Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France - R. Knecht J. - Страница 25

Historians have given so much attention to the Italian Wars that they have barely noticed the government of France under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Yet, as Russell Major has shown, it was under these kings that the monarchy which had begun to take shape under Charles VII was ‘cemented’. Louis XII’s contribution was especially notable: he provided France with ‘the most efficient government that it enjoyed during the Renaissance’. His reign produced a large number of edicts and ordinances aimed for the most part at improving the administration of justice. How far they represented his own ideas or those of his ministers is hard to say. There is not enough evidence to support the view of one historian (J.-A. Neret) that Louis came to the throne with a plan of reform inspired by Machiavelli. He certainly combined maturity with a long experience of variable political fortunes.

From the start of his reign Louis tried to be popular. This could best be done by sparing his subjects’ pockets. Charles VIII had left a treasury so empty that it could not even pay his funeral costs (estimated at 45,000 livres), so Louis announced that he would pay for them out of his private purse. He also paid for the festivities marking his own entry into Paris on 2 July and released royal officials and pensioners from the traditional obligation of making an accession gift. Louis announced that he would limit taxes to the minimum required by the defence of the realm, and kept his word for as long as possible. Except for a few years, he kept down the level of the taille almost till the end of the reign, and even lowered it on occasion. Around 1500, the taille amounted to only about 2.3 million livres annually, as compared with 3.9 million under Louis XI. Louis once ordered his agents to stop collecting a surtax when the reason for it – the Genoese revolt – had ended. When he came under pressure, he preferred to alienate parts of the royal domain or rely on loans or forced loans rather than raise taxes. He was able to do this because for many years his campaigns in Italy more than paid for themselves through plunder. At the end of his reign Louis ran into difficulties and taxes rose; yet he continued to be regarded, even as late as the seventeenth century, as a king who had spared his subjects.

Believing that a king should ‘live of his own’ (i.e. on the income from his domain), Louis avoided excessive expenditure on his court and on gifts to courtiers. He reduced the annual total of gifts and pensions from over 500,000 livres around 1500 to less than half that sum by 1510. However, in the last two years of the reign it went up again. Disappointed courtiers called Louis ‘le roi roturier’ (the commoner king) and his parsimony was mocked in satirical plays staged in Paris by the Basoche. But Louis was unrepentant. ‘I much prefer’, he said, ‘to make dandies laugh at my miserliness than to make the people weep at my open-handedness.’ Apart from curbing expenditure, he trebled the revenue from his domain by more efficient accounting. It reached a total of 231,000l. annually, or 6.3 per cent of the total royal revenues.

The sale of offices was a fiscal expedient used by Louis XII. By the end of the fifteenth century a distinction was made between financial and judicial offices: only the sale of the former was tacitly allowed. The ban on the sale of judicial offices had been affirmed by Charles VIII in July 1493: a candidate for office was only to be admitted after swearing an oath that he had paid nothing for it. Louis XII repeated the ban in March 1498. He admitted that he had allowed such sales in the past and foresaw that he might do so again ‘out of importunity or otherwise’. The chancellor was instructed not to seal such letters of provision, and royal officers were not to implement them if the letters had been sealed inadvertently. However, Louis could hardly expect his servants to obey a law which he had broken himself. In April 1499 he appointed Jean le Coq as conseiller général des aides ‘notwithstanding … his promise to pay a certain sum’. Office-holders, notably members of the Parlement of Paris, were allowed by Louis to resign their offices in return for a payment. Sometimes a fiction was used – such as the exchange of one office for another – to conceal an original payment.

Louis XII was one of the last kings of France to listen to pleadings in the parlement. The great Ordinance of Blois (March 1499) was aimed at ‘upholding justice, shortening trials and giving relief to the people’. Its 162 clauses dealt with many matters, not all judicial. While prescribing severe penalties for vagabonds and accepting the need for interrogation under torture, the ordinance sought to promote fair and prompt justice. Magistrates were to be worthy of their responsibilities; they were not to delegate them or be absent without leave. Proper legal qualifications were laid down for service on the judicial bench. No fathers, sons or brothers were to serve in the same court, and the sale of offices was banned, not for the first time. However, the ordinance seems to have been poorly enforced, for several of its provisions had to be repeated in another ordinance of 1510. This contained new clauses directed against usurers and regulations concerning notaries.

One of Louis XII’s major reforms was the reorganization of the Grand conseil, or king’s council acting as a lawcourt. It can be traced back to 1469 and a continuous series of archives, starting in 1483, shows that by then the council was meeting regularly and beginning to acquire a distinct identity. But it was Louis who, in August 1497, gave it a permanent staff of legal experts capable of coping with its growing legal business. Their competence included disputes between sovereign courts, complaints levelled at royal officials, quarrels over fiefs or ecclesiastical benefices, as well as appeals in civil and criminal cases. Being directly under the king, the council facilitated his intervention in criminal cases which touched him personally, such as that of Marshal Gié. Regarding the Grand conseil as a rival, the parlement showed its hostility on several occasions; but Louis placated it by giving it precedence and allowing its members to sit in the Grand conseil whenever they wished.

Louis’s concern to streamline the judicial system extended to France’s newest provinces. In Normandy the highest court of law, dating from the time of the dukes, was the Echiquier which met occasionally and had no permanent staff. Louis turned it into a permanent body with four presidents and 28 councillors. Under Francis I it became the Parlement of Rouen. In Provence, the Conseil éminent of the old counts of Provence was turned by Louis into a parlement with one president and eleven councillors. Finally, in Brittany justice was administered by the Grands Jours, a commission renewable each year. The members were partly Bretons and partly recruits from the Parlement of Paris. It functioned alongside a council, which was an administrative and judicial body. Gradually the commission developed at the expense of the council: in 1491 it acquired a permanent staff and fixed annual sessions. However, it did not become a parlement till 1554.

A major obstacle to judicial efficiency in early modern France was the survival of unwritten customary law. This varied from one locality to another; it was entirely pragmatic, serving particular needs as they arose. Because customs were variable and ill-defined, they needed to be validated by a judge before they could be used as evidence. In the Middle Ages attempts had been made by various kings to distinguish good customs from bad ones. Royal intervention took the form of a written declaration establishing what customs were to apply to a particular area. Professional jurists also produced coutumiers in which the customary law of whole provinces was written down. But it was only in the fifteenth century, when the kingdom was sufficiently unified politically, that the crown was able to think of providing an official, authenticated and coherent set of customs. The lead was given by Charles VII, but little further progress was made till 1497, when Charles VIII altered the procedure by which definitive customary laws were arrived at. Henceforth, a royal judge in a given area drew up a tentative list of customs after consulting his colleagues and local worthies. Representatives of the three estates then met to discuss the draft, which had to be approved by a majority of each estate’s representatives before being published in the king’s name. Much of this work was done under Louis XII, who commissioned two distinguished parlementaires – Roger Barme and Thibaut Baillet – to write down the customs of northern France. Till the end of the reign these two legists, acting in concert with the baillis, sénéchaux and representatives of the three estates in each area, verified and confirmed many customs after weeding out accretions. Georges d’Amboise signed the first rédaction at Tours on 5 May 1508 and many others quickly followed, but the task was unfinished when Louis died. Several provinces had to wait a century before their customs were verified.

In 1506, Louis was acclaimed by the spokesman of the notables at Blois as ‘father of the people’. He became renowned for his efforts to spare his subjects taxes, to give them justice and to provide them with security. His praises were sung throughout the sixteenth century. Even after Henry IV’s reign there were demands for a return to the time of Louis XII. His role, according to Russell Major, was ‘more to make the monarchy beloved than to change its character’.