Judicial Corruption and Legal Reform in Early Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

In 1614, an angry pamphleteer writing in the name of six peasants described for his French readers how the country was being taken over by lawyers. Legal officials had swelled their purses, bellies, and heads by gobbling up the rest of France; they were like a growing infestation of “leeches,” he exclaimed passionately, “that suck our blood right to the bone.” These judicial parasites were so disgusting that one should not even consider them a part of society; they were a foreign substance “born of putrefaction and living off putrescence.”