The baillis serve to increase the king's power.
Besides these important territorial adjustments, Louis IX did much to better the system of government and strengthen the king's power. Philip Augustus had established a new kind of officer, the baillis, who resembled the missi of Charlemagne. They were supported by a salary and frequently shifted from place to place so that there should be no danger of their taking root and establishing powerful feudal families, as had happened in the case of the counts, who were originally royal officers. Louis adopted and extended the institution of the baillis. In this way he kept his domains under his control and saw that justice was done and his revenue properly collected.
Government of Louis IX.
Before the thirteenth century there was little government in France in the modern sense of the word. The king relied for advice and aid, in the performance of his simple duties as ruler, upon a council of the great vassals, prelates, and others about his person. This council was scarcely organized into a regular assembly, and it transacted all the various kinds of governmental business without clearly distinguishing one kind from another. In the reign of Louis IX this assembly began to be divided into three bodies with different functions. There was: first, the king's council to aid him in conducting the general affairs of the kingdom; secondly, a chamber of accounts, a financial body which attended to the revenue; and lastly, the parlement, a supreme court made up of those trained in the law, which was becoming ever more complicated as time went on. Instead, as hitherto, of wandering about with the king, the parlement took up its quarters upon the little island in the Seine at Paris, where the great court-house (Palais de Justice) still stands. A regular system of appeals from the feudal courts to the royal courts was established. This served greatly to increase the king's power in distant parts of his realms. It was decreed further that the royal coins should alone be used in the domains of the king, and that his money should be accepted everywhere else within the kingdom concurrently with that of those of his vassals who had the privilege of coinage.
Philip the Fair (1285–1314) the first absolute ruler of France.
The grandson of St. Louis, Philip the Fair, is the first example of a French king who had both the will and the means to play the rôle of an absolute monarch. He had inherited a remarkably well organized government compared with anything that had existed since the time of Charlemagne. He was surrounded by a body of lawyers who had derived their ideas of the powers and rights of a prince from the Roman law. They naturally looked with suspicion upon everything that interfered with the supreme power of the monarch, and encouraged the king to bring the whole government into his own hands regardless of the privileges of his vassals and of the clergy.
The commons, or third estate, summoned to the Estates General, 1302.
Philip's attempt to force the clergy to contribute from their wealth to the support of the government led to a remarkable struggle with the pope, of which an account will be given in a later chapter. With the hope of gaining the support of the whole nation in his conflict with the head of the Church, the king summoned a great council of his realm in 1302. He included for the first time the representatives of the towns in addition to the nobles and prelates, whom the king had long been accustomed to consult. At the same period that the French Estates General,[81] or national assembly, was taking form through the addition of representatives of the commons, England was creating its Parliament. The two bodies were, however, to have a very different history, as will become clear later.
By the sagacious measures that have been mentioned, the French monarchs rescued their realms from feudal disruption and laid the foundation for the most powerful monarchy of western Europe. However, the question of how far the neighboring king across the Channel should extend his power on the continent remained unanswered. The boundary between France and England was not yet definitely determined and became, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the cause of long and disastrous wars, from which France finally emerged victorious. We must now turn back to trace the development of her English rival.[82]