Latest / Outlaw's Digest / The Robin Hood of France - The Life and Crimes of Legendary Smuggler Louis Mandrin
Transcript
- To start today’s episode, imagine we’re in the mountains of southeastern France in the year 1754. It’s market day. You’re headed into the center of your little town. Let’s say you’re a beekeeper and you’ve got some honey to sell. So you’re pulling a small handcart and rolling it alongside your neighbors. While you’re there, you’re going to pick up some new things for your family: some leather shoes, some bolts of fabric. And if you’re lucky—maybe you get a good price for your honey—you might even get your hands on something exciting that you’ve been hearing about: coffee beans. New kinds of food and drink have been coming in from the colonies. They say in Paris new businesses are springing up where people gather by the dozens just to drink coffee to their heart’s content. Not here, not yet. But they do say some of the wealthier families in your town have been drinking coffee. Your neighbors got some coffee just last month. And you’re dying to try it. Maybe today could be your turn, if the merchants selling in the market set a fair price. They call themselves ‘the General Farm,’ but from what you can see all they farm is taxes. The fatcats in charge have never done a lick of real farming. The first few hours of the day… go well. You’ve sold halfway through your honey, picked up your cloth, and you see that the merchants of the General Farm have, indeed, arrived with goods. You count up the coins in your hand and head in their direction. You’re starting to think you may get a taste of coffee afterall. But that’s when a well-dressed man rides into the square. He’s all dolled up like he’s headed for a palace in Paris: in a blue overcoat cut in the latest fashion. And under it you can glimpse a rich burgundy waistcoat. His tricorn hat, which is all the rage of the day, is trimmed in gold. It flops rakishly over his long hair. He’s serene, but like, flamboyantly so, like he wants all eyes on him. Like he’s putting on a show. And you realize: he’s not alone. More riders than you can count have ridden into town and formed a ring around the market. They’re all toting double-barrel muskets, pistols, and swords. And they’re all looking your way. The well dressed man rides right past you. He’s headed for the tables where the merchant from The General Farm is holding court. You’re just close enough to make out the conversation. The rider demands that the merchants buy from him. There’s just one twist: the rider sets the price… and draws his gun. Of course, the merchant agrees to this, you know, “deal,” though he doesn’t look happy about it. More men come forward around the rider and unload the goods the merchants are forced to buy. You realize: only one smuggler could be man-handling the merchants of the crown with this level of audacity, the highwayman Louis Mandrin. You’ve been hearing about him for months. Now, it seems like he’s finally in your town: shaking down the merchants of the General Farm right in front of you. Once Louis and his men have scooped up every last copper coin The General Farm sent to town, the riders turn, mount their horses, and leave. Some of your neighbors wave as they ride out of the town gates. A few others seem like they’re holding back a laugh. Everyone you know hates The General Farm just as much as you do. In the ruckus, no one noticed: you managed to grab a sack of coffee beans and tuck it into your coat. That night, you’re headed home with two treasures: the coffee you’ll brew that week, and the memory you’ll keep with you forever. You just watched agents of the crown bend the knee to notorious smuggler and tobacco kingpin Louis Mandrin… and that kinda makes him your hero. *** Welcome to Outlaw's Digest, the podcast telling stories from criminally delicious food history. I’m KC Hysmith. This story takes us to France in the years before the French Revolution, when the French king allowed a massive monopoly, called The General Farm, to put French markets in a chokehold. Luxury goods like coffee, sugar, and tobacco were flooding in from the far reaches of European colonies. But only the wealthy were enjoying the spoils. Until the people fought back… by breaking the law. The smuggler Louis Mandrin became their champion, riding over the border from Savoy and making himself the Robin Hood of France. *** Louis Mandrin wasn’t born on the wrong side of the law. In fact, he started out in life with some significant advantages. To start with, his mother came from a successful merchant family, and his father owned enough land to grow cash crops—and trade horses—for folks nearby. His family grew wheat mostly That’s Michael Kwass, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. He's growing food mostly for larger towns nearby, so he's in the food business himself, but also they're trading, little bits of food, little bits of clothing here and there. Louis was the family’s oldest son. And like all oldest sons in 18th century France, he expected that he would inherit his father’s lot in life: a successful supply business, and some respect at the local markets. I imagine him as a floppy haired youth, like, riding around on a little horse behind his dad’s slightly bigger horse, while people shout bonjour! bonjour! in the street, and other guys come up to his dad to chat business and he just plays on whatever the 18th century version of a gameboy is. Young Louis probably thought this was going to be his role in life too. But as Dr. Kwass says, the market in those days was changing pretty fast. Because in those years, farmers and traders like the Mandrin family were living—and eating—in a whole new world. there's a major transformation going on where people, ordinary people, not just the elites like before, but ordinary people like master artisans and professionals are beginning to consume more and more stuff. This was the early modern period, when European empires stretched around the globe to loot far off places and send home the goods. In French cities like Lyon and Grenoble, new forms of trade were changing how French citizens filled their homes: with luxuries, clothes, the pictures on their walls, even the furniture in every room. Simple things like a chair, you know, was relatively new. People used to sit on stools. Now they're buying chairs. Um, forks and knives. Like, uh, there's a whole way of kind of, uh, consuming food and having a kind of sociability around food that's developing. Personal accessories, canes and wigs and, jewels and things like that, but also tropical goods. For young Louis, and his family, this meant that there were new things on their table, on their plates, and in their cups. He might be seeing more sugar and coffee and things like that. And he traveled with his father, so he'd go to these other places and see what's going on. But for Louis, seeing the world from the back of his father’s horse, growing food and travelling from town to town to sell it at the local markets, came to a sudden, harsh end…when Louis was seventeen. His father died. And that left Louis the head of the household. And it was a big job. Louis was the oldest of eight children. Now it was time to see if Louis had learned his father’s lessons—and his father’s trade—well enough to keep coffee in his cup and bread on his table. At first, as he worked the land and made the same deliveries to the same old customers, it seemed like he might be able to shoulder the burden. But, and we don’t know exactly why—-mayhaps his business was in debt and he needed a big payout, maybe he was ambitious and wanted to scale up—but for whatever reason, a few years later Louis decided to take his father’s business and turn it into something bigger… So there's this war called the War of Austrian Succession going on. France is fighting in Italy, kind of east of Nice, on the Mediterranean. And Mandrin thinks, "Oh, I, I'll get this government contract and make a lot of money." And he goes down there with a bunch of mules packing food to feed the the French soldiers Louis bands together with a few other merchants he knew, financed by a major bank, and they set out together with ninety seven mules, loaded with rice, flour, and bread. They traveled east, toward the battle lines. Louis was headed toward a string of army camps along the coast that needed to be resupplied. At least, that’s what he thought. and it becomes disaster because… the war ends. Heh. So once the war ends, they don't really need his food, and he has trouble getting paid for all the capital investment he's put into this venture. Turned away by his customers, Louis set out for home. But things got even worse. The ninety-seven mules carrying his unwanted supplies started to die. He arrived home with just sixteen mules. Eleven of them were claimed by his business partners. Louis was left desperate. He was deeply in debt, with his best business relationships burned. He had only one place left to turn. You’ve already met them: the massive cartel at the center of the French economy called The General Farm. They were a huge financial company who controlled everything from managing trade, running government contracts, and even collecting taxes… for many taxes like sales taxes, taxes on goods that are moving around or being purchased. Um, for those sorts of taxes, the king of France decides to basically lease out the right to collect that tax to private financiers, and he gathers various financiers around him, and he sells it off to the highest bidder. And what happens is you get what's called a tax farm. Get it? Like an ant farm, but instead of working together to build a colony, the common goal they're working toward is getting as rich as possible by squeezing money out of every transaction in France. They form one big farm. There's 40 financiers. They're called the Farmers General, the Ferme Générale, at the top. They form this tax farm, and they start buying up all the leases, and they're the ones that farm the tobacco monopoly, the salt monopoly. They collect taxes on wine and taxes on many, many other goods as well. Think of it like if the US government decided to shut down the IRS and just have Amazon collect taxes instead. Anyway, The General Farm did most of the business for the French king, so to Louis, they were the safety net on the other side of disaster. Louis sent them a petition: he had delivered the food where it was supposed to go. He had completed his side of the work. He asked The General Farm to pay out the agreed money and make things right. That was how it should have worked. But when they received Louis’ petition: the General Farm refused. There was no safety net coming for Mandrin. There was no money coming to pay out his creditors. The family business was lost. If there was a first step toward Louis’ life of crime, it was his father’s death. The second was the ambitious attempt to raise his fortunes, and the failure of that risky venture. This was the third, and final. This is a real test of whether this family can survive at the social level to which it's accustomed. At this point, you know, you can look at the legal records. You go into the, you know, the archives of different courts of law in this period, and you can begin to see Louis and his brothers start engaging in petty crime. It wasn’t an easy road. Within a few years, two of Louis' brothers had been caught and convicted for robbery. One of them was hanged for counterfeiting. They had fallen on dark times. Louis knew who to blame. There was a power at the heart of French society that should have kept its promises to him. Instead, it had thrown his family to the wolves. Now one brother was dead and another in prison. Louis decided he had a new mission in life: to take his revenge… on The General Farm. *** When Louis hit rock bottom, he left France and went east across the mountains: he made for the kingdom of Savoy. There, just over the border, a new gang of friends offered Louis a chance to get back some of what he’d lost: business, respect, and a little sugar for his coffee. He might even enjoy the sweet taste of revenge at the same time. Because this is a borderlands, like all borderlands in this period, it's infested with smugglers. There are smugglers everywhere. Savoy was its own kingdom, sandwiched between France, Switzerland, and Italy—and not under the control of the General Farm. At that crossroads, Louis had access to the markets in Switzerland, where everything from chocolate to tobacco was cheaper than in France. So he starts smuggling tobacco into France. And at first you know, he does this like most smugglers do it. That is, he does it clandestinely. That means you keep your smuggling a secret. Yeah, You don't tell people. Yeah, why would you tell people? Why would you broadcast that you're doing this illegal thing? You know, and you're, you might go, you know, sneak into a town, talk to someone at the market, "Oh, I've got some tobacco. You wanna come check it out in my apartment?" And then, you know, you'll look at the apartment. You know, this, this should be familiar this you know, idea of buying illegal things I see Louis as the guy in a trench coat selling watches, but… instead of watches he’s got the finest Virginia tobacco. That’s where Mandrin starts. He had learned plenty from his father’s successful supply business. And he had other advantages, too: Kwass: He's in between the world of the elite and the kind of vast peasantry below him, and that's important. For example, he's educated, he's literate. So when he enters the underground economy in the world of smugglers, there are a lot of very poor peasants who are not literate, um, who haven't had this kind of middling experience that he's had. So it didn’t take long for Mandrin to go from new recruit to head honcho of his own smuggling gang: planning the routes, cutting the deals, and selling the goods in back alleys and dark rooms in the border towns of France. And it turns out, Louis Mandrin was damn good at it. But there was a huge risk in this line of work. So right at this time, because of these gangs in particular, um, and because the monarchy wants to make money and needs to keep smuggling at a minimum, they begin to repress smuggling much more than other crimes There wasn’t, yet, a large police presence across French society. But now, the crown decided to get serious. all of a sudden there are very high penalties for smuggling, even for consuming the stuff, uh, if it's tobacco or calico. Even, even tougher penalties if you're caught in a gang. That's the penalty of death. That’s a serious one. Pretty serious. If you're caught helping a gang, again, that could be a death penalty. If you're caught just, you know, doing small-time smuggling or dealing, that's a huge fine. It's 1,000 pounds, which is three times the salary of an ordinary artisan. To crack down on these crimes, and dish out these new punishments, the king established new courts, whose judgements were beyond appeal. If Louis was going to take that risk, he wanted the payoff to be worth it. Small time dealing wasn’t going to cut it. So… Kwass: Mandrin innovates. He's not satisfied with this way of doing things. He decides to scale up. And he decides to make it a show. So the first thing he starts doing with his gang is everyone jumps on their horses, and they have weapons like, um, rifles and swords and things like that. And his gang would just kinda storm into a small town- And take over the town. ride to the public marketplace, and set up shop. What they brought in from Savoy was a laundry list of illegal and outrageously expensive items: now available to Louis’ French neighbors at incredibly reasonable prices. hey, you want this beautiful Indian cloth that you're not allowed to have because the government has prohibited it to protect the wool industry? Great. You can have this. You want tobacco that's a lot cheaper from the tobacco retailer down the street? Here you go. And so he does this out in the open, which people in these towns love, and you can tell the gang's kinda hamming it up a bit. At one point, he puts on, like, a military parade for, for the people there with his gang. So it becomes a little bit performative. The whole thing is performative for him. He’s a salesman! He's a salesman, and he, and he kinda likes the attention, I think. And it works. The best thing about all this, naturally, is that Louis was, himself, making a lot of money. But it was also that every time Louis took over a French mountain town, shut down the market and sold his black market goods instead of the legal coffee, wine, and tobacco controlled by the crown, he was taking money directly from the pocket of The General Farm. Through 1753, Louis was wildly successful. So successful, actually, that he had to grow his operation over and over again. At the height of his power, he was leading hundreds of men. And the full on raids he was conducting into France, they got even more flashy, became even more of a spectacle. Sometimes they almost became something like experimental theater. Here's what he begins to do… I call them forced sales but it’s even more outrageous, like far more outrageous. And it becomes his signature, his calling card. These forced sales start like other market takeovers: Louis and his men on horseback, fully armed, ride into town. Only this time, it’s not like they set up shop and start selling their smuggled goods to the people. Instead, they’re headed directly for the agent of the General Farm… Each horse carries two 100-pound bags of tobacco saddlebags. And these guys, you know, will storm into a town. These begin to be kind of mid-level town, not the biggest towns, they never do this in Lyon or Grenoble but they do it in the kind of middling towns. And they come in, and they develop a procedure that’s very clear. So the horses ride into town, they secure the, all the gates in these towns. These towns were generally walled with city gates to protect them from people like bandits and things like that. So they get in there, they secure the city gates. They also secure the church. Why would they secure the church? Because the church bell in this period of early modern Europe was like an alarm system. So if you were being attacked, the first thing you would do in this town, if you're a townsperson, is start ringing those church bells, and that would send a message to neighboring towns that something is happening. So they secure that, basically deactivate the alarm system. And then they take over the public square. Most of these towns have a public square. And then they ride to the farm tobacco dealer, okay? And this is the... This is what really shocks people. They ride right up to the farm retailer, right? He's the one who's supposed to be policing the contraband, policing the smuggling, and they drop off a bunch of sacks of tobacco, and they say, "Guess what? We're gonna provision you with tobacco, that is, with our contraband tobacco that comes from Savoy and Switzerland and further up. And we're gonna make you pay us for this tobacco at this price. I'm gonna give you a price." Yeah, no negotiations. No negotiation. And then he’ll, the farm retailer will give the gang whatever money that Mandrin is asking for. And if the retailer doesn't have the money on hand, he or she, and there are women retailers as well, will go around to wealthy people in that town who the retailer knows and says, "Look, you gotta bail me out here. They're gonna kill me. Give me whatever money you have." So there, there's a kind of way in which the, the retailer is led around by members of the gang through town collecting money, and then all that money goes to Mandrin, who counts it. Mandrin always makes sure that the money that's given corresponds to the amount of tobacco that he's leaving behind. He's forcing a commercial exchange, which is kind of interesting to get your head around. And then, remarkably, he'll write a receipt to the retailer or even ask a notary in town to notarize the transaction. That poor notary. That poor notary, he's like trembling. You know, most people in town get the sense that they're not gonna be hurt by the gang, though they're scared but intrigued. They, they learn that the gang is really directing the violence very narrowly. This isn't like a bandit gang at random. They're really going after The Farm. I see it like a re-enactment of the first failed supply run that had put Mandrin on his criminal path. Only now, when he delivered the goods to the agents of The General Farm, he was able to make them pay. It was almost like he was saying, “Look, if you had just paid me for the supply run in the first place, none of this would have happened.” Once Louis and his men had hit The Farm in all the towns on their list, or just sold through all the tobacco they were toting through the mountains, it was time to hightail it back to Savoy. The group would split up, and vanish back into the mountain passes, slowly filtering back home to Savoy to rest, relax, and enjoy themselves. By the end of 1754, Louis had restored his family’s fortunes, and more beyond. In the town where he grew up, they may have only been well-off merchants. Now, Louis was living like a lord, with all the luxury goods in the world at his command. He moved between the Savoy Chateau of a French magistrate, who guarded some of Louis’ treasure, and an upscale tavern in Switzerland called The Silver Lion, where the proprietor took care of all his needs, received his mail, and even stockpiled his weapons. Not a bad setup, if you can smuggle your way to it. But standing tall and giving the General Farm a beating put him in the sights of the French crown. And he does this for about a year and a half before there begins to be a lot of pressure from the monarchy to say like, "Wait a minute.” It was time for the King to bring down the full might of the law… on Louis’ head. *** In the eyes of the French king, Louis’ crimes against The General Farm were crimes against the crown. After all, the King himself was the one who authorized their trade monopolies and tax collecting. Clearly, Mandrin and other smugglers were hitting the crown right where it hurt. But here’s where things got interesting, because Mandrin’s crimes… were actually pretty popular with anyone who wasn’t drinking at the trough of The General Farm. For the monarchy, for the, for the farmers general, for other people, this is very serious. We need to do something about this. But for ordinary people who are kind of living in this world, um, smuggling is not a serious crime at all. It's barely a crime. That is morally speaking, what smugglers are doing is not bad. It’s kind of expected, you know? Um, everyone kind of knows a smuggler or has heard of them Everyone's got a guy! Everyone’s got a guy, everyone's got a dealer if you're getting smuggled, you know, tobacco on the side. You know what's going on. So you begin to get a moral, a moral clash between the state and the Farm representing the state, representing the monarchy, and much of the population at large. As word spread about Mandrin’s crimes: their audaciousness, the way they flipped the script on The Farm and forced crown retailers to, quote unquote buy tobacco at prices set by someone else—the more popular Louis got. People write some songs about Mandrin. Newspapers start to pick up the story. People start to know about him. "Oh, this is this guy, Mandrin. We've heard of him." One French pamphlet from the era that was translated for English readers said, and I love this: “he was tall, well-set, robust, and very nimble and active. With a free and polite carriage, a mild and serene temper, and an admirable coolness and presence of mind amidst the greatest dangers.” So, yeah, they literally said he was totally super hot, and also… pretty dang cool. The point is, his outrageous success as a smuggler truly had him living larger than life. I’m swayed. That’s the final straw for the French government. The king sends the regular troops after Louis and his men. It's not easy to get the army enthusiastic about this. it's one thing to go fight in a foreign war because you could win a battle and that brings honor. It's quite another thing to go after, like, what a noble is gonna think of as common criminals. Like, "Why are you sending me to go after these gangs or whatever? That's not what I do." And in fact, some of the nobles in the army are colluding with some of the smuggling as well. So I mean, 'cause smuggling is so pervasive that, you know, nobles and clerics, everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s doing it. It’s cool. Everyone's doing it, exactly. Everyone, that is, except for one French cavalry officer who puts together his own strike force of six hundred riders to sweep the mountains and capture Mandrin. In December of 1754, they find the tracks of Louis’ horses in the snow, and chase him up into a mountain village. What the soldiers don’t realize until they approach the smugglers’ village, is that they are being led into a trap. Mandrin’s gang block the road with a barricade, and line their position with four cannons. That doesn’t hold the soldiers back, though. They know Mandrin only has about eighty men. The French cavalry charge forward. Despite their guns, the smugglers realize they’re outnumbered. They turn and run. Only Louis himself and seventeen others stay behind in the village to hold off the troops and let the others escape. They open fire on the French troops with everything they’ve got. Men and horses are gunned down by rifle shot and blown apart by cannons, but the French cavalry overwhelm Louis’ defenses. They trap nine of his men inside a house and burn them alive. In the end, Louis himself barely escapes. The soldiers see him abandon his horse, along with his weapons, and even his gold-trimmed hat. He grabs onto someone else’s horse and gallops off, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. The French cavalry don’t give chase. They don’t want to kill him in battle. They want to capture him alive. So, eventually, the French forces march over the border into Savoy itself. Mandrin is hanging out in Savoy after one of his recent smuggling campaigns. He's in a chateau. The French forces send a special unit to kidnap him and bring him back for trial. They wait till nighttime, and they, you know, paint their faces dark, and they cross the river into Savoy, and they walk the few miles it takes to get to the chateau, and they get him. People were beginning to think he was untouchable at this point. Yeah. Um, but they managed to get him, uh, and some of the higher people around him. And I mean the soldiers go crazy. They tear apart the chateau. They loot it, um, and they loot the town next door to the chateau. They construct a special cart with like a, a kind of cage to place Mandrin in, to keep him secure. And they wheel him back to Southeastern France, and they put him on trial. The Farm and the crown rush Louis to trial, and they decide to make an example of him. I’m going to spare us the grisly details here, but Mandrin’s execution was an awful one. The government wanted to terrify the French people. They wanted to put an end to the resistance against the royal monopoly, and tamp down smuggling. They wanted to bring the French people to heel. So they tortured Louis to death in the public square. But rather than becoming a warning, Louis Mandrin becomes a folk hero. When he's executed, there's an explosion of, um, songs, pamphlets, engravings, biographies. So there's already a legend around him while he's doing what he's doing, but when he's executed, he becomes a genuinely legendary figure. The year is 1755. The French revolution that will overthrow the monarchy is already stirring. The days were numbered for The General Farm and the French king. Louis became a symbol of resistance to the tyranny of the crown and helped inspire the gathering discontent against the monarchy. And as Louis and smugglers like him brought salt, wine, and coffee out of the locked storerooms of the elite and into the kitchens of everyday folks, the people of France came to see how the authoritarian rule of the king… could really impact your grocery bill. *** That’s the end of Louis Mandrin’s story, but in my conversation with Dr. Michael Kwass we explored so many great details about French food and smuggling at the heart of their global empire. So I want to share a little more from our conversation that sheds light on why a smuggler would become a national hero. We got into why salt was so key to the French diet in the early 1700s. If you were going to eat meat or fish in that time, you needed to salt it. Which also made it a big target for smugglers. Here’s more from Dr. Kwass… Salt then isn't just like salt today because we're living in an era before refrigeration. So salt is really important because you need to put salt in food to preserve it if you don't have a refrigerator. Uh, what salt does is it draws the moisture out of food. That dries it, and that, uh, uh, that kinda prevents bacterial development in your food. So, you know, if you're a peasant or a middling person or whoever, um, and you're not sure what the winter's gonna bring, um, you're not sure if a war's gonna break out, um, things are m- very precarious in this period, much more so than today. People think we're precarious. They have no idea what it was like in the, in the early modern period. So having this stuff like salty meats, Mm-hmm cheeses, that can get you through the winter, get you through a war, get you through a season, um, where you So we're not just, we're not just talking about pickles or kind of crocked foods. We're talking about some true hardcore preservation methods, a cellar full of dried things dried things like fish, for example. Most fish was not fresh fish. It was, you know, cod from the Atlantic, big industry around that, that was salted so it could last. Um, but also meat, you know, sausage, what we would call sausages, um, also cheeses. You know, and this, you can see this. You know, I'm c- I'm doing this call from France today. So, um, you know, you still see this in French society and European society generally, right? I mean, why do, why in Germany do you have, like, sausages for breakfast and cheese and things like that? Or in France, why are there f- you know, 400 different kinds of cheese or whatever it is? Um, this has to do with this early economy where salt is so important for preserving food so you can survive. Um, and that taste for saltiness, you know, sort of never went away. Like, things are very salty over here, I think, in part because of this historical background. So, um, now why would that necessarily lead to smuggling? Uh, um, that's because the monarchy, uh, has the idea very early on, this goes back to, you know, fifth, 14th, 15th, 16th century. The monarch gets the idea, aha, everyone needs salt 'cause they need to preserve food. They need salt to survive. So we're gonna create a salt monopoly, that is the royal salt monopoly, and we're gonna say that this huge part of France, it depends where you're from, but this one core part of France, um, uh, is, is subject to the monopoly, and people in that part of France can't buy salt from anywhere else. They have to buy it from us, from the king, from the monarchy, and the monarchy has... Sorry, go ahead. I was excited. Where, where does the salt come from? Where is Yeah. Okay. So the salt comes from different places. So most of it comes from the sea. So there are areas like Brittany in the west, which has a really long coast. It looks like, looks like Maine, lots of, lots of it. Beautiful area. So there are salt, salt, uh, marshes there, and you can see workers still today, you know, in the artisanal salt marshes in Brittany, um, where they let the salt... They, they bring in water, uh, they let it dry off in the sun, and then they kind of sweep this, the, the, the top coating of salt off, off that's where we get like fleur de sel, right? Fleur de sel, exactly. So it's in Brittany, but also fleur de sel, often that comes from the Camargue in the south, in southern France. So in the Med- Mediterranean France and Atlantic France, there, there's sea salt. There's also some, you know, salt mining. Uh, uh, there are, there are kind of thermal, um, springs that have salt, um, in the east in near the Alps and that area. So you can also... There's also that in the east, but most of it comes from the sea. So when, when the France, for example, um, creates a salt monopoly, this area of Brittany where a lot of salt comes from is kind of locked, w- i- is given privileges, so it doesn't have to pay heavy salt taxes. But to take salt from M- Brittany into the core of the kingdom, you have to pay enormous taxes on salt. So the, the, the prices of salt that the king is selling in Brittany from the price of salt in the interior of the kingdom is wildly different, on the order of four or five, five times higher in the core of the kingdom. So, you know, imagine again going from one state to another in the United States, and all of a sudden the price of salt in, uh, New Jersey as opposed to New York is five times as high. Well, a lot of people... We can’t even imagine that. …hard to imagine. A lot of people in Newark, in Newark are gonna start to think, "Hmm, I'm gonna take some of my salt and try to get into New Jersey and sell it." So that's really what happens between these different provinces in France and this internal salt monopoly. And books and calico. Join us on the Outlaw’s Digest patreon! You can hear the full interview with Dr. Michael Kwass on Louis Mandrin, peasant diets, and tobacco arriving in Europe. Plus, we talk about the role of sugar riots in the French Revolution, and some parallels between pre-Revolutionary France and today. You’ll also get the aftershow where I go behind the scenes with the production team for a second helping of the history behind Louis Mandrin and our own takeaways from this story: call it an Outlaw’s digestif. I think you’ll love it. That’s all at outlawsdigest.com. *** Outlaw’s Digest is a production of Good Egg Audio, an independent worker cooperative, and me, KC Hysmith. Thanks to Michael Kwass for talking with us about Louis Mandrin and smuggling in pre-revolutionary France. Read more of Dr. Kwass’s work in Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground from Harvard University Press. This episode was written by Carl Nellis. Story editing and production support from Nicki Stein, Gemma Castelli-Foley, and me. Carl Nellis is managing producer of Outlaw’s Digest. Mixing and mastering by Nick Dooley. Original music by Rebecca Ryskalczyk. Show art by Andreea Dumuta. My personal thanks to my kids for not banging pots and pans while I recorded this, and to Maggie Cooper from Aevitas Creative. And thanks to all of you for listening. Mmm Crimey