Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750-1800

Historians of eighteenth-century France, especially students of that nation’s legal and social history, will welcome this important study by Anthony Crubaugh of civil justice in the Aunis and Saintonge regions of southwestern France (the modern Département of the Charente-Maritime). Crubaugh examines problems of local civil justice under both the Old Regime and the legal system created by the events of 1789 to assess the juridical accomplishments of the French Revolution. This is a daunting task, one that historians have eschewed because legal procedure, court jurisdictions, and record keeping all changed with the fall of the monarchy. The result of Crubaugh’s effort, however, is a significant contribution to our knowledge.

Crubaugh studies the legal institutions of first instance for many eighteenth-century Frenchmen, the seigneurial courts of the Old Regime and the justices of the peace created by the Revolution, but his approach to these tribunals is that of a social historian, not a legal scholar. Drawing on his broad knowledge of the sorts of civil litigation that roiled the society of eighteenth-century France, Crubaugh seeks to assess the efficacy of these judicial institutions in meeting the demands that Frenchmen expressed in the cahiers de doléances of 1789 for accessible, speedy, affordable, and just regulation of a vast array of issues ranging from traditional matters of civil law, like property disputes, to affairs like verbal and domestic violence that might today be heard in criminal courts.  

At first glance, the seigneurial courts of the Aunis and Saintonge regions should have met these legal needs of local residents; there were almost five hundred of such tribunals in the area prior to 1789, an average of one of these courts for every nine hundred residents. But Crubaugh finds that in this region seigneurial courts fully justified the complaints about them in the cahiers.  Representing the delegation of royal judicial power to local aristocrats, these tribunals suffered from a number of problems, many of them rooted in this deputation of private parties to perform the public function of administering justice.

Seigneurial justice seldom was accessible and speedy. Part of the problem lay in the very plethora of seigneurial courts in the region: Jurisdictional disputes between courts eager for legal business were frequent and slowed the resolution of cases. The multiple layers of seigneurial justice fostered seemingly endless appeals, too. And the scant salaries seigneurs paid to the magistrates of their courts meant that judges often served on multiple benches to enhance their incomes, with the result that they sometimes were absent from their posts when most needed. When they were present, however, the justice that they administered was not cheap. The low salaries of court officers, reflecting the efforts of seigneurs to minimize their costs of administering justice, forced magistrates and their staffs to rely on the épices, or fees, that they charged those using their services. To maximize their income from such charges, they often exploited the Byzantine procedural aspects of Old Regime law to extend cases needlessly and overcharge litigants. Worst of all, the end result of a slow and costly procedure was not always a just verdict, particularly when the interests of the seigneur were at issue in a case in his own court. The procureurs fiscaux of seigneurial courts often had two conflicting roles: They were at once the seigneurial officials charged with protecting the fiscal interests of their employers and the public party responsible for defending community interests by pursuing such tasks as prosecuting criminals and appointing guardians for minors. When the duties of their dual functions conflicted, they inevitably chose the side of their employers. The magistrates in the courts these men served sustained similar pressures because they lacked any of the bulwarks of judicial independence that we associate with the modern bench. Judges were not venal officeholders with some security of tenure, but, instead, employees who served at the pleasure of seigneurs concerned that their courts avoid judging costly criminal cases. Thus, Crubaugh concludes that the common people of the Aunis and Saintonge region perceived seigneurial courts less as true institutions of justice and much more as agencies that guarded the rights and privileges of the aristocracy.

Despite attempts by the Old Regime monarchy to reform this traditional system of justice in the 1770s and 1780s, the legislation of August 4, 1789, destroyed seigneurial courts in one swift blow and required the creation of a whole new judicial apparatus that legislators designed with the demands of the cahiers in mind. The judicial system that they established administered justice at the expense of the state working through elected and salaried magistrates. The new judges of first instance for many civil affairs and minor criminal matters were the justices of the peace, who represented an entirely new legal philosophy. Legislators deliberately decreed that justices would be local men, usually without legal training, elected for their ability to make reasonable determinations of fact rather than interpretations of points of law in the cases in which they were competent. If possible, they were to avoid formal litigation by arbitrating between contesting parties in the cause of conciliation and peace on the local scene. Crubaugh examines the work of these men in what is our first systematic study of the justices of the peace and finds the new legal system a stunning success in the Charente-Maritime.  There, fifty-three justices of the peace replaced almost five-hundred seigneurial courts and won immediate acceptance by the rural population. In 1791 they sustained a far larger caseload than the old seigneurial tribunals, suggesting that their neighbors had no hesitation in embracing the new criminal justice system, and in 1792 the vast majority of local justices won reelection. Indeed, Crubaugh concludes that the new justices so fully met the legal needs of the countryside that their appearance, at least in the Charente-Maritime, influenced many rural persons to accept the Revolution and the growing, centralized state that it represented.

Crubaugh’s book is a welcome addition to our knowledge of the local operation of justice, and it now appears to be at the forefront of a growing field of scholarly inquiry in France into the role of the justice of the peace in French society prior to abolition of the office in 1958 with works such as Une justice de proximité: la justice de la paix, 1790-1958, edited by Jacques-Guy Petit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003). It has the additional significance of filling an important place in the historiography of the Revolution itself. Amid a large volume of recent scholarship that has tended to minimize the historical importance of the Revolution of 1789, Crubaugh’s study reminds us that, in the realm of justice, the Revolution did constitute a thorough break with the past and that it indeed did fulfill in some measure the regenerative goals proclaimed by the revolutionaries.