PASQUIER, ETIENNE. — Legal scholar and historian, born in Paris on 7 April 1529, died there on 31 August 1615.
He pleaded various cases of political importance, including that of the University of Paris against the Jesuits (1563), of whom he remained an adversary even when (1585) he held the office of advocate general of the Court of Accounts, combating them in a vigorous polemic begun with the Catechisme des Jésuites (1602), condemned by the Holy Office on 16 November. P.’s fame, however, is linked less to his work as an opponent of seigneurial abuses, which he also pursued as a member of the Grands jours, or extraordinary Assizes, of Poitiers (1580) and Troyes (1583), than to the material of historical erudition assembled and critically examined in the Recherches de la France. He published the first book in 1560, after a serious illness had forced him to interrupt his professional activity; editions in six books followed between 1569 and 1611, and others, posthumous, in nine books, from 1621 onward. A leading figure in the France of his time, P. was a Gallican, an opponent of Machiavellianism, and a resolute defender of the « regalità ». He favored permitting the Huguenot Church in France.