Parliamentary Submission
Once Louis XIV dealt with the nobility, he turned his attention to the parliaments that had so long plagued the French throne. For Louis XIV to stop the parliaments’ ability to limit the passing of his own laws, he had to reduce legislative powers of the parliaments. Louis did this through two legislative acts during his reign. The first in 1667, when Louis XIV passed a civil ordinance. Specifically, Title I of Article IV within this ordinance that made any law present by the king in a lit de justice must be registered by the parliaments. A lit de justice being when the king would be present for parliamentary tribunals to pressure parliament members to pass his laws. The parliaments did not like that this ordinance would reduce their ability to block the king's laws, so they ignored them. This continued until 1669, when Louis intimidated the Parliament of Paris by placing soldiers on the roads leading to the House of Justice and entered the building with fully armed guards and a band of trumpets and drums. This show of force led not only the Parliament of Paris, but all parliaments to register Louis' laws from then on. The second being the Declaration of 1673, which fixed all loopholes within the civil ordinance of 1663. This led some parliaments to resist by not enforcing Louis' laws. Thus, since the parliaments did not heed his will and some even contributed to revolts, Louis used his armies to end their resistance. In 1675, Louis crushed insurgencies that the Parliament of Renne and Bordeaux refused to end. Louis quickly used his standardized armies to crush all rebellion and to forcibly relocated the members of both parliaments to small villages where they would not have any influence. From then on, no such insubordination by the parliaments never occurred again under his rule.
Louis XIV presiding over a lit de justice