Grasse's Nightmare Street

There’s a short and unremarkable street in Grasse named Rue de la Rêve Vieille. Look for Maison Duplanteur, which makes amazing chocolate, on the corner with rue Droite, and you’ll find it.

Rue de la Rêve Vieille, with Maison Duplanteur on the corner with rue Droite

If you enter the street name into Google Translate, you’ll get back ‘Old Dream Street’. But Google gets it wrong – dreams are masculine and this Rêve, as the gender of the adjective vieille shows, is female. A 'rêve' was a form of taxation, so maybe ‘Old Nightmare Street’ would be better! It seems that modern high tech and archaic words don't always mix too well.

From the fourteenth century onwards, Grasse, once an independent town, fell under the kingdom of France. Locally it was governed by an oligarchy of rich merchant families. In 1650, we know that there was a town council chosen annually from a electorate of eighty, and that it employed two agents, no less than five midwives, two buriers of the dead and three schoolmasters. This was financed mainly through rêves – basically a system of purchase taxation, where merchants paid tax on goods bought for subsequent sale.

The system was based on the iniquitous but typically medieval process of tax farming. As late as 1788, just before the Revolution, a M. Maubert, from a Grasse family well known even today, paid the town 9,555 livres for the right to collect the rêve on wine. That amounted to perhaps 20% of Grasse’s total annual revenue, so although the direct equivalent today is €40.000-€60,000, it’s probably really around €1m-€1.5m in truly comparable terms. Of course, M. Maubert and his fellow tax farmers made a profit on their deals, and notoriously tended to take more than their due!

Rêves were not charged on beans and other foods regarded as staples, and the town also controlled prices on many goods. It sounds paternalistic and a method making the rich richer, but it does appear that the oligarchs helped the population in times of shortages – for example in 1709, after a disastrous frost, they bought corn and sold it at subsidised prices until the next harvest started. No doubt they wanted to ensure that the working population survived for their own benefit, but even so…

Rue de la Rêve Vieille is so-named because it was location of the tax office (the ‘bureau de la rêve’), which, it is believed, was on the first floor above these two arches:

On the left, a postcard from before the Great War, compared to the view today. Little seems to have changed in the last hundred years, and probably for far longer.

The Octrois

Like so much else, the system of rêves was swept away by the Revolution. The immediately pre-Napoleonic Directory regime in 1798 decreed a new national system, where tax was payable on goods when they entered a municipality.

Barriers known as ‘Octroi’ were placed on entry roads and tax was paid on anything carried through them for consumption in the town. That included food, wine, building and other materials, livestock and fuel. Towns could vary what goods were actually taxed and a notable exception in Grasse was flowers used by the perfumeries, even though other materials, such as alcohol and, later, chemicals, were taxed. In 1798, the tax was ten francs per head for cattle (perhaps €50 equivalent today, or as much as 15% of its market value) and 4FF per pig, but only 1FF per sheep, on animals destined for the butchers in the Rouachier quarter.

Grasse had octroi posts at every entry road, consisting of a chain barrier in front of a small stone hut like this one at La Foux, seen on a market day:

The Octroi at La Foux, long gone, was just below what is now the La Foux car park. Upper image is from the Grasse Archives

As well at La Foux, there were octrois at the porte Neuve and other ancient gates, at the PLM and Gare du Sud stations, and at La Paoute on the Plascassier road and St Jacques on the route from Draguignan. Unlike the rêves, the tax paid through octrois was collected in cash by the officials at each barrier and passed directly to the town (although no doubt some became a little diverted on the way!). Octroi taxes covered around 70% of the town’s income. They were finally abolished under the Vichy regime in 1943 and replaced with a local purchase tax.

An Octroi at St François, on the road to Peymeinade, with the junction as it can be seen today below. Upper image is from around 1900 by Jean Luce (Luce Collectio, Archives of Alpes-Maritime, Nice ref 60Fi276).

Nowadays, when trucks cross national borders within the EU quite freely, never mind département or town boundaries, it seems remarkable to think that free trade did not exist even between towns. I can remember traveling around India before the introduction of its Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2017 and seeing the huge queues of trucks waiting to cross internal state boundaries there. It’s difficult to conceive similar congestion around the octrois, but the inefficiency of such taxes is easy to understand.

For the figures for town costs, rates of tax etc., you can see details in:

• Pierre-André Sigalas, ‘La Vie à Grasse en 1650’, 1964

• Joseph Farnarier, Contribution à la Connaissance de la Ville de Grasse, 1985