Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
France →
Poujadism, 1955
In The New York Times earlier this week, Robert Zaretsky drew some parallels between today’s American “TEA Party” movement and France’s Poujadism half a century ago.
Pierre Poujade
One difference Zaretsky doesn’t mention is that Pierre Poujade’s conservative, populist, pro-imperialist, anti-tax movement actually put some skin in the game, whereas thus far the “TEA Party” has been all talk.
The loudspeaker is [the movement’s] symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning… when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.
“Attention,” it blared.
“Attention.
The tax inspector is in town.”
There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere.
Then, amidst ominous quiet, a strange procession wound its way through the medieval streets.
At the head of it marched the tax inspector, carrying a bulging briefcase.
He was followed by 80 black-uniformed members of the Republican Security Corps with gas masks dangling from their shoulders and submachine guns at the ready.
After them, looking just a little scared, came the entire citizenry of the town.
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.
The tax-hating citizens had revolted against the Government of France, and won.
Defiance soon was carried further than that.
Angry “Poujadistes” began resorting to physical violence against stubborn tax inspectors who insisted on seeing the accounts.
They also took to spiking forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure.
Thus a tax delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents.
At an auction the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third of a cent.
The movement has got its members elected to office in almost three-fourths of France’s departmental chambers of commerce.
It has secure the support of most of the provincial press, often by threatening mass cancellations of subscriptions, while its own monthly publication, L’Union, has a circulation of 450,000.
Like the anti-tax, anti-big-government right-wing in the United States today, the Poujadists didn’t seem to mind certain expensive big government projects:
Poujade presented a seven point program to enable France to hold Algeria, hinged on the presence of a large army, strong measures of repression of the independence movement, severe punishment for those who advocate autonomy, and unspecified “reforms” to overcome the unrest of the natives.
The Poujadists briefly formed a political party, and more than fifty of its slate were elected to the Chamber of Deputies (including a young Jean-Marie Le Pen).
The movement was short-lived, though.
The party was organized on rigidly authoritarian lines and didn’t have much of a platform beyond its complaints.
Poujade decided to bet everything on a single, high-stakes roll of the dice: he’d call for a reenvocation of the States-General (which hadn’t convened since ) as a way of overriding the existing government with a populist revolt.
The American parallel would be if the “TEA Party” people were to call for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the United States Constitution more to their liking.
He couldn’t pull this off, and lost credibility.
A year after their surprisingly strong showing at the polls, people were already asking “what ever happened to the Poujadists?”
Pierre Will Not Pay His Taxes, Therefore He’s a Hero in France
by Edward Cornish
Paris, France (UPI) — Pierre Poujade cheats on his taxes and it has made him a national hero.
The law says the handsome, 34 year old Poujade should be in the bastille.
Instead he heads a movement of 800,000 Frenchmen and has travelled 45,000 miles in the last year preaching his creed — don’t pay.
Poujade will carry his revolution to the capital when he addresses five mass meetings in Paris expected to draw crowds of between 300,000 and 500,000.
That is something like 50 times the number of collectors in all France so it is understandable if the finance ministry looks the other way.
Cheating on taxes is, of course, nothing new in France.
Artifices to that end are something of a national pastime.
But never before had a Frenchman taken such a direct course as Poujade.
It started in his home town of Saint-Cere in southern France where Poujade ran a small stationery store to support his wife, three sons and daughter.
He played on the football team, organized festivals and might have been a happy man except for one thing.
Taxes.
“Mon dieu!”
he would complain to his wife.
“This cannot go on.”
Then, on , he got word tax collectors were coming again to check his books Poujade summoned his friends and soon the entire village had massed around his shop.
They refused to let the collectors get near the store.
The collectors retired, muttering that they would be back.
But with the whole town supporting Poujade, there was little they could do.
The movement snowballed.
Tax men in small towns throughout the department found themselves accosted by surly mobs.
Sometimes they were roughed up but generally they were allowed to leave unharmed but empty handed.
“South of the Loire (river) we are no longer masters of the situation,” a high official confessed.
Finance Minister Edgar Faure has been cagey.
He promised that if taxpayers would file honest returns, he would lower tax rates.
The shopkeepers replied that if the government would lower rates first, they would consider honesty.
Poujade has vigorously refused to connect his movement with any political party although the Communists, among others made overtures.
Poujade admits France must have taxes and so far he hasn’t come forward with any really constructive suggestions.
He complains that there are 3,250 different tax laws for a little merchant.
“We want a tax system based on justice,” he says.
“That means we pay our taxes when we buy our goods and from then we are through with all the worries and paper work.
We are willing to pay more if we earn more but not as now when we pay more and more while we earn less and less.”
Already hailed as the “Robin Hood of the taxpayers,” Poujade plans to put pressure on the national assembly.
“It is their job to find a way out,” he says.
The whole newspaper is written like it was intended for an audience of grade schoolers.
Today I’ll continue this chronicle of the more brutal side of tax resistance campaigns with some examples of direct violent attacks on individual tax collectors.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, a Mr. Hudson was leading a party to serve notices on people who had not paid their parish tithes when the group was met by resisters who threw stones at them.
Hudson shot one, at which point the rest of his party abandoned him, whereupon “he was brutally murdered by the mob, who mangled his corpse in a very frightful manner.”
There were several examples of such attacks during the Whiskey Rebellion.
These examples come from Alexander Hamilton’s report to President Washington:
“The officers now began to experience marks of contempt and insult.
Threats against them became more frequent and loud; and after some time these threats were ripened into acts of ill treatment and outrage.”
A deputy reported that “from a variety of threats to himself personally, although he took the utmost precaution to conceal his errand, that he was not only convinced of the impossibility of serving the process, but that any attempt to effect it would have occasioned the most violent opposition from the greater part of the inhabitants; and he declares that if he had attempted it, he believes he should not have returned alive.”
“Designs of personal violence against the Inspector of the Revenue himself, to force him to a resignation, were repeatedly attempted to be put in execution by armed parties, but by different circumstances were frustrated.”
“The idea was immediately embraced, that it was a very important point in the scheme of opposition to the law, to prevent the establishment of offices [of inspection] in the respective counties.
For this purpose the intimidation of well-disposed inhabitants was added to the plan of molesting and obstructing the officers by force or otherwise, as might be necessary.
So effectually was the first point carried (the certain destruction of property and the peril of life being involved), that it became almost impracticable to obtain suitable places for offices in some of the counties, and when obtained, it was found a matter of necessity, in almost every instance, to abandon them.”
“[A]nother party of men, some of them armed, and all in disguise, went to the house of the same collector of Fayette which had been visited in April, broke and entered it, and demanded a surrender of the officer’s commission and official books.
Upon his refusing to deliver them up, they presented pistols at him, and swore that if he did not comply they would instantly put him to death.”
The Fries Rebellion also was notorious for its violence against tax assessors.
Here are some examples from William Davis’s book on the subject:
“In a few instances, and before any matured plan had been agreed upon, the officers were prevented by threats from making the assessments…”
“[A]s threats of serious injury had been made against the assessors, who were forbidden to enter the township, they declined to attempt it.”
“The assessor of this township had been so much intimidated and threatened he was afraid to go about in the discharge of his duties.
Mr. Foulke also expressed some fears of going into the township, as threats had likewise been made against him, and he anticipated trouble.”
“Captain Kuyder, who was in command of a company of militia, called them into service to assist in driving the assessors out of the township.”
“[Fries] proclaimed his opposition to the law; and said ‘I now warn you not to go to another house to take the rates; if you do you will be hurt.’ ”
“[The assessors] came to the unanimous conclusion they would not be justified in further attempt to take the rates in Milford township, on account of the violent opposition of the inhabitants, led on by John Fries.”
The rebels confronted a small band of assessors, who split up on seeing them.
“Rodrock now rode in advance, and, when he had passed about half through the crowd, without giving heed to their commands to stop, they started to run after him from both sides of the road, some carrying clubs and others muskets, and made motions as if they intended to strike him.”
He was halted, threatened at gunpoint, and then he fled; his companions were captured.
One was dragged back to a pub and beaten.
When he refused to hand over an assessment he had made earlier in the day, “They again took hold of him and shook him severely; and one man came forward and said he should be shot.”
Fries told him he would be if he ever came back to assess.
“The circumstances which took place at Quakertown decided the assessors to make no further attempt to take assessments in Milford, as they were convinced it would lead to difficulty, and, possibly, bloodshed.”
“When the people of the township heard that another person had been appointed in place of the one first named, and had undertaken to discharge the duties of the office, they became very violent and threatened him with personal injury.
The leaders of the opposition collected a number of the disaffected into a mob, who waited upon the assessor, and gave him to understand harm would be done him if he attempted to take the rates.
This demonstration intimidated him to such degree he resigned, and declined to have anything more to do with it.”
“[T]he people were so much enraged at Nicholas Michael, the assessor, for accepting the appointment, they went in large numbers to his house at night to do him bodily injury, but, being informed of their intention, he sought safety in flight.
The next day he went to the commissioner and made complaint of the treatment he had received, tendered his resignation, and begged its acceptance… …they went to Judge Traill, an associate judge of the county; but, when they arrived there, Michael became alarmed and begged to be allowed until the next morning to consider the matter; saying, that if he informed against the people, he and his family would be ruined.
In the morning he wished to be put in jail to be kept from danger, so great were his fears, but his request was not complied with.”
“[Mr. Bailliott, a collector] was waylaid upon his return from Bethlehem, whether he had been on business, and so severely beaten a physician was brought from that place to attend him.”
The French Revolution also featured attacks on collectors:
“At Toulon a demand is made for the head of the mayor, who signs the tax-list, and of the keeper of the records; they are trodden under foot, and their houses are ransacked.…”
“Especially against collectors of the salt-tax, custom-house officers, and excisemen the fury is universal.
These, everywhere, are in danger of their lives and are obliged to fly.
At Falaise, in Normandy, the people threaten to ‘cut to pieces the director of the excise.’
… For four hours the clerks are on the point of being torn to pieces; through the entreaties of the lord of the manor, who sees scythes and sabres aimed at his own head, they are released only on the condition that they ‘abjure their employment.’ ”
“ ‘No collector dare send an official to distrain; none that are sent dare fulfill their mission.’ ”
“At Saint-Etienne-en-Forez, Berthéas, a clerk in the excise office, falsely accused of monopolizing grain, is fruitlessly defended by the National Guard; he is put in prison, according to the usual custom, to save his life, and, for greater security, the crowd insist on his being fastened by an iron collar.
But, suddenly changing its mind, it breaks upon the door and drags him to death.
Stretched on the ground, his head still moves and he raises his hand to it, when a woman, picking up a large stone, smashes his skull.
— These are not isolated occurrences.”
“[A]t Béziers, thirty-two employés, who had seized a quantity of contraband salt on the persons of armed smugglers, are pursued by the crowd to the Hôtel-de-Ville; the consuls decline to defend them and run away; the troops defend them, but in vain.
Five are tortured, horribly mutilated, and then hung.”
“ ‘The arrears of taxes to be collected is here very considerable, white all proceedings of constraint are dangerous and impossible to execute, owing to the fears of the bailiffs, who dare not perform their duties, and the violence of the tax-payers, on whom there is no check.’ ”
In , a tax official in Issoudun, France, was “dragged… through the streets, [the crowd] shouting out at each street-lamp, ‘Let him be hung!’ ”
During the Poujadeist tax strikes in France, “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them” … “Angry ‘Poujadistes’ began resorting to physical violence against stubborn tax inspectors who insisted on seeing the accounts.”
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of attacks on police and soldiers when they attempt to enforce tax laws or to take reprisals against resisters.
, a crowd of people on the Greek island of Hydra attacked local police after they detained a restauranteur for tax evasion:
[T]he inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour’s ride away by fast boat.
They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat’s crew.
The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island’s police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived .
Locals cut off the station’s electricity and water supplies.
a police bus on fire in Zhili, China
In , protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.”
In another mob of tax protesters in China destroyed ten police vehicles including an armored car.
There were battles between police and protesters during the Poll Tax rebellion in the Thatcher years.
In Bristol, the crowd charged the police and rescued arrested demonstrators.
“One police officer was kicked unconscious when he tried to make an arrest.
Six more were dragged out of their van.”
In London, “As the police baton-charged the crowd… they were resisted by a hail of bricks, bottles, and stones.”
Police brutality turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot in Trafalgar Square.
“Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd.
The crowd, angered by this violent provocation, retaliated by throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles — anything they could find.
Young people, armed only with placards, fought hand to hand with police.
… As the missiles began to rain down the police retreated:
…Pedestrian isles were being torn up and real serious lumps of concrete being thrown at the romper-suited police.
I found myself with rock in hand.
The first I threw was aimed at a group of police.
I watched it bounce off a shield.
My second rock was more specifically aimed at their front line.
Again, it was well-deflected.
I saw a rock strike a policeman’s visor and he didn’t even blink.
The police were shielding themselves from the missiles raining down, but they were vulnerable to rocks aimed at their legs and midriffs.
The police were taking a battering.
Every now and then a policeman would crumple to his knees and the crowd would roar.”
More than 100 police officers would be treated for injuries sustained during the riot.
A spokesman for the police said, “I have never seen such sustained and savage violence used directly against the police.”
During the Poujadist tax rebellion in France in , “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.”
At the tail end of the Dharsana Salt Raid, some Indian nationalist sympathizers, disregarding Gandhi’s guidelines and “abandoning, it was said, all pretenses at non-violence, stoned guards and police.
Five police and three excisemen were injured by the pebbles.
Six police who went to the rescue of some hardly pressed excisemen were themselves surrounded by the mob and obliged to retire.”
In Spain in , when guardsmen tried to disperse protesters angry at the arrest of a tax resisting cattleman, the crowd fought back — “two persons were killed and five wounded.
Among the latter is a Sergeant of the Civil Guard.”
After the Russian duma-in-exile issued a tax resistance manifesto, the government said that if people refused to pay taxes, it would send in troops who would show no mercy.
“Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into execustion the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province.
… Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.”
In , the military were called in to Guerrero, Mexico, to put down a tax rebellion.
Instead, the rebels defeated the troops and took General Ranjel prisoner.
“Half-breeds” (people of mixed European immigrant and Native American parentage) in the Dakota Territory refused to pay taxes in .
When the Sheriff tried to collect, “the half-breeds assembled from all directions, and pressing about the Sheriff and his one man they forced him to surrender his well-earned pittance of taxes … and say they will resist to the last man.
Sheriff Flynn has been notified that he will be shot on sight if he again makes a similar attempt.”
“When a deputy sheriff went to make seizures” against Irish settlers in Canada who were resisting taxes in , “the residents threatened to string him to the nearest tree.
Finally, they compelled him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out of the township.”
A sheriff trying to enforce the “foreign miners tax” in California “in attempting to compel the foreigners to yield, was killed by them, and one or two of his posse wounded.”
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales targeted the constables who tried to stop or investigate the riots, or to conduct tax seizures:
Two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at a Pontyberem village, and while there “made some special constables promise not to serve, and took away their staves.”
“They then attacked the house of the blacksmith, who had previously said he would face fifteen of the best Rebecca boys, and who also had been sworn in as a special constable; according to his own statements he was a man devoid of fear.
The smith — fearless man of Vulcan — had, however, departed; but smash! went in his door and windows, and his deserted smithy was practically destroyed.”
“At the outset of these proceedings the toll-man ‘Dick’ contrived, by running over ditch and dell, to warn a parish constable, one Evan Thomas, otherwise ‘The Porthyrhyd Lion,’ of his own mishap, as well as the peril to which he thought him exposed, Evan being somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood.
On receiving this hint, away bolted ‘Ianto,’ scampering over the ditches and fields until he found a cow-house where he lay concealed in anxious suspense the remainder of the night.
Notwithstanding the retreat of ‘Ianto,’ about seventy of the tribe visited his domicile, smashed in his windows and doors, destroyed his shelf and dresser, and all his crockery, as well as the spokes of a new cart, put a cheese on the fire, cut down some of the trees in the garden, and then simultaneously raised the cry, ‘Alas! poor Ianto!’
… Evan the constable… if found, was to have his ears cut off.”
“These riotous proceedings caused considerable excitement and alarm… The different persons in the neighbourhood who were sworn in as special constables… gave up their staves, with the determination of refusing on any future occasions to interfere with the movements of Rebecca or the protection of the toll-house.”
“John Evans and John Lewis, two Sheriff’s officers from Carmarthen, were sent… to make a distress on the goods and chattels of William Philipp… They were attacked by about twenty-five of the ’Beccas, and beaten in a dreadful manner.… John Evans was compelled to go on his knees before them, and put the distresses and authority to distrain in the fire.
He was then made to take his oath on the Bible, which one of them put in his hands, that he would never again enter the premises to make another distress.
He was compelled to make use of the following words: ‘As the Lord liveth, and my soul liveth, I will never come here to make any distress again.’
After taking the oath, he was set free, and the two bailiffs returned to town.”
William Chambers, who led a police unit that wounded and arrested some Rebeccaites, was targeted multiple times.
On one occasion, a stack of his corn was burned, on another, a stack of straw met the torch.
Later his farm and outbuildings were all engulfed in flames.
A horse of his that had been rescued from another of his farms as it burned down was later shot.
This panel from the Carrickshock memorial depicts an attack on British troops during the Irish Tithe War.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, British troops killed 18 resisters who were trying to reclaim distrained livestock.
In return, the resisters killed 18 troops in an ambush:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch.
Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors.
But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless.
Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead.
The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood… In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped.
A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.”
Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
In Issoudun, France in , a general who was sent to try to quell a tax rebellion there “entered the town only through a capitulation; the moment he reached the Hôtel-de-Ville a man of the Faubourg de Rome put his pruning-hook around his neck, exclaiming, ‘No more clerks where there is nothing to do!’ ”
During the Fries Rebellion in the early United States, “it came to the knowledge of the authorities that several of the magistrates themselves were disaffected, and others were prevented doing their duty through fear of injury.”
During the French Revolution, when the people of Peronne and Ham got wind that an order had been issued to rebuild destroyed toll-houses, they destroyed the soldiers’ barracks.
In another case: “M. de Sauzay, commandant of the ‘Royal Roussillon,’ who was bold enough to save the [tax] clerks, is menaced, and for this misdeed he barely escapes being hung himself.
When the municipal body is called upon to interpose and employ force, it replies that ‘for so small a matter, it is not worth while to compromise the lives of the citizens,’ and the regular troops sent to the Hôtel-de-Ville are ordered by the people not to go except with the butt-ends of their muskets in the air.”
One way tax resisters can foil the plans of the tax collectors is to send up the alarm when they’re on the way.
Here are some examples:
In rural Germany between the wars, a tax strike broke out, and when tax collectors came to distrain cattle from the resisters:
they blew the fire horn, and on the road they lit a fire of straw, the age-old sign that help is needed.
Peasants ran from all sides towards the smoke.
“Horning” was a legal term of art describing the process under which tax debtors could be imprisoned for defying the King (because it was normally prohibited at the time to imprison someone merely for being a debtor in default).
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, one victim of this process declared “Horning! horning!
— by the powers! if they bring a horning against me, I’ll bring a horning against them.”:
When the King’s messenger-at-arms, as tipstaves are called in Scotland, brought his horning to the Cowgate, the Irishman, previously provided with a tremendous bullock’s horn, blew a blast “so loud and dread,” that it might have brought down the Castle wall; and a faction mustered as quickly as if it had sounded in the suburbs of Kilkenny.
The messenger-at-arms took leave as rapidly as possible, and without making the charge of horning at this time.
Poujadist tax rebels in France in
used this tactic: “Some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers,” according to a Life magazine article on the movement.
A Montreal Gazette reporter said of Poujade’s Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen:
The loudspeaker is its symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning 18 months ago when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.
“Attention,” it blared.
“Attention.
The tax inspector is in town.”
There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere.
…
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.
The triumph of St. Cere lit the fires of rebellion in the hearts of tax-ridden shopkeepers all over France.
Poujade was suddenly a national figure and he lost no time in organizing his Union to spread the message of the loudspeakers and the steel curtains.
More recently, in Greece, when tax official Nikos Maitos took a team of inspectors to the island of Naxos to hunt for tax evaders, “a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.”
During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and other government enforcers were tracked by the resisters, who warned villagers when they were on the way.
Resister Govardhandas Chokhavala said, “We have provided our volunteers with drums and conches, and the moment they sight a Government servant, the drum or the conch gives the alarm.
That is work which is after the heart of these youngsters.”
Some other notes from The Story of Bardoli read:
[E]very village had its volunteers ready with their bugles or drums which Were pressed into aid as soon as they caught sight of the Talati and Patel out on their japti [attachment] depredations
The youngsters on duty announced [the Collector’s] arrival by a hearty beating of their drums. and all the doors were closed.
[T]he other [new legal] notification which was over the signature of the District Superintendent of Police prohibited the beating of drums, playing music, or blowing conches or horns on or near public roads or public places or Government buildings.
Some of them had to post themselves at and keep a strict watch over the various approaches to the village, and no sooner was a japti party sighted or the whank of a car heard, than they were to be on their alert, and the warning of the fact to be given to the village people.
Some of them had always like sleuth hounds to be on the trail of the Government officials.
Their business was to scent their plans and warn the village people against their machinations.
Some boys were arrested, tried, and imprisoned for nothing more than keeping a watchful eye on a government building from across the street.
Tax resisters in Alwar, India in used this system: “The paths are blocked by huge boulders and at intervals along the hills remote from the towns are watchers with giant tom-toms which are heard for five miles, giving warning of the approach of troops or the revenue collectors.”
The horn became the symbol of the Rebeccaite uprising in Wales, because of incidents like this one:
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.
A sign declares a neighborhood a “poll tax free zone” and warns bailiffs away from entering.
During the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, resisters tracked and shadowed bailiffs, and declared certain areas to be bailiff “no-go” zones, with watchouts established to raise the alarm if any approached.
They first modeled this approach on tactics used in South African townships during the anti-apartheid resistance there, and then improvised from there:
Throughout Britain, city-wide bailiff busting groups were formed.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios, and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
Camden, in London, followed their example in :
We have organised a rota so that we know who and when people are available to do whatever shift.
We have organised a “knock up system” giving people different responsibilities for knocking up each part of the estate when the bailiffs are spotted.
Telephone trees have also been established.
We have approached a couple of mini-cab firms who have agreed to be bailiff spotters.…
Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities.
In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made.
Here are several examples:
Labor strikes
In Germany, in , “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days.
The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in , refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in , the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay.
The city then locked them out of the wharves.
This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3.
This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in .
The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in :
The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax.
Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down.
… The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional.
The citizens all side with the strikers.
Hartals and business strikes
“Bushel Bob” Williams’ produce stand
When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in , farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in , a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business.
They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them.
Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in , “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax.
The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed.
Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.
Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.”
That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.
A Parisian cafe owner holds down the fort during a one-day business strike during the Poujadist campaign.
When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes:
“The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…”
The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In , Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in , “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in , people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In , cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike:
“We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in , there were often business strikes:
…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…
…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…
Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of , businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:
The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French…
The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke.
They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.
This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.
Consumer strikes
In Cairo in , a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay.
This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer.
They were patrons of the lower-priced seats.
The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.”
One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.
(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)
One tactic tax resisters have used from time to time is to pack up and leave when the tax collector comes calling.
Here are some examples:
Around the time of the Dharsana salt raids in Gandhi’s independence campaign in India, the government there was also stymied by mass migrations.
Here are some news accounts from the period:
Government agents began at once to attempt tax collecting, but in most cases found the natives had departed from their lands.
The situation was viewed with great anxiety, as continued maintenance of the tax strike would seriously hamper government revenues at the end of the year.
The evaders lock their doors and flee when tax collectors appear or hide in the fields, so attachment was resorted to.
The anti-tax campaign which it was said would replace the campaign against the salt laws already has been initiated in the Bardoli district where officials are arriving to post signs warning the peasants that their lands will be forfeit if they refuse to pay the dues.
Thus far they have found the villages deserted.
All-India national congress reports say that 50,000 peasants of the Bardoli region [population ~88,000] have left their homes resolved not to pay land taxes until swaraj, or home-rule is established.
Many left their household goods, chattels, crops behind, the government confiscating and auctioning them off.
[Though another account said “The inhabitants had left, taking everything movable, including the newly harvested rice crop, household goods, and cattle.
It was discovered that the villagers had been secretly removing goods and crops by night across the border into Baroda State territory, where the Baroda villagers harboured and helped them.”]
The peasants are said to have for their slogan, “No swaraj, no revenue.”
The leaders of the movement declare the peasants do not desire to evade payment, but simply will not pay until Mahatma Gandhi is released from jail and has ordered them to pay.
The congress characterizes the peasants’ actions as “an unrivaled example of a migration movement on the part of the people who are resolved to forfeit their all in the interest of the Gandhi cause.”
There is a movement of sorts nowadays that goes by the initials “P.T.” — often said to stand for “permanent tourist,” but also “prior taxpayer,” and a handful of others.
One advocate explained:
In a nutshell, a PT merely arranges his or her paperwork in such a way that all governments consider him a tourist.
A person who is just “Passing Through.”
The advantage is that being thought of by government officials as a person who is merely “Parked Temporarily,” a PT is not subjected to taxes, military service, lawsuits, or persecution for partaking in innocent but forbidden pursuits or pleasures.
Terry Gilliam, Monty Python’s Yankee animator and director of such masterpieces as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, told an interviewer he renounced his American citizenship to become a taxpatriate: “I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world.
Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.
The fact that Bush was [in office] there made it easier.”
Jeff Knaebel left his life as an American entrepreneur to become a stateless mendicant in India in order to stop paying for American military adventures:
Having made the decision to cease filing and paying income tax, I undertook a radical reorganization of my life.
I would have to emigrate, to become a “tax exile.”
It would not be right to benefit from the facilities and protection of my country while not paying my share.
I made the decision to leave my own, my native land forever.
I would become a man without a country, separated by a vast ocean from friends, family and my young adult children.
No more would I smell the rain on high desert sagebrush, nor hear wolves howl across moonlit tundra, nor watch the Northern Lights dance in Arctic sky.
I would owe allegiance to all of humanity and to no State.
I would be the indentured servant of no gang of murderers sitting in any legislative body.
By paying no tax to any State would I finally make a farewell to arms. I would seek peace and brotherhood.
I would attempt Satyagraha, that strong adherence to truth which is love.
I would aspire to a life of Ahimsa — nonviolence — which is the active force of love.
When the tax inspector came to town during the Poujadist uprising in France in , there might be nothing left to inspect — the business district having been abandoned in anticipation of the inspector’s arrival.
One account put it this way:
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…
Leaving the United States for tax reasons seems to be a growing trend.
One “taxpatriate” wrote:
I sleep much better knowing I no longer fund the military-industrial-banking complex.
Anybody can get mugged, but every U.S. taxpayer is a constant patsy for the political establishment.
The rip-offs are so unthinkably big and endemic, there’s nothing an individual can do to stop them.
If you fall for the political fallacy that “the government is the people,” you end up with the faulty conclusion that America must be overrun by war-crazed, lawsuit-happy, debt-addicted criminals.
How could anybody buy this after even a moment of clear thought?
There’s certainly no resemblance to the American people I know.
These problems stem from the military-industrial-banking complex, the dark heart of the U.S. political machine.
Why continue being the stooge that supplies the money to run it?
Looking at the world with fresh, open eyes isn’t easy.
One of the great benefits of liberating yourself from the grip of the U.S. political system is that the world becomes your oyster.
You’re free to embrace places that welcome individuals who seek to live peaceful and prosperous lives.
In Sierra Leone in , collectors of a new imperial government “hut tax” found fewer huts than they expected:
The trouble in Sierra Leone has arisen by the enforcement by the Government of a tax of 5s each annum on native huts.
In many cases the huts are not worth 5s, and when the tax collectors went round in many of the people knocked down their huts and slept under trees.
The tax collectors in Mytilene, Turkey, were so rapacious that much of the rural Greek population there abandoned their farms and “emigrated to the towns and cities in the hopes of subsisting on private charity” in rather than risk losing their farms to the tax collector before harvest time.
This passive resistance was the precursor to a more active tax resistance campaign that swept Turkey starting in .
And here is an example from the Boston Evening Transcript on :
J.F. Hathaway of Somerville Says He Will Move Rather Than Pay Tax Assessed.
A long-standing controversy between James F. Hathaway of Somerville, president of the Sprague & Hathaway Company, engaged in the manufacture of portraits, and the board of assessors of that city has culminated in a statement by Mr. Hathaway regarding his attitude in the matter.
It seems that in the principal assessors taxed Mr. Hathaway for corporation stock which he was supposed to own.
Mr. Hathaway and business friends made strong efforts to induce the assessors to abate the tax.
Acting upon the advice of the city solicitor, the board refused an abatement, and turned the bill over to the city collector for collection.
Mr. Hathaway says he will remove the plant from Somerville if the collector forces payment.
It appears from the statement he has given to the press that he made the same threat in , and that on , he packed up his furniture and prepared a move from the city rather than pay a tax.
Why he did not carry out his intention he explains as follows:
“While my household goods were being loaded on a wagon in order to get them out of Somerville before , I received a message to come to the City Hall at once on important business.
When this message came over the telephone the wagon had not been at my house more than fifteen minutes.
Evidently they had someone watching my movements; they did not think I intended to move out of the city.
I went down to City Hall and fond the full board of assessors there, the city solicitor, the mayor and several others, who were probably never there at that time in the morning except by appointment.
When I arrived, they asked me what I wanted, and I said: ‘Gentlemen, this is a nice time to ask me what I want.’
They proposed that I should pay one-half the tax, which I refused to do.
Then they proposed that I pay one-third of the tax.
I said: ‘Gentlemen, I will never pay one cent of it; if any part of it is just, it is all just.’
“They were all very anxious to find some way out of the difficulty and keep me in Somerville.
The city solicitor told them then and there they had no right to abate the tax; it had been legally assessed, and there was no legal way out of it.
But in a very few minutes they told me they would drop it; they were anxious that nothing more be said about it, and desired to let the matter drop out of sight as quietly as possible; they said they would never force the collection of the tax.
The day this matter of the tax of was settled the chairman of the board of assessors brought me home in his private carriage.
On the way, he said: ‘Mr. Hathaway, I am very sorry this ever occurred, and I am glad to find some way out of it.’
I asked him how about the future, and told him that if this thing was to be repeated next year or at any future time, my goods were all on the wagon then, and I might just as well get out of Somerville immediately.
He said: ‘This taxing of foreign corporations never has come up before, and probably never will again.
I assure you that so long as I have anything to do with the assessing of the taxes in this city you will never hear from it.’ ”
Hathaway went to jail in for refusing to pay the tax, but emerged victorious, as the Somerville Board of Aldermen voted to rescind his taxes.
“He had threatened to take his business out of Somerville if this was not done,” a news account says.
What ever happened to Pierre Poujade?
The Spectator caught up to him in ,
almost fifty years after he led his enormous tax revolt in France.
The article briefly recapped his adult life: fleeing from the Nazis and
joining the Free French forces, where the British Royal Air Force trained him
as a pilot… then, after a stint doing door-to-door book sales, he “saved
enough to open his own bookshop back home in Saint Cere, in the Lot department
of South West France”:
There Poujadism was born, on .
The dreaded tax inspectors were due, and those traders to be subjected to a
control — a fearsome trawl through every last centime in their
accounts — shivered in their back rooms. The discovery of the most piffling
abuse or inadvertent error, and the victim would be “strangled, garrotted,
ruined”. Poujade clutches his neck and feigns the agony involved.
Poujade was a member of the town council, and his communist adversary came
puffing along on his bike. He was to be inspected. What was to be done?
“Well,” said Poujade, “they’ll put you through the
moulinette and it will be me next. We must leave our knives
in the cloak-room and tackle this together.” And thus was organised the first
show of resistance.
“I became the spokesman because even then I had the reputation of being a big
mouth,” he chuckles. On inspection day he sounded the tocsin on the church
bell, and the tax collectors arrived to find the whole village, including the
curé, in the street. They filled the communist’s shop and
refused to let him produce his accounts, even if he had wanted to.
“But,” cried the collectors, “l’administration [you have to
have lived in France to understand the resonance of that octopoid being
invoked against you] has decided that all the tax controls of the Lot will be
done by the end of the month.”
“Tell the administration,” roared the 33-year-old Poujade, “that you have
already finished. There will be no more controls.”
That first phase, he says now, ‘that was real Poujadism — everyone
shoulder-to-shoulder.” They had ras-le-bol — which means
they had had it up to there: the ras-le-bol factor, always
present in French life, was the foundation of his movement, enabling him to
lead the only meek and quiescent French class of small traders and
businessmen to open revolt.
A year later Poujade could stalk the country end to end among nearly a
million members of his Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen. He
made the wonky Fourth Republic government tremble and panic; he led a march
on Paris and filled the Vélodrome d’Hiver, then the biggest arena in Paris
with more than 20,000 seats, to overflowing for his speeches.
“If they don’t change the law, we’ll change the government” was the slogan,
and the government believed it. Many concessions were granted, and, for a
brief, heady time, the Poujadists held the administration in thrall.
Préfets did nothing without consulting them, ministers would
not visit a region without their permission.
“Of course,” he says staidly, “it could not last — it was a state within a
state.” He could have led 10,000 armed war veterans down the Champs Elysées,
but he seems to have had no real taste for grabbing power, preferring
democracy. In the elections his movement
won 53 seats and polled two and a half million votes.
“Poujadism is not a political party; it has no philosophy, no doctrine, no
religious affiliation. It is a movement for economic survival by little
people harassed by the fisc… all kinds of people — Catholics, Muslims, Jews,
Protestants, atheists, communists, and populism, pure and simple. Nothing to
do with Right or Left.”
Here’s a Reuters dispatch I found in The Kansas City
Times ():
Poujadists Plan to Refuse Any Tax Increases.
Paris, .
(Reuters) — Members of Pierre Poujade’s anti-tax movement decided
to harden their attitude and refuse
to pay tax increases.
The movement’s newspaper, Fraternité Française,
said the movement’s administrative council decided on “absolute opposition” to
tax inspections of shops’ books as well as “absolute refusal” of increases.
The Poujade movement of shopkeepers and small businessmen, opposes what it
calls abuses of the taxation system.
