V.I.T.R.I.O.L

Work : V.I.T.R.I.O.L

Anthropomorphic salt dough statuettes given to a goat.

Series of photographs. Prints on salted paper Bergger cot320, 27.9 x 35.5 cm.

Location : France. 2014 / 2015.

Reference text:

Le Cailar, July 3, 2014, anniversary of 100 years of income tax in France.

I am a “provincial”, as the Parisians disdainfully say. But I am crazy to think that it is my village, Le Cailar, which is at the center of the world.
Among other unsuspected particularities, I discovered accidentally that this is where the notion of proportionality of tax was born, in the middle of the twelfth century. For the first time in all of medieval Europe, it was no longer per undifferentiated fire (per household) that the tribute demanded from the inhabitants to restore local fortifications was calculated, but in fair proportion to the property of each family, assessed on documents. by an ad hoc commission.
I had long intended to tackle this heavy subject in my series of works dealing with the economic crisis. This historical starting point which flattered my chauvinism could therefore not have come at a better time. At a time when we are celebrating in blood and tears the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the income tax, at a time of the Cahuzac scandal, demonstrations by pigeons and other red hats, it was time to get started.
As is often the case, I started by putting things into perspective. At the sight of this medieval document, in a few seconds, I imagined my distant ancestors – clever little ones of course – trying to hide some furniture, two or three chickens to ease the pain a little. Because it must be admitted, today as in the past, few eagerly pay their contribution. When “the phynance pump” roars, whatever the method of calculation, we always find the sum unfair and excessive.
In these difficult times, when the increase in compulsory contributions is supposed to help France emerge from an acute economic crisis, to repay a debt, or even to clean up an original mistake that no one really remembers having committed – and for good reason – some have the impression that the burden is not shared equitably, that common revenues are diverted for the benefit of a few, that tax is, in short, nothing more than a simple plunder of the weak by the strong people implementing power issues.
When we look at the history of it, we realize that by bringing a few nuances to it, that’s really what it’s about.
The tax comes from offerings that have always been made to the gods in the hope that they will grant their worshipers a better life – or at the very least let them vegetate painlessly in credulous animist serenity. It is found later in the part of its wealth which we abandoned more or less willingly to the lords, to the men-at-arms to take away from them the idea of massacring you like someone who laughs to distract themselves, so that they possibly protect you, in their day of kindness, from hordes of plunderers from elsewhere.
It has always been a freely consented alienation of part of one’s freedom and one’s property, an evil deemed necessary in the perspective of preserving the rest, conscious submission to a power. And this sovereign power, now secular, envisaged on a scale large enough for particular interest to disappear in favor of a collective interest, is nothing less than what we call the state today. Paying the tax and possibly giving your opinion on its use means abandoning your status as an isolated and vulnerable individual to become a citizen subject to restrictive but protective laws; it is knowingly accepting to form a society. The tax particularities therefore follow those of the social system of the state in question.
The more unequal the society, the more unequal the tax. With a natural tendency, as it comes from a balance of power, to concentrate on the weakest. In the ancient Athenian city, only the metics paid it, under the old French regime, it was the third estate.
With financial globalization and the digital revolution, it would seem that the richest among us once again have the technical capabilities to distinguish themselves from ordinary mortals, even if the fashionable use of accounts located in tax havens does not is not completely validated by the law (but not really repressed either).
In any case, the unease is palpable. Because the tax comes from a fragile balance, to be freely agreed, it must be somewhat equitable, legitimate, everyone must benefit from it. Otherwise, far from being the cement of social cohesion, it can cause it to fall apart.
With irony, I think back to other archival documents discovered in my tiny village.
The fortifications mentioned above, built in the twelfth century thanks to tribute from the villagers, were destroyed two hundred years later by tuchins, wandering peasants from Beaucaire, people « on the sidelines », marginalized people harassed by the exorbitant levies of the greats. regional lords and who had been ruined by a few too many bad harvests.
Why destroy my particular village? I perhaps have an explanation linked to the main activity of its inhabitants at the time. Many were salt workers, salt merchants, customs officers… And this is where the history of my region intersects once again with that which Parisians pompously adorn with a capital H.
The most important salt works in Languedoc date back to Charlemagne and their remains are located a stone’s throw from my bell tower, in Peccais. A little later, the carts decorated with white crystals will leave from Aigues-Mortes, fifteen kilometers away, but it’s the same, the salt route starting there to sprinkle the southern half of the kingdom.
Salt… The history of compulsory levies is not lacking. As true as the salt tax was the most hated tax of the Middle Ages. Established in 1343 by Philippe VI, it lasted until the revolution. Unequal if ever there was one, it required everyone to buy salt in large quantities, whatever their real needs and at a high price. Tax collectors thus succeeded better than alchemists in the transmutation of the elements. As a result, peasant revolts and uprisings against central power multiplied until the bloody epilogue of 1789 that we know
A few centuries later, the same causes producing the same effects, Gandhi made this same injustice the symbol which allowed him to wrest, with the famous “salt march”, the independence of India from the United Kingdom.
Because salt is a separate element, with a universal symbolic richness and a local history which I have inherited a little and which is no less so. Paracelsus, alchemist for some, father of science and modern medicine for others, made it in the 16th century one of the three fundamental substances with sulfur and mercury. It’s not nothing. Not just that the word salary derives from it today. Poverty wages, wages of fear, fear above all of not having any more. (For the record, the film of the same name will also be partly filmed in the marshes surrounding my village.)
This is why I wanted to put salt at the center of this work on taxes.
And what could be more telling to illustrate its particular nature than this Masonic phrase inscribed in abbreviation in the meditative and metaphorical cavern of salt: “Visit the interior of the earth and by rectifying, you will find the sacred stone”…
This injunction is a way of inviting the applicant to express the essential, his “quintessence”, to dig into himself, this tiny self which is always at the center of our human world.
It all starts from there. Gandhi, again, said it wonderfully: “be the change you want in this world”.
When you think about it (I try sometimes), there is no point in attacking the banksters, the ultra-liberal ideology, the mass individualist, the corruption of the upper echelons of society. state, to the devil himself and to the goat Azazel who would plot together to bleed us dry.
The truth is that we cannot rely on others, discharge our responsibility as standing men simply by voting and offering from time to time to the timid goat that lies dormant in us a little of our democratic salt to then to agonize the whole earth with our bitter reproaches.
All this would be too simple, an easy renunciation. This would be showing an idolatrous faith in a republican afterlife which would take care of everything for us, by proxy. It is we who are the salt of this society, it is made of nothing more. By renouncing to take our active part in it, it is we who give ourselves up resignedly, in small pieces, to the goat’s balloon which swells by feeding on our weaknesses.
Because these appetizers, these offerings, these ridiculous amulets will not be enough to satisfy his destructive ardor. Filled with rage, resentment and fear, she will swallow her naive worshipers whole, probably every last one.
Good Daudet knows it, Gringoire and his fascist double let’s not talk about it: reality will catch up with us, much more ferocious than the mystical animals that we construct for ourselves in our minds. Already in 1893, barbarism fell on the Italian salt workers who came to work in Aigues-Mortes. Its shadow once again hangs over my village which has just offered the far right a deputy seat.

It will be merciless for poets and dreamers…

 

Links :

Invention de l’impôt proportionnel

Les impôts

Consentement à l’impôt

Les tuchins

Et les tuchins

Les paradis fiscaux

Paradis fiscaux et classe dominante.



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