ABSTRACT
For five hundred years the Parlement of Paris stood close to the heart of government in France, and an examination of its various functions — judicial, administrative, political — provides the best clue to an understanding of the role of the French monarchy itself. That role was, in the last analysis, a judicial one, based in and bound by the law, which the Parlement had the task of proclaiming, enforcing and preserving in written form. But the Parlement was not simply a mechanism through which the king could subjugate and control his kingdom: the magistrates were equally obliged to protect the privileges of the subject against royal assault. The Parlement adhered more rigidly to the traditional concept of the state, opposing the king first on the basis of its own legal records, then on behalf of those other institutions, local assemblies and Estates-General, which gradually became powerless to defend the old order.
