Land registry of Bertier de Sauvigny

The land registry of Bertier de Sauvigny is a series of maps of the parishes of the generality of Paris surveyed from 1776 to 1791, often referred to as plans d'intendance.

Bertier de Sauvigny, Intendant of Paris, sought to distribute taxes more equitably, by assessing the overall revenues of each parish.

He then measured the surfaces by large masses of crops, by triangulation, essentially using a gunter's chain, a try square and Pythagoras' theorem for his calculations.

[To 1] It was a survey of the landscape of the generality of Paris, carried out as part of a tax reform, the tarification of the taille, pursued by successive Intendants of Paris, Louis Jean Bertier de Sauvigny and then his son Louis Bénigne Bertier de Sauvigny.

[1] With the creation of this land register, Bertier de Sauvigny sought to gain a better understanding of the agricultural potential of each parish, in order to obtain a better return on the tax by distributing it fairly.

[2] This project was part of the modernization drive that swept through the Ancien Régime in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period during which various administrative and fiscal reforms were attempted, often with little success.

[3] Bertier de Sauvigny achieved concrete results: the establishment of the average value of land in each parish and a theoretical tax rate for each farm.

[To 2] The cadastre drawn up under his authority did not represent individual land lots, but instead took a survey by mass of crops (vines, fields, pastures, etc.)

[To 2] Bertier de Sauvigny had all the less reason to undertake a parcel-based cadastre since the Court of Aids, in 1768, reaffirmed that the royal power could not interfere in the distribution of the taille (tax) in the parishes.

Moreover, when he took over from his father Louis Jean Bertier de Sauvigny as Intendant of Paris, the latter had already limited the room for maneuver of parish taille collectors through a series of tariffs.

He was assisted by a clerk and, like the intendant, performed duties in a variety of fields: justice, police, roads and finance.

He chose 82 surveyors, including members of his entourage: his son Guillaume, Lucien (who may have been his brother), his neighbor Denis Duchesne, and his apprentices Antoine Schmid and Pierre Villeneuve.

Surveyors were not the wealthiest of rural dwellers, but they did enjoy a certain financial ease, which enabled them to bear the costs of surveying operations, since they were only paid once the task had been completed.

[To 4] The surveyors did not belong to the same social and cultural milieu as the king's engineers and topographers, who were involved in drawing up maps such as Cassini's and frequented learned societies.

In fact, the plan was both a tool for verifying the procès-verbal and the manifestation of a desire to control, see and represent space, typical of Lumières France.

These plans included the names of adjoining parishes, the direction of flow of rivers and cardinal points, with north not necessarily at the top of the sheet.

The rate was three sols per royal acre, with no reimbursement for travel expenses, which were reduced as surveyors often lived at short distances.

[To 5] When Bertier de Sauvigny was killed at the start of the Revolution on July 22, 1789, the land register was almost complete, and it was finished two years later.

Certain areas were excluded, as they were exempt from pruning: the towns of Paris, Versailles and Poissy, and the large forests of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Meudon and Compiègne.

[To 9] In the majority of cases, the surveyor failed to meet the one-month deadline normally set for him to deliver the procès-verbal and map.

The most punctual were Jean-Nicolas Devert, based in Rivecourt, who surveyed the greatest number of parishes (152), and Jean-Louis Droit, from Montereau-Fault-Yonne.

Surveyor Chevalier Closquinet de La Roche, entangled in local rivalries, failed to turn in a plan after more than a year.

[To 11] In 98% of cases, the inhabitants welcomed the surveyor, whom they often knew, and did not object to the survey, which did not involve them personally since it was carried out by masses of crops and not by parcels.

Only 2% of the total number of disputes concerned either the measurements themselves, or the appropriateness of the tax reform that led to the creation of the cadastre.

[To 13] Today, the survey reports and maps (known as "intendance maps") drawn up for the land registry of Bertier de Sauvigny are preserved in the repositories of the departmental archives in: These sources are used in a wide range of historical studies, at local and regional levels.

[13][14] They are also used to study the transfer of land,[15] castles and their commons,[16] describe road networks[17][18] or hydrography,[19] contextualize archaeological excavations,[20][21] and more.