Thus began to be implanted in that which should be the most respected and the most independent amongst the functions of government, namely, the administration of justice, not only the practice, but the fundamental maxim, of absolute government.  “I am going to the court, and I will speak the truth; after which the king will have to be obeyed,” was said in the middle of the seventeenth century by the premier president Mold to Cardinal de Retz.  Chancellor Duprat, if we are not mistaken, was, in the sixteenth century, the first chief of the French magistracy to make use of language despotic not only in fact, but also in principle.  President Mole was but the head of a body invested, so far as the king was concerned, with the right of remonstrance and resistance; when once that right was exercised, he might, without servility, give himself up to resignation.  Chancellor Duprat was the delegate, the organ, the representative of the king; it was in the name of the king himself that he affirmed the absolute power of the kingship and the absolute duty of submission.  Francis I. could not have committed the negotiation with Leo X. in respect of Charles vii.’s Pragmatic Sanction to a man with more inclination and better adapted for the work to be accomplished.

The Pragmatic Sanction had three principal objects:—­

1.  To uphold the liberties and the influence of the faithful in the government of the church, by sanctioning their right to elect ministers of the Christian faith, especially parish priests and bishops;

2.  To guarantee the liberties and rights of the church herself in her relations with her head, the pope, by proclaiming the necessity for the regular intervention of councils and their superiority in regard to the pope;

3.  To prevent or reform abuses in the relations of the papacy with the state and church of France in the matter of ecclesiastical tribute, especially as to the receipt by the pope, under the name of annates, of the first year’s revenue of the different ecclesiastical offices and benefices.

In the fifteenth century it was the general opinion in France, in state and in church, that there was in these dispositions nothing more than the primitive and traditional liberties and rights of the Christian church.  There was no thought of imposing upon the papacy any new regimen, but only of defending the old and legitimate regimen, recognized and upheld by St. Louis in the thirteenth century as well as by Charles vii. in the fifteenth.