In his Discours sur l'administration de la Justice Criminelle (1767) he made an eloquent protest against legal abuses and the severity of the criminal code.
In 1767 he gained great repute for his defense of a Protestant woman who, as a result of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had been abandoned by her Catholic husband.
[1] In 1772, however, on the parlement refusing to accede to his request that a present made by a grand seigneur to a singer should be annulled on the ground of immorality, he resigned, and went into retirement.
He excused himself on the score of ill health from sitting in the States General of 1789, to which he had been elected deputy, and refused to take his seat in the Corps Législatif under the Empire.
[1] Michel Foucault's quotation of Servan who he mentioned as belonging to an influential group called the Idéologues [2] in his seminal work on prisons, Discipline and Punish provides an illuminating insight into the mind of Servan: The ideas of crime and punishment must be strongly linked and ‘follow one another without interruption… When you have thus formed the chain of ideas in the heads of your citizens, you will then be able to pride yourselves on guiding them and being their masters.