Rent-seeking, reform, and conflict: French parliaments at the end of the Old Regime

Remontrances were critical comments from the parliaments about the legislation enacted by the king. The English parliament could issue similar petitions (Foster, 1974).

See Rouanet (2021) for a discussion of these arguments concerning the creation of the Banque de France during the French Revolution.

These tools have already been applied for other periods, such as the strategic role of usury prohibition in medieval Europe (Koyama, 2010), the decline of the Florentine school of painting in the Late Renaissance (Piano & Hardy, 2022), or price controls during the French Revolution (Rouanet, 2021). Tullock himself devoted a pioneering study to the English parliament of the seventeenth century, suggesting that dismantling the “Court of the Star Chamber” had greatly reduced rent-seeking activity in England and indirectly led to the Industrial Revolution (Tullock, 1988).

See Mongin (2018) and Koyama (2018) for a presentation of this approach.

The king was only prepared to grant them the least possible representation and political rights (Miller, 2011).

See Hopcroft (1999, p. 70).

During the French Revolution, any legislative intervention by the judges was explicitly prohibited by the law dated August 16–24, 1790, and Article 5 of the Civil Code that formally forbade judges “to rule by way of general and regulatory provision on the causes submitted to them.” Legislative power had meanwhile fully passed to the National Assembly.

Adam Smith (1776) gives an analysis of venality and the French parliaments under the Old Regime and more particularly of the parliament of Toulouse, emphasizing their control over the registration of laws. This right constrained the government, which was sometimes forced to use violence to compel the office-holders to approve its plans. We thank Alain Alcouffe and David Le Bris for these references.

Our work echoes the analysis by Allen (2005) of the choice between office-holders, appointed individuals, and salaried agents for the provision of public services. An office-holder is motivated by the prospect of profit, so that his incentives appear to be compatible with the king’s interest. However, the strong incentives to maximize the income drawn from the office could have undesirable consequences. For instance, if the fees received by a judge were not adjusted to take into account the changing conditions when handing down justice, this could lead the judge to take actions that were not in the interest of the citizens and he king. To avoid distortion in the provision of the service, the king could appoint agents to positions in exchange for their loyalty. The intendants were appointed by the king and could be removed without notice. The threat of being dismissed and the attendant losses acted as a strong disciplinary device.

Some généralités, which corresponded to administrative districts, had intendants with fiscal, legal, and military responsibilities since 1542 (Antoine, 1982).

The Fronde was a civil war that began in 1648, after the government issued fiscal laws to increase taxation during the Franco-Spanish War. Mazarin, the Prime Minister of France, and the young king Louis XIV faced revolts from the office-holders’ courts and the nobility. The government only managed to rectify the situation in 1653, see Moote (1971).

The Parisian courts called for their suppression on June 30, 1648.

Colbert’s survey revealed a total current price of 420 million livres tournois. At the same time, only 38.5 million livres tournois were levied in direct taxes. In 1614, the total value of the venal debt would have been 200 million livres tournois; in 1626 it was 300 million; see Doyle (1997) and Descimon (2015).

See Tullock (1975) for a general presentation of such effects.

Colbert is thought to have bought up nearly 20,000 offices by the time the war broke out in 1672. The king forced Colbert to issue new offices, threatening to dismiss him had he failed to provide enough funds to continue the war (Doyle, 2000, p. 479). But from the beginning of the eighteenth century, historians observe that many offices issued by the king were no longer purchased. They explain the market’s decline by the shrinking income from the offices (Blanquié, 2004, p. 356).

While all parliaments were able to make remontrances, nearly all were initiated by the parliament of Paris.

For example, nearly all parliamentarians belonged to the nobility, which granted them fiscal exemption. If a commoner bought a parliamentary office, he joined the nobility.

See the “Mémoire sur les diverses natures d’impositions qui composent les Recettes générales et sur les différentes branches de leur administration,” BN Ms. français 14083, p. 452. This manuscript indicates that Louis XV reconsidered the venal system as a whole. It explicitly states that the king was borrowing on the financial markets and therefore wished to limit the privileges of the office-holders, in order to broaden the tax base.

In this section, we follow the classic narrative given by Marion (1910).

For the parliament of Paris, this was “unheard of. We have never had recourse to [such an imposition] in peacetime,” while the parliament of Aix-en-Provence considered it “the most important edict that has yet appeared in the Monarchy in matters of finance” (Decroix, 2011, p. 93).

All monetary values are expressed in livres tournois and have been converted to silver equivalents (source: Hoffman, 1994). Note that since the price level increased considerably during the eighteenth century, the decline in office prices is even more pronounced in real terms than suggested by the graph.

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre occurred in 1572 when the Catholic faction attacked the Protestant Huguenots, leading to the death of thousands of people.

Delays (in days) in registering the Acts are computed as the average delay for each year.

Maupeou was the former first president of the parliament of Paris.

On this occasion, Maupeou is said to have exclaimed, “I had (finally) won a dispute for the king that had lasted for three hundred years ... He wants to lose it again ... He’s done for!” (Mousnier, 1980, p. 560).

While remontrances have been the subject of numerous studies by historians, there is a paucity of data on this period.

Touzery (1994), Riley (1987), Velde and Weir (1992), and Marion (1914).

Annuities were issued by the government and took the form of public debt.

The GMM estimator selects parameter estimates so that the correlations between the instruments and disturbances are as close to zero as possible, as defined by a criterion function. By appropriately choosing the weighting matrix in the criterion function, GMM can be made robust to heteroskedasticity and/or autocorrelation of unknown form.

Our results cannot be interpreted causally, but the evidence is consistent with our analytical framework.