If in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville sought to demonstrate how the French monarchy had destroyed self-government in France through the imposition of “absolutism,” he had to allow that judicial institutions retained considerable autonomy from the crown because venality protected magistrates from removal and because magistrates had been willing to forgo advancement in the judicial hierarchy. Recent historians have further chipped away at the notion of an omnibus “absolutist” state, casting doubt on the adequacy of even such loose terms as the “administrative monarchy” to describe a government in which many public functions were in effect privately owned and the crown's ability to police many of its own officials was sharply limited in practice. The king's thirteen superior courts—the parlements—have come in for a great deal of attention in this regard, but the lower bailiwick courts much less so, perhaps because they played a far more modest role in the battles over royal sovereignty that led to 1789.

In this superb book, Zoë A. Schneider partially fills this gap through a meticulous examination of Norman bailiwick courts during the supposed height of French “absolutism.” What she finds at the local level largely corroborates Tocqueville's insight into the judiciary and its paradoxical relationship to royal power—local magistrates were dependent on the crown for their jobs and formal legitimacy, yet they composed, as she puts it, a “nascent bureaucracy increasingly cut adrift from their state” (222). This autonomy derived partly from the considerable wealth and status most magistrates enjoyed before assuming their offices (61 percent of the highest ranking judges were nobles at entrance)—offices that did not typically provide high direct returns on invested capital but did afford profitable insights into the commercial and other affairs of the community. These insights devolved from the nature of the cases heard by the magistrates. Only occasionally occupied with criminal matters, bailiwick judges spent most of their time adjudicating disputes over property, which also helps to explain why the crown had so little leverage over them. The still underappreciated fact that the “absolute” monarchy did little to reshape customary civil law in connection with its larger enterprises under the Old Regime meant that it left the major part of the judiciary's business largely unregulated, business that touched the personal lives of even fairly modest subjects of the king. Not only did the local intendents have few contacts with and powers over the bailiwick courts but even the parlements rarely reversed bailiwick court decisions on appeal. Another obstacle to encroachment on the jurisdictional authority of bailiwick judges was the practice of cumul (ownership of multiple offices). Despite stern royal injunctions against it, many bailiwick judges occupied other positions in the royal administration in addition to posts in seigneurial courts, a situation which, as the author points out, undermines textbook assumptions about the inherent rivalry between royal and seigneurial justice. In sum, the bailiwick magistracy constituted an interlocking, elite directorate of local affairs in some respects more influential than the thirty intendents said by John Law to have governed France.

The upshot, the author points out in one of her most significant conclusions, is that much as the governments of France and Britain differed at the national level, at the local level their systems of justice closely resembled one another. Although the French system was venal and the British system was not, the jurisdictional authority of bailiwick judges was in many respects comparable to that of English JPs, who likewise constituted an elite with deep roots in their communities. What made them different was not that French bailiwick judges were more firmly tied to the national government than the JPs, but rather less so. The JPs were more closely supervised by higher judicial authorities, while they participated far more in national government decision making via their contacts in Parliament. In other words, the JPs could hardly be described as “a bureaucracy increasingly cut adrift from their state.”

If there is an underdeveloped side to this otherwise admirably researched and argued book, it is the reasons why dissatisfaction with the French system of local justice grew as the eighteenth century proceeded—not only, or even principally, among litigants, but also among the judiciary itself. The author argues that customary property law—to which the bailiwick courts were, considerations of equity aside, beholden—no longer met the requirements of a changing economy. But just how economic changes engendered this dissatisfaction is not made clear, nor is it explained why dissatisfaction was directed not only against obsolete legal codes but also against the judicial system that upheld them. Why the judiciary itself became willing to jettison a system that had worked so much in its favor remains especially obscure. Was it because serving as adjudicators of local property disputes for some reason no longer conferred the same indirect benefits bailiwick judges had previously enjoyed in addition to, and in a sense, as compensation for, their offices' modest formal emoluments? These are matters that deserve further exploration, and when and if they are, this splendid and important revision of the “absolutist” thesis, which all Old Regime institutional historians need to read and ponder, will undoubtedly provide a major point of departure.