Separatists Beneath Mont Blanc
December 3, 1780, Kingdom of Sardinia. Annecy.
A single French army captain had come to the Alps on vacation. Accompanied by four short-term hired servants to assist with his travels, he made his way to the city of Annecy at the foot of the Alpine peaks. The Alps were breathtaking, their summits dusted with snow like a sprinkle of salt, and the winter sky stretched clear and cloudless overhead.
"Bread! Bread! Give us bread!"
"Aigoo, you bastards—if you take every last bit of our livelihood, what are we supposed to eat and live on?!"
There were starving commoners amid the beauty.
"Now, now, do you think I want to torment you like this? Tax collection is a solemn royal decree. Let's not make this ugly between us—nicely hand over a hundred livres' worth per head in meat or dairy products."
"Our faces are already red with rage!!!"
The tax collector was demanding a whopping hundred livres per person—one livre equaling four hundred grams, so a hundred livres came to forty kilograms.
"Come on, the kingdom's in danger—how can you be so selfish? City folk are eating their fill right now; don't you want to help your fellow man? Didn't God Himself say, 'Love thy neighbor'?"
"You're joking, right?! We couldn't produce a hundred livres even if we churned milk all year! It's not that we won't pay—it's that we can't! And we paid taxes last month too—why again? Why the hell..."
"So just pay the clean hundred livres, eh? Scamper around the hills, and you'll bag a deer or two; rummage in your cellar, and you'll find a chunk of cheese or some milk. So, pay up quick. Unlike you lot, I'm a very busy man."
As the tax collector grew more aggressive, resentment built among the crowd. When the mood turned subtly tense, he pushed his hired mercenaries forward to bully the villagers.
"Don't make me use force. I'm only taking exactly a hundred livres—no more, no less. Food rots if you hoard it in the pantry."
"Rots? We don't even have enough to hoard!"
As the atmosphere grew uglier, the tax collector resorted to his final tactic.
"Tax evasion is a grave crime. We're now proceeding with delinquency proceedings. Penalty: one hundred percent."
With those words, a mercenary drew his sword. Made of cheap iron, it failed to gleam even in the sunlight, crusted over with what might have been someone else's dried blood.
"Hold on—this isn't very gentlemanly."
"Who are you? From your build, you don't look local."
Unable to stand the impending bloodshed, the captain stepped in.
"La Tour. Charles-Louis de la Tour. Captain in the French army."
"Charles-Louis... de la Tour. A nobleman, are you?"
"I am indeed. Call me La Tour."
"Very well, Captain La Tour. What brings you here? Come to observe our kingdom's tax procedures? How embarrassing. Nothing's quite as shameful as putting on a show of penalties before a distinguished guest. But someone has to do it."
With an outsider watching, the tax collector adopted an ambiguous stance, wary of his reputation spreading. He mocked La Tour while showing superficial respect.
"No, I'm not particularly interested in that. I was just on my way home for year-end leave. Thought I'd take in the eternal snows of the beautiful Alps and the clear skies while passing through. And maybe get a sense of local customs and the economy. I may not know the customs, but I've got a feel for the economy now."
"In that case, please be on your way. I know the road down to Savoy. Shall I escort you?"
"No need—I know it too. I just want to see a bit more of the local customs."
As the tax collector began losing the staredown, the people of Annecy clung to a glimmer of hope and gathered behind the captain. Sensing the shift, he backed off a step.
"Tch. Still, tax evaders must be caught. We'll collect the penalties—if you want to watch, follow along."
Dismissing him, the tax collector swept past and ransacked the villagers' homes. Chairs were seized as wood, coins confiscated even from those hidden in children's shoes. The few remaining cheese wheels in the cellars were recovered. Even so, they fell short of a hundred livres, so he tallied the shortfall as debt on the villagers.
"I never knew the Kingdom of Sardinia's tax laws were like this."
"Unavoidable for running the state. France is riding high right now, so you wouldn't understand. Let a few slide, and soon there's no tax left to collect in the world."
"I see."
The tax collector's ledger listed individual evasion amounts and village quotas—all exceeding the captain's monthly pay. He collected them monthly, sometimes biweekly.
"It's all to make a living, isn't it? Doesn't sit right with me either."
"I see."
Captain La Tour merely observed the tax collector's depredations. Inhuman and intolerable as they were, he was forever an outsider. A French army captain had no reason to interfere with a Sardinian taxman.
"Aigoo! Aigooh... If they take the cows too, how are we supposed to survive?!"
The tax collector tore a page from his ledger, tossed a delinquency notice at them, and departed.
*That evening, at an Annecy inn. Captain La Tour sipped watery soup while listening to the innkeeper's laments.*
"That bastard's been on a rampage with his 'public finance' nonsense for two years straight—every kind of outrage you can imagine."
"I see."
It was the typical tale of exploitation.
"At least the folk around the Arve River have been generous, helping us out time and again. That's how we've scraped by... but what's the point of a life hanging by a thread?"
"Do you happen to know anything about those people by the Arve River?"
The captain seized on the intel he'd been waiting for and probed further.
"Them? About five or six years ago, they just... showed up out of nowhere. Real closed-off types—hard to talk to. But they always look out for the neighbors when the taxmen come around, so they're not bad folk."
The captain packed up the next day and returned to France.
*December 11, 1780, outskirts of Annecy.*
Less than a week after the captain's departure, laborers flooded into Annecy. They built bridges over the river and laid brick roads. Seeing hundreds of able-bodied men digging and paving, the townsfolk cowered in their homes, terrified.
Undeterred by the fear, the workers silently paved on. The mayor couldn't take it anymore and confronted them.
"Hey, lads—what's this about? The city's in famine—do you even have food to feed this many workers?"
"Pardon? No idea what you're on about, but we've got full authorization. Public works. You know?"
The foreman directing the work initially brushed the mayor off as a nuisance. But as the man kept talking, something felt off.
"Public works or whatever—why are you doing this right in front of our town without permission? Last month the tax collector came, and you said nothing."
"Tax collector? You mean a treasury agent?"
"Treasury? What's that?"
"???"
"???"
The foreman was baffled. They spoke the same French, yet it felt fundamentally twisted—like they were talking past each other.
"This isn't Grenoble?"
"Grenoble? That's way south. This is Annecy."
The words hit the foreman like a brick.
"Wrong town?"
Harboring faint hope, the mayor asked. No way they'd be dumb enough to pave roads in another country by mistake—
"Sorry. We'll withdraw immediately."
—but they were.
"All hands, halt work! Halt! This isn't our country! We're in Sardinia right now! Withdraw at once! Turn every cart around!"
The foreman rushed back to the site and ordered a retreat. Even in 18th-century Europe, where borders were fuzzy, paving roads in a foreign land was tantamount to invasion. No excuse could pass for "preparing the way for Roman legions—or an army."
But the mayor saw not a blunder, but an opportunity.
"Young man! Hold up a second."
"What is it?"
After a second's deliberation, the mayor decided.
"France! We want to join France."
Treason.
"Pardon...?"
This wasn't spur-of-the-moment—it was calculated betrayal. Annecy's local court was in Chambéry to the west. Head south, and Sardinian troops in Nice would crush any revolt.
"We can't live like this anymore. France has a good reputation these days—just close your eyes and redraw the border."
But the people of Annecy had nowhere left to retreat. Even relying on their kindly Mont Blanc neighbors had limits. To salvage any dignity, the mayor resolved to rebel.
"That's not for me to decide. I didn't hear that. I'm not in a position to."
"Then take me myself. Isn't this the road to Lyon? Give me a ride."
"Can't do that. If word gets out we meddled in foreign strife, our heads roll."
"Fine, a carriage then. I've business in Lyon. Here's one franc."
"Still no. Good day. We're leaving."
The foreman flatly refused and departed Annecy.
"Sigh. That's my life."
"Something happen?"
"Ah, France just paved a road into our town."
"Pardon?"
Rejected, the mayor returned and recounted everything to the townsfolk.
"Can't we just go with France?"
The officials and residents weren't far off in their thinking.
"Let's flee to France on that road! What do we have left?"
"Use that road to bring in French troops."
More pragmatic than the mayor's snap annexation idea—and higher survival odds. All voices called for absorption into France.
"You sure that's okay?"
"Where's 'okay' in this? Mayor, you still think we have choices?"
The town's strongest, most upright young man stepped forward.
"What do we have left? They take the livestock, the food, every damn thing we make. We'll starve to death at this rate! If we're dying, let's resist first—or if not, at least run!"
The crowd nodded.
"A crowd this size in the square on a Monday midday says it all. Normally we'd be tanning hides, herding sheep, milking cows. So why are we here? Nothing to do. They promise two bottles of milk per cow, then take every cow and leave us not a drop—that goddamn government's fault! We've endured enough!"
The youth stomped, clenched his fist, and punched the air.
"France doesn't discriminate against foreigners or the unskilled!"
He puffed his chest, hands on hips.
"We must break free from Sardinia now! The tax collectors who bleed us dry and the government that ignores our pain will finish us off!"
He jabbed a finger skyward.
"I, Adelheit, will lead the way! I'll make us French, secure our right to live free and prosperous like true Frenchmen!"
—Waaah!
The square erupted in cheers, applause, and roars for the young man's speech.