and a . This meant that judicial proceedings concerning the peers and their were exclusively under the jurisdiction of the Court of Peers. Members of the peerage had also the right to sit in a , a formal preceding and speak before the , and they were also given high positions at the court, and a few minor privileges such as entering the courtyards of royal castles in their carriages. While many lay peerages became extinguished over time, as explained above, the ecclesiastical peerages, on the other hand, were perpetual, and only a seventh one was created before the French Revolution, taking precedence behind the six original ones, being created in 1690 for the Archbishop of Paris, after centuries as a mere suffraganage, styled as second for he held the Duchy of Saint-Cloud. The expression was also sometimes used for groups of nobles within a French fief (e.g. the Prince-Bishop of Cambrai, who held the County of Cambrai, was the overlord of its twelve ). These "peers" did not benefit from the royal privileges listed above. A fanatical defender of the privileges of the peers was the memoirist Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, who was neither very wealthy (by ducal standards), nor influential at court, but whose father had been made a peer. Louis XIV tried to promote the status in protocol of his legitimized bastards in various minor respects, and Saint-Simon devotes long chapters of his memoirs to his struggles against this. Under the First Republic and the First Empire: the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period The original peerage of the French realm, like other feudal titles of nobility, was abolished during the French Revolution, on the night of August 4, 1789, the Night of the Abolition of Feudalism. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French from 1804, 'reinvented' the functions of the , so to speak, as he created in 1806 the exclusive (in chief of politically insignificant estates in non-annexed parts of Italy) in 1806 and first recreated the honorary functions at (his own) imperial coronation, but now vested in Great Officers, not attached to fiefs. Napoleon reinstituted French noble titles in 1808 but did not create a system of peerages comparable to the United Kingdom. He did create a House of Peers on his return from Elba in 1815, but the House was not constituted before his abdication at the end of the Hundred Days (). Chamber