As a side note, France has a thing called “fiscal stamps” (timbres fiscales) which I had to use to pay a ~60€ government fee of some sort. One time I did it I p

As a side note, France has a thing called “fiscal stamps” (timbres fiscales) which I had to use to pay a ~60€ government fee of some sort. One time I did it I paid online and got an A4 thing I needed to print out, which, OK, sure. The other time I couldn’t do that for reasons I don’t remember and paid cash at a store to get one. What I got was a tiny thing that looks exatly like a small postage stamp of the standard almost-square shape (which is itself funny because all the actual French postage stamps I used were twice as large) except it cost the aforementioned ~60€. Needless to say, I was terrified I’d lose it the whole hour or so before I handed it over to a clerk. Wikipedia tells me this was a common approach once[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_stamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_stamp