While focusing on the requirements and functions of ceremony in Court Society, Norbert Elias has shed light on the behavioral and psychological types fostered by this society, where a position of inferiority was dreaded most of all. On the basis of Elias's analysis, we have - as Elias himself did - carefully examined Saint-Simon's Memoires. Attention is drawn to the strategies for equaling peers that the presidents of French Parlements pursued. Fear, the refusal of inferiority and the quest for positions of superiority were central to domination. This article focuses on seating arrange ments, postures and positions so as to undertake an anthropological and political analysis of the role and meaning of << precedence >> in etiquette under the Old Regime and particularly in court society.99247263