La Paulette (French pronunciation: [la polɛt]; after the financier Charles Paulet, who proposed it) was the name commonly given to the "annual right" (droit annuel), a special tax levied by the French Crown under the Ancien Régime.
The transmission of judicial offices had been a common practice in France since the late Middle Ages.
The paulette provided the Crown with a steady source of revenue while consolidating the practice of hereditary government offices.
This left the administration of justice in France in the hands of a new and increasingly powerful hereditary class of magistrates, which came to be known as the noblesse de robe ("nobility of the gown"), in contrast with the traditional aristocracy, known as the noblesse d'épée ("nobility of the sword", whose position derived from feudal military service).
During the rule of Louis XIV, his minister of finance Jean Baptiste Colbert expanded the creation and sale of offices to raise money without new taxation.