Parlement - Political Role

Political Role

They had the duty, however, to record all royal edicts and laws. Some, especially the Parlement de Paris, gradually acquired the habit of refusing to register legislation with which they disagreed until the king held a lit de justice or sent a lettre de cachet to force them to act. Furthermore, the parlements could pass arrêts de réglement, which were laws that applied within their jurisdiction.

In the years immediately before the French Revolution, their extreme concern to preserve Ancien Régime institutions of bourgeois and noble privilege prevented France from carrying out miscellaneous reforms, especially in the area of taxation, even when those reforms had the support of absolute monarchs.

The beginning of the proposed changes in France began with the Protests of the Parlement of Paris addressed to Louis XVI in March 1776, in which the Second Estate, the nobility of France, resisted the beginning of certain reforms that would remove privileges from the Second Estate, notably their exemption from taxes. The objections made to the Parlement of Paris were in reaction to the essay, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses ("Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth") by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. The Second Estate reacted to the essay with anger and with desperation to convince the king that the nobility still served a very important role in France and still deserved the same privileges of tax exemption as well as for the preservation of the guilds and corporations put in place to restrict trade, both of which were eliminated in the reforms proposed by Turgot.

The core concerns of this parliamentary meeting were to address some of the suggested reforms proposed by Turgot, which included taxing the Second Estate depending on the amount of land that they owned; all taxes had been a duty of the Third Estate, or the common people of France.

The personal service of the clergy is to fulfill all the functions relating to education and religious observances and to contribute to the relief of the unfortunate through its alms. The noble dedicates his blood to the defense of the state and assists to sovereign with his counsel. The last class of the nation, which cannot render such distinguished service to the state, fulfills its obligation through taxes, industry, and physical labor.

The Second Estate (the nobility) of France consisted of approximately 1.5% of France's population, and was exempt from almost all taxes, including the Corvée Royale, which was a recent mandatory service in which the roads would be repaired and built by those subject to the corvée. In practice, anyone who paid a small fee could escape the corvee, so this burden of labor fell only to the poorest in France. The Second Estate was also exempt from the Gabelle, which was the unpopular tax on salt, and also the Taille, the oldest form of taxation in France, which was based upon how much land a person owned.

The Second Estate was going to have to pay the Taille, and all those who had to pay the Taille, by law, were also (theoretically) subject to the Corvee. The nobles saw this tax as especially humiliating and below them, as they took great pride in their titles and their lineage, many of whom had died in defense of France. They saw this elimination of tax privilege as the gateway for more attacks on their rights and urged the Louis XVI throughout the Protests of the Parlement of Paris not to enact the proposed reforms.

These exemptions, as well as the right to wear a sword and their coat of arms, encouraged the idea of a natural superiority over the commoners that was common through the Second Estate, and as long as any noble was in possession of a fiefdom, they could collect a tax on the Third Estate called Feudal Dues, which would allegedly be for the Third Estate's protection (this only applied to serfs and tenants of farmland owned by the nobility). Overall, the Second Estate had vast privileges that the Third Estate did not possess, which in effect protected the Second Estate's wealth and property, while hindering the Third Estate's ability to advance. The reforms proposed by Turgot and argued against in the Protests of the Parlement of Paris conflicted with the Second Estates’ interests to keep their hereditary privileges, and was the first step toward reform that seeped into the political arena. Ironically, Turgot's reforms were unpopular among the commoners as well, who mistakenly saw the parlements as their best defense against the power of the monarchy.

This behavior of the parlements is one of the reasons that since the French Revolution, French courts have been forbidden by Article 5 of the French civil code to create law and act as legislative bodies, their only mandate being to interpret the law. France, through the Napoleonic Code, was at the origin of the modern system of civil law in which precedents are not as powerful as in countries of common law. The origin of the weakness of the French court system, with no rule of precedent, no single supreme court and no constitutional review of statutes by courts, is usually traced to that hostility towards "government by judges".