420 Ch. 1 1 • Dynastic Rivalries and Politics
The increased centralization of the French state had in itself helped cre
ate contact between more people and the officials of the king. The concept
of a “public” emerged, to which the monarch was in some sense considered
responsible and before which the layers of privilege in French society no
longer seemed to some acceptable. The crises that embroiled the king and
the parlements from the 1750s to the 1780s helped shift public opinion
toward the view that the parlements represented the rights of the “nation,”
threatened by a monarchy that seemed to be ruling in a despotic way.
The issue of Jansenism set the parlements against royal absolutism by
raising the constitutional issue of the right of the monarch to circumscribe
the parlements' traditional prerogatives. The Jansenists (see Chapter 7) were
a dissident group within the Catholic Church. The pope had condemned
Jansenism in 1713 with the papal bull Unigenitusy which Louis XV sup
ported. But Jansenists, with a considerable following in Paris, found sup
port within some of the parlements, which identified with Jansenist
resistance against what they considered the papacy's undue interference in
French affairs.
The period of conflict between the parlements and the crown really began
in 1749. The controller-general attempted to make the vingtieme tax (a tax
applying to both nobles and commoners) permanent, drawing heated
opposition from the parlements. And the Church again sought, without
success, to force the French clergy to accept the papal bull Unigeni
tus. Many bishops threatened that sacraments would be refused to laymen
who did not have a certificate signed by a priest attesting that the person
had made his or her confession to a priest who had accepted the papal
bull. Seven years later, the pope tried to defuse the crisis by banning these
certificates.
But this concession did not placate the Parlement of Paris. Many of the
parlements were manipulated by a handful of Jansenist magistrates and
lawyers who managed to convince their colleagues that French acceptance
of the papal edict amounted to an abandonment of French sovereignty over
the temporal affairs of the Church. The king, refusing to hear the par
lements’ grievances, made clear that he considered the parlements nothing
more than rubber stamps, a means of promulgating his will. When the
Jesuit order continued to crusade against Jansenism, the Parlement of
Paris responded by ordering Jesuit schools closed in 1761, citing the fact
that members of the order took a vow of obedience to the pope.
The successive crises over Jansenism may have weakened the authority
of the French monarchy by allowing the Parlement of Paris, and several
provincial parlements as well, to claim they were defending constitutional
liberties and the independence of the Gallican (French) Church—since
Jansenists saw themselves as part of it—against royal encroachment and
against Rome. By weakening the authority of the Catholic Church in
France, the crisis over Jansenism also eroded the prestige of the absolute
monarchy. Jansenism ceased being a political issue after 1758, when the