jean-louis halpérin administrative regulations, tolerated and even wanted by the king)14 and the works of the Parisian bar (organized as an “order”, a free corporation without official charter at the end of the seventeenth century) the Parlement contributed to the creation of new rules side by side with the royal legislation. Montesquieu had good reasons to say that the Parlement knew all the rules and was the“depository of laws”and in the same time the “slave of the laws.”In the last (n°2266) of his personal thoughts (the Pensées that were published at the end of the nineteenth century), Montesquieu, trying at this time to reconcile the Parlement and King Louis XV, wrote: “It is the Parlement which knows all the laws, which has learned the succession of laws, which has studied the spirit of laws. The Parlement knows if a new law gives perfection or corruption to the immense volume of laws…The Parlement says to the Prince: You are one Legislator, but You are not all the Legislators, You are responsible to make the laws effective, but You have not made all the laws. The laws were before You, they are with You, they will be after You”. During the reign of Louis XVI, the advocates general before theParlement were the heirs of this “legist” tradition (the son and the grandnephewof Joly de Fleury, the grandson of Chancellor Daguesseau, Antoine-Louis Séguier) and, for some of them, future members of the revolutionary assemblies, notably of the Convention which voted the death penalty for the king (Lepeltier de Saint-Fargeau, Hérault de Séchelles). One of the judges, Adrien Duport, was the promoter of the reform of the judiciary at the beginning of the French Revolution and one of the drafters with Lepeltier de Saint-Fargeau of the first Penal Code in France (in 1791). Among the advocates before the Parlement, Tronchet, Target, Treilhard and Camus began great lawyers of the Constituent Assembly. If the majority of theParlement rejected the ideas of enlightened reformists like Beccaria, aminority defended it in theParlement in Paris or in provincial courts (Dupaty at Bordeaux, Servan at Grenoble). In Paris, as in other 14 Payen, Philippe 1999 passim. 127
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=