Definition
In French law, a fermier (plural: fermiers) is a person who leases or farms out any public revenue — that is, one who contracts with the state to collect taxes, tolls, duties, or other public revenues in exchange for a fixed sum paid in advance to the government. The fermier bears the risk of collection: if actual revenues exceed the contracted sum, the fermier profits; if they fall short, the fermier absorbs the loss. The term is the French equivalent of the Roman publicanus and the English tax farmer.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): In French, fermier means "farmer" in the agricultural sense — a person who cultivates land.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not include fermier as an English entry, reflecting its status as a French legal borrowing rather than an assimilated English word.
Editorial note: The gap here is significant and misleading. A modern reader encountering fermier assumes an agricultural context — someone who works the soil. In French legal and fiscal usage, the word carried an entirely different meaning rooted in the concept of "farming" revenue: the practice of leasing the right to collect public income. An English reader consulting historical French legal texts or treatises on taxation must recognize that fermier refers to a revenue collector, not an agrarian tenant.
Common Confusion
Fermier is easily confused with fermier général (farmer-general), which was a specific and institutionalized form of the office under the Ancien Régime in France. The fermiers généraux were members of a powerful syndicate who collectively purchased the right to collect indirect taxes across France. The term fermier is the broader category; fermier général is a historically specific and politically charged subspecies. The two should not be used interchangeably in research contexts, particularly when reading pre-Revolutionary French legal or fiscal documents.
Why It Matters in Research
Fermier is a term encountered almost exclusively in sources dealing with French legal history, the Ancien Régime fiscal system, comparative taxation law, or early Anglo-American treatises that drew on French civil law materials. Researchers will encounter it in:
1. Historical sources on tax farming. The fermier system was central to French royal finance from the medieval period through the Revolution of 1789. Any legal or historical corpus dealing with French fiscal administration — including translated treatises — will use this term in its revenue-collection sense.
2. Comparative law works. Nineteenth-century Anglo-American legal encyclopedias and treatises occasionally borrowed French fiscal vocabulary when discussing analogous revenue-farming arrangements in English and colonial contexts. The term may appear in these sources without translation or gloss.
3. The typographical corruption in Black's. The Black's Law Dictionary entry contains an apparent typographical corruption: "One who tunii. Hob. 97." This garbled phrase likely represents a corrupted citation or clause fragment — possibly a remnant of a longer passage about the nature of the farming arrangement. Researchers should treat this corruption as an artifact of early printing, not a substantive legal proposition. The Hob. 97 reference points to Hobart's Reports, a collection of English common law cases from the early seventeenth century, but its relevance to the fermier definition as printed is unclear without a clean source text.
4. Cross-jurisdictional application. While the term is French in origin, the underlying concept of tax farming existed in England (under terms like "farmer of the revenues" or "tax farmer"), in Roman law (publicanus), and in colonial fiscal arrangements. Researchers should be alert to conceptual synonyms when moving across jurisdictions.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three dictionary sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's — are in agreement on the essential definition: a fermier is one who farms any public revenue under French law. The definitions are nearly identical across all three, suggesting a common antecedent source or direct derivation. Bouvier's entry is the cleanest. Black's 2nd edition corrects nothing from the 1st edition, leaving the garbled "tunii" text unresolved.
What the historical sources miss: None of the three entries contextualizes the fermier within the broader French fiscal system, explains the risk-bearing structure of the arrangement, distinguishes the fermier from the fermier général, or connects the concept to analogous English or Roman institutions. For substantive research, these entries serve only as a starting definition. Any serious engagement with the term requires recourse to primary French legal texts, histories of French taxation, or comparative fiscal law scholarship.
Jurisdictional Note
Fermier as a legal term is specific to French law and its civil law descendants. It has no direct functional equivalent in English common law, though the practice of farming revenues existed in England under different terminology. Researchers working in Louisiana, Quebec, or other jurisdictions with French civil law heritage may encounter the term in historical documents, but it carries no operative legal meaning in contemporary American or Canadian law.