The political institutions of the Parlement (pronounced /paʀləmɑ̃/ in French) in ancien régime France developed out of the previous council of the king, the Conseil du roi or curia regis, and consequently had ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation. In the thirteenth century, judicial functions were added. The parlementarians were of the opinion that the parlement's role included active participation in the legislative process, which brought them into increasing conflict with evolving monarchic absolutism during the Ancien Régime, as the lit de justice evolved during the sixteenth century from a constitutional forum to a royal weapon, used to force registration of edicts.

Originally, there was only the Parlement of Paris, born out of the king's council in 1307, and sitting inside the medieval royal palace on the Île de la Cité, still the site of the Paris Hall of Justice. The jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris covered the entire kingdom as it was in the fourteenth century, but did not automatically advance in step with the enlarging personal dominions of the kings. In 1443, following the turmoil of the Hundred Years' War, King Charles VII of France granted Languedoc its own parlement by establishing the Parlement of Toulouse, the first parlement outside of Paris; its jurisdiction extended over the most part of southern France. From 1443 until the French Revolution several other parlements were created in some provinces of France, until at the end of the ancien régime provincial parlements were sitting (clockwise from the north) in Arras, Metz, Nancy, Colmar, Dijon, Besançon, Grenoble, Aix, Perpignan, Toulouse, Pau, Bordeaux, Rennes and Rouen. All of them were administrative capitals of regions with strong historical traditions of independence before they were incorporated into France. Assembled in the parlements, the largely hereditary members, the provincial noblesse de robe, were the strongest centrifugal force in a France that was actually multifarious in its legal systems, taxation, and custom than it might have seemed under the apparent unifying rule of its kings. Nevertheless, the Parlement of Paris had the largest jurisdiction of all the parlements, covering the major part of northern and central France, and was simply known as "the Parlement".

In some regions provincial Estates also continued to meet and legislate with a measure of self-governance and control over taxation within their jurisdiction.

All the parlements could issue regulatory decrees for the application of royal edicts or of customary practices; they could also refuse to register laws that they judged contrary to fundamental law, the local coûtumes, of which there were some three hundred jurisdictions in France or simply as being untimely. Membership in those courts was generally bought from the royal authority; and such positions could be made hereditary by payment of the tax to the King (la Paulette).