The French Parlements

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The parlements of France were not legislative bodies like their English-language equivalents but groups of judicial officials who acted as final arbiters of royal laws and edicts, particularly those involving taxation.

Parlement

In 1302, King Philip IV was the first to set up an official parlement, in Paris. In these early days, the parlement served more as an advisory body than as a check on the king's power.

Charles VII, in 1443, established a second parlement, for Languedoc, based in Toulouse. Subsequent monarches established 11 other parlements, as follows:

  • Grenoble (1453)
  • Bordeaux (1462)
  • Dijon (1477)
  • Rouen (1499)
  • Aix (1501)
  • Rennes (1553)
  • Pau (1620)
  • Metz (1633)
  • Besançon (1676)
  • Douai (1686)
  • Nancy (1776)

As more and more parlements came into existence, the members of such bodies believed more and more that they the right to refuse to register a monarch's laws or edicts if they didn't favor the policies covered under those pronouncements. The king could call a formal session, known as a lit de justice, and compel the members of a parlement to attend and state their opposition. (It was also the case that monarchs attended parlement sessions as a matter of course, as observers, not holding court.)

Another way that the king kept some form of influence over the members of the parlements, even as they asserted more authority over the legislative process, was through la paulette, a tax paid directly to the king that enabled a member of a parlement to ensure that he could pass on his seat to his heir. That process effectively created a permanent class of magistrates, known as the noblesse de robe. The monarch who introduced la paulette was Henry IV, in 1604.

Leading the way during the uprising known as the Fronde in the mid-17th Century was the French parlement, the largest and most powerful and quite referred to as just parlement. King Louis XIV rolled back some of the privileges assumed by the parlements through the years. When that king died, the parlements reasserted their authority and made a habit of challenging both Louis XV and Louis XVI for supremacy in the realms taxation and religious policy. It was protests by the Paris parlement that stood out as a symbol of resistance to the absolutism of Louis XVI that encouraged more of the Second Estate, not to mention much of the Third Estate, to cry out against the monarch.

The critiques of the king in the form of parlement's rejection of the king's laws reached a fever pitch, and Louis XVI lashed out, arresting two of the leaders of the opposition, exiling the other members of parlement to Troyes, and then dissolving the body entirely, replacing it with a plenary court.

In 1788, the king recalled the parlement, which promptly urged the king to summon the Estates-General, another advisory body that had not met since 1614. The king did so, and the parlement gave way to the Estates-General.

After a number of other significant events, the National Constituent Assembly, on Sept. 6, 1790, discontinued the parlements. They did not return.

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