jean-louis halpérin vantage of the members of the courts. In September 1577, whereas the king imposed a “pacification” (the “peace of Poitiers”) between Catholics and Protestants – including the choice of Protestant counsellors in the courts – the royal power ordered the Parlement to make the registration without restriction of an edict that quashed some rulings of the courts against Protestants. Two years later, the great ordinance of Blois (with more than 300 articles) ascertained that the rulings of the courts that were inconsistent with royal legislation had to be considered as void, which was the only legal basis for the cassation procedure, before the King’s Council, until 1789. Whereas theParlement was less and less consulted as the natural council of the king for the government of the state and was deprived of this role in favour of the Conseil du roi, the Paris Parlement remained more than a court of appeal for Paris and the centre of France. The Parlement took an important place in the process for writing down customary law in the centre of France. This process was launched by Charles VII in 1453 in the ordinance of Montils-les-Tours, but it began really with different edicts taken by Charles VIII between 1493 and 1498. The king nominated as “commissaries” different members of the Parlement, notably the first President Thibault Baillet to direct the writing of about fifteen customs, the one of Paris (1510) but also the ones of Poitou, Angoumois, Bourbonnais, La Rochelle, Anjou, Maine, Champagne. These customs were homologated by the King in a French text. In 1539, the ordinance of VillersCotterets also imposed the French language, instead of the Latin, in all official rulings, including the judgments of the court. TheParlement took part in the doctrine’s movement, animated by Parisian advocates like Charles Dumoulin, to define a “French law” based on customs and differentiated from the Roman law. In 1539 the writing down of the custom of Berry, regulating the territory of a province that included the city of Bourges and its glorious university as the centre of the mos gallicus, gave to the first President of the Parlement, Pierre Lizet, the opportunity to promote some institutions of Roman law in the customs. Finally, the process of “reformation” of customs at the end of the sixteenth centurywas characterized by the vigorous 125
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