La genèse et l’élaboration de la capitation de 1695 : le rôle décisif de Chamlay, conseiller militaire de Louis XIV

The elaboration of the capitation of 1695, an innovating tax which touched all the population, including privileged people, is the result of a long maturation, which involved many royal advisors. Among them, we notice of course financial specialists (the contrôleur général Pontchartrain, the brothers Le Pelletier, Desmarets), but also influent and “enlightened” militaries, like Vauban and specially Chamlay, who was the main stimulating person of the project. If he was, as his friend Vauban, favourable to the idea to tax all the incomes without exception, he faced Pontchartrain’s conservatism and finally came round to the more cautious and useful solution of a rate which distributed the taxpayers into 22 classes. But his first idea leaded in part with the creation of the dixième in 1710.