Venality and Private Finances on the Eve of the French Revolution

Venality of public office was a widespread form of rent-seeking in pre-revolutionary France. Successive legal adjustments converted venal offices into a regular form of property. Though legitimized, the practice became increasingly indefensible as a public vice for private benefit. This paper concentrates on the impact of a tax experiment on the institution twenty years prior to the Revolution. The tax in question (centième) was structured as a revelation mechanism of the value of the offices to their holders. We use a large cross-section of tax payments to infer officeholders expectations about the survival of venality. **Preliminary and Incomplete. Please do not cite** ∗Email: [email protected] The author thanks Vincent Bignon, François Velde and participants at the 10th EHES Conference and in seminars at the University of Oxford, the ESCP Business School and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. Friedemann Bieber and Fabiano Ferramosca provided excellent research assistance and the author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ESRC grant RES-061-25-0492.