ABSTRACT
French royal taxation emerged, on the eve and first stages of the Hundred Years War, from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century, as the kings tried out and negotiated various formulas with their subjects. After the political crisis of the 1350s, a reinforced monarchy established a comprehensive tax system out of the control of estate assemblies. It collapsed in the civil war and new military disasters of the early fifteenth century, before being restored, and somehow reshaped, in the 1440s, giving Charles VII the means of final victory against England. Brittany and Dauphiné were the only French principalities to develop a tax system of their own; in both cases, its general frame followed the royal model. French towns began to raise taxes for their own purpose in the second half of the twelfth century. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, urban fiscal techniques reached a level of refinement unparalleled by the king or local princes, whose growing demands prompted towns to develop taxation. In the 1340s, Philip VI ordered cities to build or restore their walls and allowed them to raise special taxes, thus decisively boosting the growth and shaping of municipal tax systems.
