ABSTRACT
For eighteenth-century jurists, smuggling was a crime of lèse-majesté, a violation of the king’s fiscal authority, yet at the same time it was a key element in the state’s policy for constructing its territory and defining borders. Dauphiné’s high valleys were the theatre of endemic smuggling between privileged and non-privileged villages, despite regular inspections by the Ferme Générale’s brigades. Through an analysis of the interplay between taxation, fraud and privilege, which underlies the phenomenon of salt smuggling in the high valleys of the Dauphiné, this chapter interrogates the relationship between the mountain communities of this strategic region and the state. Thanks to constant lobbying by the Briançonnais communities and their elite, the royal administration renewed the salt privilege over a period of nearly a hundred years: to a certain extent, the enormous sums paid for the privilege could be seen as a sort of periodic payment for the right to fraud, a practice tolerated as long as it was carried out peacefully, because it allowed the monarchy to guarantee the loyalty of frontier regions and thus protect its borders.
