The 13 parlements (that of Paris being by far the most important) were by their origins law courts. Although their apologists claimed in 1732 that the parlements had emerged from the ancient judicium Francorum of the Frankish tribes, they had in fact been created by the king in the Middle Ages to dispense justice in his name. With the atrophy of the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, the parlements now claimed to represent the Estates when those were not in session. In 1752 a Jansenist parlementaire, Louis-Adrien Le Paige, developed the idea that the various parlements should be thought of as the “classes” or parts of a larger and single “Parlement de France.”

This was a politically significant claim because these courts had taken on many other quasi-administrative functions that were related to charity, education, the supervision of the police, and even ecclesiastical discipline. Royal decrees were not binding, claimed the parlementaires, unless the parlements had registered them as laws. Although the parlementaires admitted that the king might force them to register his decrees by staging a lit-de-justice (i.e., by appearing in person at their session), they also knew that the public deplored such maneuvers, which manifestly went against the grain of the monarch’s supposed Christian and paternalist solicitude for the well-being of his subjects.

Various social, cultural, and institutional developments had served to turn the parlements into strongholds of resistance to reforms that increased the crown’s powers. Since the 17th century the monarchy’s need for money and the ensuing venality of offices had enabled the parlementaires to purchase their positions and to become a small and self-conscious elite, a new “nobility of the robe.” In 1604 the creation of the paulette tax had enabled the parlementaires to make their offices a part of their family patrimony, even if the value of their offices fell somewhat during the course of the 18th century. They had gained status by intermarrying with the older chivalric nobility of the sword. By 1700 the parlementaires had become a hereditary and rich landowning elite. (Near Bordeaux, for example, the best vineyards were theirs.) The interregnum of the regency after the death of Louis XIV (1715–23) had given them a chance to recapture some of the ground they had lost during Louis’s reign; the value of their offices, however, fell again somewhat in the course of the 18th century. The parlementaires’ Jansenist leanings and their recent espousal of antiabsolutism—expressed in the work of Montesquieu, himself a baron and a parlementaire—gave this elite ideological consistency.

In 1764 the Jansenist parlementaires, as ideological “progressives,” secured the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. Incidents such as the death sentence administered by the Parlement of Paris in 1766 against the 18-year-old chevalier de la Barre, accused of mutilating a crucifix and owning a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764; Philosophical Dictionary), showed, however, that the courts were not entirely on the side of the Enlightenment. In 1768–69 the Parlement of Brittany, in an antiabsolutist stance, forced the resignation of an appointed royal official, the duc d’Aiguillon, who had boldly tried to limit the power of the local nobility, with whom the Parlement was now in close alliance.