alain wijffels courts effectively took over the autonomous courts which had developed during the Middle Ages. Yet, the ordinary system of courts was not extended to a single integrated judiciary throughout the realm.12 By the fifteenth century, both for practical reasons and for the sake of political expediency, the territorial jurisdiction of the Parlement de Paris, which until then had by and large followed the extension of the royal domain, was rounded off and provinces which were newly attached to the political authority of the Crown were given their own sovereignParlement. That policy was further implemented until the end of the Ancien Régime, even for newly acquired territories, whether in Europe or overseas, through the creation of new provincial Parlements, or the establishment of regional and overseas sovereign courts. Thus, from the fifteenth century onwards, the pattern of royal courts consisted in a large territory (perhaps half the kingdom) controlled by the Paris Parlement, and various “peripheral” territorial jurisdictions each capped by their particular provincial Parlement or sovereign court, but without a paramount, overarching ordinary appellate court for the whole realm. Yet, following the principle which has been usually referred to in French historiography as justice retenue, which refers to the royal prerogative justice notwithstanding delegation of judicial tasks, the King and his council exercised from the early-modern royal court of government judicial and quasi-judicial powers which were partly competing with those of the ordinary royal superior courts of judicature, partly aiming at controlling 11 It is not a coincidence, although the ideas had been maturing for a long time in several parts of Europe, that Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la République (ed.pr. 1576) expressed a theoretical concept of sovereignty which seemed at the time to reflect the general trajectory of the French monarchy’s long-term history, more particularly its success in neutralising both the territorial competitors within the realm and the rulers who had claimed universal, and therefore a superior political authority in Medieval political doctrines (the pope and the emperor). By the mid-sixteenth century, the incorporation of the duchy of Brittany appeared to confirm the policy of the King of France in establishing his government over (almost) the whole kingdom. Even though the French kings never succeeded in turning their kingdom into a fully centralised state, their policies gradually paved the way towards such a state, and they consolidated the notion and the image of a supreme and central political power. The Revolution was quick to seize the benefits of that concept of sovereignty, and, having transferred it to the people, ruthlessly attempted to eradicate the various institutional forms of particularism which had subsisted. 12 Rigaudière, Albert 2010. 39
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