The Rhetoric of Contention

Will the epoch of regeneration for France also be the epoch of destruction for this unhappy town? With such foreboding did the mayor of Villeneuve-le-Roy, a little town in the province of Champagne, plead for a new royal court in the first year of the French Revolution. His town's old bailliage court, founded in the twelfth century, was about to be abolished, and he feared that prominent families would emigrate unless the National Assembly in Paris agreed to locate a district and a district court at Villeneuve. 1 Spokesmen for hundreds of other towns in provincial France greeted news of administrative and judicial reform with similar anxiety. They believed that the lawcourts of the Old Regime had brought wealth and prestige to their communities. Landed proprietors had settled in towns where they could purchase offices in the King's courts; seigneurial judges had tried to imitate royal magistrates by turning lesser towns and bourgs into centers of public jurisprudence and private leisure; and everywhere a swarm of lawyers, notaries, clerks, and bailiffs had guided peasants through the tortuous procedures of the law. The countryside was filled with litigants and the towns with lawcourts, whose business provided employment for wealthy families, clients for local craftsmen, and markets for the peasantry. Lawcourts were attached to so many public institutions that the abolition of the Old Regime threatened to reduce many towns to the

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