The 1516 Concordat of Bologna between the Holy See and the Kingdom of France repealed and explicitly superseded the 1438 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges and was confirmed by the contemporaneous Fifth Lateran Council.
[1] The concordat was registered by the Parlements in 1518[2] and defined, according to Roger Aubenas, in The New Cambridge Modern History, "a logical division of prerogatives, but one which involved discontinuance of elections".
[4] In 1663, the College of Sorbonne solemnly declared that it admitted no authority of the pope over the king's temporal dominion, his superiority to a general council or infallibility apart from the Church's consent.
[7] Prior kings of France had affirmed the droit de régale as their right by virtue of the supremacy of the Crown over all episcopal sees, even those that had been exempt from the assertion of that right.
[6][c] In three successive papal briefs Innocent XI urged Louis XIV not to extend the right to dioceses that had previously been exempt,[6] sustaining them with all his authority.
[21] Two of the most important liberties defended by parliamentary Gallicanism were that kings of France had the right to assemble church councils in their dominions and to make laws and regulations touching ecclesiastical matters.
Arnauld surmised that a papal denunciation of the four articles would precipitate an "immense advantage into the hands of heretics, to make the Roman Church odious, to raise up obstacles to the conversion of Protestants, and to provoke a still more cruel persecution of the poor Catholics in England".
[24] The consequence was that a provision of the Concordat of Bologna was applied by Innocent XI and remained so until the reconciliation between the French court and Holy See in 1693.