As they had been since the Middle Ages, taxes were drawn almost entirely from peasant agriculture, supplemented by a few special taxes on commodities like salt.
In turn, the problem for the monarchy was that there was no way to raise more money: taxes were tied to land and agriculture, rather than commerce, and nobles and the church were exempt from taxation. Not only did France lose much of its empire in Canada, the Caribbean, and India to the British, the state also accumulated a huge burden of debt which consumed 60% of tax revenues each year in interest payments. The loans it desperately sought had to be found from private banks, traders, and wealthy individuals, and the interest rates it was obliged to pay were punishingly high. The major impact of the colonial wars between France and Britain in the eighteenth century on France was to push the state to the brink of bankruptcy – even as Britain funded its wars through the sale of bonds from the official national bank, the French state struggled to raise revenue. With the noteworthy exception of the American Revolution, Britain won every single war. As noted in the last chapter, starting at the end of the seventeenth century there was an (on-again, off-again) century of warfare between France and Britain, much of it fought overseas (in India, the Caribbean, and North America). The immediate case of the French Revolution was the dire financial straits of the French state after a century of war against Britain and an outdated system of taxation. Even though the Revolution failed to achieve the aims of its most radical proponents in the short term, it set the stage for everything else that happened in Europe for the rest of the nineteenth century, with major consequences for world history. France went from a Catholic absolute monarchy to a radical, secular republic with universal manhood suffrage, a new calendar, a new system of weights and measures, and the professed goal of conquering the rest of Europe in the name of freedom, all in about five years. The French Revolution was a radical political transformation of what had been one of the most traditional and most powerful of the great European states in the space of a few short years.
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