Aristocracy: The Constituted Bodies 35
generally made common cause. The older landed nobility at the same time obtained
a kind of trained professional leadership that it had never had before.^21
The Parlement of Paris was the most influential, with by far the largest territo-
rial area. It consisted of 25 “presidents” and 165 councillors, who divided up as
benches of judges to hear lawsuits, and came together to discuss and act upon po-
litical questions. In addition, the 49 peers of France belonged to the Parlement of
Paris; they took no part in judicial business unless the case of a very high noble-
man were involved, but sat with the others, at will, if greater political matters were
at stake, such as resistance to measures taken by the King or his ministers. There
will be much to say of the Parlement of Paris in later chapters.
The Parlement of Dauphiny, or Grenoble, is the one of which most is known
from recent historical study. It consisted of 10 “presidents” and 54 councillors, plus
3 royal prosecuting attorneys; the bishop of Grenoble also had a right to sit, with-
out a vote. In 1756 only 11 of the 67 were “new men,” that is non- nobles or nobles
of the first generation. In that year some people in the French government had the
idea of a “commercial nobility,” like the one dear to Goethe’s uncle at Frankfurt,
and such as existed in restricted form at Lyons and a few other mercantile cen-
ters—a nobility designed as an incentive to businessmen, by which they could be-
come nobles while still remaining in business. “The very thought of a commercial
nobility,” announced the parlementaires of Grenoble, “has revolted one of the best
constituted parlements of the kingdom.” It was now as long ago as 1600 that most
of them had had bourgeois among their progenitors. In 1762 the parlement, which
like many other such councils in Europe enjoyed a free hand in determining its
own membership, ruled that henceforth new members must have either parlia-
mentary ancestry or four generations of nobility in the paternal line. Lawyers of
the Grenoble bar, seeing a natural outlet for their ambitions thus blocked more
than ever, protested. The parlement made a concession: it might accept a barrister
on the same basis as a noble if his father, grandfather, and great- grandfather had
also been barristers and if his own “merit, fortune and marriage alliances” were suf-
ficiently worthy. The Grenoble lawyers remained dissatisfied. “It is certainly not
hard to find men with four generations of nobility to make magistrates of them,”
one of them wrote, “but it would be impossible to find a lawyer of merit who was
the fourth generation of famous lawyers.”^22
PARLIAMENTS AND ASSEMBLIES IN THE
BRITISH ISLES AND AMERICAThe familiar picture of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century can be
profitably looked at in the context of the other constituted bodies of Europe. It
21 See F. L. Ford, Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1953), 188–201; J. Egret, “L’aristocratie parlementaire française à la fin de l’ancien ré-
gime,” in Revue historique, 208 (1952), 1–14; F. Bluche, L’origine des magistrals du Parlement de Paris au
18 e siècle (Paris, 1956).
22 J. Egret, Le Parlement de Dauphiné et les affaires publiques dans la deuxième moitié du 18e siècle
(Grenoble and Paris, 1942), I, 21–24.