Which Suppresses the Corvée and Decrees the Construction of Highways for a Money Price

ouis, etc., The utility of roads designed to facilitate the transport of commodities has been recognized during all time. Our predecessors have regarded their construction and repair as one of the most worthy objects of their vigilance.

Never have these important works been prosecuted with greater ardor than under the reign of the late king, our venerated lord and grandfather. Many provinces are reaping the fruits of these activities in the rapid increase in the value of their lands.

The protection we owe to agriculture, the true foundation of plenty and public prosperity, and the favor we will to accord to commerce as a further encouragement to agriculture, cause us to seek to bind more and more by facile communications all parts of our realm, both among themselves and with outside districts.

Desiring to secure these advantages to our people by the means least burdensome to them, we have investigated carefully the means which have been employed heretofore for making and repairing public roads.

We have noted with pain that, with the exception of a small number of provinces, works of this kind have been executed, for the most part, by means of corvées required of our subjects, and even from the poorest part, while they have been paid no wages for the time they were so employed. We have been unable to escape being struck by the discomforts inherent in the nature of that contribution.

To draft the cultivator forcibly to these labors is always to do him a real wrong, even when he is paid for his day’s work. One would seek in vain to select, for demanding forced labor, a time when the peasants were unoccupied; the work of cultivation is so diversified and so incessant that no time is without its employment. Such times, when they do exist, differ in contiguous places, and frequently in the same place, owing to the varying nature of the soil, or different kinds of cultivation. The most attentive administrators cannot know all these variations. Besides, the necessity of assembling under foremen a sufficient number of laborers demands that the summary writs be general in the same district. Error on the part of the administrator may cause to the cultivators a loss of days for which no salary could repay them.

To take the time of the laborer, even for pay, is equivalent to a tax. To take this time without paying for it is a double tax; and that tax is out of all proportion when it falls on a simple day laborer who has nothing for his subsistence but the labor of his hands.

The man who works under compulsion and without recompense works idly and without interest; he does, at the same time, less work, and his work is poorly done. The peasants (corvoyeurs), obliged to travel frequently ten miles or more to report to the foreman, and as much more to return to their homes, lose a great part of the time demanded from them, without any labor return for it. The multiplied complaints, the embarrassment of tracing out the work, of distributing it, of executing it with a lot of men gathered haphazard, most of them as devoid of intelligence as they are of initiative, consume a further part of the remaining time. In this way the work which is done costs the people and the state, in day’s labor of men and vehicles, twice and often three times what it would cost if done for a money consideration.

The little work wrought so dearly is always poorly done. The art of making stone ballasts, although simple, has, nevertheless, principles and rules which determine the manner of laying out the embankments, of choosing and laying out curbs, of placing the stones according to their bulk and durability, and in accordance with the nature of their composition by which they are rendered more or less susceptible of resisting the weight of vehicles and atmospheric influences. On the attentive observation of these rules depend the solidity and durability of the roads; and that sort of attention cannot be looked for, nor can it be demanded, from the men who are drafted to the corvée, who have, all of them, a different business, and who work on the roads only a few days in each year. In work paid for in money, all the details which pertain to the perfection of the work are specified to entrepreneurs. The laborers whom they choose, instruct and oversee, make the construction of roads their regular business, and they know it; the work is well done, because if it is done poorly the contractor knows he will be obliged to reconstruct it at his own expense. The work done by the corvée remains poorly done, because it would be too harsh to demand from the wretched peasant a double task, to repair the imperfections committed through ignorance. As a result, the roads are less solid and more difficult to repair.

There is a further cause which makes the work of repair done by the corvée very much more costly.

In places where these labors are based on a money consideration, the entrepreneur charged with keeping a part of the road in repair, watches closely for the slightest disintegrations; he repairs them at small cost at the moment they are forming and before they are greatly increased; consequently the road is always in good condition and never requires costly repairs. The roads, on the contrary, which are kept in repair by the corvées, are never repaired until their grievous condition is forced upon the attention of the persons charged with keeping the roads in repair.

As a result of this, it happens that on these roads, made in the first place, as is usual, of embankments of large stones, and very crude from the beginning, the vehicles always follow the same track and wear ruts which frequently cut entirely through the ballast.

The impossibility of issuing writs of corvée at all times brings it about in most of the provinces that the repairs needed for maintenance are made twice a year, before and after the winter season, and that between these times the roads come to be in wretched disorder. It is necessary to secure new stone entirely for the work of repair; hence, aside from the inconvenience of making each time a ballast as unsatisfactory as a new one must ever be, there is involved an annual expense in days’ labor of men and of carts, approaching very near the first cost of construction.

Any industry which requires such intelligence is impossible of being carried on by means of the corvée. It is on this account that in making roads by that method we are obliged to confine ourselves to embankments constructed of ill-assorted stones, without being able to substitute a ballast of paving stones when the nature of the stones demands it or when their scarcity and the distance from which they must be brought render the construction by paving incomparably cheaper than that of general stone ballasts, which consume a very great quantity of stone. That difference in price, frequently greatly to the disadvantage of stone ballasts, is an increase in the actual expense and in the burden resting upon the people which results from the custom of the corvée.

There must be added a multitude of accidents: the loss of animals which, arriving at the place of work already exhausted by long travel, succumb to the labor demanded of them; the loss even of men, heads of unfortunate families, maimed, consumed by the maladies which the intemperance of the season occasions, or by the work itself; a loss most sad when those who perish succumb to a hazardous demand, and who have been compensated by no salary whatever.

There must be added further the expenses, the law costs, the fines and penalties of all kinds which are made necessary by resistance to a law too harsh to be executed without complaint; perhaps the secret vexations which the greatest vigilance of those who are charged with the execution of our orders cannot entirely avoid in an administration so extensive and so complex as that of the corvée, and where distributive justice goes astray in a multitude of details; where authority subdivided, so to speak, to infinity is shared among so great a number of hands, and entrusted in its final analysis to subalterns whom it is almost impossible to choose with careful discretion and very difficult to oversee.

We believe it impossible to appreciate all the corvée costs the people.

By substituting for this system, so burdensome in its effects and so disastrous in the means employed, the custom of constructing highways for a sum of money, we will have the advantage of knowing precisely what will result to our people; the advantage of drying up at once so prolific a source of vexations and rebellion; the advantage of having no longer to punish nor to command to that end, and of economizing the exercise of authority, which it is so disastrous to squander. These different motives are sufficient to move us to prefer to the use of the corvée the more pleasant and less costly means of making roads at a definite money cost. But a still more powerful and decisive motive fixes our determination: it is the injustice which is inseparable from the use of the corvée.

The weight of that charge does not fall, nor can it ever fall, anywhere else than upon the poorest part of our subjects, upon those who have no property other than their hands and their industry, upon the peasants and on the farmers. The landowners, almost all of whom are privilégiés, being exempt, contribute but very little.

Nevertheless it is to the landowners that the public roads are useful, by the value which increased channels of communication give to the products of their lands. It is not the actual farmers nor the day laborers who work for them that are profited. The successors of the present farmers will pay to the proprietors that increase of value in increase of rents. The class of day laborers will gain, perhaps, some day an increase of wages proportionate to the increased price of commodities; they will profit by participating in the general increase of public welfare; but the class of landowners alone will receive a prompt and immediate increase of wealth, and that new wealth will not be scattered among the people except in so far as the people will purchase it through increased labor.

It is then the class of proprietors of land which receives the fruit of the construction of roads; it is that class which ought alone to make the necessary advances, since they finally secure the benefits.

How can it be just to compel those to pay it who have nothing? to force them to give their time without wages? to take from them their only resource against misery and starvation in order to set them to work for the profit of those citizens who are richer than they are?

A wholly opposite error has often led the administration to sacrifice the rights of proprietors, in the misdirected desire to relieve the poorer part of the subjects, in compelling them by prohibitive laws to give up the commodities in their possession for less than their actual value. Thus injustice was worked, on the one hand, against the landowners in order to procure bread at a low price for the wage-workers; and on the other, in favor of the landowners, these unfortunates were robbed of the legitimate fruit of their toil and sweat. It was feared that the cost of subsistence would be too high for them to obtain it by their wages; and the government, demanding from them for nothing a labor, which would have been paid for if those who profited by it had borne the expense, took away from them the medium of competition best calculated to make their wages reach their proper level.

It has injured equally the property and liberty of different classes of our subjects; it has impoverished now one and now the other in order unjustly to favor each in turn. It is thus that one is misled when he forgets that justice only can maintain the equilibrium between all rights and all interests. This will be throughout the basis of our administration; and it is in order to render justice to the most numerous part of our subjects, whose especial need for protection will always command our most particular attention, that we have made haste to bring to an end the corvées in all parts of our realm.

We have not, however, wished to yield to the promptings of our heart without first having examined and appreciated the motives of our predecessors, by which they have been led to introduce and to suffer to subsist a custom, the embarrassments of which are so evident.

It may have been thought that, since the method of the corvée made it possible to work at once on all routes in all parts of the kingdom, communication would be more quickly opened, and that the state would enjoy more promptly the wealth due to the activity of trade and to the increase in the value of the articles produced.

Experience has not been slow to dispel that illusion. It was quickly seen that some of the sparsely populated provinces were precisely those where the construction of highways, owing to the nature of the country and of the soil, required immense labors which one could not flatter himself he might accomplish with a small number of hands without keeping them at it for more than a century, perhaps.

It was seen that, even in the more populous provinces, it was impossible, without crushing the people and ruining the fields, to draft peasants a sufficient number of days to complete within a short time any considerable part of the road.

It was proved that the peasants could not give their time advantageously without being directed by intelligent employees, whom it was necessary to pay; that to furnish the necessary utensils, to keep them in repair, to meet the cost of shops and store-houses, involved expenses proportionate to the number of men annually employed.

It was discovered that, on a fixed length of roadway built by corvée, many indispensable pieces of work had to be done, such as bridges, rock escarpments and walls of earth, which could be accomplished only by skilled workmen and for a price in money; that consequently it was fruitless to hasten the construction of works of corvée, if the impossibility of accelerating in like proportion the skilled work left the roads broken and useless to the public.

We are convinced, in short, that the quantity of the work accomplished annually by corvée has a necessary relation to the quantity of skilled work which the disposition of the fund for bridges and culverts permits to be done each year, and that it is impossible and useless to pass beyond this proportion; that one flatters himself in vain that all the roads may be made at once, and that the pretended advantage of the corvée is reduced to the possibility of beginning a large number of roads at the same time, without actually accomplishing any more work than could be done by the method of constructing them by contract, by which one part is not undertaken until another is finished and thrown open to the enjoyment of the public.

The present condition of the roads in most of our provinces, and what remains to be built after all these years during which the corvées have been vigorously enforced, prove how false it is that that system can hasten the construction of highways.

Some, also, are dismayed at the expense involved in the construction of roads by contract. It is not believed that the treasury of the State, drained by many wars and the extravagance of former reigns, and charged with an enormous debt, will be able to provide for that expense. Some fear to impose further taxes on the people, already too heavily burdened; and it is deemed preferable to demand from them gratuitous labor, imagining that it is better to demand from the country people, during certain days, the hands they have rather than the money they have not.

Those who reason thus forget that they must not demand from those who have nothing but their hands either what they have not or the hands which are their sole means of support for themselves and their families.

They forget that the charge for building roads, doubled and tripled by the sluggishness, the loss of time and the imperfection inherent in corvée labor, is incomparably more heavy upon the unfortunates who have nothing but their hands, than would be a charge, incomparably less, imposed in money upon the proprietors who are able to pay; who, by the increase of their revenue, would immediately reap the fruits of that outlay, and whose contribution, becoming to them a source of wealth, would at the same time relieve those men who, having nothing but their hands, can live only as those hands are employed and paid. They forget that the corvée is itself a tax, a tax most heavy, most unequally apportioned, far more disastrous than that which they dread to have established.

The facility with which roads have been made by contract in some of the states-districts, and the relief experienced by the people in certain généralités of assembly districts, where the administrators substituted for the corvée a contribution in money, have demonstrated clearly enough how preferable that contribution is to the inconvenience which accompanies the use of the corvée.

Another very obvious reason has doubtless greatly influenced the decision which has been made to adopt the method of the corvée for the construction of highways, and that is the fear that the recurring needs of the Royal treasury would impel the administrators to divert from their destination the amounts imposed for the making of roads to some more urgent item of expense, especially in time of war; that the sums, once diverted, would remain so, and that the people might one day be forced, at the same time, both to pay the tax designed originally for the roads and to provide in some other manner, perhaps even by the corvée, for their construction.

The administrators themselves have feared this; they have wished to be so placed that it would be impossible to commit an infidelity of whose danger all too many examples have made them sensible.

We commend the motives of their fear, and we appreciate the force of that consideration; but it in no way changes the nature of things; it does not make it just to demand a tax from the poor to enrich the wealthy, and to compel those to sustain the construction of highways who have no interest in them.

All concede that in the time of war the first of all needs is the defense of the state; it is necessary then, it is just, to suspend all expenses which are not of absolute necessity; the outlay for the roads should be reduced to repair merely. The tax designed to provide for that expense should be reduced in proportion to relieve the people charged with extraordinary taxes occasioned by the war.

In time of peace, the interest the sovereign has in causing commerce and tillage to flourish, and the necessity of roads to secure that end, ought to allay the fear that the works will be abandoned or that new sums proportionate to the needs will not be provided by the re-establishment of the tax suspended on the occasion of the war. Nor need there be any fear that so simple a method would be abandoned in favor of a re-establishment of the corvées, if the latter had once been abolished because they were recognized to be unjust.

On our part, the exposition we have made of the motives which have led us to suppress the corvée guarantees to our subjects that they will not be re-established during our reign; and perhaps the memory which our people will cherish of this testimony of our love will give to our example, in the eyes of our successors, an importance which will prevent them from reimposing on their subjects a burden which we have abolished.

Further, we will take all measures in our power that the sums arising from the tax levied for the construction of highways cannot be diverted to other uses.

In this mind, we have wished that that tax should never be regarded as an ordinary tax and of fixed amount, and that it can never be turned into our royal treasury. We will that it be regulated each year in our Council, for each généralité, and that it shall never exceed the sum which it will be necessary to employ in that year for the construction and repair of causeways or other works which have hitherto been made by corvée, while we reserve the right to construct bridges and other works of skill by the same funds which have been so used until the present, and which are imposed in our kingdom for that end. Our intention is that the whole sum arising from the contribution in each généralité may be used there, and that no sum may be imposed the following year except in consequence of a new edict decreed in our Council.

In order that our subjects may be informed of the objects for which the said contribution will be employed, we have deemed it proper to ordain that a writ shall be prepared in our Council, in the ordinary form, showing all the contracts for works which it will be necessary to undertake in the year; that that writ shall be deposited, both in the office of our Bureaux of Finance which are charged with the execution of the edicts of the king, and in those of our Courts of parlement, Chambers of Accounts and Courts of Aides, and that each of our subjects may have free access.

We have willed that in case the sums be not used in the year, the sums remaining for use be deducted from the levy of the following year, without being confused, under any pretext whatever, with the mass of our finances and turned into the royal treasury. We have believed it necessary also to order, by the present edict, the accounting of the sums arising from that contribution, both by our Chambers of Accounts and by our Bureaux of Finance, and of engaging the fidelity those tribunals owe us to permit at no time any use of those sums foreign to the object for which we have destined them.

By the reckoning we have made of the roads to be built and repaired in our different provinces, we believe we are able to assure our subjects that the expense of that object will in no year exceed the sum of ten millions or all the assembly districts.

That tax, having for its object an expense useful to all proprietors, we will that all proprietors, privileged and non-privileged, concur in it as is customary in all local charges; and for that reason, we intend that even the lands of our domain may not be exempt, either in our hands or in the hands of others, by whatsoever title they may be held.

The same spirit of justice which moves us to suppress the corvée and to charge the expense of making roads to the proprietors who have an interest in it, determines us to provide for the legitimate indemnity of proprietors of heritages, who are deprived of some part of their property, whether by the laying out of roads or by the extraction of material which must be used. If the necessity of public service obliges them to surrender some part of their goods, it is just that they should suffer no damage, and that they should receive the price of that part of their property which they are obliged to surrender.

For these reasons, etc., by advice of our Council, etc., we have, by the present edict, perpetual and irrevocable, decreed, enacted and ordained, etc., as follows:

Article I. There will no longer be demanded from our subjects any labor, either gratuitous or forced, under the name of corvée, or under any other name whatever, for the construction of roads or for any other public work, except in case that the defense of the country in time of war demands extraordinary labors; in such case it will be provided by virtue of our orders addressed to governors, commandants, or other administrators of our provinces. We forbid, in every other circumstance, all those who are charged with the execution of our orders, to command or require it, reserving to ourselves the right to pay those who are compelled by circumstances, in such cases, to be taken away from their ordinary work.

Article II. Works hitherto accomplished by corvées, such as the building and repair of roads, and other works necessary to communication between the provinces and cities, will be carried out in the future by means of a contribution from all proprietors of landed property or real estate subject to twentieths, and the apportionment will be made in proportion to their payments according to the regular tax lists.

Article III. With regard to the construction of bridges and other works of skill, provision will be made from the same funds which have been used for this purpose heretofore.

Article IV. We will that the proprietors of land and of structures which it will be necessary to cross or demolish in the building of roads, as well as those who may be injured by the extraction of material from their property, may receive the value of the said lands, heritages or injuries; and they will be paid by the funds arising from the tax decreed by article II herein.

Article V. The amount of tax in each généralité shall be regulated each year by the cost of construction, repair and damages which we will ordain in the said généralité in that year; to this end there shall be each year a separate writ decreed by our Council which shall include all the said expenses.

Article VI. Estimates and specifications shall be prepared, contracts for the said work and bills for their repair shall be drawn up in the form which will be prescribed; and the writ ordained by us in our Council, mentioned in the preceding article, shall include the amount of the said contracts and bills; reserving to ourselves and to our Council, as in the past, the control of routes, estimates, contracts, and all the clauses, appurtenances and provisions which they may include.

Article VII. A report shall be made to us in our Council each year, of the employment of the sums arising from the tax ordained; and in case the sum shall not be entirely consumed, mention shall be made of this fact in the writ of the following year, and the sum which has not been employed shall be deducted from the tax of the said following year. On the contrary, in case some unforeseen cause requires an expense which had not been included in any of the contracts, an account shall be made of it, and if that expense is approved by us, it will be included in the writ ordained for the following year.

Article VIII. As soon as the said edict shall be promulgated by us, four copies of it for each généralité will be deposited, one in the office of our Court of parlement, the second in that of our Chamber of Accounts, the third in our Court of Aids, and the fourth in our Bureaux of Finance of the généralité, with the intent that all persons of whatever quality or condition they may be, may have access to it without cost or inconvenience; and the said writs will serve as a basis for the reports made to the Chamber of Accounts by our Treasurers, as will be explained in Articles X and XI.

Article IX. The recovery of the sums arising from the said tax, ordained by article II of the present edict, will be made in the same manner as that of the twentieths.

Article X. The sums collected shall be remitted to the ordinary receivers of taxes, who shall withhold from the receipts, month by month, a deduction of four deniers per livre of these taxes, which shall be turned into the hands of the commission of treasurers established by us for the control of bridges and culverts in each généralité, and that commission shall deliver the said amounts to the contractors of these works, in the form which will be prescribed by us. The said sums may not under any pretext whatever be diverted to any other use or even turned into our royal treasury.

Article XI. The said treasurers will not be discharged finally of the said sums except on the delivery of the receipts of the contractors. We make express inhibition and prohibition to the commission of the said treasurers against paying out the said sums for any other purpose whatever, on penalty of being compelled to recover the entire sum which they would have paid according to the dispositions of the present article. We enjoin upon our Chamber of Accounts and our Bureaux of Finance, each according to its duty, to hold exactly to these instructions.

Thus we give by commandment, etc.

EDICT OF THE KING