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This chapter focuses on France, where both James’s Oath of Allegiance and Bellarmine’s theory were vivaciously and dramatically debated, especially after the assassination of King Henri IV by a Catholic fanatic and supporter of the Jesuits in 1610. The first section of this chapter offers an overview of the issues at stake by exploring the link between Papal authority, tyrannicide, and the doctrine of Papal deposition of heretical princes. A second section shows how Bellarmine’ theories were at the forefront of a crucial political debate involving Rome, London, and Paris by analyzing the reaction of the Parlement to Bellarmine’s theory. Another section of this chapter illustrates the significance of Bellarmine’s theory in another, parallel, debate, involving the role and nature of the Catholic Church in France, the relationship between the French Gallican tradition and the Roman centralizing tendencies, the political and ecclesiological force of Conciliarist theories. More specifically, this section will examine closely the theological debate within the Sorbonne between Edmond Richer and André Duval.

With the fall of Calonne, the Notables moved from defence to attack. Taking it as given that Calonne had squandered millions, they sought institutional restraints on the king to prevent the recurrence of such malfeasance. Notably they demanded the creation of a finance council including lay members which would audit departmental expenditure and publish an annual budget. The king was loathe to make such concessions which killed any chance of the Assembly endorsing an increase in taxation. Two bureaux accepted the need but the rest rejected it and all stressed that the Assembly had no legislative mandate. Consequently when the Assembly was closed on 25 May, the king had to send his edicts before the Parlement without their endorsement

In this chapter, the attitude toward slavery in France is discussed. The government was not completely consistent in its application of the Freedom Principle. A new law was drafted to deal with the problem of colonial slave owners who wanted to bring their slaves to France. This is known as the Edict of October 1716, which set conditions whereby slave owners could bring their slaves to France without fear of losing. According to the edict, there were two legitimate purposes for bringing slaves to France: to give them religious instruction or to teach them a trade. Based on Lemerre's report, Joly de Fleury and de Chauvelin decided that the Parlement of Paris should not register the Edict of October 1716. The fact that it was never registered by the Parlement of Paris created a legal limbo for slaves who came to Paris or other cities within the parlement's jurisdiction.

The impact of the Declaration of December 15, 1738 is presented in this chapter. It was discussed that when masters neglected to complete the required formalities, such as registration of their slaves with the nearest clerk of the Admiralty, the slaves would be confiscated au profit du roi and returned as slaves to the colonies. The Parlement of Paris and the Admiralty Court of France refused to confiscate slaves. However, the case of Catherine Morgan, who was brought to Nantes by her master in 1746, shows how the courts of Brittany enforced the Declaration of 1738. The Admiralty Court of France never recognized the validity of either the Edict of October 1716 or the Declaration of December 15, 1738, because they had not been registered by the Parlement of Paris. As a result, they relied on the maxim that any slave who entered the French soil was free.

In 1759, the Parlement of Paris made a decision that established the status of slaves who sued for their freedom within the jurisdiction of this court and, consequently, the Admiralty Courts within its domain. This was the case of Francisque, which set an important example for the suits that would follow it in the same jurisdiction, as well as across the channel in England's Somerset case. It also provided an opportunity for French thinking on racial difference in the middle of the eighteenth century. The lawyers revealed assumptions about the meaning of the term negre and the foundations of racism in eighteenth-century France due to their attempts to argue that Francisque was not a negre, and thus not subject to the laws of 1716 and 1738.

The Declaration of 1738 stayed unregistered by the Parlement of Paris and the Admiralty Court of France. The Admiralty clerk duly recorded the declarations of slave owners who brought their slaves to Paris. These declarations reveal a small portion of blacks living in Paris, but nonetheless offer information about these individuals. The aim of this chapter is to gauge the size and the sociological makeup of the black population in Paris and the administration's efforts to control them. The case of Louis v. Jean Jacques Le Fevre prompted the officers of the Admiralty of France to prepare an ordinance that required all blacks in Paris to be registered by the Admiralty's clerk. The registration drive was a one-time event, designed to give the Admiralty an report of how many blacks were residents in Paris.

Louis XVI issued the third and final major piece of legislation regulating the entry of black subjects to the kingdom of France on August 9, 1777, known as the Police des Noirs. This royal declaration varied considerably from the Edict of October 1716 and the Declaration of December 15, 1738, since this prescribed actions based on skin color alone, rather than the slave status. The Police des Noirs was also registered by the Parlement of Paris. Minister of the Marine Sartine intentionally advocated the use of racial language as a way to avoid the parlement's opposition to legislation with the word slave. The Police des Noirs was prompted by court cases in which slaves sued for their freedom.

This chapter sketches the state of affairs during which the regent Philippe d'Orléans suppressed the last traces of dissidence in the Parlement of Rennes, kept his thumb on the Parlement of Paris and settled augmentations de gages on terms of his choosing. During this time, he resolved the political and financial questions left over from the preceding reign. At every key point involving these intertwined issues, d'Orléans got his way by resorting to coercion and by overriding the wishes of the majority of the judges, damaging their constitutional and socio-economic interests along the way. On the most important issues involving the parlements, the past reign flowed into its successor, after the brief interlude in which Orléans had vainly practised conciliation. Thus the regency not only benefited from the gains Louis XIV made at the expense of the parlements; it ratified and perpetuated those gains, passing them down the century.

This chapter provides a new insight into the recall of the parlement of Paris, a key moment in the early reign of Louis XVI. Ceremonial considerations played a significant part in the timing and handling of Louis XVI's decision. The venerable ceremony of the lit de justice was exploited by the monarchy to make clear political points on the conditions of the recall and set the stage for the relationship between king and parlement during the new reign.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the relationship between law and literature in our period of study. Marie de Médicis, rebel princes, the Jesuits, and magistrates with papal or Gallican sympathies within the Parlement de Paris, all saw the publishing industry as a crucial tool with which to consolidate their power during the regency. This chapter explores how the pamphlet wars of the time led to an interest in dominating public opinion in print. Alongside the censoring of several Jesuit texts, these events led to a plethora of legislation pertaining to the print market. The chapter then gives an outline of the French criminal justice system, in order to inform our analyses of libertine author trials which form the case studies in Part II. This outline includes the various forms of law courts, the ranks of their magistrates, and the stages of a criminal trial, and is augmented by a glossary of legal terms at the end of this book.

In France, with the exception of the exiled Huguenots, natural rights were rarely discussed before 1750. Even then, their revival at the hands of the philosophes was slow and weak. Stylistically, the erudite works of the seventeenth-century natural lawyers offended Enlightenment sensibilities; these earlier texts were granted little attention. It was a group of economists, the Physiocrats, who ultimately did the most to revive the preservation regime of rights. For François Quesnay, the key right to retain in political society was property. But through their ties with philosophes in the salon of the baron d’Holbach, this economic focus gave way to a political one. By the 1770’s, nearly all the philosophes were criticizing states and laws that violated our natural rights. Another idea of rights also gained prominence in the 1770’s. This was the older constitutional theory of national rights, which members of the Paris Parlement brandished in opposition to Maupeou’s coup. This collective theory of rights rested on an idea of the nation as a natural entity. National rights were not produced through a transfer of individual rights, but had their own autonomy. These two concepts of rights were not incompatible, but there was a tension between them.

The power to disgrace was not limited to individuals and it formed an essential part of the king’s strategy for managing the great corporations of the realm. The episcopate, cities, and provincial estates were all examples of institutions or corps that felt the effects of royal displeasure, but nothing better illustrated the phenomenon than the treatment of the parlements. This chapter explains the structure of judicial politics under the Bourbon monarchy, and looks at the many ways in which the king could use imprisonment, the internal exile or transfers of individuals or groups of magistrates from one city to another, disciplinary edicts, and many other often subtle techniques to impose his authority. It also considers the limitations of disgrace, how it could sometimes rebound to the disadvantage of the crown and the obstacles to the settlement of political crises resulting from the act of disgrace.

The Parlement of Paris is undoubtedly the first, the most important and most influential Court of Law of the Kingdom of France, from the triple point of view of politics, judicial action and legal evolution. After depicting the Parlement of Paris on the basis of its sources, this contribution demonstrates, looking particularly at the archives of the King's general Prosecutor, how the Parisian Parliament served to bring about a subtle alchemy in the progress of criminal Law, probably since 1670, and especially since the Chancellor d’Aguesseau (1717). A collaboration between the Court and the King's Council was established, which brought about a real and mutual influence in the practice of criminal and civil Justice in the Parliament on the evolution of the conception of Law and the regularization of legal procedure.

The chapter examines the crisis of authority that had emerged in early 1650 between cardinal Mazarin and Condé, and provides a character assessment of the two protagonists. Mazarin’s decision to resolve the crisis by arresting and imprisoning Condé, his brother, and his brother-in-law generated a variety of damaging consequences, including military operations conducted against the royal armies by Turenne, while opposition progressively focused hostility on Mazarin and his style of government. During a crucial few weeks in January 1651, open condemnation of the cardinal, above all by the Parlement of Paris, undermined the remnants of Mazarin’s power and forced him to release the princes. Despite Mazarin’s hopes for a rapprochement with Condé, he was expelled from France and ultimately settled in exile at Brühl in the territory of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. The rest of the chapter explores Mazarin’s inability, both practical and psychological, to accept the permanence of his exile, and his attempts to exert maximum pressure, through correspondence and allies at court, on Anne of Austria, the queen mother, to recall him to France. The chapter concludes with the comprehensive failure of this policy when, on the eve of Louis XIII’s thirteenth birthday and the declaration of his official majority, the regency government promulgated an edict reiterating Mazarin’s criminal behaviour and his banishment in perpetuity (6 September 1651).

This chapter examines whether the crown of France used the courts to extend its authority during the late medieval period, focusing on the application of the death penalty by the Parlement of Paris. It argues that the royal court's sentencing policy was intended to reconcile and heal a society affected by public crime, rather than impose virtually mandatory sentences of death and hence to create martyrs. For crimes of violence, both the victim's kin and the wider community demanded some kind of retribution or vengeance. However, death penalty might do more harm than good to a social fabric that was already damaged. Thus, judges sentenced criminals not to impose the power of the state upon those who violated the law, but to heal rifts in society caused by crime.

The chapter explores Colson’s sources of income under the Old Regime and how this was related to his position in society. Although he drew revenues from familial property he owned in Varennes and a variety of other investments, his main sources of income came from his position as legal advisor and financial administrator to the Ravary wine-making family and, above all, to the Longaunay family of nobles. The chapter focuses, in particular, on the complex relations linking him to the Marquise, Marquis, and Comte of Longaunay in his role of overseeing the exploitation of the family’s lands and seigniorial dues in Normandy and Berry and serving as point man in the many lawsuits in which the family found itself entangled. It also examines the wide variety of his other responsibilities for this family beyond finances, and his close relations with Roch Lemaigre, the local intendant living near the family’s possessions in Berry in the small town of Levroux.

The chapter follows the progressive politicization of Colson and his neighbors during the so-called pre-Revolutionary period (1787–89), taking note of the extent to which he and they were taken totally by surprise by the events of that period. It examines, notably, Colson’s reaction to the Assembly of Notables of 1787; to the long struggle between Louis XVI and the Parlement of Paris; to the convocation of the Estates General for May 1789; and to the electoral assemblies and the statements of grievances (cahiers de doléances) drawn up in those assemblies. It also emphasizes Colson’s descriptions of the “hurricane” of July 1788 that destroyed a large proportion of the crops in northern France, and of the terrible winter of 1788–89 and its effects on the population of Paris.

This chapter explores the renewed early modern identification of law with theatre and the legal cultures that helped give rise to it. In the sixteenth century, as trial venues expanded, a new breed of lawyers seemed to take their inspiration from the theatres springing up throughout Europe. Many humanists, drawing on intensified antitheatrical discourses, denounced the lawyer’s use of “Histrionical-Rhetorical Gesticulation.” But others celebrated the courtroom as a “great & magnificent theatre,” investing the trope of courtroom as theatre with a multitude of meanings. The first manuals dedicated specifically to delivery appeared, along with a newly encyclopedic-anatomical science of nonverbal communication. Applied to courtroom performance critique, these offered new tools for the analysis of visible, audible, embodied meaning, inspiring the scrutiny of legal actors’ gestures, expressions, and intonations. Together, these phenomena contributed to practices of critical court-watching, the rise of the celebrity lawyer, and a full-blown culture of the trial as mass entertainment.