The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France

Whereas we tend to divide society into groups according to their place of residence, occupation or wealth, Frenchmen in the early sixteenth century used quite different criteria. They classified people, great and small, rich and poor, into one of three estates: clergy, nobility and third estate, which were regarded as divinely ordained and permanently fixed. Each estate had its distinctive function, life-style and privileges, which were acknowledged in both law and custom. Social peace rested on respect for this sacred hierarchy, yet the possibility was admitted that merit and/or wealth might enable an individual or family to pass from one estate into another.

Of the three estates, the most clearly defined was the clergy, whose members had to be ordained or at least to have taken minor orders. It had its own hierarchy and code of discipline. At the top were the archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors. Then came the canons of cathedrals and collegiate churches, and below them the great mass of parish priests, unbeneficed clergy, monks, friars and nuns. In terms of wealth the gulf between a prelate and a humble parish priest or curé was enormous. The bishop often disposed of large temporal revenues. Thus the bishop of Langres was also a duke, the seigneur of 100 villages and he owned seven châteaux. Seigneuries were also held by cathedral chapters and collegiate churches. By contrast, the humble curé was often desperately poor. The dîme or tithe paid to him by his parishioners was so meagre that he was often obliged to run a small business on the side or to serve as the seigneur’s agent in order to make ends meet. Theoretically, under the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), bishops and abbots were elected by their chapters, but in practice the church had difficulty resisting the demands of royal patronage. When the crown did not directly dispose of major benefices, elections were often disputed and the crown had to act as arbiter. Many lesser benefices were in the gift of a patron, ecclesiastical or lay. The secular clergy may have numbered 100,000, made up of about 100 bishops, many suffragan bishops and canons, about 30,000 parish priests and a huge crowd of unbeneficed clergy. The regular clergy cannot be quantified but was obviously substantial: there were 600 Benedictine abbeys, 400 mendicant houses, more than 100 commanderies of St John and 60 charterhouses.

The second estate, or nobility, was widely envied for its prestige and life-style. The noble condition was identified with perfection, while juridically and politically it implied a special status. Heredity was essential to the concept: a nobleman was born rather than made. Many nobles flaunted pedigrees going back to ‘times immemorial’. Yet it was also possible for a nobleman to be created. The king could ennoble someone who had served him well. At first this was an exceptional favour, but in the fifteenth century the holders of certain offices (for instance royal notaries and secretaries) were automatically ennobled and the practice spread to other offices. This development was accompanied by the widespread acquisition of seigneuries by office-holders. Some nobles simply usurped their status by ‘living nobly’ (i.e. avoiding any business activity), holding a public office, fighting for the king, owning a fief or seigneurie and living in a house large enough to be a manor. But a false nobleman had to ensure that his name was dropped from the tax rolls over a long period so that, if his claim to tax exemption was challenged, he could summon witnesses who would testify that his family had lived nobly for as long as anyone could remember. It is impossible to quantify the nobility exactly, but it may have numbered between 120,000 and 200,000.

The bulk of France’s population consisted of the third estate, made up of people of widely different fortunes and occupations. Seyssel in his La Monarchie de France (1519) made a useful distinction between middling people (peuple moyen) and the lesser folk (peuple menu). The former, he explained, were merchants and officers of finance and justice. The peuple menu were people principally engaged in ‘the cultivation of the land, the mechanical arts and other inferior crafts’. Seyssel believed that such people should not be ‘in too great liberty or immeasurably rich and especially not generally trained in the use of arms’, otherwise they might be tempted to rise against their betters. The third estate had its own hierarchy defined by custom and expressed in certain honorific titles, such as noble homme or honorable homme, in notarial documents, but most Frenchmen did not qualify for such titles. As one historian has written: ‘four-fifths of Francis I’s subjects fell into anonymity’.

The government of France

At a meeting of the Estates-General in 1484 Philippe Pot, representing the Burgundian nobility, described kingship as ‘the dignity, not the property, of the prince’. The crown, according to the jurists, was handed down to the nearest male kinsman of the deceased monarch. The king was not free to give it away or to bequeath it to anyone; he was only the temporary holder of a public office. Yet the concept of the king as head of the state already existed. The word ‘state’ did not come into current usage till the mid-sixteenth century, but the idea existed under the name of ‘commonwealth’ (chose publique) or ‘republic’. Although official documents distinguished between the king and the state, the interests of both were closely identified. Thus in 1517, Chancellor Duprat said: ‘The kingdom’s interest is the king’s interest, and the king’s interest is the kingdom’s interest. For it is a mystical body of which the king is the head.’ As head of state, the king was not bound to assume the obligations entered upon by his predecessors; the debts of a king could be legitimately repudiated by his successor. A corporation or individual holding privileges from the crown needed to have them confirmed at the start of a new reign. The same rule applied to office-holders.

‘The king never dies’. This adage embodied an important principle of French constitutional law: the king succeeded from the instant of his predecessor’s death. No interregnum, however brief, was deemed possible. Nor could a lawful king be denied the full exercise of his authority for reasons of age or health. If he were a minor or unfit to rule for some other reason, his authority was exercised in his name by his council, although in practice a regent was appointed. Contemporary opinion favoured the king’s nearest adult male kinsman for this role, but in the sixteenth century it was repeatedly filled by a woman: Louise of Savoy under Francis I and Catherine de’ Medici under Charles IX.

In the sixteenth century the coronation or sacre at Reims was no longer regarded as essential to the exercise of kingship, yet it remained important as a symbol of the supernatural powers of kingship and of the close alliance between church and state. The coronation service began with the oath. Standing over the Gospels, the king promised to promote peace in Christendom, to protect Christians against injury, to dispense justice fairly and mercifully, and to expel heretics from his dominions. This was followed by the anointing, the most important part of the ceremony. Thrusting his hand through slits in the king’s garment, the archbishop of Reims anointed his body with a chrism allegedly handed down from heaven by a dove at the baptism of King Clovis in 496 and used ever since to consecrate France’s kings. The anointing set the king apart from other men, giving him a quasi-sacerdotal character. Although no French king ever claimed the right to celebrate mass, he did take communion in both kinds, a privilege enjoyed only by priests.

By virtue of his anointing the king of France, who bore the title of ‘Most Christian King’, was deemed to possess thaumaturgical powers, that is to say powers of healing the sick. The only other Christian ruler to claim this power was the king of England. In time, it became restricted to the curing of scrofula, or tuberculosis of the lymph nodes on the side of the neck, a disease more repulsive than dangerous and subject to periods of remission. The king touched the victim’s sores and tumours with his bare hands, and, making the sign of the cross, said: ‘The king touches you and God cures you.’ Each victim was then given two small silver coins.

France at the end of the Middle Ages was still a largely feudal country: many towns, corporations and individuals enjoyed a degree of autonomy, regarding themselves as parties to a contract in which mutual obligations were laid down and complete submission to the king was ruled out. But a school of thought existed which advocated royal absolutism. Its chief exponents were the royal jurists, who found in Roman law the idea of absolute power vested in one man and of subjects equally subservient to him. The doctrine was backed up by the Christian concept of the king as God’s vicegerent on earth. It was claimed that he could legislate, dispense justice, revoke all lawsuits to his own court, levy taxes and create offices. He could also annul any concession detracting from his authority, and local privileges could survive only if he chose to renew them at his accession. The authority of Cicero was invoked to show that the king was entitled to sacrifice private interest to the public good.

Roman legal concepts, as elaborated by medieval commentators, were accepted in sixteenth-century France. Jurists identified the king with the Roman princeps and declared him to be emperor within his own kingdom. This simply meant that he was independent of both pope and Holy Roman Emperor in temporal matters. The idea of his absolute authority was universally accepted in French law, but he was not expected to rule absolutely without his subjects’ consent as expressed through certain institutions, notably the Parlement of Paris, which was commonly regarded as the modern equivalent of the ancient Roman Senate.

The best-known statement of the constitutionalism that prevailed in sixteenth-century France was La Monarchie de France by Claude de Seyssel, who became bishop of Marseille after long years of service to the crown as a councillor, administrator and diplomat. Like Machiavelli he was a realist, who viewed politics as a science distinct from morality and religion. Being an Aristotelian, he valued moderation in a constitution, and believed that the French kings owed their greatness to their voluntary acceptance of three constraints (freins) – religion, justice and la police – on their power. Writing of justice, Seyssel affirms that it is ‘better authorized in France than in any other country we know in all the world. This is especially owing to the parlements, which have been instituted to put a bridle on the absolute power that our kings would have wished to use.’

However absolute, the monarch needed an administrative machinery at the centre of the kingdom and in the localities, to carry out his policies. Its chief component was the king’s council, which in 1500 was still evolving. In theory its members comprised the princes of the blood, the peers of the realm and the great officers of state, but in practice admission was by royal invitation. Before 1526 the council was a large body. Between August 1484 and January 1485 there were 120 councillors, but only a small proportion of them attended with any degree of frequency. It is likely that a core of working councillors existed within the larger body. In 1502 this core consisted of only four members, of whom three belonged to the house of Amboise. Financial business was apparently dealt with separately by experts, who nevertheless continued to attend the council when non-financial matters were being discussed, The council might also divide for administrative convenience. Thus in 1494 part of the council followed Charles VIII to Italy while the rest stayed in Moulins with Pierre de Bourbon. The situation has been described as ‘one of relative informality and of response to immediate royal needs. Some councillors were specialists and the disposition of personnel in terms of location was fluid, but these were not structural arrangements within the council as an institution.’

There were many routes to membership of the council: birth, skill in law, diplomacy or administration, regional importance, ecclesiastical dignity and the influence of patrons and relatives. Councillors served at the king’s pleasure, not for life, and membership was not hereditary. Some councillors served under all three kings from 1483 to 1526, but membership was usually for shorter periods. The council was not only a point of contact between the crown, the nobility and local communities; it was also a tool which the crown used to secure the obedience of the governing classes and to arbitrate between them.

The body responsible for turning the council’s decisions into laws was the chancery, headed by the Chancellor of France. He was invariably an eminent jurist, who had served his apprenticeship in a parlement, and sometimes he was also a high-ranking churchman. His powers and duties ranged more widely than those of any other great officer of the crown. In effect, he was a kind of prime minister. As head of the royal chancery, he kept the Great seal and other seals of state. All documents emanating from the king and his council were drawn up in the chancery and sealed in the chancellor’s presence. He had to ensure that the text of each document matched the orders received, and could refuse to seal any that seemed incorrect. This power, moreover, extended to all the other chanceries in the kingdom, including those of the ‘sovereign courts’. The chancellor’s authority was, therefore, nation-wide. His influence on legislation was also crucial. He exercised it not only as a councillor but also by drafting royal edicts himself. As head of the judicial administration, he was by right entitled to preside over any sovereign court, including the parlement. He appointed judges and received their oaths of office unless they had already sworn them before the king. The chancellor attended the king’s council regularly and took the chair in the king’s absence. He helped to determine policies and explained them, if necessary, to the parlement. Now and again he served on major diplomatic missions. He was appointed for life by the king, but, if necessary, his functions could be performed by a Keeper of the Seals, who did not have his prestige or influence.

The chancery was the nearest equivalent to a modern ministry. In 1500 it had a staff of 120 which grew even larger during the sixteenth century. Unlike the ‘sovereign courts’, it continued to follow the king on his travels. Originally, all the chancery clerks drew up documents to be sealed by the great seal, but during the Middle Ages they began to specialize: the clercs du secret drafted documents emanating directly from the king; in time they became known as secretaries. Under an ordinance of 1482 notaries of the chancery were effectively granted a monopoly of drawing up and signing all royal acts, chancery letters, conciliar decisions and decrees of the ‘sovereign courts’. They were automatically ennobled and enjoyed the privilege of committimus as well as numerous tax exemptions. The quantity of documents processed by them was enormous.

Closely associated with the chancellor were the masters of requests (maîtres des requêtes de l’hôtel). There were eight of them about 1500, but their number increased rapidly thereafter. Under an edict of 1493 they were authorized to preside at the courts of the bailliages and sénéchaussées, to receive complaints against local officials and to correct abuses. They could preside at the Grand conseil and sit in the parlement, where they ranked immediately below the presidents. The masters of requests were often given temporary commissions in financial, diplomatic and judicial affairs. They were the ancestors of the intendants, who became the principal agents of royal centralization in the seventeenth century.

The Great Council (Grand conseil) was an exclusively judicial body which had taken over part of the work formerly exercised by the king’s council: it investigated complaints against royal officials, intervened in conflicts of jurisdiction between other courts and could revoke enactments that the parlement had registered. It also acted as a court of appeal and of first instance for a wide range of lawsuits. Though the Great Council’s procedure was fairly simple and relatively cheap, it had one serious disadvantage for suitors: like the king’s council, it continued to follow the king on his travels through the kingdom. It carried its records around, and suitors had to change their lawyers as it moved from place to place. Because of its closeness to the king’s person, the Great Council was more susceptible to his influence than was the parlement, and he often used it to bend the law to his interest.

The king of France was first and foremost a judge, and the earliest form of royal intervention at the local level had been the establishment of officials charged with exercising justice in his name. At the bottom of the hierarchy, but above the judges of the feudal courts, were magistrates, called prévôts, viguiers or vicomtes, whose powers were limited to the simplest cases. The basic unit of local government was the bailliage (sometimes called sénéchaussée). The kingdom comprised about 100 such units, which could vary enormously in size. By the sixteenth century, the official in charge of the bailliage, the bailli (or sénéchal), had purely honorific or military duties (for example, he summoned the feudal levy, called the ban et arrière-ban), but the tribunal of the bailliage, under the bailli’s deputy or lieutenant and his staff, was a hive of activity, bustling with barristers, solicitors, sergeants and ushers. The bailliage judged on appeal cases sent up from inferior courts and in first instance cases concerning privileged persons or cas royaux. These were crimes committed against the king’s person, rights and demesne, ranging from treason and lèse-majesté to rape and high-way robbery. In addition to their judicial competence, the bailliages had important administrative powers: they published royal statutes and issued decrees of their own.

Above the bailliages were the parlements of which there were seven in 1500: Paris, Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen and Aix-en-Provence. The oldest and most prestigious was the Parlement of Paris which had ‘gone out of court’ in the thirteenth century and was now permanently based in Paris in the old royal palace on the Ile de la Cité. Though separate from the king’s council, the parlement was still considered to be part of it: thus peers of the realm were entitled to sit in it and when the king came to the parlement, accompanied by his ministers and advisers to hold a lit de justice, the old Curia regis was in effect reconstituted for the occasion. The parlement’s view of royal absolutism differed from the king’s: while admitting that authority resided in the king’s person, it did not believe that he could treat the kingdom as he liked. He was its administrator, not its owner, and was bound to observe the so-called ‘fundamental laws’ governing the succession to the throne and preservation of the royal demesne. The parlement’s view implied a distinction between the sovereign as an ideal and the fallible creature who occupied the throne. It saw its own function as that of protecting the interests of the ideal sovereign from the errors that the human king might commit. The parlement’s magistrates liked to compare themselves to the senators of ancient Rome, an analogy resented by the king. In 1500 the Parlement of Paris consisted of five chambers: the Grand’ chambre, two Chambres des enquêtes, the Chambre des requêtes and the Tournelle criminelle, with a combined personnel of about sixty lay and clerical councillors.

Originally, the parlement’s ressort or area of jurisdiction had been the whole kingdom, but as this had been enlarged a number of provincial parlements had been created. Yet the Parlement of Paris retained control of two-thirds of the kingdom. It was responsible for the whole of France, excluding Normandy, as far south as the Lyonnais and Upper Auvergne. Within this area it judged a wide variety of cases in first instance and on appeal. But it was not just a court of law: it regulated such matters as public hygiene or the upkeep of roads, bridges and quays; it ensured that Paris received enough grain and fuel, controlled the quality, weight and price of bread, fixed wages and hours of work, punished shoddy workmanship, and intervened in academic matters. As printing came into its own, the parlement began to control the book trade. Not even the church escaped its vigilance. No papal bull could be applied to France if it had not been registered by the parlement. The court also kept an eye on the conduct of royal officials in the provinces.

Finally, the parlement played a significant role in politics by ratifying royal legislation. If it found an enactment satisfactory, this was registered and published forthwith; if not, the parlement submitted remonstrances (remontrances) to the king, either verbally or in writing, whereupon he would either modify the enactment or issue a lettre de jussion ordering the court to register the act as it stood without delay. Such a move might lead to more remonstrances and more lettres de jussion. In the end, if the parlement remained obdurate, the king would hold a lit de justice, that is to say, he would resume the authority he had delegated to the parlement by coming to the court in person and presiding over the registration of the controversial measure himself. Only the Grand’ chambre was entitled to register royal enactments or issue decrees (arrêts). Its official head was the chancellor of France, but its effective head was the First President (Premier président) of the parlement, who was assisted by three other presidents and about thirty lay and clerical councillors.

The provincial parlements developed out of the courts that had existed in the great fiefs before their absorption into the kingdom. Modelled on the Paris parlement, they exercised a similar jurisdiction within their respective areas. All claimed equality of authority and jurisdiction with the Parlement of Paris, but the latter had privileges that made it unique. Each parlement was sovereign within its own area in respect of registering royal enactments: thus a law registered by the Parlement of Paris could not be applied in Languedoc unless it had been registered by the Parlement of Toulouse.

A major figure in French local government around 1500 was the provincial governor. There were eleven governorships (gouvernements) corresponding roughly with the kingdom’s border provinces. The governors were normally recruited from princes of the blood and high nobility. Although closely identified with the person and authority of the monarch, the governor was only a commissioner who could be revoked at the king’s will. His powers, as laid out in his commission or letters of provision, were seldom clearly defined. While it was customary for his military responsibilities, such as the securing of fortresses and the supplying or disciplining of troops, to be stressed, there was also often a clause open to wide interpretation. Thus in 1515, Odet de Foix, governor of Guyenne, was instructed ‘generally to do … all that we would see and recognize as necessary for the good of ourselves and our affairs …’ which amounted to a general delegation of royal authority. But the commissions lacked uniformity: the king, it seems, was more concerned with adapting to local circumstances than establishing functional harmony among his senior provincial representatives. A governor seldom resided in his province as he was often at court or fighting for the king. The exercise of his local duties was therefore delegated to a lieutenant, who was usually a lesser nobleman or prelate. But a governor could still do much for his province, even at a distance. He could, for example, ensure that its grievances received the attention of the king’s council.