declared the necessity of uniformity with the Roman See, in which the Parliaments took the Gallican side, while the Court generally took that of the Jesuits: and the contest between King and parliaments (law courts) for prestige and authority. These parliaments were at first councils, called by the King from his baronage to give advice as to the laws of the realm. The barons gradually fell out of them, and the lawyers (probably their legal assessors) took their place; so that at the time we speak of they were wholly composed of professional lawyers. They had been largely used by the kings for consolidating their power over the feudal nobles, since they were in the habit of deciding all doubtful points of customary law in favour of the King: but by Louis XV.’s time they had in fact become the champions of the quasi-constitutional rights of the respectable citizens from the formally legal point of view, and were invariably opposed on the one hand to the Jesuits and on the other to the Freethinkers.
The Regency which succeeded to the 129 reign of Louis XIV. saw the definite beginnings of the last corruption which betokened the Revolution. The wars of aggrandisement still went on but were now generally unsuccessful; the industrialism set agoing by Colbert progressed steadily; but the profits to be gained by it did not satisfy the more adventurous spirits of the period, and the Regency saw a curious exposition of stock-jobbery before its time in the form of the Mississippi scheme of Law, which had its counterpart in England in the South-Sea Bubble. It was a financing operation—to get something out of nothing—founded on the mercantile theory of economy then current, which showed but an imperfect knowledge of the industrial revolution beginning under men’s very eyes, and assumed that the wealth of a country consists in the amount of the precious metals which it can retain. This assumption, we may observe, is curiously exemplified in the half-commercial, half-buccaneering romances of Defoe.
The free-thinkers before-named were the essence of the bourgeois party from 130 its intellectual side, as the parliaments were from the legal side.