The Crown’s Salty Start: From Crusade to Code
The idea of the French Crown controlling salt production for royal revenue began modestly on the Mediterranean coast. In 1246, Louis IX established a sea-salt pond in the estuary of the Rhône—a marshy area known as the Camargue—to raise money for his planned Crusade to the Middle East.
He later bought the Roman-era works at Peccais, and the two operations eventually became the third largest producer of salt in the Mediterranean. For his efforts in funding the Crusade, Louis IX was forever known as Saint Louis in French history. This initial concept—state-controlled Mediterranean saltworks used to generate royal revenue—would one day evolve into the rigid system of the Grande Gabelle.
In royal France, salt possessed immense symbolic weight. The table of monarchs and aristocrats would be set with a large, ornate, often jeweled vessel called a nef. This vessel served as a saltcellar and symbolized the “ship of state,” implicitly linking the ruler’s health to the nation’s stability and preservation. Medieval etiquette strictly governed salt consumption, instructing people to take salt from the cellar only with the tip of a knife, never touching it with the fingers, as doing so was considered rude and even unlucky.
The Crown’s attempts to formalize salt control were often met with resistance. In the sixteenth century, François I, the monarch who owned an ornate saltcellar by Cellini, imposed a large tax on southwestern salt producers. After protests, he cut the tax in half, and it was eventually dropped in 1543. However, the subsequent attempt to impose the rigid administration of the Grande Gabelle on the region resulted in an armed rebellion of 40,000 farmers who marched under the slogan “Vive le roi sans gabelle”—Long live the king without the gabelle.
The French Crown, stunned by the size and intensity of the uprising, backed down.
Colbert’s Grid: Codifying Unequal Taxation
The most infamous stage of the salt tax began in 1680, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, revised the gabelle, codifying the existing regional disparities into six unequal zones.
The system defined zones based on tax burden:
- Pays de Grande Gabelle: The heart of France, including the Paris region, which endured the highest taxes. These residents were required to purchase the sel du devoir (salt duty), an obligatory annual quota of 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt for every person over eight years old—an amount far exceeding their needs for table use.
The fact that this core region, containing only one-third of the population, paid two-thirds of the state’s total salt revenue made its residents the angriest people in France. 2. Pays de Petite Gabelle: Regions with slightly lower, though still significant, tax burdens. 3. Pays de Salines: Regions where salt production was taxed but not the consumer. 4. Pays Redimées: Regions that had bought permanent exemption from the tax. 5. Pays Exempt: Regions naturally exempt due to historic privileges, such as Brittany and the Basque country.
These formalized inequities created enormous incentives for crime. In 1784, the price disparity was reported by Swiss banker Jacques Necker: a minot of salt (107.8 pounds) cost 31 sous in Brittany, 591 sous in Anjou, and 611 sous in Berry.
Local merchants in high-tax regions, such as the Pays de Grand Gabelle, tried to mitigate the burden by importing inexpensive salt from Portugal, specifically the high-quality white salt of Setúbal. Meanwhile, citizens found that using their obligatory salt (sel du devoir) for practical preservation, such as curing sausages or hams, was considered a severe crime known as faux saunage (salt fraud).
The Smuggler’s Gambit and the Salt Wars
The massive price differentials guaranteed a thriving black market in contraband salt. Smugglers, the faux sauniers, became legendary figures, using colorful pseudonyms like François Gantier, also known as Pot au Lait (milk pitcher).
The geographical fault line of the gabelle was the Loire River. This river marked the border between the high-tax Pays de Grande Gabelle and tax-exempt Brittany. Smugglers exploited the hidden coves and islands of the Loire. To combat this, the Crown declared fishing at night illegal and by 1773, stationed 3,000 troops on the Loire solely to stop salt smuggling.
Smugglers developed sophisticated ruses. Salt cod, landed at Breton ports like Le Croisic, was shipped up the Loire into France. One variety, “green salt cod” (fish only salted, not dried), required copious amounts of salt to prevent spoilage in transit. Merchants would ship the cod in thick layers of salt, hoping to smuggle the excess past inspectors. Inspectors at checkpoints would shake off the salt, and too much excess salt would result in a report, though merchants could often expedite their journey with a bribe of a few salt cod to the official.
The Crown’s control over salt was so entrenched that it extended even to matters of death and criminal justice. A 1670 revision of the criminal code used salt to enforce laws against suicide, ordering that the bodies of those who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display. In a bureaucratic error in 1784, a man named Maurice LeCorre, who died in prison in Cornouaille, was ordered salted for trial. His corpse was later found seven years later, salted and fermented in beer, and was then buried without ever having received a trial.
Brittany’s Dual Fate: Privilege and Poverty
The Breton peninsula, where the Atlantic saltworks of Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Bourgneuf were located, enjoyed an exemption from the gabelle. This privilege was a key factor in Brittany’s economic success in the Atlantic trade, allowing its ports easy access to inexpensive, untaxed salt.
The saltmakers, the paludiers, produced massive quantities of “Bay salt”—an inexpensive, large-grained solar-evaporated sea salt—that was perfect for curing fish. This salt was sold to the British, Dutch, and Danish. Even the Spanish came to buy Bay salt for their northern Iberia fisheries. The port of Le Croisic became the second most important French Atlantic port, after Bordeaux, due to its trade in salt and traded goods.
This trade also supported the export of Irish corned beef. The Irish, starting in the Middle Ages, bought French salt, often shipped to Cork or Waterford, for curing beef and pork. This meticulously boned and salted beef was so durable that it became a cheap, high-protein food for slaves in the fabulously profitable Caribbean sugar colonies, and later, a provision for the British Navy.
The saltmakers of Guérande were renowned for their fleur de sel (flower of salt). This lighter, finer salt crystallized on the water’s surface during a dry wind and was painstakingly skimmed by women, who were believed to possess the “delicate touch” required for the task. The name Guérande comes from the Breton name Gwenn-Rann, meaning “white country”.
However, the Brittany advantage was extinguished by the very man who championed the Revolution. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte, now Emperor, reinstated the gabelle, simultaneously eliminating the exemption for Brittany. Deprived of their competitive advantage, the paludiers of Guérande, who continued to wear the large, three-cornered hats of the eighteenth-century peasants, became some of the poorest peasants in France.
Their cuisine reflected this poverty, based on simple crops like potatoes and onions grown in their clay-bound soil. Potatoes, boiled in brine (patate cuit au sel), acquired a fine salt powder on the skin. Salt, being their cheapest product, was applied liberally to everything, giving rise to the Breton expression, “Kement a zo fall, a gar ar sall”—Everything that is not good asks to be salted. Another proverb stated, “Advice and salt are available to anyone who wants it”. Kig-sall, salted pig made from ears, tail, and feet, was preserved in a barrel with lard and salt for months.
The French Revolution and the Enduring Tax
The gabelle reached its breaking point with the storming of the Bastille in 1789. The revolutionary legislature, finding the tax system indefensible, repealed it entirely, calling the salt tax “odious”. As a dramatic act of symbolic justice, the National Assembly annulled all trials related to the salt tax and set convicted violators free. Some legislators had suggested a low, universally applied salt tax, but the Assembly ultimately voted for no salt tax at all, though this neglected to replace a key source of state revenue.
Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, a leading revolutionary figure, concisely articulated the expectation for the new republic: “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?”. The repeal of the gabelle was a clear attempt to deliver on the promises of Liberté, Egalité, Tax Breaks.
This reprieve was tragically short-lived. In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated the gabelle, eliminating Brittany’s exemption and ensuring the tax remained a part of the French administrative structure until it was finally abolished in 1946.
French Regional Salt Specialties and Exemptions
Beyond the general tax disaster, certain French salt traditions and specialties flourished due to unique geographical or economic circumstances, sometimes earning tax exemptions:
1. Bayonne Ham and Béarn Brine: The Basques, who marketed their hams to the ham-loving Romans, shipped the prized Jambon de Bayonne from the port of Bayonne. The ham is defined as a product made within the watershed of the Adour River. The tradition of brine curing centered in Salies-de-Béarn, a village built around a natural brine spring. The villagers eligible to share this resource were called part-prenants, whose rights dated back centuries and were codified in 1587. Until modern times, these families were paid in brine, but today, the 564 remaining part-prenants receive about thirty dollars per year in money. The salt itself, like Kanawha salt in America, is highly soluble and fast penetrating, ideally suited for curing meat.
2. Roquefort Cheese: The celebrated blue-veined cheese of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, aged in cool, humid caves, relies on salt from the Mediterranean works at Aigues-Mortes. The salt is rubbed on the top of the cheeses and melts, working its way into the product. Roquefort gained a reputation as an excellent salty snack for drinking, earning the nickname “the drunkard’s biscuit” from the first food journalist, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière.
3. Collioure Anchovies: The fishing village of Collioure, near the Spanish border in Catalan country, was famous for its salted fish, particularly anchovies. Since the time of ancient Greece, anchovies have been the most praised salted fish in the Mediterranean, and Collioure’s were considered the best salted anchovies in the world during the Middle Ages. The local anchovy salters used salt from the Rhône estuary works at Aigues-Mortes. Because of the commercial importance of its salted fish, the French Crown specifically exempted Collioure from any salt tax, another arbitrary exception that contributed to the gabelle’s political failure. Curing anchovies required men to heft the salt and women to swiftly and nimbly fillet the small fish before layering them with salt in barrels.
4. Choucroute: In Alsace and Lorraine, the dish known as choucroute (from the German sauerkraut, meaning “sour grass”) became popular. Though cabbage had been pickled in China for millennia, the Alsatian version was made by salting chopped cabbage. The dish was initially served with salted fish, especially herring, but gradually transitioned into choucroute garnie, served festively piled with an assortment of salted and cured cuts of pork and sausages. Marie Antoinette, whose father was from Lorraine, championed choucroute at court.
The French history of salt, therefore, is not just a tale of high finance and taxation, but a testament to how an essential commodity could become the pivot point for political upheaval and the defining characteristic of regional life, from the poor Bretons salting their potatoes to the aristocracy vying for the most ornate saltcellar.
The French experience with the salt tax was a complex balancing act, attempting to extract necessary revenue without provoking outright revolt. It was like trying to drain a reservoir through a leaky dam: the government constantly tried to control the flow (tax collection), while the pressure of necessity (the black market) kept finding new cracks (smuggling routes and tax exemptions), until the entire structure collapsed under the weight of the revolution.