Untitled - Monoskop

PRIVILEGE-GRANTING AUTHORITIES IN FRANCE
number of books known to have been published under these privileges appears
to be 127. The number of grants had reached ten per year by 1512. Thereafter
there was no tendency to increase. There were, however, fluctuations. The
grave circumstances in France in 1 523-4 are reflected in a drop to one in 1 523,
followed by a leap to fourteen in 1524, falling back to nine in 1525 and three in
1526. Normally the annual number of grants varied from three to ten.
Many of these grants are known only from the printed books themselves, in
which a transcript is provided of the certified copy of the court's decision.
Only forty-four of the 102 grants made by the Parlement of Paris have been
found recorded in the registers of the Parlement. On the other hand the
registers record a couple of grants for items which have not survived or
perhaps were never published (e.g. PA 1524, GA), and they can sometimes
prove that the Parlement was the authority for the privilege where the book
itself bears only the words 'Cum priuilegio' (e.g. PA 1512, 7). The absence of
an entry in the registers is not in itself remarkable. It is by no means unheard
of for a judgement of the Parlement, even concerning an important lawsuit,
and even when the registers were very well kept, to be unrecorded in the
surviving volumes of the registers. 1 Such a high proportion of omissions as
that occurring in the case of the book-privileges can however hardly be an
accident. Either some of the conseillers thought the grant of such a privilege of
enough consequence to be entered in the main register, while others did not,
or else the applicant himself chose whether or not to ask for permanent
registration of his privilege, which was after all a short-term concession never
valid for more than four years at most, no doubt paying an extra fee
accordingly if he opted for registration. In the seventeenth century, when the
Parlement no longer had the right to grant privileges on its own authority, it
was still often called upon by beneficiaries to register privileges obtained from
the royal chancery. 2 This procedure was not universal or compulsory, and it
was an extra expense, but it was adopted by privilege-holders who thought
their grants especially likely to be contested. Such considerations may well, in
the earlier period, have influenced authors and publishers who had obtained
privileges from the Parlement itself, in deciding whether or not to ask for the
grant to be incorporated in the registers in their final and permanent form.
For a lawcourt to grant book-privileges at all was most unusual in the
context of the privilege-system as it had been growing up in the rest of Europe.
How then had the French Parlement come to give them?
The Parlement of Paris was the highest court of appeal for the kingdom of
France. Its duty of checking and registering all royal edicts and ordinances
1
E.g. English suits before the Parlement of Paris 1420-1436, ed. C. T. Allmand and C. A. J.
Armstrong, Camden Fourth Series, xxvi (Royal Historical Society, 1982), p. 25, n. 17.
2
H.-J. Martin, Lime, pouvoirs et societe' a Paris au xvii' siecle, Publications du Centre de recherches
d'Histoire et de Philologie de la iv Section de 1'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris: vi,
Histoire et civilisation du livre, 3 (Geneva), 1969, i, p. 448.
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