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Louis XIV and the Parlements of France, the of ROYAL AUTHORITY Parlement of Paris and All the Provincial Tribunals

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Louis XIV and the Parlements of France, the of ROYAL AUTHORITY Parlement of Paris and All the Provincial Tribunals hurt.cov 29/9/03 3:22 pm Page 1 THIS is a thoroughly researched book, which deals with a major subject in a more accessible way than previous accounts, and which commands respect because of its impressive archival foundations. OUIS XIV L L Professor Joseph Bergin, University of Manchester OUIS XIV and the AN impressive range of source material has been examined with meticulous care, which in itself will make this a very useful book. FRONT COVER David Parker, University of Leeds PARLE M E NTS — The palaisdejustice oftheparlementRennes THE ASSERTION HIS is the first scholarly study of the political and economic Trelationship between Louis XIV and the parlements of France, the OF ROYAL AUTHORITY Parlement of Paris and all the provincial tribunals. The author and the explains how the king managed to overcome the century-old opposition of the parlements to new legislation, and to impose upon them the strict political discipline for which this reign, and only this reign, is known. Hurt shows that the king built upon that discipline to extract large sums of money from the judges in the parlements, notably in the form of forced loans and office sales, thus damaging . Reproduced bykindpermissionof the MuséedeBretagne, France PARLE M E NTS their economic interests. When the king died in 1715, the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, after a brief attempt to befriend the parlements through compromise, resorted to the authoritarian methods of Louis XIV and perpetuated the Sun King’s political and economic legacy. This study calls into question the current revisionist understanding of the reign of Louis XIV and insists that, after all, absolute government had a harsh reality at its core. Based upon extensive archival research, Louis XIV and the parlements will be of interest to all students of the history of early modern France and the monarchies of Europe. John J. Hurt is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware Hurt John J. Hurt new isbn missing Louis XIV and the parlements Louis XIV and the parlements The assertion of royal authority John J. Hurt Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Copyright © John J. Hurt 2002 The right of John J. Hurt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 0 7190 6235 7 hardback First published 2002 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 10 987654321 Typeset in Monotype Photina 10/12 pt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton For Joyce Contents List of tables page viii Preface and acknowledgements ix List of abbreviations xvii Introduction: sovereignty and registration of the laws 1 1 Compulsory registration and its limits, 1665–1671 17 2 Victory over the parlements, 1671–1675 38 3 Venal office and the royal breakthrough 67 4 The ordeal of the parlementaires 95 5 The regent and the parlements: the bid for cooperation 125 6 Confronting the Parlement of Paris, 1718 149 7 Sequels 173 Conclusion 195 Select bibliography 200 Index 216 vii List of tables 1 Augmentations de gages per parlement, 1674–1701 page 71 2 Augmentations de gages of 1689 72 3 Office prices in selected parlements, 1665–1690s 82 4 Sale of new offices in parlements, 1689–1695 85 5 Conversion to venality and sale of offices, 1692–1693: Parlements of Besançon and Tournai 89 6 Augmentations de gages of 1702–1703 97 7 Sale of new offices in parlements, 1704–1705 100 8 Augmentations de gages in parlements, 1704–1705 102 9 Droit annuel redemption by parlements, 1709–1710 106 viii Preface and acknowledgements Few historians today believe that there was anything very ‘absolute’ about what was once reflexively called the absolute monarchy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. A revisionist view that treats the Bourbon monar- chy as limited in its authority and conciliatory in its methods has swept the field and entrenched itself in original scholarship and works of synthesis, textbooks and manuals. Revisionism also serves as a context for articles and book reviews. One can but admire the magnitude of this triumph, all the more impressive for having been won without any particular resistance, a victory without a battle. Indeed, I myself do not write in an effort to overthrow the main tenets of this revisionist history; I admire the quality of the core scholarship that has almost made revisionism into a new orthodoxy. I do think that we have pushed the revi- sionist thesis beyond its appropriate limits, possibly because we have given up looking for evidence that contradicts it. I have examined two aspects of the history of the parlements under Louis XIV, the king’s suppression of their political independence and his extortion of money from the magistrates who served in them. As the subtitle to this book suggests, I believe that an understanding of these subjects shows that Louis XIV acted as an absolute monarch when he needed to and that, therefore, the revi- sionist thesis needs qualification. Any statement characterizing the Bourbon system as inherently limited and conciliatory ought to contain a modifying clause, dependent or main, to make clear that there was something ‘absolute’ about the monarchy after all. Although this study belongs more to the realm of scholarship than to polemic, one ought to state a little more clearly, if only briefly, where revision- ism came from and what it amounts to. The ablest representatives of the school, indeed in a sense its founders, are Albert N. Hamscher and William Beik. In 1976, Hamscher published The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde, 1653–1673, a superb monograph which argued that the government of Louis XIV con- sulted, cooperated with, and sometimes deferred to that tribunal on important judicial, political and financial issues. As Hamscher saw it, Louis XIV skilfully ix Preface and acknowledgements ‘managed’ the judges of the Parlement, respecting their economic interests, compromising with them and compensating them when, on occasion, he did reduce their institutional power. Although different in concept and execution, socio-economic rather than political and institutional, William Beik’s Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc, appearing in 1985, ran parallel to Hamscher. Beik had comparatively little to say about the Parlement of Toulouse, but he used the ideas of compromise and cooperation as much if not more than Hamscher did. Indeed, Beik argued that the government of Louis XIV owed its effectiveness in Languedoc to a bargain it instinctively struck with the provincial ‘ruling class’, including but by no means limited to the judges of the Parlement. Under this bargain, the king co-opted an entire provincial elite into his system of govern- ment and promoted its social and economic interests. Although the rulers of Languedoc obeyed the king more readily than their forebears had done, they were also obeying themselves, in the sense that they enjoyed a collaborative ‘partnership’ with the monarchy. The two studies, the one focused on Paris and the other on a major province, nicely complemented each other.1 Hamscher and Beik had their predecessors, of course, notably the great Ernest Lavisse, whose synthesis of the reign of Louis XIV, published in 1905, stood for decades as a point of reference. In addition to his Third Republic esteem for the economic policies and administrative skills of Colbert, Lavisse clearly stated that absolute government had inherent limits and that the king formed a ‘coalition of interests’ with the French elite and respected their social status and institutional powers, thus anticipating both Hamscher and Beik. After Lavisse published, various scholars, with a range of interests, discovered one example after another of local authorities successfully resisting the gov- ernment, an indication of their residual power and thus the limits of the monarchy. Patron-client studies, initiated by Orest Ranum and taken to a high point by Sharon Kettering, emphasized the personal nature of seventeenth- century politics, lending themselves naturally to the new concepts. Russell Major had powerfully argued that what he called the ‘Renaissance monarchy’ was innately consultative in nature. The new studies, especially those of Hamscher and Beik, supplied the intellectual and empirical authority to broaden Major’s ideas about consultation and to extend them through, and indeed beyond, the reign of Louis XIV. All the recent surveys and syntheses show how deeply the Hamscher/Beik theses of cooperation, collaboration and compromise have worked themselves into the history of seventeenth-century France. Most contemporary students of Louis XIV’s reign would probably asso- ciate the word absolutism with ‘limits’ if not indeed ‘myth’. Lavisse pointed the way, but we are all revisionists now; or so it would seem.2 In calling for a time-out, so to speak, before this consensus hardens any further, I am suggesting that we have pushed ahead of what the empirical research has shown and that we have not yet gathered all the information that x Preface and acknowledgements we need in order to form a general view. In particular, we ought to know a good deal more about what happened to the parlements and their magistrates under Louis XIV.
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