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central and peripheral courts the decisions of those courts.13 The end result was, apart from the great diversity of courts and special-interest tribunals which co-existed at the lower levels of the Judiciary, a proliferation of distinct supreme courts in different territories (theParlement de Paris and the provincial Parlements),14 which were in theory of equivalent status, even though the weight and the ascendancy of the Paris Parlement tended to overshadow the authority of its counterparts elsewhere in the country. Moreover, the King’s prerogative justice underpinned the development of another type of supreme royal justice outside the system of those territorial sovereign courts. One may perhaps argue that this whole system, although it was not integrated into a single hierarchy, nevertheless came under the ultimate control of royal authority. On the other hand, the revolutionaries’ early zeal to wipe out the whole system shows that although contemporaries may not have perceived the Ancien Régime system of court as a uniform, integrated or hierarchical structure, the revolutionary ideology viewed the very fragmentation of the old system as a protection of particular interests which ran against the Revolution’s promise of equality.15 From a very different political perspective, the Holy Roman Empire leads in some ways to similar findings.16 On the one hand, the duality of imperial power, shared by the emperor and the Estates of the Empire, led to the establishment of two competing supreme imperial courts, the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht)17 and the Aulic Council 13 The phrase and concept of justice retenue in French legal historiography has been criticised by Jacques Krynen in the first volume of his fundamental analysis of the relationship between the judicature and politics in France from the thirteenth until the twentieth century, see Krynen, Jacques 2009 and 2012. 14 Jacques Poumarède – Jack Thomas (eds.) 1996. Since then, for several Parlements and sovereign courts, both in the French metropolitan provinces and overseas, much research has been done, leading to several publications, but (to my knowledge), no new attempt at such an overall state of the art; see http://bibliparl.huma-num.fr/bibliographie/ (Last accessed 1 May 2017.). The “peripheral” Parlements of Roussillon and Flanders have been recently discussed in the context of complex jurisdictions in Donlan, Seán Patrick –Heirbaut, Dirk (eds.) 2015. 15 Royer, Jean-Pierre 2010; Farcy, Jean-Claude 2001. 16 For an overview of the German developments, with comparative perspectives, see Oestmann, Peter 2015. 17 Cf. the volumes in Amend-Traut, Anja et al. (eds) 1973-2017. 40

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