358 Chapter 19court system, formed the center of the resistance (see il-
lustration 19.3). The Parlement of Paris ruled that the
king’s decree was illegal. In the south of France, the Par-
lement of Toulouse even arrested the royal governor
who tried to enforce the tax law.
Louis XV capitulated to the parlements in 1764, re-
scinding the vingtièmeand changing his government.
This did not end his battles with the parlements. When
he tried to introduce a road building program in Brit-
tany, relying upon a royal corvéeto provide labor, Breton
nobles and the Parlement of Rennes protested. The
frustrated king ordered the arrest of the president of the
Parlement of Rennes, but this provoked a united protest
from all fifteen parlements, claiming that they repre-
sented the nation whenever the Estates General (which
had last met in 1614) was not in session. As the Par-
lement of Rouen stated, they considered themselves
“the custodian and the depository” of the French consti-
tution, and the king must bend before the law.
This time the king stood firm. In 1766 he sent
royal troops to occupy the seat of the Parlement of
Paris, then personally appeared before the parlement to
express his anger. “I will not allow,” Louis told the mag-
istrates, this usurpation of power. “The magistrates are
my officers, charged with the truly royal duty of ren-
dering justice to my subjects.” Louis insisted that the
duties of the parlements did not restrict his sovereignty:
“In my person only does the sovereign power rest....
To me alone belongs legislative power, unconditionally
and indivisibly.” To underscore his claim to absolute
power, Louis XV named a new government, headed by
René de Maupeou, to fight the parlements. In 1771Maupeou abolished the parlements and created a sim-
pler court system in which the magistrates were salaried
state employees instead of owners of their office. He
hoped to create a new tax system, both fairer and suffi-
cient for the fiscal crisis, without facing an aristocratic
veto. The aristocracy, backed by many philosophes
who detested royal absolutism, naturally raised vocifer-
ous opposition. But much opinion also supported the
king. Voltaire stood with Maupeou’s dismissal of the
parlements, saying that he would rather be governed by
a fine lion than by two hundred rats.
The aristocracy won the day in 1774, when Louis
XV died. His nineteen-year-old grandson, Louis XVI,
possessed generally good intentions, but he was too
timid and inexperienced to stand up to the nobility.
His first acts were to dismiss Maupeou and to restore
the parlements. Consequently, he faced a strengthened
aristocracy throughout his reign. In 1777, when
Joseph II of Austria visited his sister, Queen Marie
Antoinette, in Paris, he concluded that the government
of France was “an aristocratic despotism.”
Louis XVI also inherited the desperate financial sit-
uation. In the year of his coronation, the state’s rev-
enues were 5 percent below its expenditures, increasing
a debt that consumed a third of the budget just in inter-
est payments. Those problems soon worsened. Begin-
ning in 1778, France was again at war, supporting—and
financing—the American Revolution. Other problems
were beginning. The foremost source of French wealth
was agriculture, and in 1774 an agricultural recession
began. Farm profits, which translated into tax revenue,
plummeted in 1775, and they never again during theIllustration 19.3
The French Parlements.The
French parlements,which were high courts
of appeal, were a different institution
from the English parliament, which was
a legislative body. There was a par-
lement in each of thirteen provinces in
eighteenth-century France, and the mag-
istrates in each court were nobles (the
nobility of the robe) who owned their
office. The parlements resembled parlia-
ment in their mutual resistance to royal
power. In this illustration, however, a
parlement is seen deliberating an issue
involving the church, as the proud
princes of the church parade in the
foreground.