At one point in his Traité dês seigneuries (1608), Charles Loyseau states the following about the historical importance of the Parlement de Paris to preserving the unity of the French crown: ‘It must be acknowledged that it was the Parlement that prevented us from being divided and dismembered in France as in Italy and Germany while maintaining the kingdom’s integrity. This way of considering the political development of the French monarchy from its sovereign court partly derives from how Loyseau began his career as a bureaucrat and lawyer in the Parlement, an experience that certainly shaped his ideological preferences and conditioned his corporate loyalty. However, it is above all explained by the need to justify and defend the prerogatives of an institution that, in the France of Loyseau and the first Bourbon king, was doubly threatened by the demoralisation inherent in the venality and the institutional subordination imposed by absolutism. Loyseau’s eulogy of the Paris Parlement is not, therefore, the recognition of any triumph, but the memory of time lost, roughly corresponding to the Valois dynasty between the first quarter of the 14th century and the last quarter of the 16th century in which the theory and practice of royal power depended largely on the political and intellectual influence of a singular institution, halfway between a supreme court and a representative assembly.

The research project presented in brief in this seminar seeks to study that influence starting out from legal reflection and the jurisprudence of the Paris Parlement on the public dimension of royal power and the organisation of society: in other words (and simplifying), on the distinction between the person of the king and the king’s function, between public and private interest; on the theory, structure and functioning of government; on problems of collective responsibility and the sharing of common resources; in short, on the form and nature of the monarchical state and its interactions with the complex of powers and interests that compose society. The constellations of particular issues that make up these general questions arise out of the tensions, conflicts and mutations permeating French society, in an extreme variety and complexity, amplified and intensified by the central problem of the legal fragility of the legitimacy of the Valois succession. The preservation of the integrity of the kingdom to which Loyseau refers was the accidental outcome of the incessant convergence of these questions in the Paris Parlement and the solutions and compromises through which it sought to resolve them. To understand this process of constructing public power in France in the late Middle Ages, the functioning of the Paris Parlement is analysed from the three essential dimensions to its influence over the political organisation of the kingdom, which is discussed and problematised in this communication: 1) its jurisdictional and political influence, as a sovereign court capable of transforming the power relations between powers and their weighting in society; 2) its symbolic influence, as a representative body of the dominant group of French society and, at the same time, a pars corporis regis and tangible manifestation of the crown and monarchical authority; 3) and its intellectual influence, as a privileged space for reflection on the theory and practice of power.

Biographical note
André Vitória is a researcher at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of NOVA University, a member of the Institute of Medieval Studies and of the Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). His research work has been dedicated to interactions between the theory and practice of law and power in the late Middle Ages, currently focusing on the contribution of the Paris Parlement to the theorisation and organisation of political power in France in the second half of the fifteenth century. His main publications are: ‘Bad Cases and Worse Lawyers: Patterns of Legal Expertise in Medieval Portuguese Court Records, c. 1200-1400’, Open Library of Humanities 5/1 (2019); ‘Late Medieval Polities and the Problem of Corruption: France, England and Portugal, 1250-1500’, in Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, ed. R. Kroeze, A. Victoria and G. Geltner (Oxford, 2018) 77-89; ‘The Season of Show and Tell, Or How Afonso IV Redrew the Jurisdictional Map of Fourteenth-Century Portugal’, in Medieval Studies in Honour of Peter Linehan, ed. F. J. Hernández, R. Sánchez Ameijeiras and E. Falque (Florence, 2018) 449-92; ‘Two Weddings and a Lawsuit: Marriage Litigation in Fourteenth-Century Portugal’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 67/3 (2016) 513-67; ‘A little known version of Oldradus de Ponte’s consilium no. 83?’, Initium: Revistacatalanad’història del dret 17 (2012) 169-207.