Heresy and absolute power: Constitutional politics in early Reformation France

This dissertation examines the emergence of a practice of juridical absolutism as a result of the responses of the king of France and the Parlement of Paris to a multi-level crisis between 1523 and 1527. Their response was shaped by the basis of constitutional practice. When the monarchy and the Parlement had grasped for a language of politics in the fifteenth century, they found that the failure of Church reform had left a powerful language free for the taking. Because that language was imprinted with its canonical origins, they came to believe that their nation (initially, their church) had alone preserved the form of the apostolic Church, while the other churches -- the Roman above all -- had become corrupt. The king's agents in the Parlement harnessed this conviction to drive the Parlement to eliminate corruption in the church. The court responded with a century long campaign to suppress abuses of bishops' temporal and spiritual authority that created a precedent for royal action within the Church.;The monarchy and the Parlement nevertheless emphasized divergent tendencies in the Romano-canonical doctrine of monarchy. Consequently, in 1525, the tension between their respective views of royal power hardened into a constitutional deadlock. This deadlock was broken when the Parlement responded to "teeming" heresy by admitting first the pope's and then the king's absolute power, destroying two key principles of its former constitutionalism: respect for ecclesiastical jurisdiction gave way to a royal mandate within the Church and respect for the power of the ordinaries gave way to acceptance of extraordinary papal delegation. Heresy permitted the deployment of the language of Church reform within the constitutional framework of Roman law in order to reshape the practice and theory of monarchy in France. From the justification of royal action against heresy emerged a new constitutional equilibrium: absolute royal power checked only by the fundamental laws.