payment from the Acadians of taxes 
that, according to the 1765 
agreements, were not to have been 
due for more than a year. By the end 
of July 1768, Le Loutre was writing 
in despair to de Warren, predicting 
the failure of the scheme and already 
mourning the loss to France of “such 
good farmers.” 
There was, in fact, a deep conflict 
between the social expectations of 
the Acadians and the ideas of the 
ancien regime , the policies then 
forming a structured and rigidly 
codified French society. Perhaps 
more than anything else, it was this 
difficulty that led, almost inexorably, 
first, to the withering of a distinctive 
Acadian settlement on Belle-Ile and 
finally, in 1785, to the departure 
from France of almost all of the 
Acadians who had settled there. The 
story of the conflict can be read in 
much detail in legal records, and it is 
told, in part, with the vocabulary of 
la capitation, la vingtieme, les 
gargennes de fouage, la dixieme — all 
taxes with which the Acadians were 
eventually confronted. Although such 
taxes were a familiar burden to 
French peasants, they did not sit well 
with the Acadians, who even before 
they became untaxed refugees had 
paid no tax more onerous than the 
nominal penny-a-year quitrent 
required by the English. As colonists 
in North America, the Acadians had 
been immune to the threat of higher 
taxes, aware as they were of land 
reasonably close by but beyond the 
administrative reach of the official 
seats of government. 
The majority of the 400 Acadians 
who settled on Belle-Ile in 1765 left 
within a few years, discouraged by 
natural calamities and by the 
burdens of French rule. Those who 
remained, however, were absorbed 
into the island’s population, 
becoming bellilois. 
