Civilisations from the Chinese to the British to the Ottoman Empire charged duties and taxes on the sale of salt, but none was quite as notorious as those in France. The gabelle, as the French salt tax was known, was costly, it was arbitrary—with some parts of the country facing eye-watering levies and others none—and it was universally hated. In some senses it was the prototype for the tax system as we know it today, analogous to the energy taxes that so squeeze households as they try to heat and power their homes. Small wonder that when the French Revolution came this tax on everyday life
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