droit de détraction

a survival from medieval European law of a then well-recognized form of tax, imposed with respect to the right of an alien heir to acquire or withdraw from the realm the property inherited. Although often referred to as a tax on property or its withdrawal, the droit de de traction seems rather to have been a form of inheritance tax, but one which, because of its imposition only with respect to property of aliens who normally removed it from the realm, was sometimes associated with the removal rather than the inheritance of the property. It was limited to inheritances, existed with and supplemented other taxes, the droit de retraite or the droit de sortie, imposed on the removal of property other than inheritances. [T]he droit de de traction-the tax-accrued upon the death of the decedent, and only after it had been collected was the heir entitled to take possession of the property and remove or otherwise dispose of it. It was thus the precursor of the modern inheritance tax, differing from it in its essentials solely in that it was levied only where one of the parties to the inheritance was an alien or nonresident.