| Visite virtuelle 360 et VR

historical event The French Revolution dismantled the Ancien Regime and ushered in a new political order, redefining state power and institutional structures. Its transformations – from the abolition of feudal privileges to the creation of modern bureaucratic and legal frameworks – extended far beyond France, shaping institutions across the world. Although the causes of the French Revolution are complex and multifaceted, one widely recognised factor is extractive taxation (Norberg 1994). However, despite its prominence, to the best of our knowledge, no systematic evidence exists on the hypothesis that extractive fiscal institutions were an important determinant of the French Revolution. Our recent paper (Giommoni et al. 2025) seeks to fill this gap, exploiting geographic variation in the incidence of the salt tax – considered one of the most “iniquitous institutions of the Ancien Regime” (Sands and Highby 1949). First introduced as a temporary measure in the mid-13th century and then made permanent one century later, the salt tax in 1780 accounted for 22% of royal revenues (Touzery 2024). The salt tax varied across regions, along multiple tax borders – creating large discontinuities in tax rates, which we can exploit in our analysis. Because public goods provision was minimal and centred around royal prerogatives, such as national defence and justice, a higher tax burden did not correspond to higher redistribution.