Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Carla Hesse, The People's Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic (June 2026)

Forthcoming from Princeton University Press: Carla Hesse, The People’s Justice: Revolutionary Law and the Founding of the French Republic (June, 2026). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

In The People’s Justice, Carla Hesse offers a sweeping reappraisal of political violence in the French Revolution. From Charles Dickens to Hannah Arendt, the Revolution of 1789–1799 in France has been depicted as the bloodiest of the eighteenth-century democratic revolutions. Through extensive new archival research, Hesse shows that, to the contrary, what set the French Revolution apart was neither the scale nor the intensity of its violence but rather the ubiquity of its political tribunals and the use of novel forms of criminal law and procedure as a means of adjudicating political conflict. More than 5,000 political trials were prosecuted by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris alone, and, with an acquittal rate of more than 50 percent, these were neither perfunctory nor foregone in their outcomes. They had a repressive function, to be sure, but more importantly, they played a critical role in founding a republic in France and in shaping its social and political norms. Through jury deliberation, public witnessing, and media coverage, these political trials legitimated a republic and the revolutionary struggle that brought it into being. They were animated less by class warfare, factional hatreds, or utopian ideology than by a patriotic, albeit tragic, effort to hold fellow citizens accountable. Over the course of the last two centuries, France, of course, has successfully established itself as a constitutional regime, but this constitutional tradition is still rooted in and haunted by its revolutionary past. Since 1793, the French Republic has, to some extent or another, kept itself alive by keeping itself perpetually on trial.

 

le Dret on Freedom of Testation in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Legislation @MPIPRIV

Valentin Pinel le Dret, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, has published Freedom of Testation in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Legislation at 140 Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Germanistische Abteilung (ZRG GA) 278 (June 2023). Here is the abstract.

Contrary to what one could have deduced from art. 2 and 17 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, where property had been elevated as a natural right, imprescriptible, inviolable, and sacred, and art. 537 and 544 of the Code civil, where the owners had been given the right to use in the most absolute way and dispose freely of their property, neither the Revolutionary nor the Napoleonic lawmakers thought of the right of disposing freely of one’s property upon death as self-evident. Although there had been a long tradition of testamentary succession in the South of France, the right to dispose freely of one’s properties by testament led to tensions as to its articulation with the pro-intestate customs of the Northern provinces – in 1789–1804 French private law(s) had indeed not yet been unified and the unification process had given rise to several rearguard arguments in favour of local idiosyncrasies –, but most importantly, it led to tensions as to its articulation with the institution of family, one of the pillars, along with property, of the new social order that had emerged from the ruins of the Ancien Régime: the bourgeois society. Note: This article is published in the Max Planck Private Law Research Paper Series with the permission of the rights owner, De Gruyter. It is freely accessible on the basis of a licence with an OA-option funded by the MPG, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Concept of Liberty

Andrew Norris, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Political Science, has published The Disappearance of the French Revolution in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

    

The French Revolution of 1789 is one of the central developments in the history of the concept and practice of political rights. Hegel recognized this, and so valued the Revolution that he claimed always to drink a toast to the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. Nonetheless, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right Hegel advances an enduring and influential attack upon the Revolution, one that, like that of Edmund Burke, links the Revolution’s accomplishments inextricably with the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794. In each Hegelian text, the Revolutionary conception of liberty is presented as being so one-sided and extreme as to be incompatible with a stable polity, and to produce, of necessity, only “a fury of destruction” (P 436/359 and PR §5A). The central line of thought here is relatively clear. The French Revolutionaries enacted a reductive, “abstract” conception of freedom as grasped by the Understanding or Verstand; this “negative freedom” (PR §5A) or “absolute freedom” (P 431/355ff) entails the absence of restriction. When made into a social policy, this can never produce a stable set of institutions, but instead only the destruction of any potential restriction - including, ultimately, those presented by the citizenry themselves. The Revolutionary government was thus destined to descend into the fury of the Terror. In the essay that follows, I do not wish to fundamentally challenge this picture of Hegel’s view. Instead, I will argue that Hegel’s elaboration of it in the Phenomenology in particular is more complicated and nuanced than it initially appears to be, and that attending to the textual details of the Phenomenology’s account allows one to see that Hegel is advancing a particular political diagnosis according which the first “victim” of the Revolution is the apparent agent of the Terror, the volonté générale or general will, a will that only “vanishes” in its own attempt to express itself in action, a vanishing that makes possible the factions, suspicion, guilt, and death of the Jacobins. In connection with this I will also propose that Hegel’s account of the Terror there needs to be read as a response to the immediately preceding account of Utility (die Nützlichkeit), and that when it is so read it shows one of its sides to be a critique of the attempt to “master” a world in which everything is considered as an object of use, a critique that bears comparison with Heidegger’s more famous reflections on the dangers of die Technik.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.