Part 2

He was also charged with the preservation of the privileges of the University, and it was for this reason, as prescribed in the ordinance of 1200, that he took his oath of office between the hands of the rector of the University. In 1613, the _prévôt_, Louis Seguier, refused to observe this formality. He had under his orders a civil lieutenant charged with the jurisdiction of civil affairs in the first hearing, and, later, of particular civil and criminal lieutenants; these magistrates had the direction of the police until 1667, when there was created a _conseiller lieutenant-général_ of police. The municipal police of Paris absorbed successively various jurisdictions which had previously existed, and the _prévôt_ administered this force in the interests of the public order.

Nevertheless, the disorder in the municipal administration became so great that Charles VI, by an edict dated January 27, 1411, restored to the _bourgeois_, _manants_, and _habitants_ of his "good city of Paris" the _prevosté des marchands et eschevinage, clergie, maison de la ville, parlouer aux bourgeois, jurisdiction, coertion, cognoissance, rentes, revenus, possessions quelconques, droits, honneurs, noblesses, prerogatives, franchises, libertez et prévillèges_, to have and to hold forever, as they had done before.

[Illustration: FAÇADE OF THE NEW PALAIS DE JUSTICE, VIEWED FROM THE PLACE DAUPHINE. JOSEPH-LOUIS-DUC, ARCHITECT.]

It was under this king that there was brought before the Parlement an important case, related at length by all the chroniclers of the time, and which may serve to illustrate the nature of the administration of justice. A certain Norman gentleman, Jean de Carrouges, residing in the château d'Argenteuil, near Alençon, having occasion to go on a journey, left his young wife at home. One of his neighbors, Jacques Le Gris, having heard of her beauty, presented himself at the castle and asked to be permitted to visit the donjon. He was cordially welcomed, invited to dinner, and the Dame de Carrouges herself conducted him to the tower. Once there, the visitor suddenly fastened the door behind them and then proceeded to avow his passion to the lady; indignantly repulsed, he threw himself upon her and inflicted upon her the last of outrages. Then, rushing down the stairs, he leaped upon his horse and effected his escape. When the Sire de Carrouges returned, he appealed for redress to the Comte d'Alençon, his suzerain and that of Le Gris; the comte summoned all the parties before him, but the accused gentleman stoutly proclaimed his innocence and endeavored to establish an alibi. The comte, unable to decide, referred the case to the Parlement at Paris; the trial lasted eighteen months, and the Parlement finally decided that the lady could prove nothing against Le Gris excepting on a field of combat _jusqu'à outrance_.

The king, who was then at L'Ecluse, a town in Holland, with his barons, preparing to pass over into England, returned to Paris when he heard of the decree of the Parlement, followed by his uncles, the Ducs de Berry, de Bourgogne, and de Bourbon, and a number of other seigneurs who had also "a great desire" to witness this judicial duel. The lists were arranged in the Place Sainte-Catherine, behind the Temple, on the 29th of December, 1386; the king and all his court were present, seated in galleries, and a great crowd of people thronged all the available surroundings. The two adversaries were armed from head to foot; Carrouges approached his wife, arrayed in deep mourning and seated in a chair draped in black.

"Lady," he said to her, "upon your assertion I am about to adventure my life and combat Jacques Le Gris. You know whether my quarrel is just and loyal."

"Monseigneur," she replied, "it is so, and you combat safely, for the quarrel is righteous."

"In the name of God, so be it!" replied the knight.

Then, embracing her, he took her hand, crossed himself, and entered the lists, while the lady remained kneeling in her black chair, praying fervently.

The two men took their oaths, one, of the truth of his accusation, the other, of his innocence; then they proceeded to their places at the extremities of the lists and waited for the signal; when it was given, they advanced toward each other, walking their horses, and attacked with their swords. Carrouges was the first to be wounded, seriously in the thigh, and he lost so much blood that the spectators feared for him; however, rallying all his forces, he assailed his enemy so vigorously that he succeeded in seizing him by his helmet and throwing him to the ground. Dismounting in his turn and maintaining his advantage, he endeavored to make Le Gris confess his guilt in the prospect of certain death; the latter maintained his innocence, but as he was vanquished he was adjudged culpable, and Carrouges thrust his sword through his body. Then, turning toward the spectators, he demanded of them if he had loyally done his duty. "Yes," they replied. After which he knelt before the king, who caused him to be raised, and gave him a post in the royal chamber with an annual allowance of two hundred livres. Carrouges thanked the monarch, then turned toward his wife, kissed her, and they both proceeded to Notre-Dame, where they made their offerings and returned to their hotel. The body of Le Gris was delivered to the public executioner, who dragged it on a hurdle to the gibbet of Montfaucon, where it was hung in chains.

A decree of the Parlement subsequently granted to Carrouges the sum of six thousand livres, to be taken from the property of Le Gris. But, some time later, a criminal, condemned to death for other offences, confessed that he was guilty of the outrage on the Dame de Carrouges, having assumed the name of Le Gris and profited by a certain resemblance which he bore to that unhappy gentleman. The lady, filled with remorse, sought refuge in a convent after the death of her husband, and took the vows of perpetual chastity.

Under Charles VII, in 1443, took place the first division of the authority of the Parlement, which, however, had been long preparing. The preceding year, the king had made an expedition into Gascogne and Languedoc; on his retiral he left behind him "that which was worth more than an army," a parlement established in Toulouse with jurisdiction over all of Languedoc and the duchy of Guyenne. Ten years later, the dauphin created in his appanage the Parlement of Grenoble. The double jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris at this period is thus defined: "First, it sat in judgment on _causes spéciales_, those of the peers of France and of the royal domain, those of _régale_ (right possessed by the crown to receive the income of a vacant bishopric), and those of individuals who had received by letters of _committimus_ the right to be judged by it; second, it received appeals from all the inferior jurisdictions, the royal, seigneurial, ecclesiastic, and university tribunals. In addition, it deliberated on a multitude of administrative matters, and, under pretext of interpreting the ordinances, rendered decrees which were veritable acts of legislation. The royal ordinances having the validity of laws only when enregistered by the Parlement, it frequently refused this _enregistrement_, and sometimes thus checked the royal authority. Finally, it frequently exercised the right of making _remontrances_, not only against the ordinary ordinances, but against treaties with foreign powers, particularly concerning the papal bulls, which led to its exercising a superior superintendence over the entire government of the Church in France. These divers powers gave the Parlement of Paris a very high position in the State, and it will be frequently seen intervening in public affairs."

[Illustration: CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. PALAIS DE BOURBON PERISTYLE FACING QUAI. DESIGNED BY GIRARDIN AND POSSET.]

Under Louis XI, there were parlements at Grenoble, Bordeaux, and Dijon; greater freedom of appeal from the decisions of the seigneurial tribunals to the court of the king, and the magistrates were relieved from the fear of removal from office. We have already seen instances of the affability of this monarch toward the bourgeoisie of Paris, and his not unsuccessful attempts to identify himself with them; the tangible benefits which he bestowed upon them were quite sufficient to win their gratitude. Their offices were rendered immovable, they were exempted from all taxation, their assemblies were authorized, the free election of their magistrates, their city was carefully fortified, they were armed to the number of sixty or eighty thousand men; he permitted them to acquire, by purchase, the right which the nobles had to command the _guet_, and to the noblesse was given the exercise of certain municipal offices.

The _États Généraux_ of 1484, during the minority of Charles VIII, are considered to have been the first of the truly representative national assemblies, even the peasants in the most distant communes being represented. The number of problems presented by the exigencies of the government was formidable; during the royal session, Jean de Rely, canon and deputy of Paris, addressed the monarch in an eloquent discourse, half Latin and half French, bristling with texts and citations, then he commenced to read the list of grievances demanding redress; he read bravely for three hours, when it was perceived that the young king was sound asleep, and the sitting was adjourned for two days. Neither François I nor his son Henri II had any desire to appear before the assembled representatives of the nation; the former replaced the _États Généraux_ by a mixed assembly of notables and deputies of Bourgogne in 1526, and in the following year by an assembly of notables at Paris, which sanctioned his violation of the treaty of Madrid, and granted him two millions of golden écus for the ransom of his sons, left as hostages behind him, but it took no part in the affairs of State. The Parlement was not treated with any more consideration; a royal edict of 1523 divested the jurisdiction of the _prévôt_ and of the Châtelet of Paris of all causes and matters of which it took cognizance in its quality as conservator of the privileges of the University, and for the judgment of these causes established a new bailiwick, of which the seat was to be the Hôtel de Nesle, where there were appointed a bailiff, a lieutenant, an avocat, a procureur du roi, twelve counsellors, an _audiencer_ [usher, or crier], a sous-audiencer, and twelve sergents. The Parlement was much displeased at this diminution of its authority, and on the 9th of March a formidable protest against the new edict was made before it by the _prévôt_ of Paris, his lieutenants, civil and criminal, the counsellors of the Châtelet, and all the other officers, sergents, greffiers, huissiers, and officials of the University. When the king heard of this demonstration, he sent to the Parlement the Sieur de la Barre, gentleman of his chamber, to inform that body, once for all, that when he granted letters patent it was understood that they were to be enregistered, no matter what protests might be made against them. The Parlement replied by appointing a commission to inquire concerning the necessity of establishing a new bailiwick, and sent word to the monarch that the members would inform themselves on the subject; on the 17th, the Comte Saint-Paul appeared before them with an order directing the immediate registering of the edict, and with the information that he would assist at their deliberations in order to be able to inform his royal master concerning those of them who permitted themselves to differ from him in opinion. The decree was accordingly enregistered, and on the 30th of April the Chevalier Jean de la Barre presented himself before the Parlement with the title and quality of Bailli de Paris. This office, however, was suppressed in May, 1526, and its jurisdiction reunited to that of the _prévôt_ and of the Châtelet. In 1527, the Parlement was forbidden to interfere in any matters of State, or in anything excepting what concerned the administration of justice; it was permitted only to give advice regarding the perfecting of the laws. The two most important legal monuments of this reign were the edict of Crémieu, 1536, restricting the jurisdiction of the seigneurs, and that of Villers-Cotterets, 1539, designed to put an end to the encroachments of the tribunals of the bishops upon those of the king, and restricting their competence to spiritual or ecclesiastical causes only. Of the principal offices of the crown, four were held by men of legal lore, _hommes de robe longue_,--that of grand chancellor, who held the royal seal and without whose advice nothing important could be decided; that of the secretaries of State; that of the presidents, counsellors, avocats, and all those to whom the administration of civil and criminal justice was confided throughout the realm, and that of the treasurers, precepteurs and receivers who administered the royal revenues. The superior officers of justice and finance enjoyed privileges of nobility which, while still confining them to their rank in society, exempted them from various imposts and charges.

[Illustration: MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, ON THE QUAI D'ORSAY.]

Henri II was obliged, after the loss of the battle of Saint-Quentin, in August, 1557, to convene an assembly of notables, in which the members of the Parlement sat apart, like a fourth order in the State, below the nobles but above the _tiers état_. There were still survivals of the feudal epoch in the administration,--the Connétable was invested with authority over the army and the Grand Admiral over the fleet, but the era of _ministries_ was beginning. "The _clercs du secret_, become _sécretaires d'État_ (in 1547), had in charge the correspondence of the king on all public affairs. An ordinance of Henri II, in 1547, fixed their number at four, each of them corresponding with a quarter of the provinces of the kingdom and a quarter of the foreign countries. The special attributions are of a later date; thus, all the affairs of the _maison du roi_ and, later, of ecclesiastical affairs, were assigned to one of them. The other three were: in 1619 and in 1636, war; in 1626, foreign affairs; under Louis XIV, the marine; which did not prevent them from apportioning France geographically among themselves for those affairs which remained common to them all. The Chancelier was chief of the department of justice, and the Surintendant, of that of finances. The police, that great arm of monarchical times, was commencing."

The Parlement of Paris, however, cannot, by any means, be presented always as maintaining a more or less courageous stand for justice and right. In the massacre of the Saint Bartholomew, for example, it was a zealous coadjutor. The officers of the municipalité had prepared for this great measure, the _prévôt_ of the merchants, summoned to the Louvre, received from Charles IX orders to close all the gates of the city and to have in readiness the captains, lieutenants, and bourgeois in whom he had confidence. He promised "to put so many hands at the mischief that it should be remembered." Rewards were given officially to the archers who had aided in the massacre, to the ferrymen who had prevented the Huguenots from crossing the river, to the grave-diggers of Saint-Cloud, of Auteuil, and of Chaillot for having interred in a week eleven hundred corpses. A municipal medal was struck in _mémoire du jour de Saint Barthélemy_. The president of the Parlement, Christophe de Thou, pronounced an eulogy on the prudence of the king which had saved the nation from the misfortune of seeing the crown fall on the head of the Prince of Condé, and, perhaps, on that of Admiral Coligny himself, who had been ambitious enough to dream of seating himself on the throne of France after having driven from it the king and ruined the royal family. The Parlement, after deliberation, declared the admiral guilty of the crime of lèse-majesté, ordered that his body, or at least his effigy, should be dragged on a hurdle, attached to a gallows on the Place de Grève and then to the gibbet of Montfaucon, that his memory should be declared infamous and that his château of Châtillon-sur-Loing should be razed. The headless body of the admiral was at that moment swinging on the gibbet of Montfaucon.

In the religious wars that followed, the city paid dearly for this wholesale murder. The population, during the siege by the King of Navarre, was reduced to the last extremity of famine, even to cannibalism, and when that monarch had retired from before the walls, the horrors of anarchy and civil war succeeded. The Parlement, terrified by the execution of the first president, Brisson, refused to sit, and, when summoned to do so, replied to the agents of the _Seize_, the chiefs of the sixteen quarters of Paris who had formed a council to aid the work of the _Sainte Ligue_ of the Catholics, that they would return to their functions only to hang those who had participated in the official murder of the president. The Duc de Mayenne, summoned to the rescue of public order, carried out these hangings in a summary manner; and the first care of the Parlement, when a government was partially established again, was to disarm the factious bourgeois.

Henri IV, who disputes with Dagobert in the legends of the people the honor of being the most popular of the French kings, was not exclusively the jovial monarch he is generally portrayed. His answer to some remonstrances of the Parlement, which have been preserved, would have been worthy of François I or Louis XIV. "My will should serve as a reason. In an obedient State, reasons are never required of the prince. I am king: I speak to you as a king; I desire to be obeyed." His nomination of a governor of Paris was sufficiently scandalous: on the death of the Sieur d'O, who held that office, the king sent to the Hôtel de Ville to say that he would not appoint a successor, that he would honor his good city of Paris by assuming that charge himself; the Parlement, the next day, despatched several of its presidents and members to thank the king for this great honor, and the gracious monarch thereupon nominated as his lieutenant-general Antoine d'Estrées, the father of his famous mistress.

[Illustration: OFFICIAL RESIDENCE OF THE PRESIDENT. ENTRANCE TO THE PALAIS DE L'ÉLYSÉE FROM THE RUE DU FAUBOURG SAINT-HONORÉ.]

Nevertheless, so heavy and far-reaching a calamity was his assassination by the senseless fanatic Ravaillac, that forerunner of the socialists and anarchists of our own day, that a certain pitiless logic attends the frightful sentence which was pronounced upon the murderer, and which was carried out to the letter. Thirteen days after the fatal 14th of May, 1610, the Parlement pronounced the following judgment: "The Court, etc., after attentive consideration, declares that it has been that the Court has declared and declares the aforesaid Ravaillac attainted and convicted of the crime of lèse-majesté, divine and human, in the first degree, for the very wicked, very abominable, and very detestable parricide committed on the person of the late king Henri IV, of very good and very laudable memory; in reparation of which it has condemned and condemns him to make _amende honorable_ before the principal door of the Church of Paris, to which he shall be led and conducted in a cart; there, naked in his shirt, holding a burning torch of the weight of two pounds, to say and to declare that, wickedly and treacherously, he committed the very wicked, very abominable, and very detestable parricide, and killed the aforesaid seigneur king with two strokes of a knife in the body, of which he repents and for which he asks pardon of God, of the king, and of justice. From there, conducted to the Place de Grève, and, on a scaffold which shall be there erected, torn with pinchers on the nipples, arms, thighs, and fleshy part of the legs, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the aforesaid parricide, burnt and consumed with fire of sulphur, and on the places where he shall have been torn with pinchers shall be poured melted lead, boiling oil, wax, and sulphur melted together. This having been done, his body torn and dismembered by four horses, his members and his body consumed by fire, reduced to ashes, scattered on the wind; has declared and declares all his property confiscated to the king, orders that the house in which he was born shall be demolished; the individual to whom it belongs previously indemnified, no building to be ever afterward erected on the site thereof, and that within fifteen days after the publication of the present decree to the sound of trumpet and by public crier in the city of Angoulesme his father and his mother shall quit the kingdom, being forbidden to ever return therein under penalty of being hanged and strangled without any form or process of law whatever. We forbid his brothers and sisters, uncles, and others to bear hereafter the name of Ravaillac, and we enjoin them to change it under the same penalties; and to the substitute of the procureur-général du roi to cause to be published and to execute the present decree, under penalty of felony; and before the execution of the said Ravaillac ordains that he shall be again put to the question for the revelation of the names of his accomplices."

He was put to the question of "the boot" very thoroughly, but refused to the last to admit that he had any accomplices; the prayers of the two doctors of the Sorbonne who assisted at his execution were drowned by the clamors of the crowd protesting that no offices of the Church should attend the passing of the _méchant damné_, and the people themselves aided the horses to tear him asunder.

Marie de Médicis, the second wife of Henri IV, after ten years of entreaty, had succeeded in inducing the king to permit her to be crowned as Queen of France on the day preceding his death; within two hours after that event, she and the Duc d'Epernon had taken all the necessary steps to secure the decree of the Parlement declaring her regent. The judicious administrative measures of the Béarnais were to be reversed, the reign of Italian favorites was to begin, events were to be subordinated to persons, "as is nearly always the case when queens are kings." Nevertheless, the Parlement remembered, when it was too late, that she had recognized its right to dispose of the sovereign power.

The last reunion of the _États Généraux_ before the famous one of 1789 was held in 1614, and was marked by the usual dissensions among the three orders. The nobles complained to the king of the insolence of the _tiers état_ in asserting themselves to be the younger brothers of the same great family; "there is between them and us the difference between master and valet." The clergy refused to assume any portion of the public burdens; "that would be to diminish the honor due to God." Consequently, the president of the upper bourgeoisie, the _prévôt_ of the merchants of Paris, Robert Miron, declared boldly to the king: "If your Majesty does not provide for the reforms which the nation demands, it is to be feared that despair will make the people aware of the fact that the soldier is only a peasant bearing arms; that when the vine-grower has taken up an arquebus, from the anvil which he was, he will become the hammer." Nothing was done; the king's great minister, Richelieu, was too much occupied with the direction of the foreign affairs of the nation to occupy himself with reforms at home.