Top Highlights

• Typically, the rising lawyer at that time was steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment. French society, like others in much of Western Europe, was undergoing a colossal transformation. The ultra-intellectual Enlightenment of Montesquieu and Voltaire, Bach and Mozart, Isaac Newton and Adam Smith was just the tip of a vast change that was happening ...
• The Enlightenment gave the rising bougeoisie a fundamental claim to a political role; the practice of the law gave them the skills to exercise it. The expanding, educated and literate bougeoisie were pushing up and could no longer be stopped.
• On the one hand there were the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the assertion of the sovereignty of the people; but on the other there were the guillotine and the Terror, and some historians have felt that the French Revolution was fundamentally defined, even invalidated, by the violence of the Terror.
• These were not democratically elected parliaments like the House of Commons or the American Congress; instead, they were law courts at the top of the legal tree. And one of the tasks of the Paris Parlement in particular was to register and thus in some sense endorse the King’s policy initiatives. This Parlement could object if it believed that a ro...
• The États généraux, by contrast, were elected and could thus claim to represent the whole of the French nation. By tradition, these three estates were expected to meet, debate and vote separately; also by tradition, each of the three orders had a delegation of roughly equal size. This had the inevitable outcome that the two privileged orders, clerg...