Conclusion: The Haunting of L'assistance Judiciaire and the Future of Legal Aid

In some respects, Bernard Schnapper was correct in minimising the signifi­cance of the modest reforms in the regime of !.'assistance judiciaire that were introduced by the 1901 law.

Together with the 1898 law on workers’ compensation, the 1901 revi­sion also helped the lawmakers of the Third Republic convince themselves they were exorcising the “excesses” of the revolutionary republican tradi­tion while demonstrating their commitment to civil justice for all. And in its struggle with the meaning and language of poverty, it furthered the project of banishing the poor and the spectre of class war from the court­room. As Vieillard-Baron explained when the draft bill was making its way to the Senate in 1900, modern reformers had to return to the founding sense of !'assistance judiciaire as it was conceived in 1849 as “a recognised right whose exercise had to be guaranteed to whomsoever met the pre­scribed preconditions [of eligibility] and not a voluntarily allocated benefit dependent on the good will of the grantor. It was also a right constituted not only for the benefit of the poor litigant who deserves to be helped by the mere fact that he has fallen into a state of absolute misery, but for every litigant, even those not deprived of all resources, for whom only the insuf­ficiency of his resources blocks his access to justice, and justice must be accessible to all.”^[770]

Even in their most radical interventions, then, Third Republic jurists sought to establish the legitimacy of both the 1851 law and its reform through a selective reading of its continuities with their constitution of a moderate republican past. In this way, republican commentators of the 1880s and 1890s, in retelling the past and reiterating the value of the law, attempted to put to rest the lingering anxieties of the fiercely anti­revolutionary liberals who had been its midwives in the aftermath of 1848.

These late-century accounts of the 1851 law and the attempts to reau­thorise the law while also legitimating its reform thus entailed the transla­tion of a liberal project born in reaction to the revolutionary republic of 1848 into a nascent republican programme of individualised social rights. This programme, moreover, was not to be confused with the radical wel­fare demands of revolutionaries, because it was animated by the spirit of state charity from the start. As Roux put it, the legislators of 1851 never imagined legal aid would function as “a cold, anonymous form of state welfare.”^[771] In later retellings such as Roux’s, moreover, the limits and gaps in the 1851 provision of [’assistance judiciaire would be recast as evidence only of earlier legislators’ uncertainty about how to develop legal assis­tance as part of an order carefully tailored to counter the effects of eco­nomic inequality while distancing the programme of aid from the revolutionary poverty’s insistence on social transformation. Reform under the Third Republic, as Mestre-Mel had put it in 1883, would then simply be a matter of “completing the work begun.”^[772] Completing the work begun did not entail putting the past fully to rest, however. Instead, it meant repeatedly reviving old ghosts from the French revolutionary, reac­tionary, and republican pasts in order to persuade those in the present that those spirits had either been driven out, made harmless, or been brought fully to life in the process of reform. It required conjuring and living amidst the shades and shadows of those multiple incomplete pasts to declare the beginning of a new age of plenitude in French social and legal policy.