his predecessors; and when the Pope proceeded to threaten
France with the interdict, and to prohibit all appeal from his decisions
to a future council, the King caused his procureur-general, Jean Dauvet,
to publish an official protest against these acts of violence,
concluding with a solemn appeal to the judgment of the Church Catholic
assembled by the representation. While awaiting that event, Charles
declared himself resolved to uphold the laws and regulations which had
been sanctioned by previous councils.

Louis XI, urged by alternate menaces, entreaties, and flattery from
Rome, revoked the Pragmatic Sanction shortly after his accession. This
step accorded well with his own arbitrary temper; for he could not
endure the privilege of free election by the cathedral and monastic
chapters; nor was he less jealous of the influence exerted, under the
shelter of that privilege, by the high feudal nobility in the disposal
of church preferment. He seems to have expected, moreover, that while
ostensibly conceding the right of patronage to the apostolic see, he
should be able to retain the real power in his own hands. The event
disappointed his calculations. No sooner was the decree of Bourges
rescinded than the Pope resumed and enforced his claim to the provision
of benefices in France. Simony and the whole train of concomitant abuses
reappeared more scandalously than ever; and Louis found himself despised
by his subjects as the dupe of papal artifice.

The parliamentary courts, meanwhile, assumed a determined attitude in
defence of the right of election guaranteed by the Pragmatic Sanction.
They pronounced the abolition of that act illegal, and treated it as
null and void; they insisted on their own authority in entertaining
appeals against ecclesiastical abuses; they eagerly supported anyone who
showed a disposition to withstand the pretensions of Rome in the matter
of patronage. The King, smarting under the trickery of the Pope, made no
attempt to restrain them in this line of conduct; and the result was
that the repeal of the Pragmatic Sanction was never fully executed,
having never been legalized by the forms of the constitution. On the
other hand, the popes so far maintained the advantage they had extorted
from Louis that the ancient franchise of the Church as to elections
became virtually extinct in France.

Things remained in this unsettled state during the reigns of Louis XI,
Charles VIII, and Louis XII. The latter