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INSTITUTIONS] The parish priests, however, continued to enter declarations of baptisms, marriages and burials in registers kept according to the civil laws.

The general customs of the pays coutumiers were almost all officially recorded in the 16th century, definite procedure for this purpose having been adopted at the end of the 15th century. Drafts were prepared by the officials of the royal courts in the chief town of the district

in which the particular customs were valid, and were then submitted to the government. The king then appointed commissioners to visit the district and promulgate the customs on the spot. For the purpose of this publication the lords, lay and ecclesiastical, of the district, with representatives of the towns and of various bodies of the inhabitants, were summoned for a given day to the chief town. In this assembly each article was read, discussed and put to the vote. Those which were approved by the majority were thereupon decreed (décrétés) by the commissioners in the king’s name; those which gave rise to difficulties were put aside for the parlement to settle when it registered the coutume. The coutumes in this form became practically written law; henceforward their text could only be modified by a formal revision carried out according to the same procedure as the first version. Throughout the 16th century a fair number of coutumes were thus revised (reformées), with the express object of profiting by the observations and criticisms on the first text which had appeared in published commentaries and notes, the most important of which were those of Charles Dumoulin. In the 16th century there had been a revival of the study of Roman law, thanks to the historical school, among the most illustrious representatives of which were Jacques Cujas, Hugues Doneau and Jacques Godefroy; but this study had only slight influence on practical jurisprudence. Certain institutions, however, such as contracts and obligations, were regulated throughout the whole of France by the principles of Roman law.

Legislation by ordonnances, édits, déclarations or lettres patentes, emanating from the king, became more and more frequent; but the character of the grandes ordonnances, which were of a far-reaching and comprehensive nature, underwent a change during this period. In the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries they had been mainly ordonnances de réformation (i.e. revising previous laws), which were most frequently drawn up after a sitting of the states general, in accordance with the suggestions submitted by the deputies. The last of this type was the ordinance of 1629, promulgated after the states general of 1614 and the assemblies of notables which had followed it. In the 17th and 18th centuries they became essentially codifications, comprising a systematic and detailed statement of the whole branch of law. There are two of these series of codifying ordinances: the first under Louis XIV., inspired by Colbert and carried out under his direction. The chief ordinances of this group are that of 1667 on civil procedure (code of civil procedure); that of 1670 on the examination of criminal cases (code of penal procedure); that of 1673 on the commerce of merchants, and that of 1681 on the regulation of shipping, which form between them a complete code of commerce by land and sea. The ordinance of 1670 determined the formalities of that secret and written criminal procedure, as opposed to the hearing of both parties in a suit, which formerly obtained in France; it even increased its severity, continuing the employment of torture, binding the accused by oath to speak the truth, and refusing them counsel save in exceptional cases. The second series of codifications was made under Louis XV., through the action of the chancellor d’Aguesseau. Its chief result was the regulation, by the ordinances of 1731, 1735 and 1747, of deeds of gift between living persons, wills, and property left in trust. Under Louis XVI. some mitigation was made of the criminal law, notably the abolition of torture.

The feudal régime, in spite of the survival of seigniorial courts and tolls, was no longer of any political importance; but it still furnished the common form of real property. The fief, although it still implied homage from the vassal, no longer involved any service on his part (excepting that of the arrière-ban due to the king); but when a fief changed hands the lord still exacted his profits. Tenures held by roturiers, in addition to some similar

rights of transfer, were generally subject to periodical and fixed contributions for the profit of the lord. This system was still further complicated by tenures which were simply real and not feudal, e.g. that by payment of ground rent, which were superadded to the others, and had become all the heavier since, in the 18th century, royal rights of transfer had been added to the feudal rights. The inhabitants of the country districts were longing for the liberation of real property.

Serfdom had disappeared from most of the provinces of the kingdom; among all the coutumes which were officially codified, not more than ten or so still recognized this institution. This had been brought about especially by the agency of the custom by which serfs had been transformed into roturiers.

An edict of Louis XVI. of 1779 abolished serfdom on crown lands, and mitigated the condition of the serfs who still existed on the domains of individual lords. The nobility still remained a privileged class, exempt from certain taxes. Certain offices were restricted to the nobility; according to an edict of Louis XVI. (1781) it was even necessary to be a noble in order to become an officer in the army. In fact, the royal favours were reserved for the nobility.

Certain rules of civil and criminal procedure also distinguished nobles from roturiers. The acquisition of fiefs had ceased to bring nobility with it, but the latter was derived from three sources: birth, lettres d’anoblissement granted by the king and appointment to certain offices. In the 17th and 18th centuries the peers of France can be reckoned among the nobility, forming indeed its highest grade, though the rank of peer was still attached to a fief, which was handed down with it; on the eve of the Revolution there were thirty-eight lay peers. The rest of the nation, apart from the ecclesiastics, consisted of the roturiers, who were not subject to the disabilities of the serfs, but had not the privileges of the nobility. Hence the three orders (estates) of the kingdom: the clergy, the nobility and the tiers état (third estate). An edict of Louis XVI. had made a regular civil status possible to the Protestants, and had thrown open offices and professions to them, though not entirely; but the exercise of their religion was still forbidden.

The Revolution.—With the Revolution France entered the ranks of constitutional countries, in which the liberty of men is guaranteed by fixed and definite laws; from this time on, she has had always (except in the interval between two revolutions) a written constitution, which could not be touched by the ordinary legislative power. The first constitution was that of 1791; the states general of 1789, transformed by their own will, backed by public opinion, into the Constituent Assembly, drew it up on their own authority. But their work did not stop there. They abolished the whole of the old public law of France and part of the criminal law, or rather, transformed it in accordance with the principles laid down by the political philosophy of the 18th century. The principles which were then proclaimed are still, on most points, the foundation of modern French law. The development resulting from this extraordinary impetus can be divided into two quite distinct phases: the first, from 1789 to the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire in the year VIII., was the continuation of the impulse of the Revolution; the second includes the Consulate and the first Empire, and was, as it were, the marriage or fusion of the institutions arising from the Revolution with those of the ancien régime.

On the whole, the constitutional law of the Revolution is a remarkably united whole, if we consider only the two constitutions which were effectively applied during this first phase, that of the 3rd of September 1791, and that of the 5th Fructidor in the year III. It is true that between

them occurred the ultra-democratic constitution of the 24th of June 1793, the first voted by the Convention; but although this was ratified by the popular vote, to which it had been directly submitted, in accordance with a principle proclaimed by the Convention and kept in force under the Consulate