Ancient verses on New Ideas: Legal Tradition and the French Historical School
1987; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2505066
ISSN1468-2303
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval and Early Modern Justice
ResumoThese lines by Andre Chenier famously locate the emotional thrust of romantic literature and art, but they suggest also the more general fascination with the past displayed by writers of many persuasions. They highlight one essential feature of that cast of mind which early nineteenth-century scholars were already beginning to call historicism and which was best realized, perhaps, in what, at least from the 1820s, Augustin Thierry and others were celebrating as the new history. During the Restoration and July Monarchy this new was the subject of much discussion and many pretensions. About l'histoire nouvelle Jean Sarazin marvelled in 1835: restoration of classes and secondary races has not only rendered justice to humanity but has also been an important conquest for history.2 Not only Thierry and Michelet but even the aged Chateaubriand applauded the achievements of l'Mcole moderne and the foreign impulses which had inspired it, especially through the work of Vico, Herder, and the historical school of law headed by Savigny.3 The novelty of this particular new (which was neither the first nor, certainly, the last to be so-called) has been much celebrated and often exaggerated, but seldom fully appreciated. It derived not only from the literary artistry of romantic narrative but also from an emphasis (fashionable then as now) on social as distinguished from political and military concerns and from a fascination with the more remote and inaccessible stretches of the past. This shift, reflected particularly in the study of legal and institutional history, was illustrated most notably, perhaps, by Thierry's researches into the history of the Third Estate and by Michelet's Origins of French Law, both launched in
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