Salt-smuggling - more snapshots from the Breton border

The division of the gabelle into regions, with extreme and arbitrary price differences, inevitably made the smuggling of salt an intractable problem.  Smugglers were most active where the pays francs or pays rédimés shared a frontier with the grandes gabelles, above all along  boundary with Brittany.  Salt which sold for two or three livres-per-minot in Brittany retailed for fifty-six or more livres-per-minot  over the border in Maine or Anjou.

According to Daniel Roche, everywhere in France the majority of those convicted of salt tax violations were men; two-thirds were adults under the age of forty.  Smuggling was normally a supplement to other work:  even the few full-time smugglers would be supported by their communities and often did ordinary chores around the villages. They were not the true marginals of society, but poor country folk - day labourers, smallholders, village artisans, petty traders. Ultimately  they inhabited the same world in which the taxed salt and tobacco were consumed.

As long as individuals operated alone and on foot, the money to be made was  modest - around 50% profit might be expected, but the quantities of salt involved were  small - an "artisanal" level of fraud. In the towns and larger settlement, particularly along the Loire, the involvement of  artisans, innkeepers and petty tradesmen  encouraged some larger scale enterprise.  In the 18th century professionals or semi-professional smugglers worked mainly as individuals or  small groups - but occasionally there were armed troops of several dozen men, quasi -military in operation.  The most dangerous operated by night, under cover of darkness. On the Breton border the landscape - with the woods and hedges of the bocages - acted in their favour, making it easy to evade pursuers and to hide the contraband. The territory round the Loire offered sizable urban outlets;  Angers was only 20 km from the frontier of the gabelle.  

See: Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer  (Harvard U.P.1998) ,  p.348-53.

Figures published by Necker (1784)

According to Necker, during the first three years of the Lease Salzard (1780) an annual average of 2,342 men, 896 women and 201 children were convicted of salt smuggling in the vicinity of Laval and Angers on the Brittany border.  Many more women and children were arrested (or rearrested) but not prosecuted.  Over a thousand horses, and fifty waggons were also seized, and 4,000 domestic raids carried out. The value of illegal salt seized and horses and wagons confiscated amounted to 280,000 livres  [Quoted G.T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms (New York, 1958) p.109]. 

The grenier à sel at Laval

In 1974  Yves Durand and his students carried out a statistical analysis of 4,788 smugglers  tried between 1759 and 1788 by the grenier à sel  in Laval, a centre of the clandestine trade.  These were overwhelmingly petty smugglers.

Smugglers and their dogs

One particularly inventive ruse of 18th-century smugglers was the use of specially trained dogs to carry contraband salt and tobacco.  On 6th June 1734,  Royal Letters patent  prohibited the inhabitants of the  pays des grandes gabelles on the frontier with Brittany from keeping mastiffs ("chiens mâtins" ), on pain of a penalty of 500 livres.  According to the preamble, these dogs were bred in great numbers.  They would be leashed together like  packs of hounds and taken into Brittany, where collaborators would keep them shut up in barns or stables for a few days until they became hungry.  Twelve to fifteen livres of salt would then be attached to the dogs' necks, wrapped up and rolled into collars of waxed cloth.  When the dogs were released at night they invariably made their way back to their masters by the route they had come.  The routes would be varied so that they were difficult to trace.  Sometimes the dog's food  would be deliberately  impregnated with salt so that the animal became maddened with thirst.

Lettres patentes portant défenses aux habitans des provinces limitrophes de Bretagne d'avoir chez eux des chiens-mâtins, à peine de 500 livres d'amende... Registrées en Parlement [à Rennes] le 12 juillet 1734

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96075628/f348.item

The dog referred to as a "chien mâtin" was the Belgian mastiff, a breed which is now defunct but was once widely employed as a working dog, particularly to pull carts. Such dogs were large and powerful beasts.

Salt smugglers [cont.] - Policing the gabelle

 [...continuing my notes from Bernard Briais's book, Contrabandiers de sel (1984)]

THE GABELOUS

Gardes des brigades des Fermes du roi, 1788, 
Association pour l'histoire de l'administration des douanes

The  Farm was faced with 1200 lieus (c.4800 kilometres) of internal frontiers to police.  Guardposts were ranged along these borders, where possible following the line of the rivers: the Meuse to the east, the Mayenne to the west, the Vienne and the Creuse between Poitou and Touraine. A second or even a third line of guard posts would  provide reinforcement.  The guards could be stationed at crossing points or act as patrols; on the water itself, flat-bottomed pataches were manned at the entrances to the rivers.   Most brigades comprised two to six men, but a few were larger:  in the Bourbonnais, the brigade of La Roche-Bransat, had a captain, a lieutenant and ten cavalrymen; the brigade La Jolivette at Chemilly also had ten men.  The distance between guardposts varied according to the terrain and the level of smuggling activity.   No less than nine brigades were stationed along the Vienne over the nineteen kilometres between l'Ile-Bouchard and Candes, including one on a patache at the confluence with the Loire.

Salt-smugglers

 

Bernard Briais, Contrebandiers du sel la vie des faux sauniers au temps de la gabelle, Paris, Aubier (1984)

It is easy to become overwhelmed by all the statistical analyses and detailed local studies of 18th-century smuggling, especially for localities you don't know that well.  

I was very pleased to get hold this general history by Bernard Briais, an impressive and  sympathetic presentation which syntheses an awful lot of material.  The following translates / summarises chapters from this book.

Origins of salt-smuggling: the miseries of the grandes gabelles (p.5-29)

The detested salt tax was at the root of smuggling activity in huge proportions. The disparity between the price of salt in the pays des grandes gabelles and the bordering provinces was so great  that in 1789 the inhabitants of the sénéchaussée of Angers could contrast the "Paradise" of Brittany, with its cheap salt, to the "Hell" of Anjou.

In the region of the grandes gabelles, salt tax was a form of direct taxation. The amount was fixed by the Farm at one minot per year between fourteen people (c.3.5 kg per person).  At fifty six livres per minot, this was four livres per person. With an average wage of 12 sols a day, this could easily represent a month's income for a family (p.16).  

This sel d'impôt or sel de devoir was restricted to salt for cooking and seasoning, "au pot et à la salière". This caused all sorts of  anomalies. The cahiers of 1789 complained that inhabitants had been subject to punitive fines for using their excess salt to cure meat; or that day-labourers and artisans had been obliged to buy salt even though they received board from their employers and had no occasion to use it (p.16)

For curing and industrial purposes, salt had to be bought from the grenier of jurisdiction.  This was not necessarily the nearest; the parishioners of Langé (Blésois) complained that they had to travel six leagues to the grenier, with a hazardous return journey on dark winter nights. (p.17-18).  

The Boots of Louis Mandrin

Postcards from the early 20th century on Louis Mandrin: bandit ou héros? [website]

https://www.mandrin.org/campagnes-de-mandrin.html

For many years, the auberge and restaurant Bottes à Mandrin in the commune of Val-de-Fier in Haute-Savoie  boasted a pair of giant boots said to have belonged to the smuggler Louis Mandrin.The boots (or ones similar) graced a number of old postcards; and a later photograph shows them on display inside the restaurant.  I am a little concerned as the property was for sale this year and, to judge by the photo on Google Streetview, is now in a pretty dilapidated state. Let's hope the legendary boots have survived!

Photos from the  Mairie Val-de-Fier website, dating from "before 1974".
http://www.valdefier.fr/Photos-d-hier

The boots on display in the auberge. 

Henry Tracol, 60 ans de photographie 1946-2006 (2005), p.230

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BZh2hrWn0moC&pg=PA230#v=onepage&q&f=false

The most recent image that I can find of the boots on the internet dates from 2005 when they were included in an exhibition on Mandrin at the Musée dauphinois in Grenoble. The exhibition brochure informs us that they were found on the banks of the Fier, in Haute-Savoie in 1880: nothing really proves that they belonged to Mandrin, but "there can be only one legimate proprietor, who can live up to their extravagant dimensions".

  

Exhibition: LOUIS MANDRIN. MALFAITEUR OU BANDIT AU GRAND COEUR ?
From  13/05/2005 to 27/03/2006
Video visit:  Louis Mandrin (2005)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x14xstk

Musée dauphinois Journal des expositions, No.7 May 2005:

https://issuu.com/museedauphinois/docs/md-journal07

In reality the boots are fairly ordinary 18th-century bottes de postillon, many examples of which survive in both England and France.  The postilion's job was to ride one of the pair of horses that pulled a mail or stage coach. The rigid leather boots protected his leg from injury, especially from the risk of being crushed if the horse lost its footing and fell.  Mandrin's boots weighed in at eight kilos - presumably four kilos each - which seems to be about the usual weight.  Since they were so heavy, the boots would be anchored to the stirrups, and would have to be abandoned when the horses were changed: hence - according to one fanciful etymology - the origin of the phrase "seven league boots"(seven leagues being the length of the "stages").  The postilion would wear his ordinary shoes and stuff the bottes with straw. 

Many  French museums - the  palais Bénédictine at Fécamp,  the château d'Anjony in the Cantal or the musée de la chaussure in Romans - have postilion boots on show. There is a particularly splendid pair closer to home in Hever Castle: 

"Castle object of the month: Postilion's boots", 7th Nov. 2018.

https://www.hevercastle.co.uk/news/castle-object-month-postilions-boots/

The serious point about Mandrin's boots, I suppose, is the tenacity of the Mandrin folk legend. This is amply illustrated by the display of books, medallions and other assorted momentos collected for the 2005 exhibition. (There are also better attested relics:  the château de Montfleury at  Avressieux has his pistols and the Musée dauphinois itself boasts his embroidered cartridge-belt.) Today in the Pays de Savoie, memories of Maudrin are still everywhere: there are Mandrin themed hotels, Mandrin tourist circuits, to say nothing of an interactive experience for children, the Repaire de Mandrin, at St Genix sur Guiers.  

Looking a bit sad - the Bottes à Mandrin on Google in June 2018

Here is an account by James Fenimore Cooper of how an old-fashioned postilion's boot saved its wearer from injury in 1828: 

It had rained a little in the morning, and, as what is called the gras de Paris is, in truth, the gras of all around Paris, the roads were greasy — I know no better word — and, for horses that are never corked, not entirely without danger. We were travelling lieuonière; or, in other words, in the place of the pole a pair of shafts had been attached to the carriage, and our team was composed of three of the sturdy Norman horses so well known on the French roads; the postilion riding the near horse, with traces so long as to enable him to travel wide of the others, and to control the movement. This beast slipped and fell.  Rolling over, he caught the leg of his rider beneath his body. I was seated on the dickey of the callèche when the accident happened. Jumping down, the horses were backed, and the postilion, who lay quite helpless, was enabled to extricate his limb. The poor fellow uttered a few sacr-r-r-es, made a wry face or two, and limped back into the saddle. At the next relay he still walked, but with difficulty.

At Melun this accident became the subject of conversation among the postilions and stable-boys, most of whom were men of la nouvelle France, or youths who no longer adhere to the prejudices of their fathers, and admire the new philosophy, and the new-fashioned boots. There was, however, a solitary relic of the ancien régime present, in the person of an old man, who wore a powdered club as thick as a large beet-root, and whose whole air had that recherché character which always distinguishes the Frenchman of 1789 from him whose proper element is revolution.  The old man listened to the account of the tumble with great gravity, nor did he utter a syllable until he had satisfactorily ascertained that no bones had been broken. Then, approaching with a politeness that would have been deemed ultra at Washington, he inquired if “Monsieur knew whether the postilion who had met with the fall, wore the ancient, or the modern boot?” When told the former, he'turned to his noisy revolutionary comrades, with a grimace replete with sarcasm, and cried, “Aha! voyez-vous, mes enfans, les anciennes modes ont aussi leur mérite!”

The old man was right. But for the celebrated boot, at which travellers are so apt to laugh, it is probable the limb would have snapped like a pipe-stem. When one sees the manner in which French horses go skating along the slippery road, he understands at once the whole mystery of this extraordinary part of a postilion’s equipment

* This old boot was the most formidable work in the way of shoe-leather that could be conceived, covering the whole leg to the thigh, and intended for giants rather than for men of ordinary size, one would suppose. The heaviest leather, in more than one thickness, with wood and iron, were worked together in the most substantial way. After the postilion had put them on — or, rather, after his legs were swallowed up in them— they were often stuffed with hay, to fill up vacant space not occupied by flesh and bone. The true old-fashioned French postilion,with his uniform, his monstrous boots and his noisy whip, well known for the peculiar sharp, rapid “crack! crack! crack!" which none but an expert could give, has become a creature of the past, driven off the field by the ironhorse. Five-and-twenty years ago postilions were as common in the streets of Paris as the gendarmes.

Extract from the diary and letters of James Fenimore Cooper, who made a trip through France to Switzerland by stage coach in 1828: Published in Putnam's Magazine, 1868

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vyk4AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA731#v=onepage&q&f=false