He was above the law, since he made it; his powers were illimitable and his decision absolute.[2313] On this triple frame the jurists, like State spiders, had, from Philippe le Bel down, spun their web, and the instinctive concordance of their hereditary efforts had attached all its threads to the omnipotence of the King .-- Being jurisconsults--that is to say, logicians--they were obliged to deduce, and their minds naturally recurred to the unique and rigid principle to which they might attach their arguments .-- As advocates and councilors of the crown they espoused the case of their client and, through professional zeal, derived or forced precedents and texts to his advantage .-- By virtue of being administrators and judges the grandeur of their master constituted their grandeur, and personal interest counseled them to expand a prerogative in which, through delegation, they took part .-- Hence, during four centuries, they had spun the tissue of "regalian rights," the great net in the meshes of which, since Louis XIV., all lives found themselves caught.[2314] Nevertheless, however tightly spun was the web, there were openings in it, or, at least, very weak spots .-- And first, of the consequences flowing from these three principles in their hands, two of them had hindered the third from unwinding its skein to the end: owing to the fact that the King was formerly Count de Paris and Abbot of St.Denis, he could not become a veritable Augustus, an authentic Diocletian: his two French titles limited his Roman title.

Without regard to the laws, so-called fundamental, which imposed his heir on him beforehand, also the entire line of his successive heirs, the tutor, male or female, of his minor heir, and which, if he derogated from immemorial usage, annulled his will like that of a private individual, his quality of suzerain and that of Most Christian, were for him a double impediment.
As hereditary general of the feudal army he was bound to consider and respect the hereditary officers of the same army, his old peers and companions in arms--that is to say, the nobles.

As outside bishop, he owed to the Church not alone his spiritual orthodoxy, but, again, his temporal esteem, his active zeal, and the aid furnished him by his secular arm.

Hence, in applied right, the numerous privileges of the nobles and the Church, so many immunities and even liberties, so many remains of antique local independence, and even of antique local sovereignty,[2315] so many prerogatives, honorific or serviceable, maintained by the law and by the tribunals.

On this side, the meshes of the monarchical netting had not been well knit or remained loose; and the same elsewhere, with openings more or less wide, in the five provincial governments (etats), in the Pyrenees districts, in Alsace, at Strasbourg, but especially in Languedoc and in Brittany, where the pact of incorporation, through a sort of bilateral contract, associated together on the same parchment and under the same seal the franchises of the province and the sovereignty of the King.
Add to these original lacunae the hole made by the Prince himself in his net already woven: he had with his own hand torn away its meshes, and by thousands.