For centuries the Lit de Justice of the kings of France, one of the most celebrated events in the ancien régime, has been interpreted in terms of eighteenth-century historiography: as a ceremonial appearance of the king in the Parlement of Paris used chiefly to exercise arbitrary power and quell parlementary remonstrances. In the mid-eighteenth century the parlementaire Louis-Adrien Le Paige reflected this view.

In his opinion the contemporary format given the ancient Lit de Justice betrayed the pristine French constitution, and that image of the assembly as unconstitutional became fixed in French history following similar denouncements in the decades just preceding the French revolution.