deprived the Cottereau children of an authority figure. Further, since their mother was illiterate, as was common at that time, the Cottereau children were also largely unschooled. Their father died in 1778 when Jean Chouan was twenty-one years old. Pierre the younger, Jean's only elder brother, proclaimed himself a sabotier like his father, but he was neither so skillful nor so industrious as his father had been. To survive, all six Cottereaus, four brothers and two sisters, became involved in salt-smuggling. Before 1790, the gabelle was a very unpopular tax on salt. Traditionally, France has been composed of a collection of regions, former duchies, principalities, or independent kingdoms, most of which enjoyed long periods of sovereignty, periods when they were all-but-completely divorced, politically, from the rest of France. Well-known examples of the regions are Normandy, Burgundy, Brittany, and Aquitaine. As an accident of the historical development of an integrated France, these regions had different tax rates for commodities like salt. Whenever there is a disparity in prices or taxes between two neighboring jurisdictions, there will be smuggling. For example, La Croixille is a town in the department of Mayenne, which was (and is) a part of the region of Maine, in the eighteenth century, a high-salt-tax region. Across the River Vilaine, the neighboring town of Princé, was, with respect to salt, in a tax-exempt region, Brittany. The huge disparity between the price of salt in the two towns prompted active smuggling, with salt purchased cheaply in Brittany being moved across the river and sold for a high price in Mayenne. A perpetual guerrilla war between customs officers and salt-smugglers simmered in the valley of the Vilaine. Those who engaged in this tax-avoidance traffic were known as "false-salters". The term, "false-salter", referred to criminal attempts to falsely represent lightly taxed salt as salt that had already been heavily taxed. An unarmed person caught "false-salting" was subject to condemnation to the galleys and deportation; by law, an armed false-salter could be executed. Between 1730 and 1743, 585 salt-smugglers were deported to New France (Quebec). Jean Chouan and his brothers, François and René, were actively involved in this kind of commerce, and, although they knew the territory intimately, including all of the places in the forests of the borderlands where illicit salt might be hidden, they were stopped on several smuggling trips and narrowly avoided arrest. Aside from their smuggling activities, the Cottereaus