The Organisation of l’Assistance Judiciaire, the Politics of Poverty, and the Rewriting of History in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

In 1851, French legislators enacted a law organising the public provision of legal aid to the poor. This chapter examines the kinds of political ghosts that surfaced when the law on l’assistance judiciaire and the history in which it was grounded were proclaimed mid-century and then repeated and retold as part of quite different conceptual chains at the century’s end. Both the debates on the law organising l’assistance judiciaire in the early 1850s and the late-century commentary on its failings reveal how retrospective narratives of invention and inauguration can ground politically powerful new claims of genealogical authenticity, authority, and plenitude, even in a code law regime that does not rely, at least formally, on precedent in the making of law. This chapter argues that French jurists and lawmakers performed complex, unavoidable historical work as they sought to write—and later overwrite—the history of legal aid into political narratives linking past, present, and future. In the first moment, they aimed to repudiate the revolutionary demands of the poor. In the second, their successors aspired to retell the history of the law’s incomplete or primitive “origins” in a story that would anchor their claims of founding a moderate, just, and well-regulated republican democracy.