ABSTRACT
The development of French law was complicated by the diversity of its sources. The Parlement was of course far more than the chief court of law in the land; before 1789, powers of justice, administration and police were not separated, and the Parlement had important responsibilities in the latter two spheres as well as in the former. The growth in royal prestige and the accompanying centralization of justice clearly observable from the reign of Philip Augustus partly explains the Parlemen’s emergence in the thirteenth century. By the middle of the fourteenth century the Parlement was overwhelmed with business, a state of affairs which persisted down to the eighteenth century. In cases requiring the intervention of the Parlement in the first instance the court’s chief agent was the Procureur-General, who from the beginning of the fourteenth century acted as public prosecutor on the king’s behalf.
