PRAGMATIC SANCTION, the technical name given to some decrees which have been issued as fundamental laws. The term is of Byzantine origin, the edicts of the Eastern emperors having been called “pragmatics.” There is a famous document known as the Pragmatic Sanction of St Louis, which contains six articles directed against the assumptions of the papacy; but there are reasons for doubting its genuineness. In 1438 Charles VII. of France issued at Bourges a pragmatic sanction which embodied the most important decisions of the council of Basel. This decree formed the basis of the liberties of the Gallican Church. Louis XI. entered into negotiations with the papacy for its revocation; but it continued in force until the time of Francis I., who substituted for it a concordat with Pope Leo X. The decisions of the council of Basel were also embodied in a pragmatic sanction by a diet which met at Mainz in 1439; but by the concordat of Vienna, concluded in 1448 by the emperor Frederick III. with Pope Nicholas V., most of the advantages which the diet had hoped to secure for the church in Germany were abandoned. The most famous of all pragmatic sanctions was that of the emperor Charles VI. In 1713 it was issued as a family statute, but, as the emperor proposed that it should become a fundamental law of the state, it was afterwards submitted to the diets of the lands ruled by the house of Austria by hereditary right. Having been accepted by the estates of Lower Austria and Bohemia in 1720, by the Hungarian diet in 1722, and by the remaining diets between 1720 and 1724, it was proclaimed as a fundamental law on the 6th of December 1724. By this edict it was decreed that the Austrian lands should always be united; that they should be ruled by Charles VI.’s male descendants; that, ...