2025-10-24 20:32 Tags:History

What Were the Parlements?

• Supreme Courts: The most important was the Parlement of Paris, whose jurisdiction covered about a third of the kingdom. There were also a dozen provincial parlements (e.g., in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Rennes).
• Composition: They were staffed by hereditary magistrates known as nobles of the robe (noblesse de robe). These were not warriors like the traditional “nobles of the sword,” but wealthy officials who had typically purchased their positions and could pass them on to their heirs.
• Key Function: Registration of Laws: This was their most important power. Any royal edict or law issued by the King had to be presented to the Parlements to be registered before it could become enforceable law in their jurisdiction.

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Their Power and Political Role: The “Right of Remonstrance”

The Parlements’ real power came not from making laws, but from their ability to delay or protest them. The process worked like this:

1. Proposal: The King’s government would issue a new law or, most importantly, a new tax edict.
2. Remonstrance: Instead of registering it immediately, a Parlement could issue a “remonstrance” (a formal written protest). They would argue that the law was contrary to the fundamental laws of the kingdom, unjust, or poorly formulated.
3. Delay and Negotiation: This process delayed the implementation of the law and forced the King to negotiate or respond. The Parlement could repeatedly refuse to register the law.
4. The King’s Ultimate Power: Lit de Justice: If the Parlement refused to back down, the King could exercise his absolute authority by personally appearing before the Parlement in a special session called a Lit de Justice. In this session, he would command them to register the law immediately, overriding their objections.

The Ideological Battle and the Path to Revolution

In the 18th century, the Parlements increasingly used their power of remonstrance to challenge the absolute authority of the monarchy. Their arguments were politically potent:

• Defenders of “Liberty” and “Property”: They portrayed themselves as the last bastion of defense for the French people against arbitrary royal power and despotism, especially against new taxes.
• A Claim to Represent the Nation: They argued that they were the descendants of the old medieval feudal councils and, therefore, the legitimate representatives of the French people. This was a direct challenge to the King’s claim to embody the will of the nation.

Enlightenment thinkers were deeply divided on the Parlements:

• Voltaire despised them. He saw the Parlements as reactionary, selfish, and intolerant bodies—notably, the Parlement of Paris had been responsible for burning books (including some of his own) and executing heretics. He believed they obstructed the enlightened reforms a progressive monarch might try to enact.
• Montesquieu, a magistrate himself in the Parlement of Bordeaux, admired them. In his Spirit of the Laws, he argued that such “intermediary bodies” were essential for a monarchy, as they provided a check on the power of the sovereign and helped preserve liberty.

The End of the Parlements

The constant political deadlock between the monarchy and the Parlements over taxation was a major cause of the financial crisis that led King Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General in 1789—the event that sparked the Revolution.

Once the Revolution began, the new National Assembly saw the Parlements as a pillar of the old, privileged order they were trying to destroy. The Parlements were abolished entirely in 1790.

In summary, the French Parlements were powerful law courts that acted as the primary institutional check on the French monarchy in the 18th century. While they were conservative defenders of aristocratic privilege, they framed their resistance as a defense of liberty against despotism, making them central players in the political conflicts that culminated in the French Revolution.