When the Royal authority had been conquered, the Parliaments at first conceived that the triumph was their own. They returned to the bench, less as reprieved delinquents than as conquerors, and thought that they had only to enjoy the sweets of victory.
The King, when he withdrew the edicts which had raised to the bench new judges, ordered that at least the judgments and decrees of those judges should be maintained. The Parliaments declared that whatever had been adjudged without themselves was not adjudged at all. They summoned before them the insolent magistrates who had presumed to aspire to their seats, and, borrowing an old expression of medi?val law to meet this novel incident, they noted them infamous. All France saw that the King’s friends were punished for their fidelity to the Crown, and learnt that henceforth safety was not to be found on the side of obedience.
The intoxication of these magistrates may easily be understood. Louis XIV. in all his glory had never been the object of more universal adulation, if that word can be applied to immoderate praise prompted by genuine and disinterested passions.
The Parliament of Paris, exiled to Troyes, was received in that city by all the public bodies, which hastened to pay it the homage due to the sovereign, and to utter to its face the most extravagant compliments. ‘August senators!’ they said, ‘generous citizens! strict and compassionate magistrates! you all deserve in every French heart the title of fathers of your country. You are the consolation of the nation’s ills. Your actions are sublime examples of energy and patriotism. The French nation looks upon you with tenderness and veneration.’ The Chapter of the Cathedral of Troyes, complimenting them in the name of the Church, said: ‘Our country and our religion solicit some durable monument of what you have done.’ Even the University came forth, in gowns[225] and square caps, to drawl out its homage in bad Latin, ‘Illustrissimi Senat?s princeps, pr?sides insulati, Senatores integerrimi! We share the general emotion, and we are here to express our lively admiration of your patriotic heroism. Hitherto the highest courage was that military valour which calls legions of heroes from their homes; we now see the heroes of peace in the sanctuary of justice; like those generous citizens who were the pride of Rome in their day of triumph, you have earned a triumph which secures to you immortal fame.’ The First President replied to all these addresses curtly, like a sovereign, and assured the speakers of the good will of his Court.
In several provinces the arrest or exile of the judges had provoked riots. In all, their return gave rise to almost insane explosions of popular rejoicing. At Grenoble, when the courier arrived, who brought the news of the restoration of the Parliaments, he was carried in triumph through the town, and overpowered with caresses and acclamations; women, unable to reach his person, kissed his horse. In the evening the whole town was spontaneously illuminated. All the public bodies and guilds defiled before the Parliament, declaiming bombastic compliments.
At Bordeaux on the same day there was a similar ovation. The people took the horses from the carriage of the First President, and drew him to his chambers. The judges who had obeyed the King’s orders were hooted. The First President reprimanded them in public. In the midst of this scene the oldest member of the Parliament exclaimed, ‘My children, tell this to your descendants, that the remembrance of this day may keep alive the fire of patriotism.’ He who said this was an aged man, born ninety years before, whose youth had been spent under the reign of Louis XIV. What changes may not take place in the opinions and the language of a people within the lifetime of a man! They ended by burning a cardinal in effigy on the market-place; which did not prevent the clergy from singing a Te Deum. These events took place at the end of October, 1788.
Suddenly the acclamations which surrounded the Parliaments ceased; the enthusiasm dropped; silence and solitude gathered about them. Not only were they the objects of public indifference, but all sorts of charges were brought against them, the same which the Government had vainly attempted to urge. The country was inundated with vituperative pamphlets against them. ‘These judges,’ it was said in these pamphlets, ‘know nothing of politics; in reality they have only been aiming at power. They are at one with the nobles and the priests, and as hostile as these are to the[226] commons, who constitute almost the entire nation. They fancied that their attack on despotism would cause all this to be forgotten; but, in asserting the rights of the nation, they have allowed them to be questioned: those rights are derived from the Social Contract; to discuss them, is to clothe them in the false colours of voluntary concession. Indeed, the demands they made from the King were in some respects excessive. They are an aristocracy of lawyers who want to be masters of the King himself.’[125] Another pamphlet, attributed to Volney, apostrophised them in these terms: ‘August body of Magistrates! we are under sacred obligations to you which we do not disown, but we cannot forget that during all these years that you have represented the people, you have allowed it to be oppressed: you, the teachers of the people, have allowed almost all the books calculated to enlighten it to be burnt; and when you resisted despotism it was because it was about to crush yourselves.’
Especially for the Parliament of Paris was the fall sudden and terrible. How shall I describe the mighty void, the death-like silence which encompassed that great Court, and its own sense of impotence and despair, or the scornful vengeance of the Crown, when, in reply to fresh remonstrances, Louis XVI. said, ‘I have no answer to make to my Parliament or to its supplications: with the assembled nation I am about to concert measures to consolidate for ever public order and the prosperity of the kingdom’?
The same measure which recalled the Parliament to its hall of justice restored d’Eprémenil to liberty. The reader will remember the dramatic scene of his arrest, his address in the style of Regulus, the emotion of the audience, and the immense popularity of the martyr. He was confined in the Ile Ste. Marguérite, off Cannes: the warrant for his discharge arrives, and he starts. On the road he is at first treated as a great man, but as he proceeds the radiance that surrounded him fades away: once at Paris, nobody cares about him, unless it be to cut a joke. To descend thus from the sublime to the ridiculous, he had only to post across the territory some two hundred leagues.
The Parliament, wretched at the discovery of its unpopularity, endeavoured to regain the favour of the public. Recourse was had to stirring means: the same language which had so often served to excite the people in its favour was again employed. The cry for[227] periodical sessions of the States-General, for the responsibility of Ministers, for personal freedom, for the liberty of the press: all was in vain. The amazement of the judges was extreme: they were totally unable to comprehend what was happening before their eyes. They continued to speak of the constitution to be defended, not seeing that this word was popular enough when the constitution was opposed to the King, but hateful to public opinion when it was opposed to equality. They condemned a publication which attacked the old institutions of the kingdom to be burnt by the common hangman, not perceiving that the ruin of these institutions was precisely what was desired. They asked of one another what could possibly have brought about such a change in the public mind. They fancied they had a strength of their own, not being aware that they had only been the blind auxiliaries of another power: everything, as long as that power made them its instruments; nothing, as soon as, being able to act on its own behalf, it ceased to need their assistance. They did not see that the same wave which had driven them along, and raised them so high, carried them back with it as it retired.
Originally the Parliament consisted of jurists and advocates chosen by the King from the ablest members of their profession. A path to honours and to the highest offices of State was thus opened by merit to men born in the humblest conditions of fortune. The Parliament was then, with the Church, one of those powerful democratic institutions, which were born and had implanted themselves on the aristocratic soil of the Middle Ages.
At a later period the Crown, to make money, put up to sale the right of administering justice. The Parliament was then filled by a certain number of wealthy families, who considered the national judicature as a privilege of their own, to be guarded from the intrusion of others with increasing jealousy; they obeyed in this the strange impulse which seemed to impel each particular body to dwindle more and more into a small close aristocracy, at the very time when the opinions and general habits of the nation caused society to incline more and more to democracy.
Nothing certainly could be more opposed to the ideas of the time than a judicial caste, exercising by purchase the whole jurisdiction of the country. No practice, indeed, had been more often and more bitterly censured, for a century past, than the sale of these offices. This magistracy, vicious as it was in principle, had nevertheless a merit which the better constituted tribunals of our own time do not always possess. The judges were independent. They administered justice in the name of the sovereign, but not in[228] compliance with his will. They obeyed no passions but their own.
When all the intermediate powers which might counter-balance or attenuate the unlimited power of the King had been struck down, the Parliament alone still remained firm. The Parliament could still speak when all the world was silent, and maintain itself erect, for a time, when all the world had long been forced to bow. The consequence was that it became popular as soon as the Government was out of favour with the nation. And when, for a moment, hatred of despotism had become a fervent passion and a sentiment common to all Frenchmen, the Parliaments appeared to be the sole remaining barrier against absolute power. The defects which had been most blamed in them acted as a sort of guarantee of their political honesty. Even their vices were a protection, and their love of power, their presumption, and their prejudices were arms which the nation used. But no sooner had absolute power been definitely conquered, and the nation felt assured that it could defend its own rights, than the Parliament again at once became what it was before—an old, decrepit, and discredited institution; a legacy of the Middle Ages, again exposed to the full tide of public aversion. To effect its destruction, the King had only to endure its triumph.