Local Justice And Rural Society In The French Revolution

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2000 by Anthony Crubaugh

I. Introduction

When Boucher d'Argis wrote of "these vampires who suck in the last drop of blood of the cadavers to which they attach themselves," [1] he was not addressing the readers of a gothic thriller. Rather, his audience was the French Estates General of 1789 and his topic the reform of local justice. The vampires of whom he spoke were the judicial personnel--judges, procureurs fiscaux, clerks, sergeants, notaries--of seigneurial courts whose cupidity victimized the justiciables (cadavers) of rural France by transforming peoples' attempts to attain justice into interminable charades with the sole purpose of lining the pockets of magistrates and court auxiliaries. Another commentator from 1789 on the French system of local justice argued that if the National Assembly truly desired to restore France's ancient liberties it ought to begin with the destruction of seigneurial justice. Fouqueau de Pussy censured this institution in the harshest terms and especially scorned the person who stood as its quintessence, the procur eur fiscal: [2]

The fiscal procurators exercise an incredible despotism ... (They) are all stewards, confidantes, and proteges of seigneurs. They are tyrants who get the attorneys who oppose their wills fired. Never have justiciables oppressed by lords, their stewards, or their procureurs fiscaux found a defender.

Unlike seigneurial justice, whose personnel invited comparisons with vampires and tyrants, the revolutionary justice of the peace often reaped lavish praise from the observers of the institution of local justice. The representative Thuriot exclaimed to the National Convention in 1793, "The most beautiful institution for which we are indebted to the Constituent Assembly, that which has been the most useful to society, is the institution of the justice of the peace." [3] Several years and a vastly changed political climate failed to diminish the enthusiasm of legislators for the new local judicial order, as seen in the declaration of Regnier to the Conseil des Cinq-Cents that "the greatest institution of the Revolution is the justice of the peace." [4] Similarly, an unsolicited comment by cantonal administrators of Nere to their departmental colleagues in the Year VII lauded both the institution and its present officeholder. "This establishment, which is one of the greatest benefits of our revolution and whose advantages we recognize daily, is currently conferred to a man who combines probity, impartiality, and speed with a genuine desire to fulfill his functions well ..." [5] To be sure, much of the support for the institution was self-congratulatory in nature, coming from legislators, administrators, and judicial personnel with a stake in the Revolution's success. Nonetheless, its sincerity is indisputable; revolutionaries truly believed in the beneficial changes wrought by their creation of the justice of the peace.

What had revolutionaries done to render local justice, once the private domain of lords, their supposedly tyrannical agents, and avaricious practitioners, one of the greatest benefits of the Revolution in their eyes? This paper seeks to answer this question by examining the practice of civil justice under the revolutionary institution of the justice of the peace in the department of Charente-Inferieure, which roughly corresponded to the historical provinces of Aunis and Saintonge. [6] I will commence with a brief treatment of civil justice under seigneurial tribunals, since the comparison with revolutionary civil justice will clarify the reasons why rural dwellers welcomed the new judicial system after 1789. Next, I will explain the institutional arrangements for the revolutionary reorganization of local justice, which will shed light on how legislators sought to satisfy their constituents' demands concerning the adjudication of disputes. The bulk of the paper will then follow revolutionary civil justice in p ractice. Did the Revolution actually fulfill its promise of providing swift, fair, and inexpensive justice, of mitigating the litigious passions of French people, and of protecting rural denizens from the avaricious practices of seigneurs and lawyers? [7] In answering "yes" to this question, my conclusion will suggest not only that changes in local justice altered significantly the relationship between rural society and the state, but also that historians need to reexamine the social impact of the French Revolution.

II. Civil Justice in Seigneurial Tribunals in Aunis and Saintonge

Stated succinctly, seigneurial justice was slow, expensive, and therefore often inaccessible to rural inhabitants of Aunis and Saintonge. [8] The primary explanation for this situation lies in the proliferation of seigneurial tribunals; there existed nearly 500 lords' courts in Aunis and Saintonge, or one tribunal for every 1.25 parishes and 880 inhabitants. Although the plethora of seigneurial courts suggests that they fulfilled admirably a central criterion of quality local justice--proximity to justiciables--in reality the high number of courts was problematic: it increased the stages of appeals that a case might undergo before its final resolution, and it created a swarm of judicial employees whose living stemmed from the court system but whose education and integrity could not be guaranteed by the royal judicial bureaucracy. The cahier de doleance of St. Herie de Mastas summarized clearly the problems presented by an excessive number of diminutive seigneurial courts: [9]