The death of a judge: performance, honor, and legitimacy in seventeenth-century France ^*

di James R. Farr

The Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), pp. 1-22

On Friday afternoon, May 8, 1643, Philippe Giroux was executed for the murder of his first cousin. This was no ordinary execution of a common criminal, for Giroux had reached the pinnacle of social respectability and political power before his sudden plunge to infamy. Since 1633 he had been one of seven présidents (or presiding judges) at the Parlement of Dijon, the sovereign court of final appeal for the entire province of Burgundy.¹ This office was about as high politically and socially as a noble of the robe (i.e., of the magistracy) could climb. Moreover, for over ten years Philippe Giroux had been one of the most important clients in the patronage network of the governor of Burgundy and prince of the blood Henri II de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé.

The victim of the crime, Pierre Baillet, was nearly as distinguished as the convicted murderer, for he had been a président at the royal financial court in Dijon, the Chambre des Comptes. Baillet was last seen by many witnesses on his way to Giroux's house on the evening of September 6, 1638. For a variety of reasons, Giroux was quickly suspected of the murder (for one thing, he and Baillet's wife were not terribly discreet lovers), but Giroux was only arrested in July of 1640. Ample incriminating testimony seemed to warrant incarceration, but according to legal procedure at the time more than this was required for conviction.² The law also demanded corpus delicti - that is, the tangible evidence that a crime had been committed. In this case, that meant the body of Pierre Baillet. Therefore, only when the earthly remains of Baillet were discovered and identified, in early April 1643, could the judges proceed toward conviction. It is at this point that a very interesting text recounting the last days of Philippe Giroux takes up the story.

"La relation de la mort de Monsieur le Président Giroux" was written by Father Larme, a monk of the Minim Order who accompanied Philippe Giroux during the last month of his life and recorded - at times in great detail - his words and actions.³ This is a retrospective account by an eyewitness. Unfortunately, we know very little of Larme, and so we can only speculate why he might compose such a text. The text itself is undated and we cannot know precisely when Larme wrote it, but judging from the detailed recollection it contains, he must have composed it shortly after the president's execution, and quite likely from notes that he had kept during the last month of Giroux's life. Larme's account is especially precise about what happened on the second and eighth of May, the dates when Giroux was summoned to the courthouse of the Parlement (the Palais de Justice) in the heart of Dijon for hearings and eventual sentencing. Nothing in this account contradicts evidence from sources contemporary to the trial itself. Larme tells us that Giroux expected conviction and was resigned to imminent death. Because of this he requested that Larme and Thomas Chaudot, the priest of Giroux's home parish of Notre Dame, be with him constantly, in Larme's words, "for this final passage." Larme emphasizes throughout his text how he and Chaudot prepared Giroux for death.

These preparations for what Philippe Ariès has called a "good death" were typical of the age and have received ample scholarly attention, but they were an important element in something much larger as well, the construction of political and social legitimacy.⁴ Legitimacy was a negotiated validation of a certain distribution of authority and respectability. Much like honor, it was both asserted and conferred. Indeed, in the early modern era honor was a salient component of legitimacy, as the illuminating series of events recounted by Larme, culminating in Giroux's execution, make dramatically clear. The subject of honor has received considerable scholarly attention of late, but historians have only implicitly pointed to its connection with political and social legitimacy.⁵

Respectability and reputation, and thus political and social legitimacy, turned upon the possession of honor. Men thought of honor as a commodity, and many an early modern male, including Giroux, deemed it more precious than life itself. As with anything, it could - indeed, had to - circulate to have value and, like any commodity, it could be lost or stolen. Lost honor led to "infamy," and to lose honor - as Giroux did, as we will see, through the legal ritual of the amende honorable - was worse than death. Honor's value was calculated in terms of "credit" and "debt," possession and loss. It was expressed through reputation, through the esteem in which one was held by others. Honor was possessed only if the public judged one worthy of it; to discredit an individual with allegations of dishonorable behavior was to raise doubt among the public. Insults were rhetorical attempts at persuading the public of an individual's infamy. Since honor was more dear than life itself, allegations of dishonor, if made to stick, could be quite literally deadly.

It was during the early modern period when, paradoxically, the idea of social stratification and hierarchical ossification was both most explicitly articulated and most challenged by demographic pressures and the resultant upward social mobility of the newly rich. Honor was called upon to fix reality, to halt the flux, and accordingly it was encased in social, political, and even legal rituals (like doffing hats to superiors, rendering visible obeisance to kings, or, as we will see, performing the amende honorable). The function of these rituals was in part, as with all rituals, to fix, however momentarily, the fluidity of social reality. Otherwise, it was thought, all manner of chaos and destruction would result.

As society became increasingly stratified in the seventeenth century, a culture of dissociation took ever firmer hold.⁶ And it was not only society's elites who increasingly distanced themselves from social inferiors: we find the process of dissociation at all social levels, and everywhere it was manifested by cultural markers of status that men and women at the time associated with the possession of honor. Honor became society's measure of social standing in the increasingly visible hierarchy, and it enforced standards of accepted conduct and measured an individual's actions and worth against a norm recognized by peers, superiors, and inferiors. Duty and obligation, revenge and redress against insult and humiliation, even vindication by violence, were all subsumed in an understanding of honor that relied on the notion that the social hierarchy was established by God and mediated through signs and symbols by which the hierarchy could be read. Honor, then, was a prop for social and political order, and it formed a fundamental component of the system of legitimacy that placed people in various positions of power and status.

Giroux's words and gestures gain deeper meaning when read against his society's ideas about honor and legitimacy. His performance was laden with intentions that make sense when we understand, as he did, that honor circulated and that reputation and legitimacy had to be earned rhetorically, through persuasion. Recognizing this allows us to appreciate why Giroux's audiences were so important to him. And given that there were multiple intended audiences in this theater of death, we should not be surprised that his intentions could be conflicted. Indeed, above all Giroux had to weigh his spiritual salvation against what we might call his social salvation.

Giroux did what he could to earn spiritual salvation without forfeiting its social counterpart, but he must have wondered if this was possible. As far as the priests Larme and Chaudot were concerned, with respect to spiritual salvation Giroux played his part well in every way but one: he never confessed to the crime that they, and almost everyone else, were sure he had committed. This cast doubt upon the "goodness" of his death and so jeopardized his soul, but by not confessing Giroux may have been able to counter the infamy that his execution would impart. He could then hope to preserve the honor of his surviving family, above all that of his eight-and-a-half-year-old son and sole heir, Henri. In fact, judging from his words and gestures during the last week of his life, honor was just as important to Philippe Giroux as spiritual salvation, and he well knew that the conferral of honor came from several sources - social superiors, equals, and even inferiors. Giroux was keenly aware that each of these groups had to be addressed and, as we will see, he addressed them in dramatic fashion. Giroux also knew that social and political legitimacy - not just for himself but for everyone close to him - hung in the balance.

Preparations for a "Good Death"

The clergymen attending to Giroux during his last month were trying to prepare him for death. This entailed, for the priests and for Giroux, adhering to a ritual that would lead to a good death, which, in turn, would prepare the way for spiritual salvation. Above all, a good death would follow the edifying script of penitence, expiation, and absolution. That Giroux felt his death was certain after the bones of Baillet had been discovered and identified is central to the didactic thrust of Larme's text. Thus, although Giroux steadfastly denied that he had committed the murder, in Larme's words "he recognized quite well that he could not escape death" because of the overwhelming evidence mounting against him. He then asked that the priests instruct him in the ways that a soul can be prepared for death and can merit salvation. This preparation required, as Larme put it, the "profession of several acts in the presence of the holy sacrament and a complete abnegation of himself," eventually arriving at a "perfect resignation to the will of God."

Although these preparations went on for most of the month of April, the first dramatic moment in the narrative occurs on May 1. It was at this point that the script of the good death called for a confession of sins, the asking of forgiveness for wrongs Giroux had inflicted upon his enemies, and a general confession. Before receiving the host at the altar, which was to cap this edifying ritual, however, Chaudot pointedly asked Giroux, "Well, monsieur? Do you not realize that this is your true and real savior ... that I hold?" To which Giroux replied, "Yes. ... God will not pardon me if I have directly or indirectly ... murder[ed] ... Monsieur Baillet."

The priests then told Giroux that he had been summoned to appear before the Parlement on the following day, May 2. Fearing that final sentence might then be passed and execution immediately follow (as was customary at the time), Giroux spent a fitful night in the place that had been his prison for two-and-a-half years, the fortified castle that loomed over the walls of Dijon. Upon rising in the morning, Larme tells us, "he threw himself to his knees and made an ardent prayer to God not to turn away from a heart as contrite as his." He then was led by Chaudot to the chapel, heard mass and took communion again, in Larme's words, "repeating his act of faith ... of the preceding day."

Giroux's fate, however, was not determined on May 2. He languished for six more days, and when he was summoned again to the Parlement on the eighth he repeated the acts of penitence, expiation, and absolution that he had performed the week before. His priest heard confession, said mass, and administered the host, coaching Giroux toward the good death the while. "If this day is to be the last of your life," Chaudot asked, "ought you not return thanks to your God?" An eternity of bliss or torment hangs in the balance, he warned, so "prepare yourself gently and courageously for whatever it pleases God to decide." Giroux replied appropriately, "I abandon myself entirely to the will of God."

In its essential outlines, the script followed by the priests and Giroux closely paralleled that required in preparation for a natural death. This ritual had become an art in the early modern period, and the essential actions performed and the words said by Giroux would have been done and said by anyone on his or her deathbed.⁷ These were the normal preparations for a good death. Of course, this was not to be a natural death but an execution, and executions obviously differed in important respects from natural deaths. Both kinds of death were carried out in the context of elaborate ceremony and ritual, but executions involved human and not just divine justice. Indeed, the judicial authorities wrapped themselves in the cloak of religion, and the entire execution ritual everywhere in Europe at this time was elaborately bound up with religious actions and words.⁸ By playing his role in the theater of justice, according to a script of what we might call judicial theology, Giroux participated in the process of legitimating the judicial acts that delivered him to his fate.⁹ As we will see, he had good reasons to do so. After the pronouncement of death by the court, Giroux, crucifix in hand, began the procession to the site of execution, the Place du Morimont. In the chapel beneath the gallows there, still clutching the crucifix, he prostrated himself before the altar, saying "Receive, oh Lord, my death in expiation of my sins." Led by Larme and Chaudot, he then ascended the scaffold, concluded a recitation of litanies with "Ora pronobis," and then met his end.

Executions and natural deaths were not as dissimilar as might first appear, in that both could be "good" if the appropriate preparatory rituals were followed. In the case of an execution, however, the script should conclude with a confession for the crime.¹⁰ As an English pamphleteer wrote in 1692, "The people expect a confession always at the time of any man's execution," the malefactor thereby "accepting the deservedness of [his] execution."¹¹ The promise of heaven in recompense for performing a good death was a powerful inducement for the condemned to follow the script to the end, and it appears that in seventeenth-century England, the Netherlands, Germany, and France many convicted criminals did just that, ending their lives confessing to the crime.¹² Giroux, however, did not.

Indeed, Giroux did everything necessary to prepare for a good death except confess to the crime, even after admonitions from a dubious Chaudot about the consequences of lying. Perhaps Giroux refused to confess to the murder because he was innocent and had been framed in a miscarriage of justice. Giroux repeatedly protested that this was the case, that he was an innocent victim of conspirators who corrupted the course of justice. Giroux seized every opportunity during his trial to declare his innocence. Even after hearing the sentence of death, Giroux asked Larme and Chaudot, "Ah well, my fathers, what must I do to prepare myself for death and to draw upon me the grace and mercy of God?" To which Larme replied, "Monsieur, the greatest act of humility that you could perform and that would draw on you the benedictions of heaven is to give satisfaction to your judges and to the people by affirming that it was you who murdered Monsieur Baillet your cousin." "Let's speak no more of that, my father," Giroux impatiently retorted. "You would not want me to affirm something that I never did. ... My father, I tell you the truth without equivocation." He repeated his claim to innocence at other times, too, blurting out upon hearing the word "convicted" as his death sentence was read to him: "Ah, convicted! Innocent it should be!" Then, when the prosecuting attorney told him on the scaffold that he had orders to ask a final time whether Giroux had killed Baillet, Giroux closed the book on the case by replying, "I have told you what I know."

The trial records at our disposal contain pages upon pages of circumstantial evidence (testimonies of witnesses, interrogations of the accused) that point conclusively toward Giroux's guilt ("indices si pressans," as Larme put it), but whether this testimony was as unimpeachable as the law required is ultimately unknowable. Indeed, Giroux wrote a letter to Pierre Bouvot de Lisle, the family attorney, complaining that he had heard from a "trusted source" that Pierre Saumaise de Chasans - Giroux's archenemy with whom he was in almost constant litigation and who became a partie civile (a private individual who joined the public prosecution and shouldered most, sometimes all, of the costs) in the murder case against him - was letting it be known about Dijon that "whatever Giroux was paying for witnesses, he would pay double."¹³ Moreover, Philippe's father, Benoît Giroux, had written Bouvot de Lisle with the information that Saumaise de Chasans had found a false witness to testify against his son.¹⁴

Indeed, doubt of Giroux's guilt seems to have been shared by the judges at the time. Certainly the authorities wanted a confession, perhaps to launch one of their own to eternity by completing the ritual of the good death, or perhaps to minimize suspicions that the incriminating testimony was tainted. Whatever the reason, even as they deliberated over the fate of their fellow judge in the first week in May, they seemed unsure of his guilt. Larme reports (and the trial record confirms) that after the judges sent Giroux back to his prison after his hearing on May 2 they spent most of the next week torturing Giroux's servants who had been accused as accomplices in the hope of extracting more convincing evidence of their master's guilt. None was forthcoming. The judges' doubts seemed to persist even on May 8. When Giroux came to the courthouse for final sentencing, Giroux, Larme, and Chaudot walked into a room adjoining the holding cell there so that Giroux could confess his sins one more time. Incredibly, Larme tells us in his text that he spied two men hidden beneath a table. He collared them, questioned them, and then threw them out of the room, having discovered that they were sent there by the judges to eavesdrop in hope of hearing Giroux "admit to the murder in question."

We will never know for sure if Giroux was guilty or innocent, but what is more important for our purposes is to understand why Giroux conformed to so much of the script of the good death so scrupulously and departed from it in such a crucial way, for this tells us a great deal about the construction of social and political legitimacy in Baroque France.

Giroux was resigned to his death nearly a month before his life ended, and he spent those days preparing for death. Beyond the religious and juridical components of this elaborate and often theatrical ritual, however, there were important social ones as well. Giroux prepared for death in a way that not only addressed the salvation of his soul and validated the judicial process that condemned him but also, and just as important, prepared for what we might call the social salvation of his family and its good name. Execution everywhere in early modern Europe brought infamy to the condemned, branding the malefactor dishonorable.¹⁵ It also splashed the stain upon the family, since the identity of an individual was inextricably social and individuals were first and foremost defined by the families to which they belonged. Infamy and dishonor were proclaimed by actions performed against the body of the condemned, but, as R. J. E. Evans points out, "The body was not simply the integral possession of the individual human being, but rather a socially defined entity, signifying status and standing in a corporate, highly stratified social system ... cemented by the pervasive notion of honor, ... the glue that held this society together. ... The loss of honour ... could spell ruin, ... infamy could mean the end of marriageability."¹⁶

So, in contemplating the final confession to the crime, Philippe Giroux had to weigh the demands of the good death and what that portended for his own spiritual salvation against the demands for the social respectability of his family - especially his young son Henri. If he had committed the crime and confessed on the gallows, salvation might await his soul, but the ignominy of execution would then be earned and the Giroux name dishonored. If he did not confess but was in fact the murderer, then his soul would be damned. Perhaps, however, his family's honor could be salvaged. Either way, however, Giroux had to contend with the fact that justice had declared him guilty, and the infamy this imparted had to be addressed if his family could hope to be spared the shame of his execution. Because of the conflicting objectives of spiritual and social salvation, both of which Giroux seems to have desired, his actions as recorded in Larme's text overflowed the narrow ritual channels devised to contain them in the script for the good death.

Countering the Infamy of Execution

Convicts suffered official, stylized degradations that stripped them of their civic being. For Giroux, this meant theatrically divesting him of his political office by removing from his person the attire (his judicial robe and hat, or bonnet carré) that announced it and destroying his social status by the dishonoring words he would be forced to utter and by the treatment of his body in execution. With his robe and hat now taken from him, Giroux, dressed simply in a black doublet and breeches, began the long, slow march from the courthouse to the gallows a quarter of a mile away.

The first stop in this lugubrious procession was between the columns of the porch of the courthouse, and here he performed the amende honorable, that socio-juridico-religious ceremony of penitence and expiation (begging forgiveness from God, king, justice, and any earthly enemies he had wronged). Technically in law the amende honorable was an abject public apology, but in the minds of men and women at the time it was much more than that. This humiliation Giroux dreaded above all else, even, as Larme tells us, more than death itself. The amende honorable paid a fine in the coin of honor, giving honor back to those from whom the convict had stolen it - God, king, and, perhaps, most important of all, wronged earthly enemies. In other words, when one performed the amende honorable, one forfeited life's most prized possession, honor. "[Giroux] feared," Larme reports, "losing honor even more than life; he was less sensitive to death than to this humiliating and dishonoring action." And so when the four-pound taper was put in Giroux's hands, beginning the ritual that would include the amende honorable and conclude with the execution, he cried out several times in what were the most revealing words of this entire account: "Ah, my father! My son! My kin! My friends! What will you not suffer from this affront that will burst upon you all!" He was then led through the streets to the site of execution where, upon the scaffold, the dishonoring ceremony that reassigned Giroux to the ignominious void outside the social hierarchy was concluded with the severing of his head from his body.

These official acts were designed to strip Giroux of status and office - of identity - and to assign him to infamy. However, as Thomas Lacqueur points out, the semiotics of execution are not stable and closed but open and fluid.¹⁷ To grasp the rich complexity of meanings buried in these morbid performances, we should consider the full range of Giroux's behavior beyond what was officially dictated, for here we will discover that the official meanings were contested. Larme presents a detailed account of both the official and unofficial acts, and from these we can discern several audiences Giroux addressed in word and gesture. The most obvious audience, of course, was God, but a close reading of the text reveals others, for in Giroux's theater of death God shared space in the audience with three other equally important groups of spectators. First, there were the judges, Giroux's former colleagues now charged with deciding his fate. Second, there were the people who lined the streets to watch Giroux's procession from the castle to the courthouse and from the courthouse to the Place du Morimont, which they clogged to view the execution. The crowd jammed about the gallows was "so numerous" and packed so densely, according to Larme, "that one could suffocate among them." The third audience so important to Giroux was that of his patrons, above all, the Prince of Condé.

From Larme's text we can discern what messages Giroux was trying to convey to these various audiences. First, the judges: Larme tells us that when Giroux entered the courtroom (the Chambre de Conseil) on May 2 and stood in the presence of "all the judges," he bowed deeply and "lugubriously" before them three times, nearly to the floor, each time "with great ... submission." Paying such respect to the judges surprised and deeply moved them, for Larme tells us that the judges covered their faces with the sleeves of their robes to hide the pain and the tears that Giroux's gesture provoked. Giroux continued the flattery by telling them that this hearing provided him the opportunity to acknowledge their virtue, and that the pallor of his face came more from respect for the judges than from fear of being convicted. He then protested pointedly that his tongue might not save his life, but it could save his honor and that of his father and son. Here was Giroux's prime objective: to counter the infamy that the official degradations would impart if he were convicted of and executed for the capital crime of which he stood accused. This was to be the first of many actions and words in the last week of his life that would have the same objective: to counter the dishonor that his conviction and execution would bring.¹⁸

By his respectful gestures, Giroux clearly hoped to convince the judges not to invoke humiliating and dishonorable forms of punishment, and as a judge himself he knew that in criminal cases it was within the judges' discretion to do just this.¹⁹ On May 8, before the final sentence was announced, Giroux said to Father Chaudot that he was ready for death, but "I would wish only that it pleases my judges to soften its form." Given the crime for which he was accused - premeditated homicide - he knew that dishonoring degradations might await him if the judges chose to inflict them. It was customary for the mode of punishment for such a heinous crime, even for nobles like Giroux, to be burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel. Breaking on the wheel was most hideous, humiliating, and painful, for the arms and legs of the condemned would be shattered by the blows of an iron bar delivered by the high executioner. The broken body of the still breathing criminal would then be thrown atop a raised, wooden-spoked wheel attached perpendicularly to a pole driven in the ground. There, eyes facing heavenward, he would be left to perish in a state of indescribable agony. Understandably, Giroux was terrified that this might be his fate, and he knew that the judges needed good reason to depart from custom and spare him this pain and shame. He hoped that his respectful pleas would so convince them. Perhaps they did, for Giroux was merely beheaded. When told beforehand by Chaudot that this was to be his fate, he said, "God be praised! These men have much charity and mercy, because according to the crime of which I have been accused, I ought to be more rudely treated."

Indeed, there are other indications that the judges did not seem bent on dishonoring this man and his family to the full extent of their power. On April 30, for example, they deliberated over how Giroux would be interrogated and even what he might be permitted to wear during the questioning.²⁰ All of this related directly to the matter of honor. Should Giroux be allowed to wear a long coat, a short coat, a hat, his scarlet judicial robes, or his judicial hat? The judges compromised, giving him his choice of long or short coat, hat or no hat, but they specifically forbade him to wear the almost sacred symbols of his office, the scarlet robes and the bonnet carré.

The judges revealed their troubled ambivalence about how to treat Giroux in other ways, too. They debated, for example, whether Giroux should be questioned in private, "behind the bar" in the Grand Chambre of the Parlement, as was typical when any judge was reprimanded by the court, or should he (like all of his suspected accomplices) be seated in front of the assembled judges like a common criminal on the shameful three-legged stool, the selette? Ultimately, the judges decided that a specially crafted, four-legged armless chair that sat higher than the ordinary stool would be used. They even had this chair placed upon a carpet rather than the bare floor and brought it closer to the judges' bench than the normal selette would have been.

The judges, then, balked at treating Giroux like a common criminal. For his hearing on May 2, to take another example, he was led into the courthouse through the "Great Door" in the front, a concession by the judges to Giroux's honor, for the ordinary criminal would have been hustled in shamefully through a side door. Similarly, on the day of his execution he was not sent to the gallows with his hands bound. Everyone knew that the executioner's touch was infamous, so the binding of Giroux's hands by him would have stained Giroux's honor as would the denial of the freedom of bodily movement.²¹ And after Giroux had been beheaded, no indignities were perpetrated upon his body. Its lifeless form simply slumped through a hole in the scaffold into the chapel below, and there it remained unmolested until some nuns took it with the severed head to the hôpital de St Esprit, whence both were taken, as Giroux had requested, for burial on the Giroux family estate of Marigny in the Charollais.

Giroux could not escape the infamy of capital execution, but he clearly hoped his judges would attenuate as much as possible the dishonorable accompanying rituals. With the notable exception of the amende honorable, this the judges seemed willing to do. Because one of the recipients of the fine of honor was Giroux's implacable foe and fellow judge on the court Pierre Saumaise de Chasans, it is likely that Saumaise insisted that the amende honorable be performed. Still, in most ways the judges did not dishonor Giroux to the fullest extent of their power. Indeed, even in the sentence of death they withheld a phrase that usually attended such convictions, speaking to the honor of the family in posterity. Sentences frequently called for punishments that would obliterate the memory of the convicted felon, but not this one. The judges, apparently, had no interest in obliterating the memory of this man.

Many of Giroux's words and gestures in the last week of his life reveal a struggle to influence how he would be remembered in the future. Some of his actions suggest a desire to counter the dishonor of the rituals of execution by imprinting a favorable impression and a lasting memory of his honor not just among his former colleagues the judges but also among the people. Giroux clearly considered the crowds of people who gathered to catch a glimpse of him and eventually to watch him die to be an audience worth addressing. Several times Larme reports that Giroux paid homage to assembled crowds. On May 2, as he emerged from the castle and was about to enter a carriage for the trip across town to the court, he twice bowed deeply to the people, hundreds of whom had gathered across the moat to watch him. En route to the court, he deliberately showed himself at the door of the carriage to the throngs of people lining the streets. Then, when he arrived at the courthouse and before entering the building, he turned and faced the crowd gathered there and, in the same spot he subsequently would be forced to give the shameful amende honorable, he again bowed to the crowd, now three times.

On May 8 the same scene repeated itself. Larme points out that Giroux showed the crowd nothing of his customary "bad humor" but instead was "mild and ... humble." His demeanor, Larme notes, evoked tears from the crowd. Upon the scaffold, Giroux continued to address the crowd, first, by once again bowing three times to them, and then - in a display yet again calculated to deflect dishonorable acts to his body - by refusing to allow the executioner to remove his doublet, instead taking it off himself. When the headsman snatched and removed Giroux's wig to gain a better view of the condemned man's neck, the crowd, says Larme, "cried with compassion." Whether the crowd was responding favorably to Giroux's defense of his honor is difficult to say, but when the executioner bungled the beheading by needing five blows to do the job, the crowd erupted with cries directed at the executioner: "Pendart de bourreau! Beat him to death!" Without the guards present to restrain the people, there would have been, in Larme's opinion, "a great riot."

Giroux's words and gestures appear to have constituted a memorable performance through which he struggled with the dishonorable rituals of execution. By countering these rituals of infamy with gestures and words articulating honor, he appealed to the people - the crowds that thronged the streets and clogged the Place du Morimont - to associate their memory of him with honor.

Larme tells us that Giroux was resigned to his own death, and Giroux spoke and behaved in a way that seems to confirm this. One might also infer from Larme's text, however, that Giroux held out the hope of eluding death altogether, for there was another audience besides the judges and the people whom Giroux was addressing, and that consisted of his patrons. Douglas Hay tells us that in eighteenth-century England "mercy was part of the currency of patronage. Petitions [for mercy] were most effective from great men, and the common course was for a plea to be passed up through increasingly higher levels of the social scale, between men bound together by the links of patronage and obligation."²² In France, only the king could stay an execution by granting grâce to the condemned, but Giroux was well placed to gain the king's ear if his majesty - or someone close to him - would only listen.

During the morning of the last day of his life, upon emerging from the chapel of the castle, Giroux encountered several unnamed individuals. He wished them good day and then entrusted them with written apologies to his "friends." At the gallows later the same day, after again asserting his innocence, he charged the officer presiding over the execution "to tell M. Bossuet père that he was his serviteur." The Bossuet in question was Claude, a judge and Commissaire aux Requêtes at the Parlement. That he was the uncle of the future renowned bishop Jacques-Bénigne meant nothing in 1643, but the Bossuets were already an important and powerful family at the time.

Perhaps Giroux hoped that his "friends" could help him (it was not unknown for executions to be stayed, even at the last moment), but the ear he most desperately wanted was one he so confidently had before 1640, that of Henri II de Bourbon, the Prince of Condé. Prince of the blood, first cousin to the king, close ally of Cardinal and Prime Minister Richelieu from 1626 until the Cardinal's death in 1642, governor of Burgundy, this illustrious prince was among the most powerful men in France and certainly could have saved Giroux's life if he had so wished. Giroux desperately hoped he would, or at least that the prince would intercede somehow to protect the honor of Giroux's heir, Henri. We hear of Condé twice in Larme's account, the first time on the morning of May 8. Giroux wrote three letters then; one was to his father and one to his sister, but the first one he wrote was to Condé, and this one he entrusted to Antoine Comeau to deliver. We do not know the contents of the letter, but entrusting it to Comeau was the best assurance Giroux had that it would reach the prince, for Comeau was not just Giroux's noble jailer but also a gentleman of the prince's chamber and the prince's chief lieutenant at the castle (Gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du prince de Condé and lieutenant du prince de Condé au Chateau). Then, while awaiting the official reading of the death sentence at the Parlement later that same day, Giroux said to Comeau, with tears in his eyes, "I beg you to assure my lord the prince that I remain his serviteur, and I beg him that this poor innocent who is my son and who has the honor to carry his [i.e., Condé's] name not to suffer from the disgrace of his father; perhaps he will be more fortunate than me." Forever preoccupied with his honor and that of his family, at this the eleventh hour he pleaded with the prince, as he had with the judges and the people if in different ways, to see to it that his son be protected and his family's name be remembered with honor.

But why did Giroux hold out any hope that Condé might listen? He had good reason: once, not so long before, he had been a - perhaps the - rising star in Condé's entourage. Indeed, the keystone of the arch of the house of Giroux, which had been built rapidly since 1600, was none other than Condé. In 1626 Condé and Richelieu became political allies, and for the remaining twenty years of Condé's life the prince amassed an enormous fortune and consolidated his power, notably in Burgundy, where he became royal governor in 1631.²³ Condé then created an extensive clientele to control the provincial Estates, municipal governments, and, above all, the Parlement. Richelieu - and later Mazarin - distributed patronage in most of France's provinces through networks of their own broker-clients to secure the loyalty and support of provincial nobles and institutions. In so doing, they bypassed the provincial governors, who had enjoyed a near monopoly on the brokerage of royal patronage in the provinces in the sixteenth century.²⁴ In seventeenth-century Burgundy, in contrast, Richelieu, and later Mazarin, relied on the Condés, leaving the princes to construct their own clientage systems.²⁵ Marc-Antoine Millotet, an avocat-général in the Dijon Parlement, wrote in 1650 that "no one obtained an office, whether in the Parlement or in other jurisdictions, other than through the mediation" of the Condés. "My Lords the princes, father and son, exercised all authority in governing Burgundy for more than twenty years."²⁶

The elder Condé constructed a network of clients, prominently including judges within the Parlement, and between 1627 and 1640 the Giroux family was central to it. The Giroux were parvenus, but this suited Condé's strategy. What better way to secure loyalty than to patronize a family that would owe its social existence to him?²⁷ In any case, Condé unquestionably favored this family. Benoît, Philippe's father and the son of a procureur du roi at the bailliage of Chalon-sur-Saône, became a judge in Burgundy's Parlement in 1596 and then purchased a presidency in 1610. Benoît Giroux was not alone in purchasing offices. Venality was one of the means to ascend the social and political ladder. Land was the other, and Philippe's father assiduously followed this path as well. Office and land spelled wealth, and this is why families who had the means feverishly acquired both every chance they got. In the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries - that is, when the Giroux were on the rise - history was decidedly on their side.²⁸ Benoît continued to be as active a property buyer as his father Robert had been - purchasing houses, vineyards, and even seigneuries whenever he could. Near the end of his life in 1650 he boasted the title of Lord of Vessey, Corcassey, Marigny, Ocle, and Saint Vallier. Multiply the real estate acquisitions of the Giroux by the number of all of the other upwardly mobile office-holding families, and we see voluminous growth in the venal magistracy and a massive land transfer from countryside to town.²⁹ The result was that by 1650 most of the lands and offices in Burgundy were owned by city dwellers, many of them residing in Dijon.

Benoît Giroux, then, was a man on the rise in the early seventeenth century, and as a result he was recruited into Condé's circle sometime in the 1620s. Clientage paid off for Benoît, for the prince supported the acquisition of a judgeship (a conseiller du roi) in the Parlement for Benoît's twenty-two-year-old son Philippe in 1627. The double illegality of the underage Philippe serving on the same court as his father (according to the letter of the law conseillers had to be twenty-five, and father and son could not serve simultaneously in Parlement) was swept aside by power politics.³⁰ Similarly, Condé's influence overrode the letter of the law a few years later when Benoît resigned his presidency to Philippe in 1633 (at twenty-eight, Philippe was still two years short of the minimum age required by law to serve in that office). There was opposition on the court to Philippe's accession, led by Giroux's implacable foe the judge Pierre Saumaise de Chasans, but the Giroux were ultimately vindicated when an exasperated Condé personally escorted Philippe into the Palais de Justice and seated his client.

Philippe Giroux knew he was the prince's créature even before this dramatic action, for in 1631, the year Condé assumed the governorship of Burgundy, the prince arranged a marriage between Philippe and Marie Le Goux de La Berchere, the daughter of the former First President of the Parlement, Jean-Baptiste, and the sister of the current one, Pierre.³¹ The first-born son of that union was given the name Henri, for it was the prince himself who held the child at the baptismal font as his godfather and namesake in 1634.³²

The Giroux were a good family for Condé to recruit and secure. Consider their connections in the parlementaire community in Dijon: Philippe Giroux's sister Barbe was married to Jacques Sayve, who was, like her father and brother, one of the seven presidents of the Parlement. Philippe's other sister, Madeleine, was married to Etienne Bouhier, a judge on the court. Philippe's mother-in-law, Marguerite Brulart, who also stood as godmother to his son Henri, was the granddaughter of a first president (Denis, 15701610), the daughter of another (Nicolas, 161027), the wife of a third (Jean-Baptiste Le Goux de La Berchere, 162731), the mother of a fourth (Pierre Le Goux de La Berchere, 163137), and the aunt of a fifth (Nicolas Brulart, 165791). In one way or another, the Giroux were allied or kin to many of the most powerful families in Burgundy: the Le Goux, the Brulart, the Bouhier, the Sayve, even, as we have seen, the Bossuet.³³ Indeed, the Giroux "house," as one of its enemies complained, was rapidly coming to dominate the Parlement; this enemy pointed out that by 1637 the house of Giroux included five of the seven presidents and thirty-six of the sixty-four conseillers.³⁴

Philippe Giroux had every reason to feel confident that he had Condé securely in his corner. However, in 1637 cracks began opening in this once-solid edifice. First, Philippe's brother-in-law, First President Pierre Le Goux de La Berchere, lost favor with Condé and was exiled from Burgundy.³⁵ He was replaced by Antoine Bretagne, an aged judge from the Parlement of Metz, and then, upon Bretagne's death within the year, by Jean Bouchu, a trusted client of Condé and no friend to or ally of the Giroux. Condé was beginning to switch horses, a shift in the patron-client constellation that would eventually isolate Giroux.

In late 1638 Giroux was suspected of the murder of President Baillet, but it was only in 1640 that Giroux knew decisively that his former patron had abandoned him, for it was then that Condé first refused an audience with him and then declined one in Paris with his father Benoît (threatening to have him chased from the city if he didn't leave immediately). Finally, in early 1643, the prince turned away the family lawyer Pierre Bouvot de Lisle, even though Bouvot claimed to have important evidence bearing on the innocence of Giroux.³⁶ By May of that year Giroux was desperate, but he had not abandoned hope that his former protector might spare his life, or at least save the honor of his family name. Thus his appeal to him by way of Comeau on the morning of May 8, the day that was to be the last of his life.

Political and Social Legitimacy

Giroux's histrionic appeals to patrons, judges, and people, focusing on his honor even more than his life or the salvation of his soul, were a desperate attempt to preserve for his family the place in society and in the power structure that the Giroux family had so painstakingly (and successfully) labored to construct for half a century. The theatrics of this strategy in the last week of his life, therefore, throw into relief the processes through which legitimacy was constructed in the mid-seventeenth century. Social legitimacy, Giorgio Chittolini and others have pointed out, derived from the exercise of public functions, and so social and political legitimacy were inextricably bound together. The honor of office, and the struggle of families to acquire it, was "a sign of the vital importance attributed to [official] ... positions of power as instruments of further [social] advancement and [political] empowerment."³⁷ The Giroux, of course, were not the only clan who grafted the family's interest upon an emerging institutional state structure (in this case, its judicial machinery), but they certainly reveal clearly that in the world of the nobility of the robe there were no meaningful distinctions between the social and the political.³⁸ What makes the theatrical performance that marked the last days of Philippe Giroux so enlightening is that his words and gestures expose the pluralism of power of the day and how honor was at its very core. Indeed, in a broad sense, honor legitimated power. Giroux's performance in the theater of death lays bare the subtle, complex, and even paradoxical nature of the strategies that individuals and families deployed to gain power and save honor as they negotiated their way through this shifting and dangerous thicket of a world.

Larme's narrative reveals how Giroux tried to counter the infamy of execution by calling attention to visible markers of honor. His performance was a reinscription of familiar rituals, but he tried desperately to turn their meaning to his and his family's advantage. Perhaps Larme's text itself served this purpose. Whether it was Giroux's intent to use Larme to record his words and gestures we can only infer, but at least once in the text Larme records that he expressed concern that Larme was not at that particular moment at his side. This text preserved in writing and thus in memory a record of Giroux's honorable words and actions in the face of the inevitable dishonorable execution. In a sense, then, we have a fifth audience beyond God, judges, the people, and patrons, and that is the indeterminate future readers of Larme's account. At stake was salvation, in a social sense perhaps more than a spiritual one, for Giroux's overriding objective was to salvage a future for his young son and his family's good name from the wreckage of his own life, which was brought to an end by an infamous capital conviction.

Most of the men and women accused as accomplices in the murder were convicted by Parlement within a week or so after Giroux's beheading. Some were flogged and banished, some fined, and one was sent for life to the king's galleys.³⁹ One, however, was not convicted, and that was Benoît Giroux, Philippe's father. Seventy-four years old when his son died, this leader of the Giroux clan must have suffered greatly during the travails of the son in whom he had entrusted the family's future. Benoît was a suspect in the murder conspiracy (he was formally accused of concealing evidence by hiding the bones of the victim), but when his fate was decided on May 20, 1643, his former colleagues on the bench spared him. His case was dismissed.

This must have seemed small consolation for this broken man who would die himself six years later at the age of eighty, for the sentence against Philippe had plundered his son. From Philippe's estate a total indemnity was extracted of 100,000 livres tournois - a huge sum - paid in court costs and damages to plaintiffs in the case. And, since Giroux was a condemned criminal, the remainder of his estate was confiscated by the crown.

Benoît Giroux, with good reason, might have seen this as the death knell rung not just for his son but for his clan as well. What, after all, would become of Philippe's eight-year-old son and sole heir Henri? Here, perhaps, Giroux's performance had some effect, for the king, on the recommendation of Condé, granted Henri a brevet du roy, which was in effect a gift from the king. This brevet restored to Henri his father's confiscated estate but only in the amount of what remained after all of the indemnities had been paid. His grandfather Benoît served as his guardian, and what wound up in Henri's hands was the fief of Vessey and some undisclosed amount of cash. Vessey was a rural estate of moderate size, returning to its owner about 1,000 livres tournois annually. Henri was ennobled in 1666 when his estate of Vessey became a marquisate. By then Henri had become an aide-de-camp in the king's army, and he never married. He was the last of his line to carry the name of Giroux.

That Philippe Giroux seemed largely to fail to wrest honor and legitimacy for his family from his desperate situation is less important for our purposes than the means by which he tried. His performance both recognized the need for honor and legitimacy and exhibits to us the processes by which they were circulated and constructed. Legitimacy - be it political or social - is about assent and consent, and one might even say that the mid-seventeenth-century French state and society were products of the countless and continuous struggles and accommodations not just among the ruling class but also throughout society. Philippe Giroux well knew that his power and its legitimate exercise depended upon social status, which in turn rested upon honor, and the recognition of this priceless possession lay with superiors, equals, and inferiors. To preserve in the future the position his arriviste family had carved in the tumultuous yet conceptually rigid sociopolitical hierarchy in just two generations, in his darkest hour when all the gains of his family could be lost, Giroux did all he could to curry favor with all the participants in the process who conferred legitimacy. He prepared his soul for God. He pleaded with his patrons and above all Condé to spare the honor of his son, his family, and its name. He entreated his fellow judges to attenuate the dishonorable aspects of execution. And, just as important, he conceded that the people played a role in legitimating the powerful by acknowledging to the people, by the homage he paid to them by repeatedly bowing before them, that the great - even in this age of "absolutism" - rule, in part, with the assent of the masses.

^* I would like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies for their generous support. Earlier versions of this article were presented as papers at the Colloquium, "La Légitimation des acteurs sociaux comme sujets politiques (XVI-XVIIIe siècles)," at Cornell University and the Wabash Valley French History Group. I would like to thank all of the participants at both meetings, with special thanks to Steven L. Kaplan, Christian Jouhaud, Robert Descimon, Sarah Maza, Mack P. Holt, William Beik, Paul Hanson, John Lynn, David Kammerling Smith, Brad Brown, and John Lauritz Larson.

1. The Parlement of Dijon was one of ten such sovereign courts in the entire kingdom, and within each of these courts there existed the offices of présidents. As the name suggests, présidents presided over cases heard in the various chambers of the court (civil, criminal, requests, and so on), and after consultation with conseillers du roi or advising judges also assigned to the various chambers, they would pass judgment. See E. de La Cuisine, Le Parlement de Bourgogne depuis son origine jusqu'à sa chute, 3 vols. (Dijon, 1864).

2. On criminal procedure at the time, see Andre Laingui and Arlette Lebigre, Histoire du droit pénal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1980); Jean Imbert and Georges Levasseur, Le Pouvoir, les juges, et les bourreaux (Paris, 1972); Edmond Detourbet, La procédure criminelle au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1881); Adhémar Esmein, A History of Continental Criminal Procedure with Special Reference to France, trans. John Simpson (Boston, 1913); John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof (Chicago, 1977), and Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1974).

3. Bibliothèque municipale de Dijon (henceforth BMD), Ms. 328, n.d. The text contains over 4,000 words.

4. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York, 1982).

5. On honor during the early modern period, see M. E. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642, suppl. 3 of Past and Present (Oxford, 1978); James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550-1650 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), "Honor, Law and Custom in the Renaissance," in A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance, ed. Guido Ruggiero (Oxford, 2002); Franco Hernandez and V. Montojo Montojo, "Cultura de honor, linaje-patron y movilidad social en Cartagena durante los siglos XVI y XVII," Hispania 53, no. 3 (1993): 1009-30; Kathleen Elizabeth Stuart, "The Boundaries of Honor: `Dishonorable People' in Augsburg, 1500-1800" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993); Robert James Bast, "Honor Your Fathers: The Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Early Modern Germany" (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1993); Pieter Spierenburg, "Faces of Violence: Homicide Trends and Cultural Meanings, Amsterdam, 1431-1816," Journal of Social History 27, no. 4 (1994): 701-16; William Palmer, "That `Insolent Liberty': Honor, Rites of Power, and Persuasion in Sixteenth-Century Ireland," Renaissance Quarterly 46, no. 2 (summer 1993): 308-27; Frederick Robertson Bryson, The Point of Honor in Sixteenth Century Italy: An Aspect of the Life of the Gentleman (New York, 1935); Thomas Cohen, "Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain, and Truth-Telling in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Courtroom," Sixteenth Century Journal 29, no. 4 (1998): 975-98, "The Lay Liturgy of Affront in Sixteenth-Century Italy," Journal of Social History 25, no. 4 (summer 1992): 857-77; Richard Cust, "Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings," Past and Present 149 (1995): 57-94. For a useful anthropological perspective on honor, see Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago, 1994).

6. See Robert Muchembled, L'Invention de l'homme moderne: Sensibilités, moeurs et comportements collectifs sous l'ancien régime (Paris, 1988).

7. In addition to Ariés, see Bettie Anne Doebler, "Rooted Sorrow": Dying in Early Modern England (Cranbury, N.J., 1994); Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (Seven Oaks, Calif., 1991); Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995); Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); and Sharon Strocchia, Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 1992).

8. On executions, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pt. 1, chap. 2, "The Spectacle of the Scaffold"; R. J. E. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany from the Thirty Years' War to 1945 (Oxford, 1995); Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge, 1984); Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel (Chicago, 2000); Richard van Dülmen, Theatre of Horror: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Germany, trans. E. Neu (Cambridge, 1990); Albrecht Keller, ed., A Hangman's Diary: Being the Journal of Master Franz Schmidt, Public Executioner of Nuremberg, 1573-1617, trans. C. Calvert and A. W. Gruner (Montclair, N.J., 1973); J. A. Sharpe, "`Last Dying Speeches': Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 107 (1985): 144-67; Thomas W. Lacqueur, "Crowds, Carnival, and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First Modern Society, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989); Esther Cohen, "Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: The Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe," History of European Ideas 1 (1989): 407-16, "`To Die a Criminal for the Public Good': The Execution Ritual in Late Medieval Paris," in Law, Custom, and the Social Fabric in Medieval Europe, ed. Bernard Bachrach and David Nicholas (Kalamazoo, 1990), pp. 285-304; Filippo Fineschi, "La rappresentazione della morte sul patibolo nella liturgia Firentina della congregazione dei Neri," Archivio Storico Italiano 150, no. 3 (1992): 805-46; Constance Cagnat, "Les histoires tragiques de Mme de Sévigné," Dix-septième siècle 44, no. 2 (1992): 219-34; and Jutta Nowosadtko, "`Scharfrichter'-`Hangman': Zwei sozialkulturelle Varianten im Umgang mit dem Vollzug der Todesstrafe," Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 74, no. 11 (1992): 147-72.

9. On the sacralization of justice and judges, see James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 1550-1730 (New York, 1995), chap. 2, "Parlementaires and the Paradox of Power: Sovereignty and Jurisprudence in Rapt Cases in Early Modern Burgundy," European History Quarterly 25, no. 3 (July 1995): 325-51; Etienne Delcambre, "Witchcraft Trials in Lorraine: Psychology of the Judges," in European Witchcraft, ed. William Monter (New York, 1969); and John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985), chap. 8 ("Migrations of the Holy").

10. Foucault, pp. 65-66.

11. Sharpe, pp. 150, 152.

12. Spierenburg, Spectacle; Foucault, p. 65.

13. Archives départementales de la Côte-d'Or (ADCO) B 12175, f. 133v., January 2, 1639.

14. ADCO B 12175, f. 138v., December 10, 1642.

15. For France, see Daniel Jousse, Traité de la justice criminelle de France, 4 vols. (Paris, 1771); and P.-F. Muyart de Vouglans, Institutes au droit criminel (Paris, 1757).

16. Evans, pp. 53-54.

17. Lacqueur, p. 319.

18. Seeking "posthumous rehabilitation" of honor and reputation, in Benoît Garnot's words, was not an unusual tactic for convicted criminals. See his book on a Burgundian murder trial, Un crime conjugal au 18e siècle: L'affaire Boiveau (Paris, 1993), epilogue ("La logique du rachat"), esp. p. 166.

19. For a lucid discussion of the discretion of judges in the system of French "arbitrary justice," as it was called then, see William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), chap. 1 ("Criminal Justice in Sixteenth-Century France").

20. ADCO B 12175 (Journal de ce qui s'est passé en Parlement au procez criminel de Monsr Le Président Giroux, 5 mars 1640-16 juillet 1646).

21. Spierenburg, Spectacle (n. 8 above), p. 91; Evans (n. 8 above), pp. 54, 55.

22. Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law," in Albion's Fatal Tree, ed. Hay et al. (New York, 1975), p. 45.

23. Christian Jouhaud, "Politiques de princes: Les Condé (1630-1652)," in L'état et les aristocraties, ed. Philippe Contamine (Paris, 1989), p. 339. On Richelieu, see Joseph Bergin, Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (New Haven, Conn., 1985), and The Rise of Richelieu (New Haven, Conn., 1991). On Condé, see Katia Béguin, Les princes de Condé: Rebelles, courtisans et mécènes dans la France du grand siècle (Seyssel, 1999); Arlette Jouanna, Le Devoir de révolte (Paris, 1989); and Henri d'Orleans, le Duc d'Aumale, Histoire des princes de Condé, 8 vols. (Paris, 1885-96).

24. See Robert Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: Provincial Governors in Early Modern France (New Haven, Conn., 1978).

25. Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9, 165. Henri II de Bourbon died on Christmas day in 1646. He was succeeded as the prince of Condé by his son, Louis, later known as the Grand Condé.

26. Quoted in ibid., p. 94. See Heide Gronau-Chenillet, "Le parlement de Bourgogne et l'intendant sous les ministères de Richelieu et de Mazarin: Du clientélisme condéen vers fidelité au roi," in Les Parlements de province: Pouvoirs, justice et société du XVe au XVIIe siècle, ed. Jacques Poumarède and Jack Thomas (Toulouse, 1996), pp. 44352.

27. On this strategy of Condé's in general, see Pierre Lefebvre, "Aspects de la `fidélité' en France au XVIIe siècle: Le cas des agents des princes de Condé," Revue historique 250 (1973): 67.

28. Pierre de St. Jacob, "Mutations économiques et sociales dans les campagnes bourguignonnes à la fin du XVIe siècle," Etudes rurales 1 (1961): 34-49; Georges Huppert, Les bourgeois gentilhommes: An Essay on the Definition of Elites in Renaissance France (Chicago, 1977); Roland Mousnier, La venalité des offices sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris, 1971); and William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1996).

29. Between 1556 and 1643 the number of venal officers living in Dijon mushroomed from barely 100 to more than 250. James R. Farr, "Consumers, Commerce, and the Craftsmen of Dijon: The Changing Social and Economic Structure of a Provincial Capital, 1450-1750," in Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France, ed. Philip Benedict (London, 1989), pp. 134-73. See also Gaston Roupnel, La ville et la campagne au XVIIe siècle: Etudes sur les populations du pays dijonnais (Paris, 1955).

30. J.-F. Isambert et al., Recueil général de anciennes lois françaises, 29 vols. (Paris, 1839; reprint, 1964), 14:410, Ordinance of Blois, article 116, 1579; Jonathan Powis, "Aristocratie et bureaucratie," in Contamine, ed., p. 239, cites a royal ordinance of 1499 stipulating the same restrictions. See also de La Cuisine (n. 1 above), 1:80.

31. The first president of the Parlement was a royal appointee and was charged with annually assigning the presidents and the conseillers to their various chambers. Because of this discretion, his was an influential and prestigious office.

32. Archives municipales de Dijon, Series B, Etat civil, Baptisms, Notre Dame parish, December 3, 1634. Godparentage established "spiritual kinship" and was a very important bond uniting patrons and clients. See Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, 1979); John Bossy, "Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries," in Sanctity and Secularity, ed. Derek Baker (New York, 1973); and Farr, Hands of Honor (n. 5 above), pp. 126-28, 147-49.

33. See BMD, ms. 328. Claude Bossuet's son, Jacques, had stood as godfather to the son of Giroux's servant and alleged accomplice in the murder, Denis Cartaut, on December 27, 1638.

34. ADCO B 12175 (n. 13 above), 181r., March 16, 1637. See also Bibliothèque de France, Fonds français 1994, 5r.-v., n.d. (but after April 10, 1643).

35. In 1636 the Crown had imposed upon the Parlement of Dijon a 10,000 livres tournois levy to raise a corps of troops and to pay for fortifications to defend Dijon from imminent invasion. Parlement refused (we do not know how the justices voted, so we also do not know where Giroux stood on this issue) and further angered Richelieu and the king by declining to register a royal edict calling for the creation and sale of new offices, including an eighth presidency in the Parlement. Parlement remonstrated that it had not been consulted, and Richelieu opted temporarily for conciliation. Condé agreed to go along with the Cardinal's decision, but his counsel to Richelieu is informative. He wrote the following to the prime minister from Dijon on September 18, 1636: "I just received your orders on the Edicts; I will delay them as you wish. But you will please pardon me for saying that you are too good and that never will you see the authority of the king solidly established except by bringing the Parlements to heel [tenant les Parlements bas] and bringing them into line as is their duty. Sooner or later you will know their poor affection; nevertheless, ... when it pleases you I will push the business to its conclusion without danger of any resistance."

36. ADCO B 12175, fol. 151v.

37. Giorgio Chittolini, "The `Private,' the `Public,' and the State," Journal of Modern History, Suppl., 67 (December 1995): 50. For France, see Charles Loyseau, Cinq livres du droit de l'office (Paris, 1613); and Farr, "Parlementaires and the Paradox of Power" (n. 9 above). See also Anthony Fletcher, "Honour, Reputation, and Local Office Holding in Elizabethan and Stuart England," in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 92-115.

38. See Ralph Giesey, "State-Building in Early Modern France: The Role of Royal Officialdom," Journal of Modern History 55 (1983): 191-207.