34 Chapter II
usually, as in Languedoc, the municipal mayors or councillors. To the Second or
noble estate every “gentleman” of Brittany had the right to come, as in Sweden and
in the subdistricts of Hungary and Poland. About 3,000 persons had the right to
sit in this second chamber, and the number who actually attended never fell below
500 after 1746. Thus, though with vote by house the Third Estate possessed a veto
on the two others, the estates of Brittany were dominated, or rather swamped, by
nobles. Most of these were poor provincial gentry who hated taxes, viewed govern-
ment and public works with suspicion, looked down on lawyers and tradespeople,
and constantly disputed with the royal intendant.
The estates of Brittany and Languedoc were not declining in the eighteenth
century. Both were becoming institutionally more mature. Government was be-
coming more complex, as taxation, conscription, road- building, postal communi-
cations, military housing, or poor relief grew more extensive. In both provinces the
estates developed permanent committees and offices that remained at work be-
tween the meetings. Each province thus saw the rise of a provincial capital that
was not merely the headquarters of royal officials. In Brittany after 1732 the es-
tates almost always met at Rennes, and in Languedoc after 1736 they always met
at Montpellier.^20
The French parlements were more important than the provincial estates. A par-
lement or conseil souverain was at work in every part of France, each a supreme
court of law for the area under its jurisdiction. All the parlements, in addition to
judicial functions, exercised an executive role, supervising the keeping of order and
the enforcement of their legal decisions, and also enjoyed what was in effect a
share in legislation, claiming that they must register or “verify” every royal ordi-
nance before it could take effect.
Seats in the parlement were for the most part owned as personal property. Mem-
bers were thus neither elected nor appointed, but sat by personal right, and they
could not be removed even by the King. The institution of property in office, though
known almost everywhere in Europe, had been most fully developed in France and
had been growing for over two hundred years. Hence, in the eighteenth century far
more seats in parlement were inherited than were purchased. The King no longer
sold them; they could be bought only from owners or heirs, who most often be-
queathed them to sons, nephews, or sons- in- law. The parlementaires by 1750 thus
constituted a hereditary magistracy going back three or four generations. They were
now also nobles, and freely mixed and intermarried with the noblesse de race, descen-
dants of the formerly feudal nobility. Their income came mainly from land owner-
ship, and was sustained by the usual noble tax exemptions. With their legal educa-
tion, their better habits of work, their living as neighbors in cities, their daily
participation in public issues, their channels of regular access to the King and his
ministers, and their facilities for meeting privately as recognized bodies in their sev-
eral courts, the parlementary nobility by the middle of the eighteenth century had
assumed a leadership over the French nobility as a whole, with which they now
20 For a convenient summary see E. Appolis, “Les états de Languedoc au 18e siècle: comparaison
avec les états de Bretagne,” in Organisation corporative du moyen age à la fin de l ’ancien règime: études
présentées à la commission internationale pour l ’ histoire des assemblies d ’ états, II (Louvain, 1937),
129–48.