Nestled densely in the countryside of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France lay the largest permanent bureaucracy in Europe: twenty to thirty thousand royal bailiwick and seigneurial benches, dispensing justice to more than 85 percent of the French population.¹ The ordinary crown courts and lords’ courts were far more than arenas of litigation in the modern sense. They had gradually become the nexus of local governance by the middle of the seventeenth century, a rich breeding ground for men who both administered and governed the villages and towns. The judges of the common courts were the front line of the French state....

To a visitor in 1670, riding north across the great sweep of plains that angled down to the Atlantic Ocean in Normandy, the pays de Caux would have looked aptly like a golden loaf of bread rising out of the English Channel. Cut across the crown with deep river valleys that drained into the ports of Rouen, Dieppe, and a half dozen other towns, the district looked like the rich, rural cereal producer that it was. But the countryside surrounding the old Roman towns hid myriad complexities by the late seventeenth century. Fields of blue flax now covered the downs...

Sieur Pierre Doré rode into the town of Grainville-la-Teinturière in late December 1699 to hold his first assizes as chief judge of the royal bailiwick. No one in the community would have been surprised to see him don the long black robe as a royal justice in court that day; he was already a prominent figure in local circles. Doré had been a practicing barrister before the bar of Grainville for at least five years, and before that an avocat au Parlement in Rouen. He held a parish office in his home village as treasurer of Bosville, a twenty-minute walk...

To a young lawyer such as François Papillon, just beginning his practice at the king’s bench in the Caux, the problem of applying the king’s law to the countryside might seem a formidable task.¹ French royal law was a vast filing cabinet of disorganized directives, many unheeded or even contradictory. These positive laws of the French crown were impressive in their volume, if not in their congruity. By the late seventeenth century, royal law amounted to a collection of well over a million ordinances, edicts, arrêts, and declarations that had never aspired to the coherence of English common law. Astoundingly,...

One of the least-known aspects of governance during the ancien régime is how the lower-court system was integrated with the sovereign courts, Estates, and intendants at the pinnacle of provincial administration to provide order and authority in the countryside.¹ In Normandy, this relationship changed dramatically after the mid-seventeenth century. With the demise of the Norman Estates after 1665, and the only very specialized interests of the intendants in provincial matters, the Parlement and the bailiwick courts were perfectly poised to inherit the mantle of power. By 1665, over 90 percent of the 1,219 principal royal officers of the généralité of...

A week before the Christmas feast of 1728, Judge Jean Rousselet, in his black robes, took the bench at the Croix Rouge tavern, opening the year’s last royal assizes in the town. The tavern was a warmly familiar setting for the villagers and townspeople assembled at the audience.¹ Rousselet’s court had circulated from inn to inn in Grainville-la-Teinturière for more than two decades, after his chambers were flooded by the Durdent River in the winter of 1703. Royal edicts and arrêts repeatedly forbade holding court in taverns, but finding the village publican a more congenial landlord than the king, some...

As the pall of smoke lifted from the town square of Grainville-la-Teinturière in the spring of 1693, the bourg’s inhabitants were left looking at a pile of ashes representing villager Jacques Lefrançois. The ashes were not those of Jacques Lefrançois himself; they were his straw effigy, which had been hanged and set afire according to the court’s order. Judge Pierre Alexandre and the king’s prosecutor, Robert Maribrasse, were presiding over a theater of death in which the sentence was read out before an empty prisoner’s stool and a straw man burned in justice for a very real murder.¹ The spectacle...

The reemergence of bailiwicks as units of provincial governance, and of the common courts as their hub, was in some respects an elegant solution to problems of royal order in the ancien régime. A class of legally educated, propertied men stationed in the ordinary courts was a logical successor to the authority of the high nobility and aristocracy. Indeed, the French legal class had become so indispensable to local government that it largely crossed the watershed of the Revolution unscathed, becoming a key part of the country notability of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ From the crown’s perspective, the...