Clashes with Monarchy 73
registration, publication and execution.... Public order in its entirety emanates
from me, and the rights and interests of the Nation, which some dare to set up as
a body distinct from the Monarch, are necessarily joined with mine, and rest only
in my hands.”
Respectful remonstrance, made privately and decently, he would continue to
allow; but he would not allow the parlements to proclaim to all France that sub-
mission to his will was a crime, or that “the whole Nation is groaning to see its
rights, liberty and security perish under a terrible power”; for in that direction lay
anarchy and confusion, and he would use all the authority he had received from
God to save his people from such a fate.
Never had a French King made so strong an official statement of absolutism.
One might be excused for believing, in the enlightened France of 1766, that if any
sovereign power existed so enormous as the King described it, and from which all
law and lawful authorities derived their existence, it was too much to be located in
a single man. On the other hand, one could agree with the King that the parle-
ments, as they really were, did not represent the French people any better then he
did, and that officers of justice must draw their authority from some source outside
their own hereditary positions. As events were later to have it, it was the new
“body,” the Nation, so passively argued over by King and parlements in 1766, to
which sovereign power and the source of lawful authority were to be imputed.
The parlements were not intimidated by the King’s blast against them. They
continued their protests, remonstrances, and obstruction. The Brittany affair
dragged on; the parlements of Paris and Rennes, while both opposing the use of
administrative or prerogative courts, and upholding “law” against “circumstance,”
disputed with each other for jurisdiction over the hapless La Chalotais. In 1768
the royal government, moving toward economic liberalism and freedom of the
market, attempted to abolish regulations on the grain trade. The parlements of
Grenoble, Aix, and Toulouse favored such free trade in grain, but those of Paris
and Rouen declared against it. There was also the usual opposition to taxes. In
1768 the King reactivated the Grand Conseil, a kind of supreme court operating
directly under the King, and empowered to decide cases arising from government,
or those involving conflicts of jurisdiction between the parlements. The parle-
ments, fearing the “evocation” or transfer of their own lawsuits to this council,
naturally protested, and fortified their protests by again urging the rights of the
usual judiciary against administrative and presumably unfree courts.
In 1770 Louis XV decided to make an end of parlementary opposition. He put
into office a reform administration composed of Maupeou as chancellor, with his
aide the young lawyer, C. F. Lebrun, and the Abbé Terray as controller- general of
finance.
Maupeou simply abolished the parlements, putting their members on perma-
nent vacation, and set up a new system of law- courts in their place. He did away
with property in judicial office. Judges no longer received fees from litigants for
their decisions. The new judges, drawn in part from men experienced in the Grand
Conseil, received a fixed salary, with assurances of secure tenure. They had no per-
sonal or proprietary right to their position. They were appointed by the crown,
which, according to the edict, could now select men according to professional