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The French postal system was founded by Louis XI. (June 19, 1464), was largely extended by Charles IX. (1565), and received considerable improvements at various periods under the respective governments of Henry IV. and Louis XIII. (1603, 1622,1627 seq.). In 1627 France originated a postal money-transmission system, a system of cheap registration for letters. The postmaster who thus anticipated modern improvements was Pierre d’Alméras, a man of high birth, who gave about £20,000 (of modern money) for the privilege of serving the public. The turmoils of the Fronde wrecked much that he had achieved. The first farm of postal income was made in 1672, and by farmers it was administered until June 1790. To increase the income postmasterships for a long time were not only sold but made hereditary. Many administrative improvements of detail were introduced, indeed, by Mazarin (1643), by Louvois (c. 1680 seq.), and by Cardinal de Fleury (1728); but many formidable abuses also continued. The revolutionary government transferred rather than removed them. Characteristically, it put a board of postmasters in room of a farming postmaster-general and a controlling one. Napoleon (during the consulate ) abolished the board, recommitted the business to a postmaster-general as it had been under Louis XIII., and greatly improved the details of the service; Napoleon’s organization of 1802 is, in substance, that which now obtains, although, of course, large modifications and developments have been made from time to time.

The university of Paris, as early as the 13th century, possessed a special postal system, for the abolition of which in the 18th it received a large compensation. But it continued to possess certain minor postal privileges until the Revolution.

Mazarin’s edict of the 3rd of December 1643 shows that France at that date had a parcel post as well as a letter post. That edict creates for each head post office throughout the kingdom three several officers styled respectively (1) comptroller, (2) weigher, (3) assessor; and, instead of remunerating them by salary, it directs the addition of one-fourth to the existing letter rate and parcel rate, and the division of the surcharge between the three. Fleury’s edicts of 1728 make sub-postmasters directly responsible for the loss of letters or parcels; they also make it necessary that senders should post their letters at an office, and not give them to the carriers, and regulate the book-post by directing that book parcels (whether MS. or printed) shall be open at the ends. In 1758, almost eighty years after Dockwra’s establishment of a penny post in London, an historian of that city published an account of it, which in Paris came under the eye of Claude Piarron de Chamousset, who obtained letters-patent to do the like, and, before setting to work or seeking profit for himself, issued a tract with the title, Mémoire sur la petite-poste établie à Londres, sur la modèle de laquelle on pourrait en établir de semblables dans les plus grandes villes d’Europe. The reform was successfully carried out.

By this time the general post office of France was producing

a considerable and growing revenue. In 1676 the farmers had paid to the king £48,000 in the money of that day. A century later they paid a fixed rent of £352,000, and covenanted to pay in addition one-fifth of their net profits. In 1788—the date of the last letting to farm of the postal revenue–the fixed and the variable payments were commuted for one settled sum of £480,000 a year. The result of the devastations of the Revolution and of the wars of the empire together is shown strikingly by the fact that in 1814 the gross income of the post office was but little more than three-fifths of the net income in 1788. Six years of the peaceful government of Louis XVIII. raised the gross annual revenue to £928,000 On the eve of the Revolution of 1830 it reached £1,348,000. Towards the close of the next reign the post office yielded £2,100,000 (gross). Under the revolutionary government of 1848–1849 it declined again (falling in 1850 to £1,744,000); under that of Napoleon III. it rose steadily and uniformly with every year. In 1858 the gross revenue was £2,296,000, in 1868, £3,596,000.