Campbell P. Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720-1745

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remonstrances of 3 September 1731 makes this difference of approach explicit:

‘H.M. is fully aware of the danger of censures and threats of excommunication

which could arise over these matters of overlapping jurisdictions, and in all

cases in which the rights of the temporal power could be either directly or

indirectly affected. The King will not permit such encroachments’.

The crisis of 1730–2 appears, then, to have been partly the product of the

radically different positions of the ministry and the parlement. Each was acting in its

own traditional way for traditional reasons, it seems, and each side argued that it

was defending the monarchy. However, whereas the ministry could understand the

magistrates’ point of view, the latter, to judge from the opinions expressed in their

speeches and formal complaints, utterly failed at all times to appreciate the politique

view of the ministry. The stance taken by the parlementaires appears to show that

they were acting strictly as judges. Their real concern was not with the effects of

policy upon the constitutional position of the monarch vis-à-vis the Pope but with

the defence of their own jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters. The parlement was a

corporate body which, to defend its privileges against the church and royal council,

appealed to broad constitutional arguments.

Given the direction of royal policy and the increasing number of appeals comme

d’abus which the courts tended to uphold, some sort of dispute between the ministry

and the parlement was therefore inevitable. Even so, many other aspects of the crisis

remain unexplained. There is no full explanation of why the confrontation occurred

in 1730 and why it took the form that it did. It would seem that we have so far only

a partial explanation for the role of the parlement, and not a sufficiently wide one. It

is in re-examining this problem that most new light can be thrown on the crisis. The

examination of the formal pronouncements of the parlement and the speeches of

the magistrates, without looking at the problem in different ways, certainly tends to

confirm the view that legality and the protection of the French constitution were the

guiding lights in the courts. From this it appears almost ineluctable that the

parlement was very much on the defensive in the dispute—it would seem almost as

if it were defending the Jansenists simply because they were an arbitrarily oppressed

minority.

In this, appearances are deceptive. To accept that ‘official’ or ‘legal’ explanation

would involve ignoring a fundamental problem arising in the study of institutions.

The problem is a familiar one in French history: the question is, does an analysis of

the formal legal records of an institution supply sufficient information to enable the

historian to be satisfied that an interpretation is correct? After all, there is a whole

aspect to consider which is hardly ever explicable with such documents: the

interplay of politics and human relationships within the institution. Looking at the

legal pronouncements of the parlement one would almost inevitably conclude that

the first concern of the parlementaires was to do their duty as they conceived it—but

the professional judges were hardly likely to admit anything else. (To coin a phrase,

They would say that, wouldn’t they’.) Even if there were other covert

considerations at work, whatever these motives might have been, they were bound

to be expressed in the customary legal language, if not entirely obscured. On the

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other hand, any interpretation in less theoretical terms is frequently hard to prove

conclusively because the evidence which can be gleaned is too often circumstantial

and indirect. Nevertheless, in this particular case, the use of ministerial records has

already permitted us to identify the corporate concerns of the institution which were

obscured by its own pronouncements. By using the records of speeches, together

with what can be discovered about the structure of the parlement and of the

personalities involved, it is possible to come to terms with the human element and

to answer some fresh questions about the role of the parlementaires. Owing to the

fortunate survival of private and secret documents, immensely important new

evidence can be brought forward that reveals a whole world of parlementary

politics never before suspected in this period.

We have seen in an earlier chapter how a parti janséniste came into existence in the

later 1720s, composed of lawyers and magistrates in the parlement, with

connections to the appellant bishops and the Figurist clergy in Paris. This parti, in

order to defend itself against the repressive measures taken by the bishops and the

ministry, determined to appeal to the courts using the procedure of the appeal comme

d’abus. The parti of about twenty lawyers and fourteen or so magistrates in the

parlement was a small minority of the barristers and judges, but their close

organisation and clever strategy more than made up for this disadvantage. Possibly

all fourteen of the magistrates, but certainly an inner group of them, were acting in

concert. The various accounts of the proceedings in the courts provide evidence of

this, as some examples will show. First, the speeches made suggest that a group was

skilfully taking advantage of the opportunities offered by general assemblies. On 24

May 1730, Fornier de Montagny called for a resolution asking the First President to

request that the ministry allow liberty of speech to the parlement. On 23 June,

Clément took up the same line, to be followed by Davy de La Fautrière on 4

August. On 16 December 1730, in the debate on evocations, Robert and Pucelle

called for remonstrances, and on 19 January 1731, it was they who demanded

iterative remonstrances, and they were supported by Fornier de Montagny and

Titon. On 12 May 1732, over the issue of the royal refusal to allow-the parlement to

take up the case of the curés who refused to publish Vintimille’s Instruction, Pucelle

and Titon made outspoken protests, Robert and Thomé contributed and Dupré

suggested a judicial strike. Throughout the period from 1730 until 1743 all the most

extreme courses of action were proposed by probable Jansenists. Counsellors

Pucelle, Titon and Clément specialised in the denunciation of constitutionnaire

writings and the introduction of appeals comme d’abus. On 11 February 1735,

Clément denounced a pastoral instruction by the archbishop of Cambrai, and this

was followed up on the eighteenth with strong speeches by Clément, Davy de La

Fautrière, Titon, Thomé and Pucelle. These activities were, it may be contended,

designed to further a particular and well-devised strategy.

An affair would begin with the denunciation of some deed by a constitutionnaire

against a Jansenist or an episcopal writing which ultimately raised the issue of the

status of the Bull Unigenitus. The magistrates would either demand the suppression

of the work or request that the case be received as an appeal comme d’abus by the

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courts. If an assembly of chambers could be brought about or was already in

session, there would be a succession of speeches by the Jansenists, who emphasised

the duty and right of the parlement to intervene and proposed suitable courses of

action. Once the situation had developed, usually in the direction of a conflict with

the royal council, the Jansenists would intervene to uphold the prerogatives of the

parlement in order to exacerbate the issue. If, as usually happened, there was an

evocation of the case, then the mass of magistrates would inevitably support the

Jansenists because if not they risked allowing the courts to be deprived of an

important facet of their jurisdiction. At this stage it was easy to suggest to the mass

of magistrates that the root of the problem was the Bull Unigenitus, on the grounds

that if it were not being upheld by the ministry and the constitutionnaires there

would be no conflict with the parlement. To protect themselves against possible

accusations of disloyalty and to convince those whose consciences needed a sound

principle to prompt them to defy the King, they could point out that the action of

the parlement amounted to no more than a defence of the King against an abuse of

power which was properly his own. Inherent in this strategy was the virtual

certainty of a direct conflict with the ministry in which, it was hoped, the ministry

would retreat and modify its policy towards the Jansenists. Simply by ensuring that

the courts retained cognisance of the cases of appeal comme d’abus, the Jansenists

could win their victory. The parlement was hardly likely to fight to retain its

competence in these matters only to give verdicts which confirmed those arrived at

by their rivals, the ecclesiastical courts!

Other theories of the overall motivation of the magistrates in this crisis have been

put forward, but they put the parlement and ‘Gallicanism’ at the centre. They

neither explain the activities of the Jansenists nor accord with the rest of the

evidence. Did the magistrates oppose the Bull Unigenitus because they were upright

men driven by a strongly legalist conscience, outraged that the Bull misrepresented

Jansenist beliefs? Or did they indeed oppose it for truly Gallican reasons, namely

that the Bull’s condemnation of the ninety-first proposition undermined royal

power? If either of these cases were a sufficient explanation we should expect a

much larger group of magistrates to have been involved in an active way—and we

should find that, if these ideologies were indeed actively shared by magistrates,

those who were prominent would not have been almost all Jansenists. (Where are

these vehement Gallicans who were not Jansenists to be found intervening in the

debates?) If a strategy of deliberately obscuring the religious issue was not being

practised, it would have been an odd coincidence that a Jansenist, Le Clerc de

Lesseville, chose to denounce only the ninety-first proposition in April 1730 when

he obviously, as a Jansenist, had so many other grounds for disliking it.

Furthermore, had the magistrates’ resistance to Unigenitus been so markedly

‘Gallican’ the margins of votes in favour of extreme courses of action would hardly

have been so narrow, nor would they have been reached by such a complicted

combination of factors. We should have expected a great deal more unanimity at

different and earlier stages in the debates.

Significantly, inside the courts, for the most part the Jansenist magistrates

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avoided any statement of, or appeal to, religious convictions.

The developing

situation provided numerous opportunities to obscure the doctrinal issues and still

provoke determined reactions by their colleagues. By this tactic the religious issues

tended to become obscured by jurisdictional ones and particularly by disputes

focused on the way in which the parlement was treated by the ministry. Although

not every magistrate could become involved in such issues as the appearance of a

new mandement condemning Jansenists and lauding Unigenitus, all members of the

courts could become irate about a refusal to allow them to deliberate. An occasion

of this kind occurred on 29 November 1731 when lettres de cachet forbade discussion

of the royal arrêt of 7 September on the subject of the limits of the two powers. The

crown made a tactical error in the second lettre de cachet by enjoining the procureur

général to record the names of those ‘who contravene our will, in order to inform

us’.

This excited a general outcry which gave Pucelle the opportunity to deliver a

stirring speech in which he said that an inquisition (a splendidly emotive word!) was

being established and that, since the King could scarcely wish for such a thing, he

must be being misled. The throne had been inaccessible for too long, he said, and

he therefore proposed a dramatic gesture, that the magistrates should send a large

deputation to Marly to protest. Faced with a royal refusal to receive them there, the

courts devoted great energy over the next six weeks to an attempt to have the

restriction lifted.

There was certainly a general increase in involvement owing to such methods,

but there are other factors which also help to explain the support for the Jansenists

and hence the genesis of the crisis of the summer of 1732. The parlement was a

hierarchical institution fond of comparing itself with the Roman senate. Its eldest

and most prestigious counsellors usually found their way into the grand’chambre. As

a body, this was, except on a very few occasions, noted for its conservatism and

loyalty to the ministry. Its members earned more from épices and gages than other

counsellors and they could expect royal favour for themselves or their families. The

grand’chambre did not always support the other chambers from 1730 to 1732 and

played a notable role in inducing the other magistrates to return to work in May and

July 1732. Of the remaining chambers, the two chambers of requêtes appear to have

been fairly neutral in their sympathies, probably because they were composed of

rather older judges, but the five chambers of enquêtes were quite a different matter.

There, the magistrates were usually younger and often lacking in maturity,

experience and judgement. Not only were they more headstrong, but they were also

more idealistic and would become more devoted to causes than to advancement

and tranquillity. Since their careers had barely started and their earnings from cases

were rather low, these magistrates felt that they had little to lose from opposition to

the ministry. For some, like La Fautrière, a controversy with the ministry provided

the opportunity to make a name and perhaps lead to an alternative source of

advancement in politics. (Even Jansenists might hope for advancement by this

route, and in the 1760s were not to be disappointed.

) Thus, the counsellors of the

enquêtes were much more likely than the grand’chambriers to respond to a call for steps

which were likely to offend the ministry.

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Time and again it was the enquêtes which were the most intransigent chambers.

For example, on 31 August 1731, the first enquêtes, backed by the others, called for

an assembly of chambers. The First President refused to permit one, but they

came nevertheless, and ‘M. the First President tried in vain to persuade Messieurs

that such an assembly was highly irregular’.

The most conclusive proof of the

relative extremism of these chambers is to be found in the records of the voting, in

May and July 1732, on whether or not to return to duty. Over the weekend of 5

and 6 July 1732, when the counsellors were under considerable pressure to

resume their functions and in receipt of a direct royal order to do so, the first

chamber of requêtes was in favour of a simple return to work, the second requêtes

was for a return with remonstrances, as was the first enquêtes, while the second,

third and fourth enquêtes were against going back, and the fifth was split. The

parlement was bound by a majority decision, so it was only by all agreeing to the

issuing of remonstrances that a return to work became acceptable to the

remaining enquêtes.

In these circumstances the decision to remonstrate was in the

nature of a compromise.

Mistakes in the royal management of the parlement also contributed on occasion

to greater unity of opinion in the courts than might otherwise have occurred. The

problems of the political imbroglio in which the ministry found itself, especially the

activities of the extreme constitutionnaires, led to the adoption of courses which

were at times inconsistent. Although this was due not to the lack of a consistent

policy but to the pressure of unforeseen events, the result was that the parlement

sometimes had very good grounds for criticism. The political need to support the

activities of the archbishop of Paris, even when he went beyond what Fleury’s

caution dictated, was a crucial factor in 1732, because in May the Instruction of

Vintimille saw the beginning of the worst phase of the crisis. Before then, pressure

from the constitutionnaires had led to the equivocal arrêt of 10 March 1731 which

had confirmed the church in its ecclesiastical jurisdiction and imposed silence on all

sides in the quarrel over Unigenitus. When the constitutionnaires complained, Fleury

had to give way and so sent a circular letter recognising that their right to publish

writings was part of their jurisdiction. After the issue of the refusal of the sacraments

to a dying Jansenist in Orléans, a circular letter of 22 July 1731 had enjoined bishops

to avoid the expression ‘rule of faith’ when describing Unigenitus but suggested

alternatives like ‘dogmatic judgement of the Universal Church’ or ‘judgement of

the Universal Church in a matter of doctrine’.

This was hardly adhering to the

declaration of 24 March 1730 and both the arrêt and the letters served only to

confuse the legal status of Unigenitus in the eyes of the parlement. As so often

happens in politics, the pressure of political forces made inconsistencies in the

execution of policy impossible to avoid.

Furthermore, gratuitous errors were made which can only be attributed to over-

hasty reaction or to simple miscalculation. The use of lettres de cachet to forbid

deliberation on the arrêt of 8 September 1731 was probably such an error, as was the

refusal of the King to receive the deputation to Marly. The ministry had been

surprised by the precipitate action of the parlement, and no ministers were present

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to advise the King. Richer d’Aube, when criticising this in his ‘Réflexions’, correctly

points out that the decision could easily have been justified by a good excuse, such

as it being a punishment for the refusal of the parlement to read the lettres de cachet.

The bluntness of the royal reply made the government appear arbitrary and hardly

contributed to a calmer atmosphere in the courts.

Not wholly divorced from this point is another. During the two years of the

struggle there was a steady increase in tension. One can detect the growth of a spirit

of dissatisfaction and exasperation which led to the contemplation of more extreme

courses of action than might have been considered wise, had tempers been less

frayed. In keeping with this went an increasing suspicion of royal intentions with

regard to the parlement’s jurisdiction. The repeated evocations of cases involving

Unigenitus led to a widespread feeling that, in spite of royal assurances to the

contrary, there was a design to deprive the parlement entirely of its role in the

procedure of appeals comme d’abus. There was more to it than simple defence of their

jurisdiction, for in the past the procedure had served to curb genuine abuses of

clerical authority in the state, and the courts were not prepared to admit of an

exception to this process being made over Unigenitus. Furthermore, the several royal

refusals to allow the courts to debate certain royal replies, or to hold general

assemblies to discuss affairs arising from Unigenitus, certainly induced many

magistrates to vote with the opposition to the royal policy.

By May 1732, after two years of almost continual brushes between the parlement

and the ministry, the atmosphere in the palais de justice was highly inflammable. The

Pastoral Instruction which the archbishop of Paris issued on 2 May raised all the old

problems once more and acted as a catalyst.

Fearing the response of the parlement,

the royal council published an arrêt reserving to itself all matters pertaining to the

miracles of Saint-Médard.

The King also sent the parlement an order, conveyed by

the First President, forbidding it to take any action connected with Unigenitus

without first having informed his council. Such a procedure would have given the

ministry time to pre-empt any action by the parlement by taking perhaps milder

steps itself. But this was the spark which set the magistrates afire with frustration,

and their anger was well played upon by stirring speeches from counsellors Paris,

Pucelle (speaking ‘with his usual force and wisdom’), Thomé and especially Titon,

whose discourse was particularly violent.

In such an atmosphere some counsellors

began to contemplate a judicial strike as the most effective reaction to the royal

statement.

That the virtual unanimity in the requêtes and enquêtes was reached by a number

of different routes is shown by a memoir which describes the various groups in the

parlement at the time of the strike.

It was probably written for the ministry by

d’Argenson:

In the parlement there are several different bodies of opinion [partis], most of

whom agree with the present step. There is a very small number of

constitutionnaires who approve more or less openly of what the [royal] court

is doing; and these are held in horror by the rest of the company. A number

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are convinced that they must support the rights of the parlement on this

occasion as a matter of honour, and are offended by the attempt to deprive the

parlement of appeals comme d’abus; they believe that cognisance of these

appeals should remain with them for the good of the kingdom. These people

are basically convinced that obedience is owed to the king and they sincerely

hope that all this can be patched up. Then there are out and out Jansenists,

whose heads have been turned by those in the parti; they strongly believe in

the miracles of M.Pâris, that the government wants to overturn religion, and

that it is time to uphold it even at the risk of their lives. Finally, I cannot

conceal that there are also some who are exaggeratedly parlementaire, little

concerned with these religious matters, who only want to exploit them to

favour much wider views that would tend to diminish royal authority

considerably.

The weapon of a judicial strike was not an unfamiliar one in the history of the

parlement, but on this occasion it began with a remarkable manifestation. When

the First President had communicated to the chambers, on 16 May, the result of the

deputation to Compiègne, where the King had reiterated his refusal to allow the

magistrates to interfere with the mandement, the magistrates simply got up and

walked out, leaving only the grand’chambriers. Without doubt, this move had been

concerted beforehand, and there had been time enough to prepare it, since informal

reports of the interview at Compiègne would have reached the courts by 14 May

and the assembly was not held until 16 May. Although magistrates and lawyers

were wont to gossip in the courtyards of the palais de justice and in the cafés of that

quarter, they were hardly likely to have plotted such a move in public because there

were too many police spies. In fact, the journal kept by an extremely well-informed

counsellor reveals that secret conferences were held on the 15th in order to prepare

for the assembly.

Those members of the company who have the greatest role in its

movements and decisions, spent all that afternoon in secret conferences

with skilled lawyers, to agree together upon the course of action to take the

next day during the plenary assembly. Their final decision was taken in the

evening at M.Visinier’s, the lawyer. The First President had become so

neglected and was held in so little esteem, that he had no knowledge of

what was going on about this in his company, which is perhaps previously

unheard of.

The close organisation of the extremists and their alliance with the lawyers made

management of the parlement very difficult for the ministry. The above

document is doubly interesting because it points to another feature in the

development of the crisis: the inability of the First President to fulfil his role. A

long document in the archives gives a full contemporary picture of the paramount

importance of his role in the parlement.

One of the most important aspects of his

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function was to contain and moderate the enthusiasm of the courts on sensitive

issues. His was always a difficult job, as he had to balance loyalty to the King with

the retention of his prestige as the chief magistrate before his colleagues. In

difficult times he was in constant contact with the ministry and was an essential

part of the mechanism of royal control of the courts. Procedure in the courts gave

him some advantages in this role: he could, for example, usually choose the

commissioners who would aid him in drawing up remonstrances; he it was who

decided whether to call or grant a request for a plenary session of the chambers to

discuss a particular issue. These tactical advantages had to be used with restraint

if he were to retain the confidence of the courts, and on some occasions it was

more advisable for him, rather than to confront the opposition, to take over its

leadership and thus moderate its force.

During this crisis Portail employed all these tactics at different times yet he failed

quite rapidly to carry the courts with him in the direction of moderation. Unlike

president Le Peletier in 1737, he lacked tact in dealing with his colleagues, was

overwhelmed by their manœuvres and he was unable to carry through successfully

either a bluff or a finesse. He also lost the respect of the magistrates to the extent that

in the summer of 1732 he was without any influence at all.

During the strike a

magistrate noted of him: ‘Almost no one in his company went to see him. Everyone

simply feigned respect. The company was very wary of the good offices he was

offering to render them with the ministry and seemed resolved to do entirely

without him: something unprecedented on such occasions’.

The discredit of the First President lasted throughout the summer months.

Although the parquet also urged moderation, their counsels were not heeded. The

normal channels of communication between the ministry and the court, which

were especially useful for negotiations, thus became useless and the split between

the two parties inevitably widened. For the ministry, there was no point in

entrusting Portail with discreet negotiations if his credibility and influence with the

magistrates had evaporated. The fact that henceforth only the formal channels of

communication—speeches by the Chancellor, lettres de cachet, arrêts du conseil—

remained open, made the resolution of the crisis that much more difficult. This state

of affairs accounts in part for the emphasis which the ministry was to place on its

own covert mechanisms of control which were developed from May onwards.

A final point to remember in this survey of the genesis of the crisis is that the formal

written records conceal the well-known fact that assemblies and large groups of people

do not always act strictly rationally. As so often happens, a host of minor

considerations, often with only a very tenuous connection with the issue at stake, can

intervene and influence those coming to a decision. In this case it is apparent from the

evidence that some crucial decisions were taken in the heat of the moment, with scant

reflection, at times when slight incidents could cause opinions to sway one way or

another. A case in point is the momentous decision on 13 June 1732 to receive an

appeal comme d’abus against the Instruction of the archbishop of Paris. Since 27 May

when counsellor Le Clerc de Lesseville had proposed that the Instruction be handed to

the gens du roi who would examine it to see if a case could be brought, the parquet had

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prevaricated in order to gain time. They were aware that there was a substantial group

of moderates in the parlement who were now against an appeal, and they of course

realised that a condemnation of the Instruction would be an open challenge to royal

authority. On 13 June Gilbert de Voisins reported that no conclusions had yet been

reached and suggested that the assembly should take no action. In the ensuing

discussion president Le Peletier proposed that the gens du roi be allowed more time to

examine the mandement. This opinion was taken up by the presidents a mortier, all the

counsellors of the grand’chambre, almost all the presidents of the enquêtes and requêtes and

by the commissioners who had framed the parlementary arrêté of 27 May, ‘in short, by

57 voices, among whom were to be found almost all the distinguished members of the

company’.

Voisins was pressed to give reasons for the failure to come to a decision

on the Instruction and he then made another speech. After this, the motion of the

Jansenist president Ogier to the effect that the Instruction be received as an appeal comme

d’abus and condemned in spite of the refusal of the parquet to pronounce upon it, was

voted on and passed by 97 to 36.

According to one observer, this victory was largely to be attributed to the effect

upon the assembly of the speech by Voisins. In insisting upon the sole competence

of the grand’chambre for appeals comme d’abus, he mortally offended the requêtes and

enquêtes who suddenly all voted for Ogier’s proposition. In order to safeguard their

claims to judge such appeals, they had to take action there and then. An arrêt

forbidding the distribution of the Instruction was drawn up and published forthwith.

This immediate publication was designed to avoid the fate which had befallen the

arrêt of 7 September 1731 which had been annulled before publication. The arrêt

was a great success with the public and it included, strictly contrary to normal

practice, some correspondence between the Chancellor and the parlement. As was

only to be expected after such blatant defiance of royal authority, the council

promptly annulled the arrêt and ordered the arrest of the four magistrates who were

most involved. The details of the opinions given by each member of the conseil des

dépêches reveal that the final decision was actually the most moderate one

proposed.

There was great consternation in the assembly of 20 June when the royal arrêt

was read out, and the chambers dispersed to deliberate individually. ‘After several

comings and goings by the deputies in each chamber, to communicate their arrêtés,

the chambers suddenly decided amongst themselves upon a general resignation,

which each [judge] signed and of which the First President of each chamber took

charge.’

The journal of Barbier provides some further information on this

momentous decision.

Although there had been talk of these resignations for a long time, nobody

could believe they would really do it. There are perhaps sixty stubborn

Jansenists amongst the magistrates, but all the rest are moderates who don’t

care a fig for Jansenism and Molinism. Nevertheless they all took this bold

step out of honour, pride and annoyance at the treatment they had

received.

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In addition to this, the archives contain a letter from d’Argenson and two letters

from counsellors explaining how the decision was reached.

Pasquier, who had in

May become devoted to the ministerial cause, wrote that he, in common with some

other moderates, had felt incapable of going against the rising tide by proposing a

less extreme course, because this would have alienated him from his colleagues.

There was a feeling that remonstrances should be decreed, but there was a problem

there, as he explained.

They need to deliberate to decree remonstrances, but this deliberation will

perhaps give rise to some disagreeable opinions for the government and

thence the arrest of those who proposed them. This fear is what led them to

decide to resign an office whose imminent loss the king was promising and

which they could not retain without exposing themselves to personal danger.

I can assure you that the perhaps well founded rumour of the death of M.de

Vrevin was also a great means of increasing their anger.

Another letter from a magistrate explained that there was such an atmosphere in the

chambers that it was extremely difficult for individuals to resist the general

movement to resign.

* * *

How then might the causes of the crisis be summarised? There is no doubt that the

royal government was reluctant to clash with the courts, but to some extent their

involvement was, in 1730 as in 1731, the inevitable consequence of the long-term

change of policy going back to 1695: the move away from a Gallicanism on which the

crown and the magistrates agreed, towards a better understanding with Rome on the

part of the crown. At the same time, the magistrates remained intransigent in

upholding their jurisdiction which the royal policy had previously enhanced. The

ministers and the judges quite simply had different priorities with regard to the policy

over Unigenitus. The government of Fleury, acting on the criterion of raison d’état, felt

that the spread of Jansenism and the controversy over the Bull was a greater threat to

the stability of the state than the implied risk of increased papal interference in the

French church represented by the promulgation of the Bull Unigenitus.

Although the basis of the dispute lay in the status of Unigenitus in France, which

was altered in 1730, much of the quarrel was about the legal province of the

parlement vis-à-vis the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishops. Whereas the royal

council based its position in the debate about the limits of the two powers on the

declaration of 1695, the parlement stood by the articles of the special Assembly of

Clergy in 1682. Ultimately, the dispute involved the royal council acting in its

capacity as the supreme law court of the realm, which was more sympathetic to the

ecclesiastical authorities than was the parlement, which had a long-standing quarrel

over jurisdiction with the ecclesiastical courts. In 1729, it was already clear to the

government that it was only a matter of time before the parlement became more