The monarchy had tried on many occasions to reform the criminal system, but their intentions were always frustrated by the stubborn resistance of the Parlement. It was one of the most conservative bodies in all history. Every new law, and almost every other new development, was seen as an affront to its ancient rights and privileges. It is quite extraordinary the way it objected to everything: to the petite poste, by which private individuals delivered letters and packages; to the planting of potatoes, and even to the use of emetics. Above all, it opposed reform. In the eighteenth century, every right-thinking proposal for change made by a monarch foundered because of its opposition.
These abuses of power did nothing to harm its popularity. Neither the die-hard conservatives nor Voltaire, Diderot and the entire reformist camp of acerbic-minded philosophers ever attacked it. It never lost its popularity, because its members were eminent, belligerent and fearless, and were seen by the people as the representatives of the very idea of freedom.
Their ideal, since the start of the century, had been the British constitution, but by the time of Louis XVI their political theories had moved on. It was now accepted that every aspect of power, and all legal process, derived ultimately from the person of the King, but there was nonetheless a need for some sort of mediator between the monarch and his people to supervise the enactment of the laws he handed down: and that role fell to the Parlement.
In reality it had exercised this supervisory function for centuries, by virtue of the fact that its duty was to ‘register’ bills promulgated by the King — without such registration, bills could not become law. If the Parlement saw fit, it could block them. Naturally France was for this reason never an ‘absolute’ monarchy, since the King could not flatly impose his will against its members’ wishes. If the latter dragged their feet for too long and formally remonstrated with the King, he could call a lit de justice in his palace, at which he simply informed the relevant authorities that the bill was now in force. But this was very much a two-edged sword. It poisoned relations between the King and the Parlement, and with the passing of time the latter body became identified with protest, resisting everything, including the most welcome and necessary social reforms, since the very notion of ‘reform’ had come to be associated with ‘tyranny’.
It obstructed generally welcome measures because it felt that any increase in popular contentment resulting from initiatives handed down from above would at best treat the symptoms of the malaise rather than the malaise itself, or indeed, would exacerbate it by reinforcing the power of absolutism. And in these struggles the people, or at least the ‘Third Estate’ (the collective citizenry) stood not on the side of those reforms that would improve the lot of the people as a whole, but with the conservatives, the old reactionary Parlement, because they felt that freedom was more important than mere prosperity. Paradoxically enough, this conservatism did indeed represent a kind of freedom, as it had once before in the Roman Senate, against the ‘progressive’ dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
Under Louis XV the Parlement had waged war above all on the clergy. Its members mostly shared the mental outlook of the Jansenists. That grim tendency has very much the same sort of place in French history as Puritanism, the nonconformist movement, has in England, with its prohibition on worldly pomp and beauty in the church.
The Parlement’s long war against the clergy reveals the sociological roots of its animosity. As we have mentioned, by virtue of its upper-middle-class elements it represented the bourgeoisie as against the Church, the nobility and the Court. A century-and-a-half before the French Revolution, the same social stratum in England had fought in Cromwell’s revolution and then, at the end of the seventeenth century, in the ‘Glorious’ (and thoroughly bourgeois) Revolution, to create the British constitution. The citizenry no longer languished behind the nobility in terms of wealth and culture, and began to question why it was inappropriate for them to benefit from the laws and the higher life generally, as did the privileged few.
Such was the Parlement on whom the responsibility fell to decide Rohan’s case. Now we can understand why one of its most influential councillors, Fréteau de St Juste, rubbed his hands in glee when he heard that it was to come before it, and cried:
“What a stroke of luck! A swindling cardinal and the Queen embroiled in a fraud case! All that mud on the cross and the sceptre! What a triumph for the ideals of freedom! And how it will raise the importance of the Parlement!”
Now that we have introduced the Parlement, we must bring in the other side, the King. In all honesty we should have preferred to introduce him at the start, centre stage, along with the other dramatis personae. The only reason we did not was that the queue of people waiting to come on was rather lengthy, and we feared we might weary the reader who is interested in the ‘action’. But the fact that we were able to leave the King until now means that he is already established as a character. “The principal reason for the downfall of the French monarchy,” we read in Lavisse’s great Standard History of France, “was the failure of the King.”
Louis XVI was a very different person from the French Kings, the endless line of the Capet dynasty, who preceded and followed him. In some respects, both morally and as an individual, he was unlike any of them. The Kings of France owed their popularity to the fact that they shared the character traits of their people. For the most part they saw living as an art form: they loved women, food and drink; they relished brave, brief, triumphant adventures; they hated boredom, work and anything that went on too long, and they always wanted to be in the thick of things. That was true both of the grandest of them — Francis I and Henry IV — and of the gloomiest — Henry III, Louis XV and, after the Revolution, Charles X. But wise or cunning, they also produced kings worthy of the Age of Reason, such as Philippe-Auguste and, again after the Revolution, Louis XVIII. The most exceptional were both wise and chivalrous, like St Louis and Louis XIV. But our Louis was neither wise nor chivalrous. It was his brothers who inherited the royal qualities. The Comte de Provence was shrewd and cunning, while the Duc d’Artois had the adventurous traits. In his younger days it tormented the King that his brothers were so much more successful than he was, and when on one occasion a speaker praised his intellect, he ungraciously interrupted him:
“You are mistaken: I am not the clever one; that is my brother, the Comte de Provence.”
He possessed none of the characteristic traits of a French king. He was more like a German or some other northern prince. Which is not really all that surprising. The leading members of the French royal family had always found wives among the ruling houses of neighbouring countries, so there was far more foreign than French blood in his veins. His ancestor Louis XIV was married to Maria Theresa, the Infanta of Spain; his son, the ‘Great Dauphin’, to a Bavarian princess; his son, the Duc de Bourgogne, to the Princess of Savoy; his son, Louis XV, to the Polish Princess Maria Leszczynska, and his son, the Dauphin, to Louis XVI’s mother, the Saxon Princess Maria Josepha. So even if we consider only the interbreeding that had taken place since Louis XIV, Louis XVI had scarcely any French blood at all, not to mention the fact that Louis XIV’s mother had not been French, and so on and on. Viewed in this way, Louis XVI’s queen, the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette, comes across as much more typically French in her character; which again should hardly surprise us, since she was Habsburg only on her mother’s side. On her father’s she sprang from the effectively French house of Lotharingia, or Lorraine, so that there was considerably more Gallic blood in her than in that scion of the Bourbons, her husband.