Abstract

Some of the trials instructed in front of the Senate of Chambery during the eighteenth century involved members of the regular clergy as defendants. These could not just be described as unruly clerics, who lacked discipline within the community or the Order: they rebelled against the sovereign's law and were prosecuted by the secular court for crimes such as poisoning, passing of counterfeit money and instigation to revolt. By considering themselves out of the bonds of civil law the clerics revealed their difficult relationship with it. Civil law was rejected partly as non-applicable to clerics, and partly as being an expression of the secularization of society.