Under the Ancien Régime, tax farmers would taste commoners' food to determine whether their preserved food contained salt. They would even barge into wineries, measure other people's barrels, and demand to inspect their drinking records.
Fifty thousand customs inspectors or farm employees, along with twenty-three thousand plainclothes soldiers, were deployed along the country's twelve-thousand-li frontier like a chaotic, intricate net, enclosing every province, city, district, and town and collecting provincial or municipal taxes on twenty or thirty different kinds of goods and nearly sixteen hundred tolls.
After the Revolution, human rights came first. Without an arrest warrant, even the police could not casually enter a commoner's home, much less taste someone else's food to see whether it contained salt.
The main thing was to let people far from Paris feel those new ideas and that progress. Otherwise, some would still confuse the French Revolution with enlightened absolutism and the American Revolutionary War.
The French Revolution was founded on The Social Contract. The Declaration of the Rights of Man stated that "the purpose of society is to promote the welfare of the people." Under the primary requirement of the common good, an individual's free and voluntary actions must not obstruct the order and conditions of social life. That was the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: people were born free and remained free and equal in rights; social distinctions could only be founded upon the common good.
France did not permit joint-stock companies, yet the Civil Code permitted partnerships. Partners were equal, and there was no such thing as a major shareholder bullying minor shareholders. In other words, if there were debts, each partner bore an amount or equal share according to the number of partners, even if one partner held a smaller share in the partnership—unless