Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2

Under Louis XI, there were parlements at Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Dijon; greater freedom of appeal from the decisions of the seigneurial tribunals to the court of the king, and the magistrates were relieved from the fear of removal from office. We have already seen instances of the affability of this monarch toward the bourgeoisie of Paris, and his not unsuccessful attempts to identify himself with them; the tangible benefits which he bestowed upon them were quite sufficient to win their gratitude. Their offices were rendered immovable, they were exempted from all taxation, their assemblies were authorized, the free election of their magistrates, their city was carefully fortified, they were armed to the number of sixty or eighty thousand men; he permitted them to acquire, by purchase, the right which the nobles had to command the guet, and to the noblesse was given the exercise of certain municipal offices.

The États Généraux of 1484, during the minority of Charles VIII, are considered to have been the first of the truly representative national assemblies, even the peasants in the most distant communes being represented. The number of problems presented by the exigencies of the government was formidable; during the royal session, Jean de Rely, canon and deputy of Paris, addressed the monarch in an eloquent discourse, half Latin and half French, bristling with texts and citations, then he commenced to read the list of grievances demanding redress; he read bravely for three hours, when it was perceived that the young king was sound asleep, and the sitting was adjourned for two days. Neither François I nor his son Henri II had any desire to appear before the assembled representatives of the nation; the former replaced the États Généraux by a mixed assembly of notables and deputies of Bourgogne in 1526, and in the following year by an assembly of notables at Paris, which sanctioned his violation of the treaty of Madrid, and granted him two millions of golden écus for the ransom of his sons, left as hostages behind him, but it took no part in the affairs of State. The Parlement was not treated with any more consideration; a royal edict of 1523 divested the jurisdiction of the prévôt and of the Châtelet of Paris of all causes and matters of which it took cognizance in its quality as conservator of the privileges of the University, and for the judgment of these causes established a new bailiwick, of which the seat was to be the Hôtel de Nesle, where there were appointed a bailiff, a lieutenant, an avocat, a procureur du roi, twelve counsellors, an audiencer [usher, or crier], a sous-audiencer, and twelve sergents. The Parlement was much displeased at this diminution of its authority, and on the 9th of March a formidable protest against the new edict was made before it by the prévôt of Paris, his lieutenants, civil and criminal, the counsellors of the Châtelet, and all the other officers, sergents, greffiers, huissiers, and officials of the University. When the king heard of this demonstration, he sent to the Parlement the Sieur de la Barre, gentleman of his chamber, to inform that body, once for all, that when he granted letters patent it was understood that they were to be enregistered, no matter what protests might be made against them. The Parlement replied by appointing a commission to inquire concerning the necessity of establishing a new bailiwick, and sent word to the monarch that the members would inform themselves on the subject; on the 17th, the Comte Saint-Paul appeared before them with an order directing the immediate registering of the edict, and with the information that he would assist at their deliberations in order to be able to inform his royal master concerning those of them who permitted themselves to differ from him in opinion. The decree was accordingly enregistered, and on the 30th of April the Chevalier Jean de la Barre presented himself before the Parlement with the title and quality of Bailli de Paris. This office, however, was suppressed in May, 1526, and its jurisdiction reunited to that of the prévôt and of the Châtelet. In 1527, the Parlement was forbidden to interfere in any matters of State, or in anything excepting what concerned the administration of justice; it was permitted only to give advice regarding the perfecting of the laws. The two most important legal monuments of this reign were the edict of Crémieu, 1536, restricting the jurisdiction of the seigneurs, and that of Villers-Cotterets, 1539, designed to put an end to the encroachments of the tribunals of the bishops upon those of the king, and restricting their competence to spiritual or ecclesiastical causes only. Of the principal offices of the crown, four were held by men of legal lore, hommes de robe longue,—that of grand chancellor, who held the royal seal and without whose advice nothing important could be decided; that of the secretaries of State; that of the presidents, counsellors, avocats, and all those to whom the administration of civil and criminal justice was confided throughout the realm, and that of the treasurers, precepteurs and receivers who administered the royal revenues. The superior officers of justice and finance enjoyed privileges of nobility which, while still confining them to their rank in society, exempted them from various imposts and charges.

Henri II was obliged, after the loss of the battle of Saint-Quentin, in August, 1557, to convene an assembly of notables, in which the members of the Parlement sat apart, like a fourth order in the State, below the nobles but above the tiers état. There were still survivals of the feudal epoch in the administration,—the Connétable was invested with authority over the army and the Grand Admiral over the fleet, but the era of ministries was beginning. "The clercs du secret, become sécretaires d'État (in 1547), had in charge the correspondence of the king on all public affairs. An ordinance of Henri II, in 1547, fixed their number at four, each of them corresponding with a quarter of the provinces of the kingdom and a quarter of the foreign countries. The special attributions are of a later date; thus, all the affairs of the maison du roi and, later, of ecclesiastical affairs, were assigned to one of them. The other three were: in 1619 and in 1636, war; in 1626, foreign affairs; under Louis XIV, the marine; which did not prevent them from apportioning France geographically among themselves for those affairs which remained common to them all. The Chancelier was chief of the department of justice, and the Surintendant, of that of finances. The police, that great arm of monarchical times, was commencing."

The Parlement of Paris, however, cannot, by any means, be presented always as maintaining a more or less courageous stand for justice and right. In the massacre of the Saint Bartholomew, for example, it was a zealous coadjutor. The officers of the municipalité had prepared for this great measure, the prévôt of the merchants, summoned to the Louvre, received from Charles IX orders to close all the gates of the city and to have in readiness the captains, lieutenants, and bourgeois in whom he had confidence. He promised "to put so many hands at the mischief that it should be remembered." Rewards were given officially to the archers who had aided in the massacre, to the ferrymen who had prevented the Huguenots from crossing the river, to the grave-diggers of Saint-Cloud, of Auteuil, and of Chaillot for having interred in a week eleven hundred corpses. A municipal medal was struck in mémoire du jour de Saint Barthélemy. The president of the Parlement, Christophe de Thou, pronounced an eulogy on the prudence of the king which had saved the nation from the misfortune of seeing the crown fall on the head of the Prince of Condé, and, perhaps, on that of Admiral Coligny himself, who had been ambitious enough to dream of seating himself on the throne of France after having driven from it the king and ruined the royal family. The Parlement, after deliberation, declared the admiral guilty of the crime of lèse-majesté, ordered that his body, or at least his effigy, should be dragged on a hurdle, attached to a gallows on the Place de Grève and then to the gibbet of Montfaucon, that his memory should be declared infamous and that his château of Châtillon-sur-Loing should be razed. The headless body of the admiral was at that moment swinging on the gibbet of Montfaucon.

In the religious wars that followed, the city paid dearly for this wholesale murder. The population, during the siege by the King of Navarre, was reduced to the last extremity of famine, even to cannibalism, and when that monarch had retired from before the walls, the horrors of anarchy and civil war succeeded. The Parlement, terrified by the execution of the first president, Brisson, refused to sit, and, when summoned to do so, replied to the agents of the Seize, the chiefs of the sixteen quarters of Paris who had formed a council to aid the work of the Sainte Ligue of the Catholics, that they would return to their functions only to hang those who had participated in the official murder of the president. The Duc de Mayenne, summoned to the rescue of public order, carried out these hangings in a summary manner; and the first care of the Parlement, when a government was partially established again, was to disarm the factious bourgeois.

Henri IV, who disputes with Dagobert in the legends of the people the honor of being the most popular of the French kings, was not exclusively the jovial monarch he is generally portrayed. His answer to some remonstrances of the Parlement, which have been preserved, would have been worthy of François I or Louis XIV. "My will should serve as a reason. In an obedient State, reasons are never required of the prince. I am king: I speak to you as a king; I desire to be obeyed." His nomination of a governor of Paris was sufficiently scandalous: on the death of the Sieur d'O, who held that office, the king sent to the Hôtel de Ville to say that he would not appoint a successor, that he would honor his good city of Paris by assuming that charge himself; the Parlement, the next day, despatched several of its presidents and members to thank the king for this great honor, and the gracious monarch thereupon nominated as his lieutenant-general Antoine d'Estrées, the father of his famous mistress.

Nevertheless, so heavy and far-reaching a calamity was his assassination by the senseless fanatic Ravaillac, that forerunner of the socialists and anarchists of our own day, that a certain pitiless logic attends the frightful sentence which was pronounced upon the murderer, and which was carried out to the letter. Thirteen days after the fatal 14th of May, 1610, the Parlement pronounced the following judgment: "The Court, etc., after attentive consideration, declares that it has been that the Court has declared and declares the aforesaid Ravaillac attainted and convicted of the crime of lèse-majesté, divine and human, in the first degree, for the very wicked, very abominable, and very detestable parricide committed on the person of the late king Henri IV, of very good and very laudable memory; in reparation of which it has condemned and condemns him to make amende honorable before the principal door of the Church of Paris, to which he shall be led and conducted in a cart; there, naked in his shirt, holding a burning torch of the weight of two pounds, to say and to declare that, wickedly and treacherously, he committed the very wicked, very abominable, and very detestable parricide, and killed the aforesaid seigneur king with two strokes of a knife in the body, of which he repents and for which he asks pardon of God, of the king, and of justice. From there, conducted to the Place de Grève, and, on a scaffold which shall be there erected, torn with pinchers on the nipples, arms, thighs, and fleshy part of the legs, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the aforesaid parricide, burnt and consumed with fire of sulphur, and on the places where he shall have been torn with pinchers shall be poured melted lead, boiling oil, wax, and sulphur melted together. This having been done, his body torn and dismembered by four horses, his members and his body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, scattered on the wind; has declared and declares all his property confiscated to the king, orders that the house in which he was born shall be demolished; the individual to whom it belongs previously indemnified, no building to be ever afterward erected on the site thereof, and that within fifteen days after the publication of the present decree to the sound of trumpet and by public crier in the city of Angoulesme his father and his mother shall quit the kingdom, being forbidden to ever return therein under penalty of being hanged and strangled without any form or process of law whatever. We forbid his brothers and sisters, uncles, and others to bear hereafter the name of Ravaillac, and we enjoin them to change it under the same penalties; and to the substitute of the procureur-général du roi to cause to be published and to execute the present decree, under penalty of felony; and before the execution of the said Ravaillac ordains that he shall be again put to the question for the revelation of the names of his accomplices."

He was put to the question of "the boot" very thoroughly, but refused to the last to admit that he had any accomplices; the prayers of the two doctors of the Sorbonne who assisted at his execution were drowned by the clamors of the crowd protesting that no offices of the Church should attend the passing of the méchant damné, and the people themselves aided the horses to tear him asunder.

Marie de Médicis, the second wife of Henri IV, after ten years of entreaty, had succeeded in inducing the king to permit her to be crowned as Queen of France on the day preceding his death; within two hours after that event, she and the Duc d'Epernon had taken all the necessary steps to secure the decree of the Parlement declaring her regent. The judicious administrative measures of the Béarnais were to be reversed, the reign of Italian favorites was to begin, events were to be subordinated to persons, "as is nearly always the case when queens are kings." Nevertheless, the Parlement remembered, when it was too late, that she had recognized its right to dispose of the sovereign power.

The last reunion of the États Généraux before the famous one of 1789 was held in 1614, and was marked by the usual dissensions among the three orders. The nobles complained to the king of the insolence of the tiers état in asserting themselves to be the younger brothers of the same great family; "there is between them and us the difference between master and valet." The clergy refused to assume any portion of the public burdens; "that would be to diminish the honor due to God." Consequently, the president of the upper bourgeoisie, the prévôt of the merchants of Paris, Robert Miron, declared boldly to the king: "If your Majesty does not provide for the reforms which the nation demands, it is to be feared that despair will make the people aware of the fact that the soldier is only a peasant bearing arms; that when the vine-grower has taken up an arquebus, from the anvil which he was, he will become the hammer." Nothing was done; the king's great minister, Richelieu, was too much occupied with the direction of the foreign affairs of the nation to occupy himself with reforms at home.

Louis XIII was but eight and a half years old at the date of his father's assassination, and his melancholy, reserved, and suspicious character bore the traces of that tragic event through life. His early education was greatly neglected, excepting in the matter of floggings for obstinacy and disobedience; as a king, it was said of him that "no man loved God less, or feared the Prince of Darkness more." The weakness and irresolution which are generally attributed to him were conspicuous by their absence in his retention of his minister, notwithstanding the constant cabals, intrigues, and menaces of his mother and her adherents, and the famous "Day of the Dupes," in which they thought they had finally attained their end, was followed by dismissal of the Chancellor Marillac, and the trial and execution, on the Place de Grève, of his brother, Marshal of France, for the misappropriation of funds for the army,—"a matter of some hay, straw, stone, and chalk," he exclaimed, "not enough to whip a valet for!"

One of the most recent of the works on the great cardinal, that of the Abbé Lacroix, presents us with a Richelieu but little known, administering his diocese of Luçon, at the age of twenty-two, firmly and justly, regular in his habits and conciliatory in his character, ambitious, preparing himself, during eight years of obscure study and skilful intrigue, for his accession to power, and having already selected the men whom he would designate to carry out his great designs. "The bishop prepared the minister," says this biographer.

It was no part of his plans to have the Parlement oppose them, and that body was forced, during this reign, to swallow some of its bitterest mortifications. In 1631, having refused to verify a royal decree, the king returned from Fontainebleau hastily, and ordered the members to present themselves in a body at the Louvre, the greffier bringing with him the register of their debates; in the grand gallery of the palace they were obliged to kneel before the throne, and the monarch, rising, took the register which was presented to him, tore out the page on which was the record of their deliberation, and ordered that there should be inserted in its place the decree of the royal council which had been refused the enregistrement. Ten years later, in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, the magistrates having declined to approve of certain new taxes, Louis XIII held a "bed of justice," and again brought them to terms. The Parlement was formally forbidden to put forth any remonstrances regarding the edicts which concerned the government and the administration of the State. Only on those relating to the financial decrees were they to be permitted to have a voice. These wearisome episodes were repeated at intervals during the reigns of all the later kings of France.

Neither was there any contemplation of the États Généraux in the administration of the king and his minister. A few assemblies of notables were held, one in 1625 on the subject of the Valteline and the rupture with the Pope, and another in the latter part of the following year, to which were admitted only magistrates, ecclesiastics, councillors of State, and the prévôt of the merchants of Paris.

Against Mazarin, minister and cardinal, but not a priest, the Parlement was more successful in its long contest. Entrenched in their office, rendered hereditary by the establishment of the paulette (so named from the contractor Paulet, who suggested it to Sully in 1604), the magistrates had acquired a spirit of independence and pride which led them to style themselves "the born protectors of the people," and to assert their right to assume the rôle of the États Généraux, and to play the part of the Parliament of England, which at that hour was accomplishing a revolution, and to which, indeed, Mazarin compared them. In January, 1646, they proclaimed the cardinal a disturber of the public peace, an enemy of the king and the State, and directed him to leave the court immediately, and the kingdom within a week. In February, 1651, he was again banished, he, his family, his adherents, and his foreign servants, and this decree, promulgated to the sound of the trumpet in all the quarters of Paris, was greeted by the populace with noisy exclamations of joy. In March and in June these orders were repeated, the wily favorite of Anne d'Autriche seeking every opportunity of regaining his power. It was these triumphs of the Fronde that inspired the despotic Louis XIV with that dislike for the city of Paris which he cherished all his life,—these, and the too-frequent public monuments which spoke of other crowned heads than his own!

The nation had already entered that period of incredible distress and degradation which was to lead to the Revolution, and on the surface of which the so-called splendor of the court glittered with a species of decaying phosphorescence which blinds the eyes of grave historians to this day. In 1646 there were in the jails of the kingdom twenty-three thousand eight hundred persons, confined for non-payment of taxes, five thousand of whom died there. "Tout le royaume," said Omer Talon, two years later, "is sick with exhaustion. The peasant no longer possesses anything but his soul, because he has not yet been able to put that up for sale." No prince, in the judgment of Saint-Simon, possessed the art of reigning in a higher degree than did Louis XIV. "Louis Quatorze is certainly not a great man," says Duruy, "but he is very certainly a great king, and the greatest that Europe has seen." And yet the latter quotes from the Mémoires which the king demanded from his intendants on the condition of their provinces for the instruction of his grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne: "The wars, the mortality, the lodging and the continual passage of armed forces, the military regulations, the heavy taxes, the withdrawal of the Huguenots, have ruined this country.... The bridges and the roads are in a deplorable state, and commerce is abolished. The frontier provinces are the most completely crushed by the requisitions, the pillaging of the soldiers, who, receiving neither pay nor provisions, pay themselves with their own hands. In the district of Rouen, out of seven hundred thousand inhabitants, six hundred and fifty thousand have for bed a bundle of straw. The peasant in certain provinces is returning to a state of savagery,—living, for the most part, on herbs and roots, like the beasts; and, wild as they are, fleeing when any one approaches." "There is no nation as savage as these people," says the intendant of Bourges of those under his administration; "there may be found sometimes troops of them seated in a circle in the middle of a field and always far from the roads; if they are approached, this band immediately disappears."

At this great king's death, he left France, says M. Duruy himself, "in a prodigious state of exhaustion. The State was ruined, and seemed to have no other resource than bankruptcy. Before the War of Succession, Vauban had already written: 'Nearly the tenth part of the people are reduced to beggary; of the nine other portions, five cannot give any alms to the mendicants, from whom they differ but slightly; three are very much distressed; the tenth part do not include more than one hundred thousand families, of which not ten thousand are comfortably situated.' This poverty became especially terrible in 1715, after that war in which it was necessary to borrow money at four hundred per cent., to create new imposts, to consume in advance the revenues of two years, and to raise the public debt to the sum of two milliards four hundred millions, which would make in our day nearly eight milliards!"

"Behold the cost of his glory," says M. Duruy elsewhere, "a public debt of more than two milliards four hundred millions, with a sum in the treasury of eight hundred thousand livres; an excessive scarcity of specie; commerce paralyzed; the nobility overwhelmed with debts, the least burdensome of which had been contracted at an interest of fifteen and twenty on the hundred; the magistrates, the rentiers, long deprived of the revenues owed them by the State; the peasants, in certain provinces, wanting for everything, even for straw on which to lie; those of our frontiers passing over to foreign countries; very many districts of our territory uncultivated and deserted." For the credit side of the account of this greatest of kings, the historian can cite the acquisition of two provinces, Flanders and Franche-Comté, certain cities, Strasbourg, Landau, Dunkerque, "so many victories, Europe defied, France so long preponderant, finally, the incomparable brilliancy of that court of Versailles and those marvels of the letters and the arts which have given to the seventeenth century the name of the siècle de Louis Quatorze!" Of the bigotry, ignorance, intolerance, and incredible and always uneasy vanity of the little soul of this great monarch the chroniclers of even his sycophants are full.

His political creed may be learned from this passage in his Mémoires: "The kings are absolute lords and have naturally the full and entire disposition of all property which is possessed as well by the churchmen as by the laymen, to use at all times, as judicious stewards, that is to say, according to the general need of their State. Everything which may be found within the limits of their States, of whatsoever nature it may be, appertains to them by the same title, and the coin which is in their strong-box and that which remains in the hands of their treasurers, and that which they permit to remain in the commerce of their peoples."

Consequently, the end of this reign of seventy-two years was "very different from its beginning. He received his kingdom powerful and preponderating abroad, tranquil and contented at home; he left it weakened, humiliated, discontented, impoverished, and already filled with the seeds of the Revolution." (Rœderer: Mémoires.)

For the administration of the government of the State, there were three great Councils, under the immediate direction of the king, who was his own prime minister. The Conseil d'en haut, to which he called the secretaries of State, and sometimes the princes of the blood, corresponded to the modern council of ministers in that it had the general direction of the great political affairs, with the additional function of judging appeals of the Conseil d'État, or Conseil du Roi. The latter, subordinate to the ministers but superior to the supreme courts, was the great administrative body of the kingdom and was composed of eighteen members. The Grand Conseil, which had been invested by Charles VIII with the judicial attributes up to that time appertaining to the Conseil du Roi, in order that the latter might remain a purely administrative body, sat in judgment on ecclesiastical matters, appeals to the higher courts, conflicts with parliamentary authority, etc.

For the administration of the city of Paris, and with the design of replacing the various seigneurial, ecclesiastic, and municipal authorities by one royal one, a decree was issued as early as 1674, in which all these justices, "and even that of our bailiwick of the palace, shall be reunited to the siège présidial de la prévosté et vicomté de Paris, held at the Châtelet, … so that in the future they shall never be separated from it, nor re-established, for any cause, or under any pretext whatsoever." A second seat of the prévôté and vicomté of Paris was established at the same time at the Châtelet with the same powers and prerogatives as the other,—the number of affairs being much too great for the cognizance of one jurisdiction. A supplemental decree, some months later, established the seat of the second in the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This abolition of the divers administrations of justice by the seigneurs was greatly appreciated by the populace, and greatly resented by the deposed lords, secular and ecclesiastical. In 1687, a magistrate, Nicolas de la Reynie, was appointed as superintendent of the police of Paris, and he was succeeded, ten years later, by the Marquis d'Argenson,—these being the first two lieutenants de police. This police, in addition to maintaining the public order, exercised a surveillance over all printed and written matter—even searching the post and opening suspected letters in the cabinet noir, and making itself a servile instrument in the abuse of the lettres de cachet through which, as the president of the Cour des Aides, Malesherbes said to Louis XV in 1770: "no citizen has any assurance that his liberty may not at any moment be sacrificed to some personal vengeance."

An edict of 1705, recalling that, in 1690, la noblesse au premier degré had been bestowed upon the president, councillors, and other officers "of our Cour de Parlement de Paris;" that in 1691 the same privileges had been granted to the presidents, councillors, and other officers "of our Cour des Aydes de Paris;" in 1704, on the officers of the Chambre des Comptes, granted also this nobility to the presidents, treasurers-general of France, avocat, procureur, and greffier en chef of the bureau of finance. In the following year, the privileges of this nobility were granted to the échevins, the procureur, the greffier, and receiver of the city of Paris, and the prévôt of the merchants was given the title of chevalier. Following the ancient traditions of the French monarchy, the king preferred to see himself served by the men of the middle classes, rather than by the powerful lords, whose rôle was reduced to that of obsequious courtiers in his antechamber, but, "in working with the bourgeois, the grandson of Henri IV wished to remain always le roi des gentilshommes."

In the person of Louis XV the most ignoble vices of a man were united to those of a king, but he had sufficient intelligence to foresee the calamity that was coming. "The thing will last at least as long as I do," he said, "my successor may get out of it the best way he can." And to Madame Pompadour is credited the famous saying: "After us, the deluge." When the minister Choiseul was disgraced, in 1770, half the nobles deserted the court to follow him to his estate of Chanteloup, near Amboise,—so much had the splendor of Versailles, that great glory of the reign of the Roi-Soleil, departed!

There were thirteen parlements and four provincial councils in France having sovereign jurisdiction in civil and criminal cases; the authority of the Parlement of Paris covered two-fifths of the kingdom. The chambres des comptes, the cours des aides, and the cours des monnaies judged all cases relating to the imposts, to the coinage, and to bullion. The grand conseil, the requêtes de l'Hôtel, the tribunal of the University of Paris, the capitaineries royales, etc., had each a special jurisdiction. Certain persons could only be judged by certain tribunals. In 1735, the Parlement having despatched its first president and several of its members to the king, then at Compiègne, to remonstrate with him, Louis XV informed them that he "forbade his Parlement to meet, to issue any decree, or to deliberate in any manner on the affairs of State; that they were to assemble only to receive his orders and to execute them, and that they had better not constrain him to make them feel the weight of his authority." In September of the same year, he summoned them to a bed of justice at Versailles, contrary to all precedent, and when they returned protesting, all the presidents and conseillers des enquêtes and requêtes were summarily banished to different cities in the kingdom by lettres de cachet. In 1753, the whole body was sent into exile, at Soissons, and to replace it the king created a chambre royale, which held its sittings at the Louvre, but which, though duly registered at the Châtelet au très exprès commandement du roi, was received with such contempt for its authority and such general levity that the members "became so well accustomed to it that they frequently assembled laughing, and made jests of their own decrees." The Parisians, who ridicule everything, declared that these members enjoyed themselves greatly at the masked ball during the Carnival, because none of them were recognized.