RS 27

marie seong-hak kim tal attempted reforms of the administration of justice, and de Thou oversaw the customary law campaigns. Dedicated public servants and loyal councilors, they agreed in the belief that only the king and his law could assure the cohesion of the fabric of society and the state, and made utmost efforts to prevent the splintering of the kingdom during the crisis of civil war.When the king and the Parlement collided over the religious pacification policy, however, they found themselves at the opposite ends of the spectrum. As the official faces of the royal government and the law court, they faced down each other on the public front over constitutional and political issues. Incidentally, these two remarkable figures came from two very different backgrounds. De Thou hailed from one of the powerful robe families in the ascendancy as a result of the sale of judicial offices; L’Hôpital, the son of an exile who had been banished from the kingdom, could not be farther from the world of the privileged judicial establishment. In the sixteenth century, nearly all judicial offices, including the posts of parlementaires, became subject to sale. Judgeship effectively became private property, and judges, enjoying solid guarantees of their tenure, created a cohesive group with the distinct esprit de corps as the noblesse de robe. De Thou’s family was one of the eminent judicial dynasties, well connected in the capital and active in municipal politics. In contrast, L’Hôpital had entered the parlement thanks to his wife’s dowry, and remained more or less an outsider to the elite Parisian parlementaire brass. After he became chancellor, L’Hôpital made serious efforts to suppress the practice of selling judicial offices, which he argued was detrimental to royal power. The chancellor’s attack on the venality of offices did not endear him to the judges. Meanwhile, de Thou, as the head of the Parlement, naturally had to defend its institutional interest. The situation in which public office was the object of legal transactions created a distinct judicial culture in France. The cases of de Thou and L’Hôpital can provide an interesting point of reference to that culture against the backdrop of civil war. Judges’ constitutional positions and their claim of institutional integrity were not detached from their corporate interests.11 11 See Saint Bonnet, François 2007. For the discussion of constitutionalism as a “nexus of 135

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