340 Chapter XIV
King is only a national treasurer, and “what is not used for the common good be-
longs to the citizens.” This was a “principle founded on the rights of man and
confirmed by reason.” “Man is born free.” “The nature of man is to unite with his
equals (ses semblables) and to live in society subject to some general conventions,
that is, laws.” To Thomas Jefferson, then in France, these utterances of the Par-
lement of Paris all seemed reassuringly Anglo- Saxon. France, he thought in 1787,
would soon have a “revolution” like that of England against the Stuarts, but with-
out the bloodshed.^11
It is one of the puzzles of the Revolution that class animosity, or antagonism
between noble and non- noble, should have been so little in evidence in 1787 and
much of 1788. The Parlement of Paris, despite all that could be known of it from
its own published remonstrances, enjoyed a wide popularity with both Third Es-
tate and nobility at this time. There were of course exceptions: Condorcet, Dupont,
Morellet (the school of Turgot) suspected the Parlement of Paris as Voltaire had
suspected it twenty years before. That it nevertheless enjoyed wide support can be
explained only on the ground that most politically conscious persons at the mo-
ment were concerned mainly with absolutism, and would admire any group of men
that stood up against arbitrary and non- responsible government.
The parlement in 1787 proved a little more flexible than in the past. It accepted,
for example, the abolition of the corvée which it had refused to Turgot. It declined,
however, to “verify” any new taxes. New taxes, it now openly maintained, could be
authorized only by a meeting of the Estates General, the national gathering of the
three orders, whose complete dormancy for over a century had seldom been regret-
ted except by a few nobles. Meanwhile the fiscal crisis grew worse, so that it ap-
peared that the government could not carry on. Louis XVI (it was now that he
called the parlements an “aristocracy of magistrates”) came to the same conclusion
as Louis XV. In May 1788 he in effect abrogated the parlements by reducing them
to mere judicial organizations.
The May Edicts deprived the parlements of their political power, their right to
verify taxes and legislation. This power was vested in a new body, a Plenary Court,
which was to sit in Paris and serve for the whole country. The provincial parle-
ments thus sustained a great reduction of stature, losing a political power which,
though regional, had made them equals to the Parlement of Paris. They felt victim-
ized by centralization. All parlements, those of Paris and the provinces alike, at the
same time had their jurisdiction confined to legal cases involving more than 20,000
francs. Smaller cases were assigned to lesser, more decentralized and more acces-
sible courts. The parlements thus lost out in income, in volume of business, and in
general importance in the world of lawyers.
The outcry against these May Edicts was universal. Pamphlets poured from the
presses in all parts of the country. Opinion was more freely expressed in them than
in regular periodicals that were more subject to censorship, so that the pamphlets
offer the best, though an imperfect, indication of public opinion. A recent attempt
at statistical analysis shows over five hundred published in the four months follow-
11 Flammermont, Remontrances, III, 671, 714–15; my article, “The Dubious Democrat: Thomas
Jefferson in Bourbon France,” in Political Science Quarterly (1957), 388–404.