请将“The pride of the judges in their position, something that the crown pro-moted, was, according to Bailey Stone, the guiding thread of the parlements’ policy in the eighteenth century, both in Paris and the provinces.132 There were certain principles of 'constitutional law' that became, over time, a part of their members' self-conception: the view that the highest courts should be concerned with the maintenance of a hierarchically ordered society and the protection of private property (taken also to include privileges), as well as the defence of a certain independence of the French crown and church from Rome (a form of Gallicanism specific to the French parlement), and a paternalistic relationship towards the less well-favoured strata of the population. Certain of the parlements also had their own specific traditions, such as the vigorous defence of serfdom by the parlement of Besançon, or the Paris par-lements opposition to the superstition that vented itself in the provincial trials for witchcraft. The opposition of the parlements to the policies of the king's ministers and especially to their reform attempts, an opposition that became notorious, can be explained without difficulty in terms of the paternalistic and status-conscious self-conception of a privileged group of officials, the members of which possessed not only land and generally the seigneurial rule that went with it, but also lived off rent from town land and buildings. This line ran from the bitter struggle of the parlement de Paris against the power of the Jesuits, through its opposition to the transformation of the corvée (the obligation of peasants to maintain highways), as Turgot had proposed, into a financial contribution to be paid by all landowners, its resistance to the abolition of the dixième (also proposed by Turgot), down to its struggle against the establishment of provincial assemblies. (These were set up in 1787 to perform some of the former functions of the intendants, as well as some functions of the parlements, and were not constituted on the basis of the estates.) All these conflicts that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, and were sometimes very violent, in no way marked a new position on the part of the parlements, a sudden turn to aristocratic reaction, but rather the defence of a world of privilege and hierarchy that the office-holders of the supreme royal judicial power had long seen as their task. Franklin L. Ford, in a work pub-lished in 1962, argued that the policy and significance of the parlements, espe-cially that of the parlement de Paris, had changed with the social rise of their incumbents. This had supposedly blocked the way for the crown to continue limiting the power of the noblesse d'épée with the help of the noblesse de robe. Conversely, the increasing social and kinship fusion of the two strata of nobil-ity in the eighteenth century also made it impossible to use the special courts to control the practice in office of the noblesse de robe. For the great nobles active in these courts were no longer prepared to prosecute their relatives in the noblesse de robe (for a different explanation, see above). The rapprochement of the top layers of the two strata of nobility deprived the king of the possibility of playing off one of them against the other. This removed the most important basis of the (absolutist) power of the king, the competition between ‘robe' and ‘sword', and brought the royal power into a structural crisis. Against this sociological theory of absolutism, it has since been objected that - at least in the provinces - the fusion of the two strata of nobility had occurred already in the seventeenth century, and moreover, no fundamental change in judicial strategies can be shown for the eighteenth century. The most important criticism of Ford's interpretation, however, derives from the finding that gen-eralised rule under the ancien régime was organised in the form of the compe-tition of clientele groups. While institutional and estate differences did come into play in this competition, these were never a structuring aspect of it, since all the powerful - including the king - were aware that their ‘clienteles' cut across institutional and estate competition. The change since Ford's work in the interpretation of the role that the parlements played in the crisis of rule, also indicates that this did not arise from any new strategies, but rather from the unerring continuation of traditional parlement strategies in fundamentally altered circumstances.
When the crown's financial crisis assumed previously unheard-of propor-tions, in the wake of the Seven Years War and support of the North-American independence efforts, and the strategies for maintaining positions of nobility in various fields sharpened into a bitter defence against emerging forces, the adherence of the parlements to traditional positions meant a weakening of the crown, in as much as this was prevented from reforming its exercise of rule. Maupeou, the first minister of Louis XV, recognised this situation and reacted with all severity to the parlements both in the provinces and in Paris.
Some provincial parlements were sent on leave or banished, others forbidden to petition on behalf of the disciplined corps or to make contact with one another. The members of the parlement de Paris maintained that this ban obstructed the performance of their office, and thus damaged their office as property. They reacted with a judicial strike. The government then sent the parlement members lettres de cachet, individually and at night, either banishing them to prescribed locations, or confining them (in a few cases) to their estates. What was new here was that the members were not prescribed a common place of exile, as had traditionally been the case. Instead they were carefully isolated from one another. The most bitter critics of the government were given places of exile in mountainous or marshy districts. Touching stories soon made the rounds of magistrates who had to travel in the thick of winter, sleep on straw and have furniture and provisions sent them from the nearest towns. When the exiles did not, as expected, each offer their obedience, their offices were declared unoccupied and confiscated. A substitute court was established in Paris, the provincial parlements were abolished, and - as Maupeou later wrote - 'more sensible district courts' set up. Though the new judicial institution in Paris was boycotted both by lawyers and the police authority, the government remained unyielding until the end of Louis XV's reign.
In 1772 Louis XV died, and in 1774 the rights of the parlements were restored. The new government hoped that with its help it could implement its financial legislation. Whether this strategic turn was a 'mistake' - as J.F. Bosher133 believes - is not our concern here, rather the fact that in a situation of widespread opposition to the royal fiscal policy, the opposition of the par-lements was seen as a different issue from that of their role as the expression of general interests. This made the magistrates into 'representatives without mandate' (Egret), and historians previously debated why they did not make political capital out of the situation. As far back as 1883, Jules Flammermont wrote: 'The men who acquired their offices for money could not summon up the courage to demand the right to legislate in the name of the people'.134 In fact, the great majority of members of the parlements could not be brought to change their self-conception even by cold and discomfort. They continued to see themselves as true servants of the king (none of them thought of rejecting the terms of their banishment), asking only for their old privileges to be respected. To convince the crown of their right, they demanded a number of times from 1787 that the Estates General should be summoned, well aware that this would support them. They demanded its convening according to the regulations that had held sway in 1614, convinced that the better ordering of monarchical rule required a return to the principles sanctified by tradition.
Sanctioning of conditions of appropriation by ruling power
Scholarly discussion of the forms of appropriation of the developed ancien régime, and the structural context of its material reproduction, has been domi-nated in the last few decades by two sets of questions: the question of the modernisation potential of absolutist state power, and the debate on the causes of the French Revolution. As far as the first of these goes, it is now in a state of unravelling. When the concept of absolutism was still unchallenged, the task of research was only to explain the details of government develop- mental policy in each national state, but as the concept of absolutism has been challenged, the idea of systematic mercantilist economic promotion has also been somewhat shaken. Little is now heard of the celebrated French heroes of mercantilism, Sully and Colbert, and Colbertism, which had previously been seen as a particularly systematic case of development ‘from above', is nowa-days described as a mere illusion, or even a fiscal and bureaucratic obstacle to development. Of all the results of this historical revision, what especially stands out at this time is the demonstration that there was scarcely anything at the time that could be described as a national market, that peasant production - especially that of poorer peasants in the more remote districts - was involved in market relations to a far lesser extent than was previously thought, and above all, that legal texts say little or nothing about actual economic relations, or even actual government policies in the provinces. As to a new assessment of the importance that the specifically French form of generalised rule and concrete political strategies had for material relations, there have been general proposals - above all Robert Brenner's thesis of the structural importance of the French state as an independent institution of exploitation135 and George C. Comninel's analytical concept of an economy of owners of land and office - but no analysis of the overall connection that systematises the results of recent decades.
The situation is very similar in respect to the second of the debates men-tioned above. The explanatory concept of the French Revolution that was previously dominant has been dismantled, but no new one established in its place. Whilst criticism of the concept of absolutism proceeded more or less unchallenged, criticism of the so-called ‘social interpretation of the French Revolution' has been the object of bitter struggle between opposing schools. For the question of the social-structural causes of the Revolution involves a debate not only between scholarly and political positions, but between entire world-views. The ‘social interpretation' applies to the French Revolution a Marxian concept of the ‘bourgeois revolution' as a social transformation and consequently also a political one. In the view of its champions and its opponents alike, this interpretation needed to prove that both material reproduction and forms of rule before the Revolution were still dominated by feudal forms. ‘Feudalism', in this context, was broadly interpreted (extending for example 
to the purchase of landed property by bourgeois and newly ennobled). At all events, according to this interpretation, the Revolution was a confrontation between a feudal-aristocratic class and an alliance of oppressed classes that was dominated by the bourgeoisie. The opponents of this Marxist interpreta-tion (most clearly formulated by Albert Soboul), grouped under the rubric of 'revisionists', maintained that feudalism had disappeared long before the Revolution, and that the Revolution, far from accelerating capitalist develop-ment, actually interrupted it. There was no social need for the Revolution, which rather arose accidentally from a situation of political crisis.”翻译为中文