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Concept
Parlement
Summary
Under the French Ancien Régime, a parlement (paʁləmɑ̃) was a provincial appellate court of the Kingdom of France. In 1789, France had 13 parlements, the oldest and most important of which was the Parlement of Paris. While both the modern French term parlement (for the legislature) and the English word parliament derive from this French term, the Ancien Régime parlements were not legislative bodies and the modern and ancient terminology are not interchangeable.
Parlements were judicial organizations consisting of a dozen or more appellate judges, or about 1,100 judges nationwide. They were the courts of final appeal of the judicial system, and typically wielded power over a wide range of subjects, particularly taxation. Laws and edicts issued by the Crown were not official in their respective jurisdictions until the parlements gave their assent by publishing them.
The members of the parlements were aristocrats, called nobles of the robe, who had bought or inherited their offices, and were independent of the King.
Sovereign councils (conseils souverains) with analogous attributes, more rarely called high councils (conseils supérieurs) or in one instance sovereign court (cour souveraine), were created in new territories (notably in New France). Some of these were eventually replaced by parlements (e.g. the Sovereign Council of Navarre and Béarn and the Sovereign Court of Lorraine and Barrois). As noted by James Stephen:
There was, however, no substantial difference between the various supreme provincial judicatures of France, except such as resulted from the inflexible varieties of their various local circumstances.
From 1770 to 1774 the Chancellor of France, Maupeou, tried to abolish the Parlement of Paris in order to strengthen the Crown. However, when King Louis XV died in 1774, the parlements were reinstated. The parlements spearheaded the aristocracy's resistance to the absolutism and centralization of the Crown, but they worked primarily for the benefit of their own class, the French nobility.
Official source
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