Clashes with Monarchy 67
at Versailles is a senator, the chambermaids have a part in government....
The court prevents every reform of finances...
The court corrupts the army and navy by promotions due to favorit-
ism...
The court gives us ministers without merit, authority or permanence...
The court corrupts morals by teaching intrigue and venality to young
men entering upon a career, instead of emulation by character and
work....
It must be noted, and probably d’Argenson would admit, that these evils were
due not to the court alone, but to certain oligarchic and entrenched hereditary in-
terests in French society, of which the parlements came to be the spokesmen. But
the court at Versailles was easier to see.
With its most shameful parts thus paraded before the public, and its most cred-
itable efforts studiously concealed, the French government was an easy target for
all who had a mind to be critical. The charges against it, made with increasing
openness from the middle of the century until the Revolution—that it was ex-
travagant, wasteful, despotic, and arbitrary—were all true. The parlements enunci-
ated many liberal principles in making these charges. It was also true that the
government undertook many serious reforms, but of this part of the truth much
less was heard, because it was the parlements, as much as the court, that brought
these reforms down in failure. And public opinion, until late in 1788, generally
supported the parlements. To the modern observer today nothing is clearer than
that the Bourbon monarchy, in the generation before the Revolution, seriously at-
tempted to solve the basic problem of French society, the existence of special privi-
leges based on legal stratification or hierarchy; and nothing is more remarkable
than that the French public, bourgeois and intellectuals, seldom saw this to be the
issue, took so long to develop any sense of hostility to the nobility as a class, and so
widely supported the Grand Whiggery of France, the noble- aristocratic-
parliamentary opposition to despotism. The government was blamed by all classes
for its faults, and received credit from none for its merits.
The Parlement of Paris, together with its sister magistracies in the provinces,
had had numerous clashes with the royal government for half a century, when new
royal enactments in 1763 opened the way to a quasi- revolution. It was the fate of
the parlements that in launching a quasi- revolution in the 1760’s they opened the
way for the King, who crushed them in 1770 in order to drive through certain re-
forms, just as in launching a real revolution in 1787 the same parlements opened
the way for persons acting in the name of the nation, and bent on a program of
reforms not wholly unlike the King’s in 1770. Between 1774 and 1787 a kind of
parliamentary- aristocratic counterrevolution was at work, as again after 1789.
Before 1770, however, as again before 1789, the parlements contributed signifi-
cantly to the political education of the French people. Their repeated resistance to
the crown gave a respectable precedent for more flagrant disobedience. To force
the recognition of a constitutional monarchy, they formed an unauthorized and
extra- legal union—what Louis XV called an “association,” a word that was to take
on revolutionary implications in England and America also. They emphasized