Academic literature on the topic 'Judicial world of the Ancien Régime'

For Americans, long accustomed to judicial review of the law, the traditional absence of a similar system of constitutional control in France comes as a surprise. Closer examination however, reveals that the French politico-historico-judicial tradition inherited from the Ancien Régime and the Revolution of 1789 is deeply opposed to the development of "government by the judges." Why did the Revolution react against the judiciary? How has the idea of constitutional control evolved in modern France? What are the possible sources of legitimacy for an institution (the Conseil constitutionnel) and a concept (judicial review) cut off from the sanction of tradition? What is the future of the Conseil?

The Fifth Republic : From the Droit de l’État to the État de droit ? ; In 1958 the French legal System was the direct inheritor of a long tradition with its roots in the Ancien régime and which was characterised by a natural distrust of judicial authority. The Fifth Republic has been marked by a ‘judicialisation’ of public acts through the increased autonomy of French and European judicial authorities and through the advent of a control over the constitutionality of législation. This increase in the power and the rôle of the judiciary in public life is due to a great number of factors — démocratie, économie, social and political. Notably the judge plays the rôle of referee at the heart of political power and suppléments démocratie control mechanisms with regard to numerous affairs.

After the Second World War, a wave of euphoria fostered an international consensus that led to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Treaty for Human Rights, and institutions safeguarding their application. In the early 21st century, however, these great ideals and even parliamentary democracy appear to be open to various forms of manipulation tending to the restriction of its own constitutional rights and functions. This paper retraces the long-term genesis of these concepts which emerged in the course of a centuries-long development that is uniquely European. A constant tension can be observed between the difficult formulation of fundamental rights of subjects, originally on a local and regional basis, and the effectiveness of the institutions created to control governments. The growth of cities, which acquired various levels of autonomy and autarchy, was fundamental to make it possible that immunities and particular privileges similar to those of clerics and aristocrats were extended to the new communities. The periods of urban growth, and the density of cities within particular territories, determined which balance of powers was stabilised. The earliest and most intense wave of urbanisation, in North and Central Italy from the 10th to the 13th century, brought civil rights and privileges for local communes, but also domination of the largest cities as they absorbed or eliminated all potentially countervailing powers. In other regions, various balances were attained between the prevailing seigneurial interests and those of urban communities.

This paper aims at describing and explaining certain common characteristics that have endured in the African Atlantic islands by virtue of the fact that these islands depend on centres of authority located at considerable distances away. Their location on linking routes to three continents led to the first globalization since the world economic shifts of the 16th century. The islands have sometimes been described metaphorically as a bridge, but we prefer to speak of maritime doors. These islands have been an entrance and exit for goods, people, culture, and ideas, opened or closed, depending on your point of view, through the modern age as European penetration spread. It includes the archipelagos of the Middle Atlantic, the cases of Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Principe, and the Guinea Islands of Bioko, Corisco, and Annobon.

AbstractPoisoning at Nice under the Restoration, judicial investigations and toxicological experts' reports. – Poisoning may be a fairly well-known crime in legal history, but the judgements of the Senate in Nice (at the time of the Restoration in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia) shed some new light on some of its issues. The court worked according to principles of organisation, a legal system and a procedure which had all been inherited from the Ancien Régime and re-established under the Restoration, and which allowed it to conduct core criminal investigations. These investigations aimed at finding out the intention of the criminal and the means used in committing the crime. They relied, in spite of the limitations of scientific knowledge, on toxicological expertise, which became an essential stage in prosecuting cases of poisoning.

ABSTRACT This paper examines new research on crimes and punishments in Neapolitan public banks between the 17th and the early 18th centuries. This is a new area of study, based on the archives of the banks, that can explain the failures of these institutions, the lack of controls, and the damages the fraudulent actions caused. The appropriation of the “public good” (money deposited in the banks) was carried out by bank employees whose illicit behavior violated the set of norms common to all Christianity, norms that constituted a solid foundation for the patrimony of trust at the heart of all commercial transactions in the ancien régime. Archival records are used to examine the possible motivations that led to the circumvention of the norms, including lack of economic gratification, a scarcely efficient internal control system, a judicial system that did not apply strict punishments, and marketplace economic factors.

The media and political scientists create the impression that the world of Islam and the Occident are two totally different civilizations. The author shows, on the contrary, that life in the 14 centuries of the Christian Middle Ages and the Ancien Régime – Old Europe – was in many ways similar to that of the area's Muslim neighbours, and only moved into the modern world with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The author also examines the chances of an Arab spring heralding, after 14 centuries of Old Islam, the entry into the modern democratic world. He argues that the two civilizations are not fundamentally dissimilar, but that they move through comparable stages of development at different moments in time: a difference in chronology rather than in essence.

The idea of “liberating or freeing up” land can be found in numerous studies of Spain’s economic evolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. Many of the measures implemented by the liberals were related to land, some of which have been considered key by Spanish historians. However, recent empirical studies have shown very dynamic land markets even during the Ancien Régime, raising the question of whether the changes should be attributed to liberal measures. This article offers a broad view of the whole of Spain, combining statistics generated by land registry institutions with the most detailed analysis of a geographical area of marked economic vitality and registry activity –the judicial district of Figueres in north-eastern Catalonia. By pointing out the diversity of land ownership forms, practices and circulation, these two approaches call into question the idea that the latter accelerated in the liberal period, and invite us to radically reconsider the object of study and the very process of liberal revolution.

In the revolution of 1789, France set out to replace its absolute monarchy with a government based on a separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers. In Geometries of Power: Royal, Revolutionary, and Postrevolutionary French Courtrooms, Katherine Fischer Taylor asks how the goal of separating powers affected the reform of French justice through its physical housing. Providing the first overview of French courtroom layout, Taylor identifies four geometric configurations that characterize in turn the late ancien régime, the revolutionary decade, and the Napoleonic era and beyond. While taking account of changes in the conduct of trials, the analysis emphasizes instead how the courtroom’s spatial arrangement expresses the political source and status of justice. The revolution’s hitherto-unstudied circular layout is placed in the context of the novel curvilinear legislative chamber and influential theater reform. It proposes that the Napoleonic replacement, a rectangular layout inspired by contemporaneous basilican church interiors, instead reframed justice as a sacral power distinct from the theatrical legislature.

The nineteenth century, a time when world history seemed to accelerate, was the epoch of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Germany. It was also an epoch which saw the last efforts of dynastic ancien régime empires (Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman) to shore up their political systems with methods often borrowed from their adversaries, the nationalist liberals. Eric Hobsbawm's inspiring recent study has pointed out that, in the world after the French Revolution, it was no longer enough for monarchies to claim divine right; additional ideological reinforcement was required: “The need to provide a new, or at least a supplementary, ‘national’ foundation for this institution was felt in states as secure from revolution as George III's Britain and Nicholas I's Russia.”

Dans la préface de nombreuses œuvres doctrinales provençales de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, leurs auteurs, tels que Jean-Joseph JULIEN (1704-1789) ou encore Marc-Antoine DE BARRIGUE DE MONTVALON (1714-1775), enseignent que le droit romain constitue la « Loi de la Provence ». Dès le XVIIe siècle, une véritable littérature juridique provençale voit le jour pour étudier l'usage des dispositions du Corpus Iuris Civilis au sein de la Justice royale. Parmi elle se trouve le « Code Buisson » (titre simplifié), une explication du Code Justinien par un avocat du Parlement d'Aix dénommé BUISSON. Cet ouvrage, qui n'a jamais fait l'objet d'une impression par qui que ce soit, devient un véritable classique de Droit dans la Provence du Siècle des Lumières. En effet, tous les juristes, tant praticiens que magistrats, en possèdent une copie manuscrite, parfois augmentée de la nouvelle législation royale et des nouveaux arrêts de la Cour d'Aix. Pourtant, malgré cette célébrité, personne ne connaît la véritable identité de cet avocat aixois. Notre étude est la première à se pencher sur le Code Buisson et sur son auteur. Elle a pour objectif de rendre les lettres de noblesses au savant avocat du Grand Siècle qu'est Honoré BUISSON (1624-1692), oublié des mémoires des Provençaux jusqu'à présent
In the preface to many Provençal doctrinal works from the end of the 18th century, their authors, such as Jean-Joseph JULIEN (1704-1789) or Marc-Antoine DE BARRIGUE DE MONTVALON (1714-1775), teach that Roman Law is the « Law of Provence » (territory of the South of France). From the 17th century, a Provençal legal literature emerged to study the use of the Corpus Iuris Civilis within royal justice. Among it is the « Code Buisson » (simplified title), an explanation of the Justinian Code by a lawyer from the Parlement d'Aix (French royal Court) named BUISSON. This work, which has never been printed by anyone, becomes a classic of Law in Provence of the Age of Enlightenment. Indeed, all jurists, both practitioners and magistrates, have a handwritten copy, sometimes supplemented by the new royal legislation and the new judgments of the Court of Aix. However, despite this celebrity, no one knows the true identity of this Aix lawyer. Our study is the first to look at the Code Buisson and its author. Its objective is to restore the letters of nobility to the learned lawyer of the Grand Siècle who is Honoré BUISSON (1624-1692), forgotten in the memories of the Provençals until now

Ce travail prend appui sur une source jusqu’ici largement sous-exploitée et qui appartient à la communauté des procureurs au parlement de Paris sous l’Ancien Régime. Source aux apparences familières en ce qu’elle se rapporte à un ordre disciplinaire commun à de nombreuses compagnies judiciaires et corps de métiers de l’époque, son objet est pourtant passé inaperçu : la pratique. En 1670, est établie sous l’autorité du Parlement une Chambre de la postulation qui a pour objectif de poursuivre les faits d’entreprise supposée sur le ministère de procureur au parlement de Paris. Les registres par elle produits entre 1670 et 1738 forment la matière première de ce travail en consignant des usages qui forment autant d’écarts à une mise en ordre opérée par la communauté que de fenêtres sur le monde de la pratique. La postulation saisie dans ses rapports entre le postulant et le procureur qui prête son nom devient, une fois sortie des registres et articulée à d’autres corpus de sources, un outil pour sonder la vie des études de procureurs, la difficulté du métier et son accès disputé par divers praticiens sans titre. En tant que manifestation d’une inscription sociale et professionnelle, la postulation mise en lumière par la communauté des procureurs éclaire divers usages du monde de la pratique où le déploiement de l’exercice du procureur s’accommode mal de l’étroitesse du titre
This work is based on a source hitherto largely underused and which belongs to the community of attorneys (procureurs in French) in the parliament of Paris under the Ancien Régime. The source seems familiar in that it relates to a disciplinary order common to many judicial systems and trades of the time, yet its object has gone unnoticed : la pratique. In 1670, a Chambre de la postulation was established under the authority of Parliament, the objective of which was to prosecute alleged corporate acts against the ministry of the attorney in the Parliament of Paris. The registers produced by this chamber between 1670 and 1738 form the raw material of this work and reflect uses which form as many deviations from an order made by the community as windows on the world of practice. The postulation, caught in its relations between the postulant and the attorney who lends his name, becomes, once out of the registers and articulated with other corpora of sources, a tool to probe the life of the attorney’s office, the difficulty of the profession and its access as disputed by various untitled practitioners. As a manifestation of social and professional registration, the postulation, brought to light by the community of attorneys, sheds light on various uses in the world of the pratique where the deployment of the attorney’s pratique is ill suited to the narrowness of the title

L’étude d’environ 200 mémoires judiciaires, ou factums, principalement publiés entre 1770 et 1789, permet de fournir un éclairage sur la place des femmes dans la société française. Bien que soumises à la tutelle et à l’autorité masculine, les femmes sont montrées défendant leurs intérêts devant la justice. Si la norme de soumission à leur mari est rappelée, les épouses sont fréquemment mises en scène dans des situations où elles affirment leur indépendance. Les veuves peuvent défendre leurs intérêts seules, voire assumer des rôles de protectrices ou tenter de peser dans la répartition des biens dans la famille. La place des filles est très réduite, même si les récits des factums peuvent leur donner des rôles de premier plan. Quant à l'autorité maternelle, elle est reconnue. La fonction maternelle peut aussi être représentée par des mères de substitution (nourrices, marraines, grands-mères et tantes, soeurs). Les soeurs ne sont pas placées systématiquement sous le contrôle de leurs frères. Les mémoires judiciaires permettent ainsi de réfléchir sur la représentation de la nature féminine à la veille de la Révolution. À la différence des discours produits par les médecins et les philosophes, ils ne répandent pas l’idée d’une nature féminine spécifique
This survey (PhD) sheds light on women’s status in the French society between 1770 and 1789, through the study of approximately 200 printed judicial briefs or factums. Although they were under men’s control, women could go to court. Wives had to obey their husbands. Nevertheless, they often showed their independence in judicial briefs. Widows could act by themselves, protect their families and influence the wealth distribution between the family members. “Girls” or “never-married women” are rare in judicial briefs, even though they could play important parts. The mother’s authority was recognized in judicial briefs. Other women also played the mother’s part instead of the real mother, e.g. godmothers, grand-mothers, aunts, sisters and wet-nurses. Sisters were not always under their brothers’ control. Judicial briefs interrogate the idea of women’s nature as it was portrayed before the French Revolution. Unlike physicians’ and philosophers’ discourses, they do not support the idea that there should be a specific nature of women

L’étude retrace les fondements dogmatiques du droit au procès en France sous l’Ancien Régime. Pour ce faire, elle propose l’appellation plus abstraite de « droit subjectif aux formes juridiques » et analyse les différents discours qui durant l’époque moderne tendent à rapprocher les formes, formalités et procédures à la garantie de la liberté, jusqu’à faire de celles-ci le rempart par excellence contre l’arbitraire.La procédure constitue la matrice des « libertés anciennes » : elle a été forgée théoriquement par la doctrine, traduite institutionnellement par la magistrature, réalisée légalement par les ordonnances, et mise en application – bien que très difficilement – par les gens de robe. L’analyse des discours sur la procédure permet par ailleurs de repérer que l’affermissement du pouvoir étatique entraîne progressivement la subjectivation des énonces juridiques qui contiennent les normes procédurales. Ainsi, la conception spécifique des libertés anciennes entre en résonance avec sa traduction la plus contemporaine
This research traces the dogmatical foundations of due process of law in Ancient Regime’s France. To do so, we propose the more abstract concept of “subjective right to legal forms”. This study analyses the different speeches that in the modern age connect forms, formalities, and procedures to the protection of rights and liberties, making those forms the more adequate defence against arbitrary measures.Procedure constitutes then the source of the “ancient liberties”: it was theoretically shaped by the doctrinal works, translated into an institutional speech by the ancient magistracy, legally accomplished by the royal ordinances, and enforced, although with difficulties, by the judiciary. The examination of the speeches about procedure allows us to notice that the consolidation of the state’s power leads to the subjectivation of the legal statements containing procedural norms. Thus, the specific conception of the ancient liberties resonates with the contemporary version of them

In this book, a team of contributors surveys and presents current thinking about the world of pre-revolutionary France and Europe. The idea of the Ancien Régime was invented by the French revolutionaries to define what they hoped to destroy and replace. But it was not a precise definition, and although historians have found it conceptually useful, there is wide disagreement about what the Ancien Régime's main features were, how they worked, how old they were, how far they stretched, how dynamic or inert they were, and how far the revolutionaries succeeded in their ambitions to eradicate them. In this collection, old and newer areas of research into the Ancien Régime are presented and assessed, and there has been no attempt to impose any sort of consensus. The result shows what a lively field of historical enquiry the Ancien Régime remains, and points the way towards a range of promising new directions for thinking and writing about the intriguing complex of historical problems that it continues to pose.

The idea of the Ancien Régime can be traced back to the French Revolution. As soon as it became clear, during the summer of 1788, that the structure and apparatus of authority in France was collapsing, people began to look forward to an era of change. Suddenly, it seemed, all their dreams of a better, juster, fairer, kinder, freer order of things might be made to come true. Nothing was exempt from these expectations, and they were only fanned in the spring of 1789 when all the King's subjects, prior to electing the Estates-General, which was expected to solve all the kingdom's problems, were invited to draw up lists of their grievances. Much of the Ancien Régime as the revolutionaries defined it is still accepted by historians as a meaningful framework for study. Revolutionary destruction sliced like a guillotine through its fabric, and exposed for posterity a vivid cross-section or snapshot of how things were before the cataclysm struck. But in condemning the Ancien Régime to death so comprehensively, the revolutionaries tended to erase the memory of its previous life, bequeathing a static version of the world before their own emergence which denied it vitality.

Voltaire worked hard throughout his life to establish and defend his status as an author within the social hierarchy of the ancien régime, with varying degrees of success, but with unflagging determination. ‘The courtier’ charts his time at the French court in 1725 and 1745–6, at the Prussian court of Frederick 1750–3, and his extensive correspondence with Catherine the Great. It describes Voltaire’s role as the Royal Historiographer in 1745 and some of his key works including the opera collaboration with Rameau, Le Temple de la gloire (1745), his historical masterpiece Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), and his world history, Essai sur les mœurs (1756).

The Catholic Church faced a number of issues during the development of modern society from the French Revolution to the beginning of the First World War. After examining the Catholic response to secularization of society, the chapter analyses three currents which played an active role in the first half of the century: supporters of the ancien régime, intransigents, and liberal Catholics. As a consequence of the European revolutions the papacy condemned the modern world and promoted hierocratic medievalism. Pope Leo XIII encouraged a distinction between thesis and hypothesis as entryway to modernity: Catholics could enter the modern world, almost in order to use all it possessed to combat its results. But his successor, Pius X, thought that the modernization of the Church had degenerated into the illegitimate inclusion in it of the pernicious principle of modernity. Modernism became for more than half a century the main enemy of Roman Catholicism.

Evangelicals reprised the biblical trope of the “one thing needful” (the unum necessarium) but emphasized singular devotion not in the context of cloister or vestry but in the wider world. This book gives an account of this dynamic spirituality in the new social space of a modernizing society where the traditional bonds of ancien régime society were weakening. It describes the emergence of evangelical spirituality but views devotion, culture, and ideas all together. Evangelical devotion appeared alongside the rise of Modernity, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution, and in the midst of a shift from the authority of the ancients to that of the moderns. Evangelical devotion is therefore examined in relation to the key cultural domains of science, law, and art, and the leading intellectual discourses of natural and moral philosophy. The leading subjects and sources for the book and the content of each chapter are also briefly introduced.

Huguenot refugees were everywhere in the early modern world. Exiles fleeing French persecution, they scattered around Europe and beyond following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, settling in North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and even remote islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This book offers the first global history of the Huguenot diaspora, explaining how and why these refugees became such ubiquitous characters in the history of imperialism. The story starts with dreams of Eden, as beleaguered religious migrants sought suitable retreats to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to create these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, and they thus ran headlong into the world of politics. The refugees promoted themselves as the chosen people of empire, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that would strengthen the British and Dutch states. As a result, French Protestants settled around the world—they tried to make silk in South Carolina; they planted vines in South Africa; and they peopled vulnerable frontiers from New England to Suriname. Of course, this embrace of empire led to a gradual abandonment of the Huguenots’ earlier utopian ambitions. They realized that only by blending in, and by mastering foreign institutions, could they prosper in a quickly changing world. Nonetheless, they managed to maintain a key role in the early modern world well into the eighteenth century, before the coming of Revolution upended the ancien régime.

Ancien régime France did not have a unified law. Legal relations of the people were governed by a disorganized amalgam of norms, including provincial and local customs (coutumes), elements of Roman law and canon law that together formed jus commune, royal edicts and ordinances, and judicial decisions, all coexisting with little apparent internal coherence. The multiplicity of laws and the fragmentation of jurisdiction were the defining features of the monarchical era. A key subject in European legal history is the metamorphosis of popular customs into customary law, which covered a broad spectrum of what we call today private law. This book sets forth the evolution of law in late medieval and early modern France, from the thirteenth through the end of the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on the royal campaigns to record and reform customs in the sixteenth century. The codification of customs in the name of the king solidified the legislative authority of the crown, the essential element of the absolute monarchy. Achievements of French legal humanism brought French custom and Roman law together to lay the foundation for the French law. The Civil Code of 1804 was the culmination of these centuries of work. Juristic, political, and constitutional approaches to the early modern state allow an understanding of French history in a continuum.

This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

Os textos produzidos na denominada América Portuguesa (1500-1822) abrangem os mais variados campos das letras ocidentais – lírica, épica, dramaturgia, historiografia, epistolografia, parenética, lexicografia, etc. – e seguem um modelo retórico-poético e teológico-político comum, próprio das Letras do Ancien Régime. Manuscritos e impressos escritos em várias línguas (português, principalmente, mas também em latim, castelhano, francês, italiano, tupi-guarani, língua geral, etc.), por um número de autores considerável (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.), corriam com avidez entre os leitores. São justamente esses textos, esses autores e esses leitores os que conformam o sistema cultural das Letras na América Portuguesa. A historiografia brasileira, portuguesa e inclusive internacional tem se debruçado há já vários decênios no estudo dos Estados do Brasil e do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, tanto de um ponto de vista micro-histórico como macro-histórico, salientando-se nos últimos tempos a sua relação com o resto do mundo, no âmbito próprio da global history. Nos últimos decênios, ao mesmo tempo, a literatura vem perdendo, paulatinamente, o seu poder de conhecimento legitimador das elites culturais de uma nação. Esse esquecido «Parnaso Brasileiro» mantinha, no entanto, um fluido diálogo cultural com Lisboa assim como com outras cidades europeias, diálogo esse que os processos de formação das literaturas exclusivamente nacionais, brasileira e/ou portuguesa, vieram apagar ou até mesmo ignorar. No espaço hermenêutico próprio dos Atlantic Studies, recuperam-se, neste livro, as Letras escritas e lidas na América Portuguesa, estudam-se seus autores, interpretam-se textos escolhidos e indaga-se tanto sobre seus primeiros leitores, como sobre seus leitores de ontem e de hoje. Um conjunto de docentes do Brasil, de Portugal, da Alemanha e da Espanha discute textos de Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto e Santa Rita Durão, entre outros. Die in der sogenannten »América Portuguesa« (1500-1822) entstandenen Texte gehören zu verschiedensten Diskursformen der westlichen Literatur und Kultur: Lyrik, Epik, Dramaturgie, Historiographie, Epistolographie, Homiletik, Lexikographie usw. Sie folgen einem gemeinsamen rhetorisch-poetischen und theologisch-politischen Modell, das charakteristisch für die Texte des Ancien Régime war. Manuskripte und Drucke in verschiedenen Sprachen (hauptsächlich Portugiesisch, aber auch Latein, Spanisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral etc.) von einer beachtlichen Anzahl von Autoren (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa usw.) fanden eine umfassende Leserschaft. All diese Elemente - Texte, Autoren und Leserschaft – bilden das System der »Letras« in der »América Portuguesa«. Die brasilianische, portugiesische und sogar die internationale Geschichtsschreibung konzentriert sich seit mehreren Jahrzehnten auf das Studium der Kolonialstaaten Brasil und Maranhão e Grão-Pará sowohl aus mikro- als auch aus makrohistorischer Sicht. Gleichzeitig verliert die Literatur in den letzten Jahrzehnten allmählich die Funktion, das Wissen der kulturellen Eliten einer Nation zu legitimieren. Der aktuell wenig beachtete »Parnaso Brasileiro« unterhielt einen intensiven kulturellen Dialog mit Lissabon wie auch mit anderen europäischen Städten, einen Dialog, der der Ausbildung ausschließlich nationaler Literaturen, brasilianischer und/oder portugiesischer, wenig Stellenwert einräumte oder sie sogar ignorierte. Im hermeneutischen Raum, den die Atlantic Studies eröffnen, erschließt dieses Buch die in der »América Portuguesa« geschriebenen und gelesenen Texte, beschäftigt sich mit ihren Autoren, interpretiert ausgewählte Texte und fragt nach ihren ersten Lesern sowie nach ihren Leserinnen und Lesern gestern und heute. Eine Gruppe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland und Spanien diskutiert Texte u.a. von Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto und Santa Rita Durão. The texts produced in the so-called “América Portuguesa” (1500-1822) cover the most varied fields of Western Literature and Culture – lyric, epic, dramaturgy, historiography, epistolography, homiletics, lexicography, etc. – and follow a common rhetorical-poetic and theological-political model, typical for the Ancien Régime. Manuscripts and prints were written in various languages (Portuguese, mainly, but also Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral, etc.), by a considerable number of authors (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.) found a broad reception by readers. Precisely, these texts, these authors and these readers constituted the literary system in the “América Portuguesa”. Brazilian, Portuguese, and even international historiography has focused for several decades on the study of the colonial states Brasil and Maranhão e Grão-Pará, both from a micro-historical and macro-historical point of view, emphasizing recently their relationship with the rest of the world in the context of global history. Currently, literature is gradually losing its power of legitimising knowledge of the cultural elites of a nation. This forgotten “Parnaso Brasileiro” maintained, however, a fluid cultural dialogue with Lisbon as well as with other European cities, a dialogue that the formation of exclusively national literatures, Brazilian and/or Portuguese, came to neglect or even ignore. In the hermeneutic space opened up by the Atlantic Studies, this book deals with texts written and read in the “América Portuguesa”, studies its authors, interprets selected works and inquires both about its first readers and about its readers yesterday and today. A group of scholars from Brazil, Portugal, Germany and Spain discusses texts by Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto and Santa Rita Durão, among others.

This chapter examines the concept of ‘constitutional justice’ (justice constitutionnelle) as it is understood within the French legal order. Afterward, the chapter examines the history of French constitutional justice from the Ancien Régime to the Fifth Republic. Here, the constitutional jurisdiction of the Fifth Republic—that is, the Constitutional—and, in a broader sense, the system of constitutional justice as it exists in the Fifth Republic—are given particular attention. But an analysis of the Constitutional Council is not enough, however. The chapter also allows for a larger picture that takes into account the interactions between constitutional jurisdiction and all the other judicial actors.

This chapter examines the development of France’s colonial empire over the long eighteenth century, from the early settlements to the eve of the revolution. It demonstrates the geopolitical logic of an empire stretching from the St Lawrence River to Louisiana and across the Caribbean, and shows how this empire had been cut back through a series of colonial wars, especially with Great Britain, leading to the loss of Canada at the Peace of Paris in 1763. By the end of the Ancien Régime, France’s principal interest in the Americas was in the Caribbean and especially Saint-Domingue, which was the wealthiest of all European colonies in the Atlantic world. The chapter concludes with a discussion of France’s trade with its Atlantic possessions and of the system of imperial preference it imposed.