the legacy of the parliament of paris 116 n the 3rd ofNovember 1789, in the first months of the French Revolution, the Constituent Assembly decided that all the highest courts of the kingdom, calledParlements, would be in vaca- O tions until the complete reform of the judiciary. In fact, the royal Parlements were suppressed and for the oldest one, the Parlement de Paris, it meant the end of a prestigious institution that worked during five centuries as the main representative of the king in the exercise of justice. The French revolutionaries made thus a complete break between the tradition of Ancien Régime courts and the history of the judiciary after 1789. The French “supreme court” in civil and penal matters, the so-calledCour de cassation, that was the transformation made by Napoleon of theTribunal de cassationcreated by the Constituent Assembly in 1790, was rather the heir of the King’s Council (Conseil du roi). Today, it is the first chamber of the subordinate court of Paris (Tribunal de grande instance de Paris) that uses the place. The oldGrand’Chambre of the Parlement de Paris was burnt out in 1871 and the new room was rebuilt with a few elements evoking the old decoration of the Parlement de Paris, as if the French Republic has tried to forget any remembrance of the oldest French court. This rupture was also clear in French historiography for a long time. The historians considered that the Parlements – the one in Paris and the twelve others that existed in provinces at the end of the Ancien Régime – played a dangerous role of opponents to the royal will, notably the attempts to reform the kingdom and to make the nobility to pay taxes, during the eighteenth century. Using their power to remonstrate (through a kind of special advice, called remontrances, that had to be kept secret, but were in fact published during the eighteenth century) for blocking or delaying the royal legislation, theParlement de Paris was judged in the same time as the agent of the “Pre-Revolution” (all the political conflicts that led to the convocation of the General Estates by Louis XVI in 1788/ Introduction
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