Before the Revolution of 1789, few powers were more evocative of French monarchy than the right to pardon. In their many remonstrances presented to the crown, the parlements frequently reminded the king that it was his power to dispense grace and not to punish that was truly royal. Yet while they have been happy to repeat these sentiments, historians have rarely troubled to investigate the exercise of the right to pardon. In this erudite and meticulously researched study, Reynald Abad offers a remarkable insight into the workings of the system of royal pardons during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. Both rulers did exercise their right to clemency, and on occasions they could do so of their own volition if pressed by powerful supplicants or those who intervened on their behalf. However, these were the exceptions and not the rule, and as Abad demonstrates the system of judicial clemency formed a staple part of an increasingly sophisticated state legal machine.

It was the Parlement of Paris, the senior judicial tribunal in the kingdom, and its parquet (King's Counsel), which was central to the system. For much of the eighteenth century, a member of the Joly de Fleury family held the key office of procureur général du roi, and the incredibly rich archival records of this legal dynasty are housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Abad has used these records to put together a series of fascinating case studies, illustrating the various crimes for which pardon was sought from the predictable homicides and thefts to more complicated financial frauds or sexual crimes such as the Arcueil affair perpetrated by the notorious marquis de Sade. As we might expect, the letters of pardon reflected the multitude of sins, and could vary from the commutation of the sentence for a condemned murderer to letters of recall for a convict ending a period of banishment or time spent in the galleys. If in theory, the relationship between the king and the recipient of a letter of pardon was a direct one, the reality was very different. While a substantial percentage of those studied by Abad had no apparent intercessors, most had one or more intermediaries intervening on their behalf. While many were reduced to relying on immediate friends or family members, it was still common to find illustrious individuals pleading on behalf of social inferiors with whom they had no direct connection. The case of the pious queen, Marie Leczinska, who interceded for a young domestic servant convicted of theft, largely, it would seem, because she was on the point of converting to Catholicism, was a case in point.

Clearly, few had such immediate access to the king, and the system of pardons rested largely on the administrative shoulders of the parquet working in close cooperation with the keeper of the seals (garde des sceaux). It was through them that recommendations were made to the king, who rarely questioned their judgment. The procureur general, in particular, was the principal target of those seeking to obtain pardon, which added another burden, and further prestige, to the already Herculean load of his office. Whether supplicants claimed a miscarriage of justice or more commonly sought to minimise the gravity of their crimes or to vaunt their other personal qualities in mitigation, it was ultimately for the parquet to investigate, not least because they were often petitioned no less vigorously by victims or their relatives.

Having set out the procedures involved, Abad turns his attention to how the system worked in practice. Firstly, it is striking that the crown was highly respectful of the decisions of the Parlement of Paris, and when it recommended an individual for pardon a favourable result was almost inevitable. Abad also stresses the expanding role of the parquet, made possible, in part, by the close relationship between the procureur général, Guillaume François Joly de Fleury, and the chancellor d'Aguesseau. Between them they gradually established a procedure for demands for pardon, which was less liable to interference by government ministers and by the second half of the eighteenth century more than three quarters of the king's decisions were in direct accord with the advice of the parquet. Throughout Abad is careful to explain the functioning of the judicial system, the role of its officers and the strategies of supplicants, their supporters and opponents. However this is not just a legal study, and it contains much that will interest scholars of the broader social, cultural and administrative history of eighteenth century France, and as such it is likely to remain the definitive text on the subject of royal pardons for a long time to come.