The Chancellor Daguesseau is said to have been descended from a noble family of the province of Saintonge; if so, he was careless of his privileges, for he never used between the two first letters of his name the comma, indicative of noble birth. He came however of distinguished parentage; for his grandfather had been First President of the Parliament of Bordeaux, and his father was appointed, by Colbert, Intendant of the Limousin, and subsequently advanced to the Intendancies of Bordeaux and of Languedoc. In the latter government he suggested to Colbert the grand idea of uniting the Ocean and the Mediterranean by means of that mighty work, the Canal of Languedoc. In the persecution raised against the Protestants of the South of France by Louis XIV., he was distinguished by mildness; and to his honour be it remembered, one person only perished under his jurisdiction. Disgusted by the dragonnades, and by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he resigned his Intendancy, and removed to Paris, where he continued to enjoy the royal favour, and to be employed in offices of trust: so that he may be said not only to have formed his son’s youth, but to have watched over his manhood.

That son, Henry FranÇois Daguesseau, was born at Limoges, November 7, 1668. In 1690, he was appointed King’s Advocate in the Court of the Chatelet, and soon after, at his father’s recommendation, Advocate-General in the Parliament of Paris. On hearing the wisdom of so young a choice brought into question, the king observed, that “the father was incapable of deceit, even in favour of his son.” So brilliantly did the young lawyer acquit himself in his charge, that Denis Talas, one of the chief of the magistracy, expressed the wish, “that he might finish as Daguesseau had begun.” The law-officers of that day did not confine themselves to a mere dry fulfilment of legal functions; there was a traditional taste, a love of polite and classic literature, a cultivation of poetry and eloquence, on which the jurists prided themselves, and which prompted them to seize every opportunity of rivalling the ecclesiastical orators and polite writers of the age. Thus, at the opening of each session, the Avocat-GÉnÉral pronounced an inaugurative discourse, which treated rather of points of high morality than law. Daguesseau acquired great fame from these effusions of eloquence. Their titles bespeak what they were: they treat of the Independence of the Advocate; the Knowledge of Man; of Magnanimity; of the Censorship. “The highest professions are the most dependent,” exclaimed Daguesseau on one of those occasions; “he whom the grandeur of his office elevates over other men, soon finds that the first hour of his dignity is the last of his independence.” These generous sentiments are strongly contrasted with the despotism of the government and the general servility of the age.

In 1700, Daguesseau was appointed Procureur-General, in which capacity he was obliged to form decisions on the gravest questions of state. A learned Memoir, drawn up by him in the year 1700, to prove that no ecclesiastics, not even cardinals, had a right to be exempt from royal jurisdiction, shows his mind already imbued with that jealousy of Papal supremacy which afterwards distinguished him. But his occupations were not confined to legal functions, the administration of that day being accustomed to have recourse, in all difficult and momentous questions, to the wisdom and authority of the magistracy. Thus Daguesseau was enabled, by directing his attention to the state of the hospitals, to remedy the enormous abuses practised in them, and to remodel these charitable institutions upon a new and philanthropic system. In the terrible famine of 1709, he was appointed one of the commission to inquire into the distresses of the time. He was the first to foresee the famine ere it arrived, and to recommend the fittest measures for obviating the misery which it menaced.

There existed, at that time, few questions on which a French statesman or magistrate found himself in opposition to the sovereign. Constitutional political liberty was unknown; and even freedom of conscience had been violated by the persecuting edicts of Louis XIV. The magistracy had allowed the Protestants to be crushed, awed by the fear of being considered favourers of rebellion. The legal and the lettered class of French, however they had abandoned the great cause of Reform, exaggerated as it had been by Calvin, were nevertheless still unprepared to submit to the spiritual despotism of Rome. They did not presume to question fundamental doctrines of faith; but they rejected the interference of the Pope in matters of ecclesiastical government, and their claim to independence was sanctioned by the ancient privileges of the Gallican Church. And they were resolutely opposed to the faithless and insidious doctrines of the Jesuits, who sought to make the rule of conscience subordinate to the dictation of the priesthood. These two grounds of opposition to Rome and to the Jesuits constituted the better part of Jansenism. Louis XIV., in his later years, commenced a crusade against this species of resistance to his royal will; and, amongst other acts of repression, he procured a Bull from Rome, called Unigenitus, from its first word, which condemned the combined opposition of the Gallican clergy and the anti-Jesuit moralist. In order to be binding upon the French, it was necessary that it should be registered in Parliament. The consent of the great legal officers was requisite, and they were accordingly summoned before Louis XIV. The First President and the Advocate-General had already been won over to the court. The independent character of Daguesseau was the only obstacle; and they had hopes that he might be induced to yield, from the known mildness of his disposition. His parting from his wife on this occasion is recorded both by Duclos and St. Simon: “Go,” said she, as she embraced him; “when before the king, forget wife and children: sacrifice all but honour.” Daguesseau acted by the noble counsel, and remained immoveable, though threatened by his despotic master with the loss of his place. The death of Louis XIV., in 1715, soon relieved Daguesseau from the difficulty of his position.

On the establishment of the Regency, the administration was reorganized on a different plan, each department being intrusted to a council. Daguesseau was appointed member of the Council of Conscience, being, in fact, the ecclesiastical department. He proposed the immediate banishment of the Jesuits from the kingdom; but this measure he was unable to compass. In February, 1717, a vacancy occurred in the office of Chancellor, and the Regent immediately sent for Daguesseau, who was at mass in his parish church, and refused to come until he was twice sent for. When he arrived, the Regent exclaimed to the company, “Here is a new and very worthy Chancellor!” and carrying him to the Tuileries in his coach, made the young king present him with the box of seals. Daguesseau escaped from the crowd to acquaint his brother with his good fortune: “I had rather it was you than I,” exclaimed the latter, continuing to smoke his pipe.

The Regent, however, did not long remain satisfied with his choice, which had been made from a generous impulse of the moment. During the last years of Louis the Fourteenth’s reign, there had been a confusion of parties and of opinions, which were almost all united against the bigotry and despotism of the monarch’s dotage. The grandee and the magistrate displayed equal discontent, and joined in common protestations. On the demise of the monarch, however, this union disappeared. The grandee hoped to see that aristocratic influence restored, which had been suspended since the wars of the Fronde. The magistracy did not favour this idea, being of opinion that the Parliament was the fittest council and check to the authority of the crown. Daguesseau of course inclined to the magistracy, in whose interest he laboured, in conjunction with the Duc de Noailles, to root out the Jesuits, and deprive the church of ultra-montane support. The Duc de St. Simon was of the opposite opinion. He was the partisan of an aristocratic government, and he defended the church, and even the Jesuits, as useful allies. These discordant views led to bickerings in the council. St. Simon accused some magistrates of malpractices. The Chancellor sought, more than was just, to screen them. He obtained a rule, about the same time, that all the members of the Great Council, consisting chiefly of magistrates, should be rendered noble by their office, another offence to the nobility of birth. The Regent, at first inclined to be neutral, soon leaned to the noblesse. The Parliament thwarted him, and showed symptoms of an intention to support his rival the Duke of Maine, the illegitimate son of Louis XIV. The difference between the Regent and the magistracy was widened into a breach by the scheme of Law, and by the advancement of that foreigner to influence in political and financial affairs, which had hitherto been chiefly in the hands of the magistracy. The legists looked upon Law as an intruder, and regarded his acts as audacious innovations. Their remonstrances accordingly grew louder and louder, and their opposition more bold, until the Regent began to fear the renewal of the scenes of the Fronde. The Memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz were then published for the first time; and their perusal, filling the public mind, excited it strongly to renew the scenes and the struggle which they described. The Chancellor’s true office, as a minister, had been to manage the Parliament, to cajole, to persuade, to menace, to repress; but the task suited neither the character nor the principles of Daguesseau, and accordingly nothing but censure of him was heard at court. He was weak, he was irresolute, and lawyers were declared to make very bad statesmen. “They might have reproached the Chancellor with indecision,” says Duclos, “but what annoyed them most was his virtue.”

On the 26th of January, 1718, the seals were re-demanded of him and given to D’Argenson, the famous lieutenant of police. Daguesseau was exiled to his country-house at Fresnes. Whilst in retirement he occupied his time chiefly in the education of his children. His letters to them on the subject of their classical and mathematical studies, lately given to the public, bear witness to his simple and literary bent of mind. Happy it was for Daguesseau to have been removed from the troublesome scene of public life during the two years of Law’s triumph and the disgrace of the magistracy. When Law’s scheme exploded, amidst the ruin and execration of thousands, the Regent, not knowing whither to turn for counsel and support, resolved at least to give some indication of returning honesty by the recall of Daguesseau, who resumed the seals with a facility that was censured by many. Law was deprived of the place of Comptroller-General of Finance, though continued in the management of the Bank and the India Company. In his place certain of the Parliament were admitted to the Councils of Finance, so that Daguesseau seemed to have had full security against the continuance of that infamous jobbing by which the public credit had been destroyed. He was disappointed. The Place VendÔme, in front of his abode, being the exchange of the day, was crowded by purchasers and venders of stock; until the Chancellor, unable to suppress the nuisance, caused it to be removed elsewhere.

The reconciliation between the government and Parliament, produced by Daguesseau’s return, did not last long; and Law having sent an edict respecting the India Company for that body to register, a tumult occurred while they were debating on it, in which the obnoxious financier was torn to pieces. Elated by the news, the Parliament rejected the edict, and hurried from the hall to assure themselves of the fate of Law, who was the great object of their odium. The Regent took fire at this mark of their contempt for his authority, and resolved to exile the Parliament to Blois. Daguesseau himself could not excuse their precipitancy; he obtained, however, that the place of exile should not be Blois, but Pontoise, within a few leagues of Paris.

In addition to these causes of quarrel, another matter occurred to widen the breach between the court and the Parliament, and to place Daguesseau, who stood between them, in a position of still greater difficulty. This was the old question of the bull Unigenitus, the acceptance of which the prime minister Dubois was labouring to procure, as the condition on which he was to receive a Cardinal’s hat from the court of Rome. The Regent, who had at first supported the Jansenists, or Parliamentary party, was now disgusted at not finding in them the gratitude which he had hoped. “Hitherto,” said he, “I have given every thing to grace, and nothing to good works.” He leaned, in consequence, to the other party; and it was resolved to obtain the acceptance of the bull, or Constitution, as it was called, in the Great Council. The Great Council was a court of magistrates acting somewhat like the English Privy Council, or present French Conseil d’Etat, and pronouncing judgment on points where the crown or government was concerned. It was the rival of the Parliament, in the place of which Dubois proposed to substitute it as a high court of judicature; an idea acted upon at a later period of French history. The Regent, attended by his court and officers, went to the Great Council, and enforced the acceptance of the bull. Daguesseau attended as Chancellor, and by his presence seemed to countenance this act, which forms the great reproach, or blot of his life. He is reported, on this occasion, to have asked a young councillor, who was loud in opposition, “Where he had found these objections?” “In the pleadings of the late Chancellor Daguesseau,” was the keen retort. The conduct of Daguesseau admits, however, of excuse. The bull had been already registered, under conditions, by the Parliament in the reign of Louis XIV.; and the present agitation of the question being rather to satisfy the Pope than make any real alteration in the law. Daguesseau was for making every concession of form, and some real sacrifices, to avoid further extremities or hostilities against the Parliament. He hoped, indeed, that registration by the Great Council might spare the Parliament further trouble on the subject. But the Cardinal de Noailles, the head of the Jansenist party, continued to protest; and the Regent, concluding that he was incited by the Parliament, re-determined to extend the exile of that body from Pontoise to Blois. Daguesseau learning this, seeing his concessions of no effect, and that extreme measures were intended against the Parliament, came instantly to offer his resignation. The Regent, in answer, bade him wait a few days; and the Cardinal having desisted from his extreme opposition, at length he was satisfied. The Parliament was recalled, and Law finally disgraced, a point gained from Dubois, no doubt, as the price of moderation in the affair of this bull.

The Regent and Dubois had now both made all the use they required of Daguesseau’s presence in the ministry; and both were anxious to get rid of a personage so little in harmony with their politics or morals. Nevertheless, the Regent felt his obligations as well as the respect due to the Chancellor, and evinced them in a manner peculiar to himself. A person of some rank and influence had proposed for the daughter of Daguesseau, allured perhaps by the hope of being allied to a minister. The Regent learning this, determined to defer the Chancellor’s disgrace, lest it might prevent the match. When Daguesseau’s future son-in-law went to ask the Regent, as is customary in France, for his sanction to the marriage, the latter, while granting it, turned to those near him, and remarked, in a style usual with him, “Here is a gentleman about to turn fishmonger at the end of Lent,” thus intimating the Chancellor’s approaching downfall. Daguesseau had irritated Dubois by joining the Dukes and Marshals, who retired from the council table rather than yield precedence to the minister who, in his new rank of Cardinal, pretended to this honour. The seals were again taken from him in February, 1722, and he returned to his estate at Fresnes.

Again resuming the volume of his private letters, as the only history of his years of retirement, we find Daguesseau occupied with the progress of his son at the bar, and in the functions of Advocate-General. At the epoch of the Duke of Orleans’ death, and the accession of the Duke of Bourbon to the ministry, there were evident intentions of recalling Daguesseau. Recourse was had to his advice in some affairs, but he refused to take cognizance of them in a position where his word might be misrepresented. In short, he refused to take any part in political affairs without, at the same time, “having the ear of the prince,” thus positively refusing to act any subordinate part. These overtures were made at the commencement of 1725. “What you must avoid of all things,” he writes to his son, “is to do any thing that might afford cause of imagining that conditions are asked of me as the price of my return, or that I engage myself in any party.” The son was, nevertheless, anxious for the return of his father to power, and, on one occasion, entreats him to open his mansion to Mademoiselle de Clermont, sister of the Duke of Bourbon, who was travelling near Fresnes; but Daguesseau refused to pay any such expensive compliments, even to the sister of the minister.

At length, in August, 1727, not very long after the installation of Cardinal Fleury in the office of Prime Minister, Daguesseau was recalled. At the same time the seals were not given back to him, but intrusted to Chauvelin as Lord Keeper. The Parliament wished to make some resistance on this point, but Daguesseau, who, as he grew in years, seems to have grown also in reverence for the royal authority, dissuaded and silenced them. Even before his restoration to power, his advice to his son marks strongly the moderation of his views. “Never push the government to extremes,” writes he (Lettres InÉdites, p. 254). “We should all feel the great distance that exists between a king and his subjects. Moderation is the most efficacious. If the Parliament take too strong a resolution, it will but justify the rigour of the government.” We no longer recognize here the bold man who withstood the threats of Louis XIV.

His character for consistency and principle suffered in consequence. In 1732, the old quarrel of ultra-montanism and Jesuits was renewed with great animosity. Some bishops and ecclesiastics resisted the Papal Bull. Those who suffered for their opposition appealed to the Parliament, who, as of old, upheld liberty of conscience, and, in connexion with it, personal freedom. Daguesseau sought to act as moderator, to calm at once the resistance of the Parliament and the rigour of the court. He was obliged, in consequence, to make himself party to some of the complaints of the one, and to some acts of persecution on the part of the other. Four of the more violent young counsellors were exiled. The high personal character of the Chancellor alone enabled him to bear up against the obloquy and reproach that were directed against him from both sides; but fortunately the storm was of short duration, for the menaces of foreign war drowned the voices of ecclesiastical and legal disputants. On the disgrace of Chauvelin, in 1737, the seals were returned to Daguesseau, who thus once more reunited in his person all the functions and honours of his place. He kept them until the year 1750, when, feeling that his infirmities rendered him incapable of performing his duty, he resigned. At the King’s request, he retained the titular dignity of Chancellor until his death, February 9, 1751.

It is hard, in a brief and popular memoir, to assign reasons for the high reputation enjoyed by Daguesseau. His celebrity is rather traditional than historical; it can be appreciated only by those skilled in the science and history of French law, by those who are acquainted with the great and innumerable ameliorations wrought in the system of law and legal proceeding by his assiduity and talents. Indeed that part of his career, which is necessarily most prominent in history, the share which he took in politics and administration, was by far the least honourable. Renowned as a pleader, his very talents in this respect are said to have unfitted him for judicial functions. “Long habits of the parquet (the office of the Attorney-General) had perverted his talents. The practice is there to collect, to examine, to weigh, and compare the reasons of two different parties; to display, in different balances, their various arguments, with all the grace and flowers of eloquence, omitting nothing on either side, so that no one could perceive to which side the Advocate-General leaned. The continual habit of this during twenty-four years, joined to the natural scruples of a conscientious man, and the ever-starting points and objections of the learned one, had moulded him into a character of incertitude, out of which he could never escape. To decide was an accouchement with him, so painful was it.” From this account by St. Simon, we learn how honourable and impartial was the office of the public accuser in the old French courts; and that he blended with his functions the high impartiality of the judge; a characteristic that the office has since lost, in that court at least. It also explains the Chancellor’s indecision, and his failure as a judge. Whatever were his defects as a decider of causes, he made amends by his talents as a legislator and an organizer of jurisprudence. To this, indeed, he gave himself up in his latter years almost exclusively, declining to meddle more with politics, and devoting himself to ameliorate the laws and the forms of procedure. It is on this subject that it is difficult to explain his merits to the reader. One of the first objects of his attention was to separate the functions of the Grand Council from those of the Parliament. When he resumed the seals in 1737, he suppressed the Judges and Presidents of the former court, to do away with its pretensions of usurping the place of the Parliament. He at the same time collected and remodelled the law of appeals, and regulated the respective jurisdiction of different courts; and we learn from Isambert, that the Ordonnance issued by him at this period still serves as the rule of law procedure before the Court of Cassation and the Council of State. The law for repressing forgery formed the subject of another long Ordonnance. The next legal subject of importance that absorbed the attention of Daguesseau was that of Entails. This forms the subject of a voluminous Ordonnance, bearing date August, 1747. One of its clauses nullifies entails extending beyond two degrees, not including the testator. An Ordonnance, signed May, 1749, not enough attended to, establishes a sinking fund for paying the debts of the state, and the levy of a twentieth to constitute it. The question of Mortmain is the subject of an Edict in the same year. Wills form another source of legal difficulties which Daguesseau sought to simplify or remove.

The character of Daguesseau has been drawn minutely, and at great length, by one of the most penetrating of his contemporaries, who sat at the council board with him, and was his most decided political enemy. Nevertheless, we need go no farther than this very writer, the Duc de St. Simon, for a record of the Chancellor’s virtues and genius:—“An infinity of talent, assiduity, penetration, knowledge of all kinds, all the gravity of a magistrate, piety and innocence of morals, formed the foundation of his character. He might be considered incorruptible (St. Simon makes an exception); and with all this, mild, good, humane, of ready and agreeable access, full of gaiety, and poignant pleasantry, without ever hurting; temperate, polished without pride, noble without a stain of avarice. Who would not imagine that such a man would have made an admirable Chancellor? Yet in this he disappointed the world.” His faults, according to the same writer, were indecision as a judge, and too high a respect for the Parliament and the legal profession, to which St. Simon asserts he sacrificed the royal authority. In this the aristocratic writer is mistaken. Daguesseau compromised too much for the independence of Parliament; it is among his faults. “He was the slave of the most precise purity of diction, not perceiving how excess of care rendered him obscure and unintelligible. His taste for science added to his other defects. He was fond of languages, especially the learned ones, and took infinite delight in physics and mathematics; nor did he even let metaphysics alone: in fact, it was for science that he was born. He would, indeed, have made an excellent First President, Chief Judge of Parliament; but he would have been best placed of all at the head of the literature of the country, of the Academies, the Observatory, the Royal College, the Libraries; there his tediousness would have incommoded no one, &c.” In short, the Duke, in his scheme of restoring the aristocracy to exclusive influence, found the Chancellor in his way, and wished him out of it. He tells us that Daguesseau was of middling stature, with a full and agreeable countenance, even to the last expressive of wisdom and of wit.