The Capétiens were also elected to the throne, but the Roman tradition, preserved by the Church, recognized in their accession to power "a decree of Providence," and the sovereign was recognized in the feudal suzerain, "even when he was not obeyed." The great royal officers, the Ministerium regale, included the Chancelier, who signed the state papers; the Sénéchal, a species of mayor of the palace, of which he had charge of the service; the Connétable, chief of the royal stables and, later, head of the military forces; the Chambrier, keeper of the treasury and the archives; the Bouteillier, who administered the vineyards and the revenues of the royal domains. All these high offices were made the objects of persistent attempts on the part of the holders to retain them as hereditary privileges. In the eleventh, as in the sixth century, we find three classes of society in Gaul, the Gallo-Romans,—the barbarians,—the clercs,—the Church being replaced by the seigneurs,—and the serfs, each with its own organization and manners and customs and, in a certain degree, its peculiar language and literature. The first two were rich, active, and powerful; the last, poor and oppressed. There were three species of jurisdiction exercised by the seigneurs, high, medium, and lower, though some of them had the right only to the last two; these distinctions were frequently regulated by the quality of the accused, and were definitely determined only in succeeding centuries. The right to administer high justice carried with it that of executing death-sentences, and the pillory and the gibbet, erected near the château, were the visible evidences of this power. The bishops and the abbots had the same rights as the seigneurs, even to the extent of donning armor and combating in person if they so willed.
The obligations of the vilains, or serfs, included a long list of services, taxes, and obligations of all kinds; in the cities, and wherever possible, the seigneurs were in the habit of requiring payment in money. There was for them a civil as well as a penal law, the loi vilaine. They had, however, the right of appeal to the suzerain against the decision of their seigneurs, and Saint-Louis favored these appeals to his own court as tending to subordinate the seigneurial justice to his own. In this royal court a change was taking place,—to the great officers of the crown were now added légistes, as the procedures were based upon written precedent, and these bookish personages, at first treated with contempt by the nobles, gradually assumed the leading rôle as their familiarity with the records and their legal knowledge triumphed over the ignorant assurance of their betters.
In the thirteenth century, "the great revolutionist is the king, as the aristocracy had been before Hugues Capet, as the people will be after Louis XIV.... The royal authority had overthrown a great many barriers, and it was marching with great strides toward absolute power. It had imposed upon its turbulent vassals the king's peace, the king's justice, the king's coinage, and it enacted laws for all." In the character of Saint-Louis, "the spirit of justice which is in the Roman law was well combined with his Christian sentiments. When he condemned, for example, the judicial duel, he did so because combat is not a means of justice,—this is the Roman conception, and because it is to criminally tempt God,—this is the Christian spirit." The enfranchisement of the serfs, which received so great an impulse in this century, was largely brought about by a somewhat similar combination of just impulses and of practical motives,—the latter being frankly expressed by Beaumanoir and in several charters of the period.
The feudal court of the king had the double character of a council and of a court of justice; with the growth of the royal authority the functions of this court naturally increased, and it became necessary to divide them,—there was accordingly constituted the political court, or grand council, and the judicial court, or Parlement. Philippe le Bel, who was far more of an innovator than even Saint-Louis, first gave the latter a distinct organization. It was to sit twice a year at Paris, two months at a time, in the Palais de la Cité, which, in 1303, took the name of the Palais de Justice. The monarch counted upon his sovereign court of justice, which extended its jurisdiction over the whole kingdom, to bring the nation definitely under the royal authority. As the Parlement had been separated from the Grand Conseil, or royal court, so was there separated from it the Chambre des Comptes, charged with the administration of the finances. With this monarch also originated the institution of the ministère public, or magistrates charged, in all legal cases, with the defence of the rights of the king and of the public welfare.
But the most important measure of the administration of this reign was the convocation, in 1302, of the first States-General. "The États Généraux of Philippe le Bel," says Michelet, "constituted the national era of France, its certificate of birth." Despotic as he was, the king found himself under the necessity of seeking the support of the people for aid in his enterprises and to sustain him against the intolerable claims of the Papacy. The Assemblées Générales, in which the bishops met with the seigneurs, had been convoked as early as the reign of Pepin le Bref, in the middle of the eighth century, but in the États Généraux the sons of vilains took their seats with nobles and clergy. And very loyally they came to the aid of the monarch, not only in granting him the right to levy subsidies on the Church, but also in protesting against the bull of excommunication which Boniface VIII had launched against the king and the nation, and which Philippe had caused to be publicly burned on the 11th of February, 1302. It was unanimously declared that "the kings recognized no sovereign on the earth excepting God, and that it was an abomination to hear Boniface maintain that the kingdoms were subject to him, not only spiritually but temporally."
Under Philippe V, the États Généraux were convoked three times, and the regularity of their sittings thus seemingly established; this monarch also, following the procedure established under Louis XI, 1462, excluded the clergy from the Parlement, in order that he might have there only docile members. They re-entered it later under the name of conseillers clercs. In 1318 was created the Conseil étroit, or Council of State, which was the deliberative power, as the officers of the crown and the clercs du secret, from whom were selected later the secretaries of State, constituted the executive power. In the reign of Philippe VI, in 1338, the great principle of "taxation without representation is tyranny" was openly proclaimed in a meeting of the États Généraux, and the monarchs henceforth found themselves constrained to wage a varying struggle against this claim of the representatives of the nation to be consulted before the levying of imposts upon them. In the Dark Ages, now fast drawing to a close, three great principles had been promulgated which were to survive through many tribulations to the present day,—that no tax could be imposed without the consent of those who were to pay it; that no law could be enacted if it were not accepted by the representatives of those who were to obey it; that no judgment was legal unless rendered by the peers of the accused.
By an ordinance of Philippe VI, dated March 11, 1344, the personnel of the Parlement was fixed at three presidents and seventy-eight conseillers, appointed; of the latter, forty-four were ecclesiastics, and thirty-four, laymen. It was subsequently divided into seven chambers, the grand'chambre, the chambre criminelle, or la Tourelle, three chambres des enquêtes, and two chambres des requêtes. The first took cognizance of the important causes which concerned the State, the city, and the corporations; the criminal chamber sat in appeal on judgments rendered in the criminal courts (after 1515 it was given general jurisdiction); the three chambres des enquêtes decided upon the validity of appeals addressed to the Parlement, and decided as a court of last resort in processes which entailed punishments by fine; the two chambres des requêtes judged personal suits between officers of the royal household and others who, by their rank, were entitled to be judged by the Parlement. The second chambre des requêtes was instituted in 1580; they were both suppressed at the establishment of the Parlement Maupeou, in 1771. When Louis XIV recalled the Parlement, he established only a single chambre d'enquête. In 1546, the members of the Parlement enjoyed the privilege of hereditary nobility. They had the precedence over all other constituted authorities.
When the disastrous war with England broke out, under Jean le Bon, this monarch assembled