Entre justice et administration: la cour des aides de Montauban contre l'intendant lors des crises de l'Ancien Régime français

Abstract

The relations between the sovereign courts and the intendants contain a tormented and unsuccessful history, marked since the Grand Siècle by the difficult passage from the traditional jurisdictional management of the kingdom, considered inefficient, to an organisation that supports the triumph of the absolute and administrative monarchy. In these southern lands of the kingdom of France, torn apart by the Protestant reformation and the wars, the institutional upheaval which prepared the modern state and the Napoleonic granite masses, was carried out through strong embarrassments which opposed the intendant of the generality to the court of aids in Montauban. As soon as they were created, the magistrates of the jurisdictional company multiplied the manoeuvres against the intendant to safeguard their contentious attributions and the control of the municipal funds. Their particularistic actions were denounced by the intendant, who was there to make the king present everywhere in the kingdom and was zealous in his service. Since then, all the elements were in place for the outbreak of a noisy quarrel – the lawsuit against the intendant Gaspard Lescalopier – which worried the government at the turn of the reign of Louis XV, in the middle of the tax war in 1749, when King Louis XV, whom the subjects looked upon as a charming prince, became „Louis the Unloved”. These tumults prevented the modernisation of the French monarchy and led to the troubles of the Revolution.