History of the just in France — Wikipedia

L’ History of justice in France partially cut that of law without coinciding with it, since it deals more specifically with the application of standards by the different jurisdictions; It is therefore in part partly with criminal and civil law, administrative law knowing a different destiny. But more broadly, the history of justice is mainly of social history: it is therefore not limited to the history of law alone.

Popular justice [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

If they kept their own customs, the Germanic peoples who invaded Gaul in IN ^{It is} century did not end the legal uses of Gallo-Roman. Thus coexisted different laws according to the people of subjects according to the system of the personality of the laws ^{[ first ]} . This system generated so many difficulties that the judges gradually replaced him that of the territoriality of the laws, without being able to unify the laws ^{[ 2 ]} .

The inspiration of the laws of arrivals was different from Roman law: it was necessary to substitute for the revenge of the victim or his family financial compensation and fix the price. The “evidence” recognized by the procedure were mystical and not rational: test by red iron or water (ordalies), judicial duel. However, we must not forget that “The harshness of this mode of evidence aims to push the parties to the compromise” ^{[ 3 ]} .

Gradually, the monarchs of the different peoples had their laws write. The Salic Law was written around 507 – 511, the Ripuire law around 630, and the Burgonde law (or Gombette law) at the start of the WE ^{It is} century ^{[ first ]} .

Justice royale [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The Carolingians endeavored to impose their decisions on the whole Empire, and therefore to begin a first legal standardization. With the promulgation of their capitulars, they led a policy which did not manage to greatly weaken the local forms of justice ^{[ 2 ]} . This policy finds a theoretical justification in identification by the high characters surrounding the king between the royal person and the law itself. Alcuin, thus, established the elaboration of the law to a properly royal function, which it brings back to divine grace ^{[ 4 ]} .

Charlemagne, then Louis the Pious following it enacted many capitulars prepared during restricted assemblies and approved during wide meetings of the great of the Empire. This intense legislative activity, however, does not produce exhaustive corpus. With the collapse of the Empire, the kings no longer manage to impose legislative acts ^{[ 4 ]} .

Ecclesiastical justice [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

As for the church, it remained subject to canonical law.

At that time, the evolution of justice and its functioning was intimately linked to the social and political evolution experienced by France, with the end of the crumbling of royal and princely power until XII ^{It is} century, then the creation of powerful principalities and the recovery of royal power.

Sources problematic [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The weakness of the X sources ^{It is} imposed a biased and narrow vision of justice at that time. This has long led to proposing a kind of legal vacuum, devoid of a normative system, on which subsequent developments would have been constructed almost out of nothing . Nevertheless, “For a long time, the custom prevailed on any other source of law; from the X ^{It is} century, it appears to be the only source ” ^{[ 5 ]} .

Local justice – customary justice [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

From the X ^{It is} century, feudal lords appropriate justice, soon imitated by the cities erected in communes. Royal justice is no longer in force only on the king’s own domain. In fact, from the IX ^{It is} century, north of a Bordeaux – Lyon line, “Customs are essential as the main source of law” ^{[ 2 ]} . However, this relationship to customs did not make Roman law disappear in the north, since the customs themselves draw part of their rules there. Likewise, the south of France also knows, to a lesser extent, local customary adaptations to Roman law ^{[ 6 ] , [ 2 ]} .

Is the XI ^{It is} century that the most important principalities united local customs within them. This evolution begins where princes have a strongest authority, as in Normandy with Customs and Justice of Guillaume the Conqueror or in Catalonia with the Barcelona uses from Raimond Béranger I ^{[ 7 ]} . These customs which are established around the year Mil are the product of an evolutions made within the group in which it has all its value, and never of an external intervention of public authority. Thus, in the territories where no prince manages to ensure authority, the establishment of customs is done at the level of the seigneury or even of the village community. Thus, if we look at the level of the whole of France, the law of XI ^{It is} century is extremely multiple and contrasting ^{[ 8 ]} .

Despite this fixing of the functioning of justice as close as possible to social groups, the clerics have not stopped producing a thought on the subject. The main theoretical texts established in XI ^{It is} century come mainly from churches or monasteries close to royal authority, Tel Orléans, Reims, Chartres or Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. At the Abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Abbon compiles an important collection of legal text and writes a first attempt to compare between law and custom. In Chartres, Fulbert launches a revival of reflection on the law ^{[ 9 ]} .

Following this unification and to have texts summarizing all the laws gradually established and local customs, private texts are established by royal or seigneurial officers, above all for their own practice. These texts appear at the end of XII ^{It is} century, one of the first important people is the Very old customary from Normandy, written in the first years of XIII ^{It is} century ^{[ 7 ]} . The vast majority of customs in France are written in XIII ^{It is} century ^{[ ten ]} .

Urban justice [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Urban law is attached to its origin on the franchises granted by the royal or stately authority. This fixation proves the previous existence of a customary right specific to cities, which is then formalized and lying in writing. Urban customs and laws appear at XII ^{It is} century, and are often compiled in the franchise charter which has a very strong symbolic value ^{[ 11 ]} .

Justice royale [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Until XII ^{It is} A century, kings are too weak to have an influence on justice rendered outside their own principality. It is from Louis VII that the French monarchy regains an influence on the whole of his kingdom. The royal edicts, the letters patents are gradually resuming, at a variable pace according to the place. Royal thinkers come back to the themes developed under Charlemagne to make kings the origin of all power, especially judicial ^{[ twelfth ]} .

At the beginning, the monarchs touched restricted courts, limited to the king’s person, religious order or manners. They let private law be settled by customs. It is from Louis IX that the ordinances have general spans ^{[ twelfth ]} .

“If condemnation is a tool for affirmation of royal power, it is not by its coercive or arbitrary nature, but by the supervision of judges and the practice of grace ^{[ 13 ]} ».

Ecclesiastical justice [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Ecclesiastical justice also takes advantage of the erasure of royal power to extend its competence. She returns to XII ^{It is} century with Roman law. Until XII ^{It is} Century, the lords returned to justice in person, then they delegated their power of justice to officers. From the XIII ^{It is} century, royal justice asserted itself in the face of stately justice ^{[ 14 ]} ; At XIV ^{It is} century, it requires the justice of the Church to limit itself to the spiritual domain alone ^{[ 15 ]} .

According to Jean Foyer ^{[ 16 ]} , we must wait for Saint Louis, in the middle of the XIII ^{It is} A century, for a return to start towards rational evidence, which had only remained in force before the ecclesiastical courts. He indeed tried to prohibit the judicial duel on his field.

At XIV ^{It is} century, king’s lawers invent the formula that “The king is a source of all justice and fountain of justice” . This does not mean that the law enacted by the monarch is the only source of law, but it becomes possible to appeal before the royal justice of the decisions of stately justice. The prevention principle allows royal justice to replace the seigniorial judge because of his inaction. Finally, the royal cases, always more broadly defined, are subtracted from the seigniorial justice. The so -called conceded justice, stately or ecclesiastical, will survive until the Revolution.

Royal justice is essentially exercised by officers, who own their charge; this venality of the offices (which dates back to Louis XI and especially François I ^is ) Allows the king to feed his boxes, hence the plethora of magistrates. If the king thus delegates royal justice to courts, he retains the right to judge himself a cause, outsources the normally competent justice. Thus the delegated justice can at any time, in theory, give way to the justice chosen. Historians note the persistence of the infra-judicial under the old regime. The transactions concerned not only illegitimate pregnancies but also certain murders, whose reasons were deemed honorable. Crime judicially repressed was in fact very low ^{[Ref. necessary]} At XVIII ^{It is} century.

Delegated justice, in particular the Parliament of Paris, turned into a counter-power from the reign of Charles VI. Louis XIV will be able to stop the harassment process, but not stop it, notes Jean-Pierre Royer ^{[ 17 ]} . Until the Revolution of 1789, the history of justice will be characterized by the permanent confrontation of these magistrates imbued with their prerogatives with the monarchy. This politicization of the legal only increased “as the term of the monarchy was approached” ^{[ 17 ]} .

Parliament opposed any tax reform, and for this reason Clear Louis XVI to bring together the Estates General. But justice was itself the target, at a time when a real public opinion began to build up, of lawyers and intellectuals, like Beccaria or Voltaire, who reproached him for the cruelty of his processes (torture, abolished by Louis XVI) or his religious intolerance (Calas, Sirven, knight of the bar). Parliament will be hostile to the doubling of the number of Third State deputies, which will make it lose all popularity. He will disappear at the same time as the old regime.

Of revolutionary justice to XX ^{It is} century [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was voted from the August 26, 1789 . The 21 mars 1790 , the Constituent Assembly undertook to rebuild the entire judicial system on new bases (penal code of 1791). An important role was devolved to arbitration and conciliation in the field of civil justice. The judges were elected by active citizens, the jury instituted in criminal justice. The constituent believed in the natural goodness of man;
The Convention will have recourse to terror to regenerate the people, and will transform the judiciary into an instrument of this policy. The procedure was quickly expeditious. In thermidor, the terrorists were in turn victims of the revolutionary tribunal.

Napoleon drew the main lines of the contemporary judicial organization. He restores the titles and costumes of the Old Regime. The appointment of magistrates became the rule. The Empire, like all the regimes that followed, allowed itself some freedom with the rule of the irremovibility of the magistrates of the siege. Above all, their career depended on political power.

In 1819, a decree of the governor of French establishments in India made the Napoleonic codes immediately, while demanding respect for local customs.

The Dreyfus affair ends with the difficult victory of the ideal of justice on the reason of state. At the end of the interwar period, financial and political affairs (Stavisky case, etc.) highlighted the collusion of justice and political power. It was not until 1958 that the independence of justice began to assert itself, thanks to the simplification of advancement and the institution, by Michel Debré, of a entrance exam to the national school of the Magistrates.

Although benefiting from a new penal code since first ^is mars 1994 , French criminal law is the heir to two previous codes. First of all, the penal code of 1791, which was the first attempt to codify the entire criminal matter, but especially the imperial penal code of the February 12, 1810 which was more durable although highly changed over time.

At the end of XIX ^{It is} century, recurrence became an important issue in debates on penitentiary policy and the sense of pain, while at the beginning of XIX ^{It is} A century, the Pierre Rivière affair had raised, with a particular exergue, the problem of criminal responsibility in the event of possible dementia. Bérenger laws thus distinguish “recurrences”, which must be far from society and are thus condemned to deportation to the prison (even if they are only simple vagabonds; law of the law of May 27, 1885 ), accused who have never been previously sentenced, and which are the subject of a relative reintegration policy ^{[ 18 ]} . Thus, the law of March 26, 1891 relating to the attenuation and aggravation of the penalties established the stay for the accused who “did not suffer any conviction prior to the prison for crime or crime of ordinary law” and aggravates automatically the sorrows of repeat offenders ^{[ 18 ]} . It also allows parole can be pronounced by judges.

In 1911, the prison administration was attached to the Ministry of Justice ^{[ 19 ]} , and the following year, a law instituted for children’s courts ^{[ 20 ]} .

After 1945, an important penitentiary reform movement took place, implemented by the new social defense movement, embodied by people like the lawyer Marc Ancel ^{[ 21 ]} , the children’s judge Jean Chazal, the first director of the prison administration Paul Amor, or a member of the work of Saint-Vincent de Paul, Pierre Cannat, largely shaped, until 1975, the French penitentiary policy. The 1945 reform was represented in particular by the ordinance of February 2, 1945 on delinquent childhood, which imposed the primacy of the educational on the repressive and renewed the courts for children (created by the law of 1912).

These debates intervene after almost half a century of silence, the only issues discussed having been, from the end of XIX ^{It is} In the Second World War, the possible abolition of the prison (the deportation is removed by an order of General de Gaulle in 1960) and the questions about the correction houses ^{[ 19 ]} . In the 1930s, children were denounced, such as the “correctional colonies” of Eysses (created in 1895) and Belle-Île-en-Mer, renamed in December 1927 “Surveified education house” ^{[ 22 ]} .

1945 thus sees in particular the creation of the social service of prisons, open environment and vocational training of prisoners, with a view to social reintegration ^{[ 19 ]} . At the Liberation, the public debate was concentrated in particular, until the early 1950s, on the courts of justice responsible for the judicial purification of collaborationists ^{[ 19 ]} . In 1958, the judge of the penalties (JAP) was created, with a concern to individualize the penalty according to the personality of the criminal.

But from the outbreak of the Algerian war, the reform process slows down, and the sorrows are increasing. The security period, introduced in 1978 by the Raymond Barre government, adds to the imprisonment the impossibility of its development, reducing the powers of JAP ^{[ 23 ]} . If the death penalty was abolished under François Mitterrand in 1981, the sorrows tightened: long sorrows went at thirty years in 1986, and the real perpetuity sentence was introduced in 1994, by the Balladur government, for certain crimes committed against children. The reform of the Criminal Code, in 1994, increased convictions from 20 to 30 years for crimes, and from 5 to 10 years for crimes. Finally, a series of laws still harden the legislation in the 2000s, up to the law of February 25, 2008 relating to security detention and the declaration of criminal irresponsibility due to mental disorder.

Inquisitory procedure has been reformed by the law of January 4, 1993 , which gives a greater role to the person prosecuted and the civil party, vis-à-vis the public prosecutor. Various reforms have been promulgated in order to unclog the courts, including criminal composition (1999), immediate appearance and other avatars of “real -time business treatment”, such as the automated center for the finding of traffic offenses.

At the same time, since 1986 the criminal affairs law has experienced a movement of decriminalization, although the judges are taking over more and more often in politico-financial cases in the 1990s (abuse of social goods, etc.). Finally, the sources of French criminal law internationalize.

Since 2022, the trials have been filmed and broadcast on television ^{[ 24 ] , [ 25 ] , [ 26 ]} .

Notes and references [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Works used [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Justice in antiquity

• (fr) Jean Gaudemet Antiquity institutions , Paris, Montchrestien, coll. “Domat Public Law”, 5th ed., 1998, 511 p. (ISBN  978-2-7076-1063-8 And 2-7076-1063-1 )
• (fr) (it) Aldo Schiavone ( trad. of the Italian by Geneviève and Jean Bouffartigue, pref. Aldo Schiavone), Ius: The invention of law in the West [« Ius. The invention of the law in the West  »], Paris, Belin, coll. “Antiquity in the present”, 2008 , 539 p. (ISBN  978-2-7011-4419-1 )

Justice in the Middle Ages

• Maïté Billoré, Isabelle Mathieu and Carole Avignon, Justice in medieval France, VIII ^{It is} – XV ^{It is} century , Paris, Armand Colin, coll. “History course”, 2012 , 222 p. (ISBN  978-2-200-27274-6 )
• Yves Sassier, Olivier Guillot and Albert Rigaudière, Powers and institutions in medieval France: origins in feudal times , t.  1, Armand Colin, 2003 (ISBN  2-200-26500-X )

Justice in contemporary times

• (fr) Kernaleguen Francis, Judicial institutions , 4th ed. , Paris, Litec, 2008 , 270 p. (ISBN  978-2-7110-1032-5 )

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Bibliography recommended [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Ancient works:

Studies on the history of justice:

• Justice in modern France, XVI ^{It is} – XVIII ^{It is} century , Hervé Leuwers, Ellipses, 2010.
• History of justice. France, XVI ^{It is} – XXI ^{It is} century , Benoît Garnot, Gallimard, 2009.
• Justice and justiciable to XIX ^{It is} And XX ^{It is} centuries , Gilles Rouet, Belin, 1997.
• The black files of French justice , Denis Langlois, Le Seuil, 1974.
• History of justice in France, from absolute monarchy to the Republic , Jean-Pierre Royer, PUF, 1995
• The history of French justice of the revolution to the present day , Jean-Claude Farcy, PUF, 2001

Sites internet [ modifier | Modifier and code ]