marie seong-hak kim lement over the process and scope of royal legislation that took place in the midst of the civil war. L’Hôpital repeatedly chastised the Parlement for its seeming defiance of the crown’s will by drawing out the registration process; in turn, the Parlement professed its duty to uphold royal justice by presenting its reasoned objections to royal acts throughremonstrances. The growing tendency of the crown to assert its monopoly in lawmaking led to its attempt to reduce the Parlement’s right to present remonstrances. L’Hôpital declared that the Parlement’s proper role was resolving disputes among individuals, not interfering with royal legislation. The king had already grown less open to the law court’s claim of its power to interpret the law and judge in equity.3 The royal determination to exert control over the sources of law and the bureaucratic agencies that implemented them was amply witnessed in a flurry of legislation, initiated by the chancellor, to reform judicial administration.4 It clashed with the Parlement’s presumed institutional role in the legislative process and also the judges’ self-perception as the conseillers du roi. It is important to keep in mind that the French kings in the early modern period were not in perpetual quarrel with their law courts. Their relationship was not one of sustained confrontation and hostility, but one of symbiosis. The familiar analogy was that the king was the fountain of justice that flowed from him to his subjects through the medium of the sovereign courts.5 It had commonly been seen by historians that the rise of royal power took place at the expense of the representative assemblies or the high courts. More recently, however, Michel Antoine and Bernard Barbiche have explained that the kings, from Francis I through Louis XVI, functioned more as an arbiter of privileges among different groups in the kingdom than as an arbitrary tyrant determined to humiliate and silence the representative institutions and suppress local autonomies. The insight that the king was not in endless war with his officials – not tomention foreign wars – in order to become an absolutist ruler provides 3 See Krynen, Jacques 2008. 4 See Kim, Marie Seong-Hak 2010a. 5 Pasquier, Étienne 1723 vol. 2, col. 427-28. 133
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