The Gabelle (2025)
About the Project (ongoing in various iterations)
First conceived as an audio drama, “The Gabelle” will be realized in its final iteration as a digital video and sound artwork, comprising photography, maps, model ships, sketches, and possibly a short, fictional game created using Twine. As its subject, this work will feature "the gabelle", a very unpopular salt tax in France established in the mid-14th century. This tax impacted all citizens, as salt was essential for cooking, food preservation, cheese production, and livestock raising. The tax created significant regional
disparities in salt prices, making it one of French history's most despised and inequitable forms of taxation. The tax was abolished in 1790 by the National Assembly during the French Revolution, but was reinstated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806. The tax saw further fluctuation during the French Second Republic before being permanently abolished in 1945 after France's liberation from Nazi
occupation.1
Image Credit: Douaniers attaqués par les contrebandiers Customs officials attacked by smugglers. Le Petit Journal, end of the 19th century, which makes it post-revolutionary, of course. Musée National des Douanes
During my research for an exhibition at the salt marsh museum in Hyères, France, I discovered that I had a direct ancestral link
with salt smugglers (Faux-Sauniers who were given the choice of fleeing Europe or facing time in prison.2 My ancestor, Pierre Dame, settled in Chambly, a small colony south of Montreal. I intend to create a fictitious voyage that is overlaid with the documents and genealogical information I have gathered thus far. (See below)
1 Source: “Gabelle.” Wikiwand. Accessed September 30, 2024. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Gabelle
2 Pierre Dame, my seventh great-grandfather, was born on 31 August 1716 at Saint-Martin, Angre, Hainaut, Belgium.
Work Progression (Audio Drama)
Pierre Dame – The Salt Runner of Hainaut
Born 31 August 1716 – Died 3 November 1774
My 7th-generation relative, Pierre Dame, was born in the small village of Saint-Martin in Angre, Hainaut, a region near the borderlands of what is now Belgium. The son of a modest weaver, Pierre grew up watching goods and grain move through the patchwork of French provinces where borders were invisible but taxes were not. Among them, salt—essential to life and cruelly taxed—became the key to his perilous path.
By the time he was a young man, Pierre had joined the shadowy ranks of the faux-sauniers — salt smugglers who defied the gabelle, France’s notoriously unjust salt tax. Smuggling salt from low-tax regions into high-tax areas could mean the difference between poverty and comfort. But it came with a price. The King’s men were everywhere, and in 1739, Pierre was caught and imprisoned in Cambrai.
Yet, fate had other plans. Desperate to populate the struggling colony of Nouvelle-France, the Crown saw value in these hardened smugglers. On 3 April 1739, Pierre Dame and eighteen others were plucked from their cells and put on a ship bound for the colony of New France.
Less than a year later, Pierre found new roots in Boucherville, a quiet settlement along the St. Lawrence River. There, he married Marie-Reine Blain dite Habelin, a native daughter of New France and one of fourteen siblings. Together, they raised six children, weaving themselves into the fabric of settler life. His past as a smuggler was never far behind, but his new life seemed worlds away from the dank prison cells of Cambrai.
Tragedy struck early when Marie-Reine died at only thirty-five. Pierre, then a widower with children, remarried Marie-Madeleine Denoyon and had five more children, further anchoring his legacy in Quebec.
At fifty-eight, Pierre Dame died on 3 November 1774 in Chambly, Quebec. He had crossed an ocean in chains, carved out a life in a harsh land.
Sources: * All the vital statistics came from the Family Tree on Ancestry.com * http://www.francogene.com/gfna/gfna/998/sauniers.htm * http://www3.sympatico.ca/mgchassey/jfc/esauniers.htm
Publications
| adventures_of_a_salt_smuggler_compressed.pdf |
| Conditions Variable PhD Dissertation |
| The New Bauhaus in America and The Influence of György Kepes |
| futurity_and_photography.pdf |
| Blue Collar/White Coat: Conceptual Art and Hygiene Semiotics |
| troy_david_ouellette_|_water_systems_esthetics.pdf |
| 2017_visual_arts_program.pdf |
| t_ouellette_essay_patrick_thibert_reliefs_and_drawings.pdf |
| The Text Outside, Outside the Text Imagining the Parisian Street in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas |
| Near_Everywhere_Catalogue_web_excerpted.pdf |
