Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2

One of the grandest institutions of ancient France was the Parlement de Paris, and its history and that of the prévôts would constitute a history of the capital, while that of the fitful and accidental convocations of the États Généraux would in nowise illustrate that of the nation. Our facilities for acquiring a knowledge of the functions and methods of procedure of the Parlement have been greatly increased by the numerous critical historical works which have appeared within the last few years, amongst which that of M. Felix Aubert, which covers the long period between its origin, in 1250, and the reign of François I, when it was "the instrument par excellence of the national unity and pacification," is, perhaps, the most valuable. The establishment of the magistrature prévôtale, replacing that of the Vicomte de Paris, has been credited to Hugues Capet, but the first official record appears to be a charter given in favor of the monks of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, dated in the last year of the reign of Henri I, 1060, and bearing the signature of Étienne, prévôt de Paris. This officer was a lieutenant of the king, designated by him to administer justice in his name; he presided over the tribunal of the Châtelet, and commanded the guet, or watch, and the noblesse in the arrière-ban of the general muster for war. In Paris, this office required the command of important funds, and several citizens sometimes combined to give guarantees for the prévôt. Nevertheless, the latter was frequently found unworthy of this trust, and the Étienne of 1060 appears in the chronicles as advising the young king, Philippe I, to plunder the treasury of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with the view of securing for himself the famous cross of gold brought from Spain by Childebert. This nefarious scheme was undertaken, but at the moment when the burglarious prévôt put out his hand to seize the cross, he was suddenly stricken with blindness.

Of a very different quality was the Étienne Boileau, selected by Saint-Louis to fill this important post, and who, according to Joinville, "executed such good and straight justice," that "no malefactor, thief, or murderer dared to remain in Paris but he was immediately hanged and exterminated; neither family nor gold nor silver could save him." The king was so well satisfied with his prévôt that he caused him to be seated by his side when he presided at the Châtelet, and, in order to preserve to this office, after Boileau, the lustre which he had conferred upon it, he separated from it the receipt of the funds of the royal domains, and created for the latter a receiver, a guardian of the seals, and sixty notaries who exercised their functions under the authority of the prévôt, who, subsequently, was entitled garde de la prévôt de Paris. The guet royal was established, and the prévôt drew up the ancient regulations of the hundred trades or handicrafts which existed in the capital, "in order to establish peace and order in industry as he had established it in the nation." These trades were divided into various great corporations. Under this wise king, also, the Hanse, or confraternity, of the marchandise de l'eau became definitely the municipalité parisienne; for about a century the members of this confraternity had been called échevins jures, and their chief was known as the prévôt des marchands de l'eau, or prévôt de confrérie de l'eau. The numerous privileges which this corporation enjoyed passed in course of time to the prévôt des marchands, who acquired, successively, the administration of the rentes or funds drawn from the Hôtel de Ville, the regulation of public ceremonies, the care and construction of the public monuments, the opening of new streets, etc. The ancient privileges of the Hanse had previously been confirmed at various times, amongst others, by Louis VII.

Saint-Louis was but a boy of eleven when he succeeded to the throne on the death of his father, and a coalition of the great nobles was immediately formed to take advantage of his minority; but the wisdom, prudence, and piety of his mother, Blanche of Castile, not only preserved the crown for him until he came of age, but also stood him in great service during the years of his reign, especially in those in which he was absent from the kingdom on his ill-starred crusades. One of her most beneficent deeds has been immortalized by the modern painter, Luc-Olivier-Merson, in a noble mural painting,--the delivery of the prisoners held in bondage by the chapitre de Paris (Notre-Dame), several inhabitants of Châtenay who had incurred the displeasure of the ecclesiastical authorities, and who were so maltreated in their dungeons that the lives of several of them were despaired of. The queen at first sent a civil request to the chapter to release the captives under bonds, but the churchmen returned an uncivil refusal and redoubled their severities; whereupon she proceeded in person to the prison with her son, struck the doors with her bâton, her guards immediately broke them down, and the liberated serfs, men, women, and children, flocked out tumultuously to thank their deliverers on their knees. The canons protested furiously, but the discreet regent, knowing their sensitive point, allowed them to rage openly and contented herself with seizing their temporal revenues. This immediately brought them to terms; in the smoothest of phrases they besought an accommodation, and speedily agreed to set at liberty, in consideration of a certain sum, all those whom they had unjustly incarcerated.

It would scarcely have been thought that this gracious sovereign lady, one of the noblest figures among the women of France, could have been made the object of malicious slander; but one of her latest biographers, M. Élie Berger, thinks it worth while to defend her seriously against the "legend born of jealousy and impotence" of having been the mistress of the Cardinal de Saint-Ange and of the Comte Thibaut de Champagne. His defence, apart from the inherent improbability of the story, seems to be quite convincing.

The centre of authority, for both the nation and the capital, was naturally the king, though, as we have seen, his power was often furiously contested and at times very precarious. Under the Mérovingians, the crown was both elective and hereditary, that is to say, the brother of the deceased monarch was frequently chosen in the place of his eldest son, too young to bear worthily the sword and the sceptre. The royal authority was practically unlimited, the king decreed constitution and laws, made war, and signed treaties of peace; he wore the Roman costume, spoke and wrote in Latin, sate, like the Emperor, in the prætorium to judge, and was given the titles of Dominus, of Excellency, and of Majesty. For the personal service of the king, and for the public service, there were a great number of officers,--the major domus or mayor of the palace, who eventually pushed the monarch off the throne and mounted it himself; the marshal, the treasurer, the cup-bearer, the chamberlain, and a multitude of inferior officers. The political officers were more particularly the Comte du Palais, who sate in the king's tribunal, and the Réferéndaire, a sort of chancellor, who kept the royal signet-ring and sealed the royal decrees. The court, or palatium, was crowded with important personages, counts, dukes, and bishops, any of whom might be called to the king's council or to sit in his tribunal. In the provinces, the royal authority was represented in the comtés, which corresponded to the civitates of the Romans, by the comtes, who were at once judges, generals, and financial administrators, and the ducs whose administrative province included several comtés. The bishops already enjoyed very considerable political power, and the rôle of the king in their election, by the people and the clerks of their diocese, was confined to confirmation,--a limitation which they very frequently disregarded.

In the edict, or perpetual constitution, drawn up by the assembly of seventy-nine bishops and the leudes or great vassals of the three kingdoms, held at Paris in 615, the interference of the king in the election of the bishops was expressly forbidden, and his authority was in many other matters seriously impaired in favor of the double aristocracy, ecclesiastical and military, which was strengthening itself. With the unworthy sons of the "good king Dagobert" this authority gradually disappeared entirely under the rising power of the mayors of the palace, who succeeded in making their office hereditary under an Austrasian family, that of the Carlovingians, already powerful in their own right.

Charlemagne's court was constituted much in the same manner as that of the Mérovingians: his royal officers included bishops, comtes, ducs, missi dominici, any of whom were eligible for the council that could at need be transformed into a tribunal to judge the causes of the Francs. The efforts of this monarch to repress the persistent progress of the aristocracy were more intelligent and successful than those of his successors, but the general movement of society was in their favor. Charles le Chauve, desirous of obtaining the imperial crown, which was without an owner in 875, assembled his vassals at a diet at Kiersy-sur-Oise and there signed a capitulaire which gave to the sons of those of his comtes who followed him into Italy the right to succeed to their fathers' titles. This formal recognition of a practice already ancient deprived the king of the powers which he had once conferred.

From a painting by L. O. Merson.]

The Capétiens were also elected to the throne, but the Roman tradition, preserved by the Church, recognized in their accession to power "a decree of Providence," and the sovereign was recognized in the feudal suzerain, "even when he was not obeyed." The great royal officers, the Ministerium regale, included the Chancelier, who signed the state papers; the Sénéchal, a species of mayor of the palace, of which he had charge of the service; the Connétable, chief of the royal stables and, later, head of the military forces; the Chambrier, keeper of the treasury and the archives; the Bouteillier, who administered the vineyards and the revenues of the royal domains. All these high offices were made the objects of persistent attempts on the part of the holders to retain them as hereditary privileges. In the eleventh, as in the sixth century, we find three classes of society in Gaul, the Gallo-Romans,--the barbarians,--the clercs,--the Church being replaced by the seigneurs,--and the serfs, each with its own organization and manners and customs and, in a certain degree, its peculiar language and literature. The first two were rich, active, and powerful; the last, poor and oppressed. There were three species of jurisdiction exercised by the seigneurs, high, medium, and lower, though some of them had the right only to the last two; these distinctions were frequently regulated by the quality of the accused, and were definitely determined only in succeeding centuries. The right to administer high justice carried with it that of executing death-sentences, and the pillory and the gibbet, erected near the château, were the visible evidences of this power. The bishops and the abbots had the same rights as the seigneurs, even to the extent of donning armor and combating in person if they so willed.