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Under the French Ancien Régime, a parlement () was a provincial appellate court of the Kingdom of France. In 1789, France had 13 parlements, the original and most important of which was the Parlement of Paris. Though both the modern French term parlement (for the legislature) and the English word "parliament" derive from this French term, the Ancien Régime parlements were not legislative bodies and the modern and ancient terminology are not interchangeable.
The members of the parlements were aristocrats, called nobles of the robe, who had bought or inherited their offices, and were independent of the King.
Sovereign councils (conseils souverains) with analogous attributes, more rarely called high councils (conseils supérieurs) or in one instance sovereign court (cour souveraine), were created in new territories (notably in New France). Some of these were eventually replaced by parlements (e.g. the Sovereign Council of Navarre and Béarn and the Sovereign Court of Lorraine and Barrois). As noted by James Stephen:
From 1770 to 1774 the Chancellor of France, Maupeou, tried to abolish the Parlement of Paris in order to strengthen the Crown. However, when King Louis XV died in 1774, the parlements were reinstated. The parlements spearheaded the aristocracy's resistance to the absolutism and centralization of the Crown, but they worked primarily for the benefit of their own class, the French nobility. Alfred Cobban argues that the parlements were the chief obstacles to any reform before the Revolution, as well as the most formidable enemies of the French Crown. He concludes that the
In November 1789, early in the French Revolution, all the parlements were suspended.
Philippe le Bel was the first to fix this court to Paris, in 1302, officially severing it from the King's Council in 1307. The Parlement of Paris would hold sessions inside the medieval Palace on the Île de la Cité, nowadays still the site in Paris of the Hall of Justice. The parlement also had the duty to record all royal edicts and laws. By the 15th century the Parlement of Paris had a right of "remonstrance to the king" (a formal statement of grievances), which was at first simply of an advisory nature.
In the meantime, the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris had been covering the entire kingdom as it was in the 14th century, but did not automatically advance in step with the Crown's ever expanding realm. In 1443, following the turmoil of the Hundred Years' War, King Charles VII of France granted Languedoc its own parlement by establishing the Parlement of Toulouse, the first parlement outside Paris; its jurisdiction extended over most of southern France. From 1443 until the French Revolution, several other parlements would be steadily created all over France ; these locations were provincial capitals of those provinces with strong historical traditions of independence before they were annexed to France (in some of these regions, provincial States-General also continued to meet and legislate with a measure of self-governance and control over taxation within their jurisdiction).
The parlements' ability to withhold their assent by formulating remonstrances against the king's edicts forced the king to react, sometimes resulting in repeated resistance by the parlements, which the king could only terminate in his favour by issuing a lettre de jussion, and, in case of continued resistance, appearing in person in the parlement: the lit de justice. In such a case, the parlement's powers were suspended for the duration of this royal session. Louis XIV moved to centralize authority into his own hands, imposing certain restrictions on the parlements: in 1665, he ordained that a lit de justice could be held without the king having to appear in person; in 1667, he limited the number of remonstrances to only one. In 1671–1673, however, the parlements resisted the taxes needed to fund the Franco-Dutch War. In 1673, the king imposed additional restrictions that stripped the parlements of any influence upon new laws by ordaining that remonstrances could only be issued after registration of the edicts. After Louis' death in 1715, all the restrictions were discontinued by the regent, although some of the judges of the Parlement of Paris accepted royal bribes to restrain that body until the 1750s.John J. Hurt, Louis XIV and the parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (2002) pp 195–96
In the years immediately before the start of the French Revolution in 1789, their extreme concern to preserve Ancien Régime institutions of noble privilege prevented France from carrying out many simple reforms, especially in the area of taxation, even when those reforms had the support of the king.Julian Swann, Politics and the Parliament of Paris under Louis XV, 1754–1774 (1995).
Chancellor René Nicolas de Maupeou sought to reassert royal power by suppressing the parlements in 1770. His famous attempts, known as Maupeou's Reform, resulted in a furious battle and failure. Parlements were disbanded and their members arrested. After Louis XV died, the parlements were restored.
The beginning of the proposed radical changes began with the protests of the Parlement of Paris addressed to Louis XVI in March 1776, in which the Second Estate, the nobility, resisted the beginning of certain reforms that would remove their privileges, notably their exemption from taxes. The objections were made in reaction to the essay, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses ("Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth") by Turgot. The Second Estate reacted to the essay with anger to convince the king that the nobility still served a very important role and still deserved the same privileges of tax exemption as well as for the preservation of the guilds and corporations put in place to restrict trade, both of which were eliminated in the reforms proposed by Turgot.
In their remonstrance against the edict suppressing the corvée (March 1776), the Parlement of Paris – afraid that a new tax would replace the corvée, and that this tax would apply to all, introducing equality as a principle – dared to remind the king:
The Second Estate (the nobility) consisted of approximately 1.5% of France's population, and was exempt from almost all taxes, including the Corvée Royale, which was a recent mandatory service in which the roads would be repaired and built by those subject to the corvée. In practice, anyone who paid a small fee could escape the corvée, so this burden of labor fell only to the poorest in France. The Second Estate was also exempt from the gabelle, which was the unpopular tax on salt, and also the taille, a land tax paid by peasants, and the oldest form of taxation in France.
The Second Estate feared that it would have to pay the tax replacing the suppressed corvée. The nobles saw this tax as especially humiliating and below them, as they took great pride in their titles and their lineage, which often included those who had died in the defense of France. They saw this elimination of tax privilege as the gateway for more attacks on their rights and urged Louis XVI throughout the protests of the Parlement of Paris not to enact the proposed reforms.
These exemptions, as well as the right to wear a sword and their coat of arms, encouraged the idea of a natural superiority over the commoners that was common through the Second Estate, and as long as any noble was in possession of a fiefdom, he could collect a tax on the Third Estate called feudal dues, which would allegedly be for the Third Estate's protection (though this only applied to serfs and tenants of farmland owned by the nobility). Overall, the Second Estate had vast privileges that the Third Estate did not possess, which in effect protected the Second Estate's wealth and property, while hindering the Third Estate's ability to advance. The reforms proposed by Turgot and argued against in the protests of the Parlement of Paris conflicted with the Second Estates' interests to keep their hereditary privileges, and was the first step toward reform that seeped into the political arena. Turgot's reforms were unpopular among the commoners as well, who saw the parlements as their best defense against the power of the monarchy.
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Regarding criminal justice, the proceedings were markedly archaic. Judges could order suspects to be in order to extract confessions or induce them to reveal the names of their : there were the question ordinaire ("ordinary questioning"), the ordinary form of torture, and the question extraordinaire ("extraordinary questioning"), with increased brutality. There was little presumption of innocence if the suspect was a mere poor commoner. The death sentence could be pronounced for a variety of crimes including mere theft; depending on the crime and the social class of the victim, death could be by decapitation with a sword (for nobles), hanging (for most of the secondary crimes by commoners), the breaking wheel (for some heinous crimes by commoners). Some crimes, such as regicide, exacted even more horrific punishment, as drawing and quartering. With the spread of enlightenment ideas throughout France, most forms of judicial torture had fallen out of favor, and while they remained on the books, were rarely applied after 1750.
Ultimately, judicial torture and cruel methods of executions were abolished in 1788 by King Louis XVI. Abstract of dissertation "'Pour savoir la verité de sa bouche': The Practice and Abolition of Judicial Torture in the Parliament of Toulouse, 1600–1788" by Lisa Silverman.
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