In the ancien régime, final courts of appeal from lower courts, for this reason known as cours souveraines, with wide powers of jurisdiction. An offshoot from the curia regis, the first parlement took form in the mid-14th c. in Paris and had a jurisdiction over about three-fifths of the realm. It comprised three chambers: the grand'chambre, which received appeals from lower courts and judged cases from privileged officers and the peers in the first instance, and received appels comme d'abus; the enquêtes, which judged appeals on written evidence; and the requêtes, which received cases from those with letters of committimus. Before the temporary abolition of the Parlement de Paris in 1771, there were five chambres des enquêtes and two chambres des requêtes. A chambre de la Tournelle was created in 1515 to judge criminal cases. Each had a number of counsellors and presidents, and the Parlement was presided over by a premier président. Judicial offices were venal, conferring lifetime nobility, but the vast majority of the magistrates were already nobles of the robe or sword when recruited [see Nobility]. The parquet was the name given to the gens du roi who were the prosecuting attorneys: the procureur général, the three avocats généraux.
Provincial parlements, usually transformations of existing higher courts and possessing a corresponding structure, with fewer chambers, were established in Languedoc (1437), Dauphiné (1453), Bordeaux (1462), Burgundy (1477), Normandy (1499), Provence (1501), Brittany (1553), Béarn (1620), Metz (1633), Franche-Comté (1676), Flanders (1686), and Lorraine (1775) [see map on p. xxix]. Most cases were judged in the first instance in the 400 or so courts which existed in the local bailliages and sénéchaussées, minor cases in the numerous courts held by prévôts; about 70, 000 seigneurial courts of very reduced competence still existed in 1789. Bailliages and prévôtés originated in the 13th c. and had administrative, judicial, and financial attributions.
The parlements were both judicial and administrative bodies with wide local responsibilities. With powers to preserve order, they had authority over highways, municipalities, charitable institutions, the grain trade, and many other areas of provincial life. They could issue administrative rulings (arrêts) which, if not contradicted by the royal council, eventually became part of the local legal corpus. Like all corporate bodies, they had their own traditions and a very strong sense of their own importance, even going so far as to regard themselves as the guardians of the legal forms of the monarchy (and claiming there were ‘fundamental laws’); magistrates often compared themselves to Roman senators. To become law, edicts had to be registered before the courts, and this verification process was combined with their right of remonstrance against inconsistent or ill-conceived royal legal declarations to give them an ill-defined power of interference in the legislative process. Remonstrances could be ignored by the king's council and legislation registered in the parlement by lettres de jussion or in the presence of the king by a lit de justice. In 1648 the Parlement de Paris protested against the ‘constitutional’ changes wrought by Mazarin's war policies, and this sparked off the Fronde Parlementaire. Louis XIV, while giving an impression of authoritarian dominance of the parlements, avoided conflict by being much more sensitive to their interests and jurisdiction. From the 1730s jurisdictional conflict, often over ecclesiastical issues (the bull Unigenitus) and parlementaire Gallicanism, was exploited by Jansenists in the parlements with radical constitutional ideas. The consequent running battle between the parlements and the council up to 1770 (which led to the abolition of the parlements from 1771 to 1774, by the coup Maupeou of 1771), and from the mid-1780s, was one of many causes of the collapse of the monarchy in 1789. They were abolished along with the other courts in 1790.
[Peter Campbell]
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
