La Loi en Révolution 1789-1795 – Revloi

Law has played an essential part through the French republican model. Did not the Revolution not emphasize, according to Michelet, the coming of the reign of law ' Because of the political stakes, but also for material reasons which were never pointed out, the revolutionary law, the one produced between 1789 and 1795, has always remained absent. Curiously enough, it was under the so-called Restauration that a real enthusiasm for law occurred. Laws were collected and classified in many different collections. Two of them encapsulated the spirit of the time : firstly that of Jean-Baptiste Duvergier (1824), indisputably the most famous and the most accessible amongst the revolutionary collections of law, and that of Louis Rondonneau. In fact, both of them made great use of another collection, the so-called collection Baudoin « the most reliable of the many private collections of legislative bills » would later write a Belgian lawyer. Fascinating from a scientific point of view, the collection Baudoin is also interesting as far as French cultural heritage is concerned : only three complete sets remain in existence today. This project is built upon the digitization of the 64 volumes of the collection Baudoin published between 1789 and 1795. The digitization would be made through a most sophisticated process, the one enforces by ARTFL (Chicago University) which allowed to reach a 99,5% reliabilty of the digitized datas while keeping financial costs under control. « Law through the French Revolution » is seeking to gather and put on display a new corpus of fundamental texts among the Academics and the ordinary citizens. It is also looking for the renewal of the thinking about the practical enforcement of a new public order. Maybe no later than in year II, law had been conscious of its « uneffectiviness » : the multiplicity of the statutes increased the revolutionary jurists' fear to see the « retrogradation » of a Revolution, victim of a « war of laws ». This dreaded feeling in front of the « chaos » of laws gave birth to the necessity of classifiying all the texts voted by the assemblies : in spring 1794, Cambacérès came in front of the Convention and offered it a global map on paper, dividing up the revolutionary statutes into twenty eight codes. This plan would never been achieved for both political and also material reasons : was it not hypertext before it had been coined ' « Law through the French Revolution » took over in 2008 where Cambacérès left off in 1794 : by encoding the digitized statutes, the project will make real the twenty eight revolutionary codes imagined in year II. Going through the national archives, especially the ones of the serie D XXXIX, and encoding the statutes through the categories of the contemporaries, the team will made corpuses of different kinds of laws (the statutes of general interest, the statutes of circumstances, the faulty statutes, the confused statutes') based upon objective indicators : would be considered as a political or a circumstancial statute the one the jurists of the time considered to be so. A more pragmatic approach will lead to a quantitative evaluation of the work of the assemblies. One of the main objectives is not only to have the revolutionary law rediscovered, but also to have it produced thanks to the new technology. The introduction of markers would lead to the statutes being consolidated. In other words, it would be possible to produce a virtual statute respecting the text voted by the assembly, but following it with the directions to apply it, if it existed, and the decrees which had completed or corrected it. Because the different dispositions concerning the same statute had rarely, if ever, been gathered in the same text, the plasticity of the law of Terror was always neglected to the benefit of its extreme radicality. The material approach of the law choosen here is aimed to work with and to deepen the most recent revolutionary studies which are dealing with the structures of the assemblies, trying to relate the story of their different committees more than dealing with their famous political debates. Last but not least, the project will deal with operations neglected, as the translation of the statutes by a specific desk, located at the Agence des lois, the Bureau des traductions des lois. At the end, we hope to be able to produce a chronological history of the Revolution with a focus on law and to map the european influence of the revolutionary ideas which arms had enforced by violence, which law had rooted outside the national boundaries for longer.