Subjects and Citizens in the Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Everyone parades the name of these days, grumbled the abbe Bouniol de Montegut in 1756.1 Six years later Rousseau complained that the French applied this name to themselves without understanding its real meaning.2 As the self-styled genuine Catholic patriot and the self-styled of Geneva suggested, their contemporaries used the word citizen both loosely and frequently. Loosely, as if synonymous with subject, inasmuch as the principles of divine-right absolutism excluded them from sovereignty and the structures of the corporate kingdom deprived them of any common juridical identity. Frequently, not because the Encyclopedists interpolated the word into their vocabulary but because it served their polemical purposes during the prolonged disputes about religious, fiscal, and administrative matters spanning the eighteenth century.3 While philosophes repudiated much of the Ancien Regime outright, clergy, Jansenists, Protestants, parlementaires, pamphleteers, and their rulers unwittingly undermined the traditional order they claimed to defend by arguing for decades about the interpretation of the unwritten constitution of the realm.4 Their prolonged and well publicized contestations altered the meaning of words like citi-