334 Chapter XIV
councils of grave old men, for since most of them owed their position to family
the average age was surprisingly low, as in the House of Commons. In 1789 over
half the members of the Parlement of Paris were under thirty- five. Some were
very wealthy; Le Peletier de Saint- Fargeau (who in truth became a Jacobin, and
friend of Robespierre) had 500,000 livres a year; and First President d’Aligre was
rumored to have an annual income of 700,000 and a nest- egg of five million in
the Bank of England.^4
In what I have called the quasi- revolution of the 1760’s the parlements had had
a grand conflict with the King’s ministers. Protesting against modernization of
property assessments, they had banded together in an union des classes, or a super-
parlement claiming to be representative of the whole kingdom. On the one hand,
a royalist pamphleteer denounced the parlements as a “monstrous hereditary aris-
tocracy.” On the other hand, the parlements, as early as the 1760’s, put a good deal
of incipient revolutionary language into wide circulation—citoyen, loi, patrie, consti-
tution, nation, droit de la nation, and cri de la nation. It seems likely that the parle-
ments had more positive influence than the philo sophes, especially among lawyers
and other makers of public opinion, to whom they spoke out as weighty and repu-
table bodies in Paris and a dozen provincial capitals. Louis XV had tried to silence
them in 1766, in the séance de la flagellation, then in 1771 had simply abolished
them by a monarchical coup d ’état. Louis XVI, however, at his accession in 1774,
restored the old parlements in their historic form.
Twenty- two years after the séance de la flagellation, Louis XVI was at odds with
his parlements as much as his predecessor had been, and was even, in his turn,
declaring that if they had their way they would become “an aristocracy of magis-
trates,” harmful to “the rights and interests of the nation.” This accusation the Par-
lement of Paris indignantly rejected. The danger to France, it warned on May 4,
1788, came not from aristocracy but from despotism. “The right of freely verifying
the laws does not make the parlements an aristocracy of magistrates. If it had hap-
pened that your parlement had refused to accept useful laws, we should have to
pity humanity but still not make the king a despot, destroy the constitution, or
establish servitude.... But is it true that your parlement need reproach itself with
such refusals?”^5 The parlement thus invited an examination of its record.
The record shows that the parlement took a strong stand for important liberal
principles, that it helped to school the country on the evils of unchecked govern-
ment power, that it long enjoyed the support of public opinion, that non- nobles
were slow in turning against it, but finally did so abruptly and with devastating ef-
fect, since the parlement associated its liberalism with palpable class interest.
The young Louis XVI in 1774 wished above all else to be a good king, no “des-
pot,” and to act as differently as possible from his discredited grandfather. Hence
he restored the parlements. He also appointed the reformer Turgot as his chief
minister. These two steps soon proved to be incompatible. Turgot was a tenth-
generation noble, but he was also a physiocrat and an experienced government
4 On age, see J. Egret, “L’aristocratie parlementaire français à la fin de l’ancien régime,” in Revue
historique, CCVIII (1952), 12–13; on wealth, H. Carré, La fin des parlements (Paris, 1912), 2ff.
5 Remontrances du Parlement de Paris... presentées au roi le 4 mai 1788, pp. 2, 10, 12.