, Turgot noted the regional population disruptions generated by those seeking to escape the tax when the annual levy was rotated among different communities over the years. This created an incentive for those liable to the milice (young men of a designated age) to leave their community when it was its turn to furnish military recruits, by escaping to a village unaffected by the milice for that year (ibid., 118). Replacing the system of direct recruiting for the army—by either commuting the milice to a money tax whose revenue could be devoted to hiring soldiers or by administering the milice with less emphasis on compulsion—were the specific reform options supported by Turgot.
Turgot’s major criticism of the levy rested on equity grounds. Inequities arising from indivisibilities in the tax base have already been mentioned.
The widespread exemptions—particularly for those with money or those able to rely on protection from the influential—were the major inequities Turgot identified in this context. For Turgot, it was much better to depend on the welfare benefits from voluntary service, even if this had to be paid for by additional taxes on the peasants and villages affected. As Turgot (ibid., 125-26) put it, “Why oppose that a person essential for [the maintenance of] his family, puts in his place a person who would carry out this service with pleasure? Contributions [like the milice] are always less onerous when they are perfectly freely and voluntarily made.”In his final paragraph of observations, Turgot (ibid., 129) also noted that reform would likewise free the local intendant and his staff from much unnecessary and unpleasant labor, more usefully bestowed elsewhere. Turgot added that there were other arguments on this subject, some of them apparently lost subsequently. Perhaps these may have pointed out what Turgot had omitted in his 1773 memorandum: the overwhelming case for reforming the milice and the compulsory provision of military transport and services by peasants, from the standpoint of rigorously applying the principle of the division of labor, so badly violated in the existing, erroneous policies.
Turgot’s case for abolishing the corvee was most succinctly made in his preamble to the Edict of February 1776, which intended to abolish it for France as a whole. After reminding the people of the valuable services to agriculture, manufacturing, commerce and government rendered by good roads for enhancing transport and communication, Turgot claimed that these benefits could be more efficiently procured by means of financing road construction directly rather than through imposition of the corvee as an indirect tax in the form of labor services (1776, 287-88). The enforced labor by peasants on road work without payment constituted a particularly pernicious form of what Turgot described as “double taxation.” Moreover, it lowered the incentives for the conscripted labor to carry out its tasks with vigor and due care.
This form of tax in kind was far better commuted into a money tax. Road building and associated construction would then be left to a group of entrepreneurs specializing in this type of activity, skilled in directing a paid workforce solely employed in this activity. This clearly enabled the work to be carried out more effectively. In addition, a money tax could also be more equitably assessed on every class of society, given that some of those currently exempt benefited greatly from using the roads (ibid., 291-92). In provinces where such reforms had already been made—Turgot’s former province of Limoges was a good example—the benefits of this reform in the form of better roads were clearly visible, as were those from removing the inconvenient period of road conscription by those forced to pay the corvee (ibid., 293-94). To remove the temptation to divert to other purposes some of the revenue levied by the money tax for replacing the corvee, Turgot proposed that this revenue should be specifically tied to the objectives of road and associated construction for which it was imposed. Although this preamble to the act implementing the abolition of the corvee mentioned the advantages of a specialized labor force for road construction, the principle of the general benefits of specialization and division of labor was not explicitly invoked. Perhaps Turgot believed it unnecessary to state such an obvious truth to the learned audience of magistrates to whom the text of the preamble to the Edict was explicitly addressed.Despite Turgot’s omission of explicitly justifying these reforms of removing onerous taxation in kind from the peasantry by appealing directly to the advantages of specialization and the division of labor, this rationale was clearly appropriate to the reform of both the milice and the corvee. Turgot’s proposed reforms would have left peasants in peace to carry out their own work in the fields without the interruptions from transferring their labor to tasks for which they were not necessarily suited and to which other, more specialized, labor ought to be directed for the sake of efficiency. Equity arguments were likewise part of Turgot’s explicit rationale for these measures, but the efficiency argument from the division of labor was clearly also important for him, even if only implicitly appealed to by him in this context.
5.