Délibérer à Toulouse au XVIIIe siècle. Les procureurs au parlement by Claire Dolan (review)

In this fascinating book Claire Dolan analyses the documents left by the community of procureurs in the Parlement of Toulouse. Procureurs were legal officers who represented clients through their mastery of procedural form but who were forbidden from presenting legal arguments to the court, a function that was reserved for avocats (lawyers). In 2012 Dolan published an important study of procureurs in southern France during the Ancien Régime (Les Procureurs du Midi sous l’Ancien Régime) and readers will benefit from reading the two books together, but Délibérer à Toulouse works well on its own, being focused on the functioning of the community and its writing practices. The book seeks to understand how the rhetoric of unity that pervades the community’s self-image intersected with the interests, business practices and mentalities of the individual members that comprised it.

Délibérer à Toulouse demonstrates how much caution is required when historians analyze and attempt to understand the registers of early modern communities of all kinds. The registers were clearly prepared after the fact, and while the rules of transcription could vary as the elected officers changed, the registers never present a complete picture of what happened in meetings. There was a gradual process whereby the registers became increasingly complete and detailed, notably after a 1749 Parlement arrêt required them to record all deliberations. Even then, however, they are much more (and less) than an objective account of what happened during their meetings. The registers, for example, present the community as united, and when conflict is mentioned, it is always “personified” so that, rather than the community being divided by faction, it is challenged by the behavior of one or two bad apples.

The community was a complex body. It was governed by two elected syndics and a doyen, the oldest member of the community. Relations among the various officers and with the general assembly were sometimes quite contentious. And if the community generally took sides with the syndics in their disputes with the doyen, the Parlement of Toulouse more often supported the doyen, confirming, for example his authority over the community’s finances and defending the requirement that the syndics provide advance notice to the doyen of any propositions they intended to bring before the community. In addition to the syndics and doyen there was a group of 24 commissaires, older procureurs named both by the elected officers and the Parlement, who were responsible to investigate questions of discipline. Dolan argues that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an ongoing process whereby the community ceded its power to the elite of the community in the person of these different officers. This can be seen in the decline in the number of procureurs who attended the assemblies, notably during the 1770s after the return of the pre-Maupeou Parlement. Still, Dolan notes that procureurs continued to turn out in large numbers when the community was threatened, whether by rival judicial officers or the fiscal demands of the absolutist state.

The community fought very hard to maintain the right to determine who could become a member and exercise the function of procureur. Individual members were to be subservient to the community, and too much tension between a member and the company could lead to his exclusion. There is a fascinating discussion of the ways that the community controlled members’ patronyms. Members apparently only used each other’s last names, and when two procureurs shared the same name, the community imposed a slight name change. In 1766 Antoine-Pierre Lapeirie was received as a member, but to avoid confusion he was told to sign DLapeirie, or Louis Casseirol was told to sign JCasseirol, with no indication given of why their first initial was not used. Membership in the community involved the symbolic disappearance of the individual to such an extent that procureurs frequently signed for each other, in a procedure...