THE FRENCH PARLIAMENTS. By JAMES BRECK PERKINS, LL. D. The French Parliaments bore little resemblance to their more famous namesake. In the English Parliament they talked politics, and in the French Parliament they talked law. The French and English courts differed not only in name, but in substance. To us it seems a fundamental requirement that the man who performs the duties of a judge should have prepared himself alike by the study and by the practice of the law which he is to interpret. The selection of one for judge who has not taken prominent position as a practitioner is regarded as somewhat of a scandal. In England it is almost unknown; even in this country most judges have at least attained respectable standing at the bar. But the members of the French Parliaments, like their successors of to-day, ordinarily became judges without experience as practitioners. Not only so, but in the fatal development of governmental finance under the Bourbons judicial office became a matter of purchase, and in due time was property that could be sold, devised, or inherited. The son succeeded the father, not uniformly, but not infrequently; a judicial body became an aristocratic body, whose ranks were filled for the most part from families which became known as parliamentary families. The English bar, like the Catholic Church, has furnished an opening for talent of every social class, but the first president of the Parliament of Paris was no more likely to come from a family of peasants or artisans than the Venetian Doge. There is not time to discuss the judicial character of the French courts, nor the system of laws they administered. I wish to say something of a political anomaly which I think is not paralleled in the history of any other country; the political power exercised by the Parliament of Paris and the long and unsuccessful effort of that court to increase this power. Lawyers have been lawmakers in every land, and of judgemade law there is a great volume. It is hard to overestimate the influence of our Supreme Court on the political development of this country through the interpretation given by it to our Federal Constitution. But this influence has been exercised, as in the English courts, by judges acting as interpreters of the law. The position assumed by the Parliament of Paris was very different. There was indeed no opportunity for the interpretation of constitutional law in that country. France possessed neither a written constitution like the United States nor an unwritten constitution like that of England which could be the subject of judicial interpretation. The practice on which the French courts sought to raise a stately fabric of legislative power grew up accidentally. The power of lawmaking was in the monarch, but to secure publicity for his decrees, that knowledge of them might be conveyed to the public at a time when newspapers did not exist, by the fifteenth century it was a recognized usage that these should be registered in the Parliaments. Registration was required in each of the numerous Parliaments, but here, as so often in French history, political agitation was confined to the capital, and the struggles of the judiciary for power were carried on by the Parliament of Paris. This right was only a formal right, but it was also the usage that the court to which an edict was sent for registration, if it disapproved the tenor of the proposed law, might present its protest to the monarch. In the meantime the registration was postponed that the monarch might reconsider his decision, and by a natural process the court soon attempted to adjourn the registration indefinitely and thus have its protest grow into a veto. If the monarch declined to follow the advice of the court, the judges still sought to defeat the obnoxious law by refusing to register it. Such a development was natural. The body whose action is needed is sure to claim a discretion as to its exercise. The Pope, whose consecration was required that the King of the Romans might become Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, soon asserted the right to examine whether the candidate was worthy of the office. In like manner the court, whose regis tration was required for the validity of an edict, naturally sought to make the registration something more than a formality. So far as the right of protest was concerned, this was not contested by the King. But a graver question was presented when the court refused to register an edict. If this right had become recognized, the Parliament of Paris would have possessed an absolute veto on legislation, and have exercised a power hardly inferior to that of the English Parliament. But another usage, the validity of which no one questioned, rendered the necessity for registration of small importance. When an edict was presented to the court, it could refuse registration and prepare remonstrances. But if the King saw fit to hold a bed of justice-in other words, if he attended the Parliament in person and there directed the registration of the edict-remonstrance must cease; the will of the monarch could not be disputed in the monarch's presence, and the Parliament proceeded to register the edict "by the express order of the King." Whether the registration was made voluntarily or was compelled by the monarch's presence made no difference as to the validity of the edict. It is from conflicting institutions that constitutional principles are developed by the slow processes of national growth. The right of the King to compel registration by his personal attendance might in time have become obsolete, and the authority of the Parliament would then have been supreme. The English King in like manner had, and still has, the right to veto any bill passed by the English Parliament. But in the conflict between monarch and Parliament the representatives of the people became the stronger party. The exercise by the English King of his constitutional right to veto legislation would now be deemed in the highest degree unconstitutional, and if persisted in would lead to revolution. The progress of constitutional development in France was just the reverse. The Parliament of Paris sought to increase its authority to obtain a position where the King's right to enforce registration, even though it might exist nominally, should not be enforced practically. During two centuries the struggle went on, and the end of that period found the contestants where they were at the beginning. The authority of the Parliament was considerable under a weak king and very little under a strong king. When the court represented any |