La mise en place de l’impôt provincial sous le règne d’Auguste en Aquitaine et dans le nord de l’Hispanie : un bilan.
Résumé
In Roman times, the regions of Aquitania and northern Hispania underwent a decisive phase in their fiscal organisation at about the same time, between the end of the second triumvirate and the reign of Augustus. After requisition fiscality, which had characterised the conquest, and then the unrest and the abuses brought about by civil wars, this period corresponds to an affirmation and a rationalisation of the imperial tax. This great administrative project can not be dissociated from the desire to exploit the provincial areas because their combined implementation was at the heart of the Augustan project which, in the fiscal domain, sought to perpetuate the exemption of the centre of the Empire, which is to say Rome and Italy. In this perspective, the article evokes the two tributes, on land and on people, which made up what we can call the provincial tax. Here we try to show that undertaking the setting up of this tax in the provinces was not at all carried on outside of a framework and principles.
First of all, the status of provincial land was made compatible with the establishment of a permanent tax. We have to go back to Cicero and to classical legal experts according to whom the Roman people were the owners of provincial land and thus the beneficiaries of the fiscal revenues. This domanial conception clashed with the idea that provincial land was subject to Rome essentially because of the affirmation of its sovereignty. These two conceptions are not necessarily incompatible but the debate draws our attention to the concrete procedure which was the basis of the taxation of the land: it is through the procedure of deditio-restitutio, well illustrated by antique sources, that this fiscalisation must be studied
The article then refers to the frameworks for the establishment of the tax and these consisted in widespread census and surveying operations, carried out from the beginning of Augustus's reign and based on Roman examples and foreign models, especially Egyptian. We should not exclude the notion that certain regions in the West may well have served as a field for experimentation in this domain and that the procedures that were applied there may then have been extended to other provinces. Finally, the political aspect of the topic is stressed. Today we can no longer be satisfied with the tradition view of tax where we only remember its constraining character and the opposition with which it met. We must also highlight the justifications on which imperial power founded it as well as the ways in which consent was based and expressed by the provinces themselves, and prominent among these, the elites in the cities.