FRANCE

France was in the Middle Ages marked by a divide between the pays de droit ecrit of the south and the pays de droit coutumier of the north. In the former case, there had been some survival of Roman law during the Dark Ages, and so the new learning was readily received there.

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Paris was the centre of the movement known as Legal Humanism, although this school of thought had adherents elsewhere. Legal Humanism was known as the mos gallicus (French way), as distinct from the mos italicus (Italian way) of the Glossators and Commentators. Humanism (which has no connection to what is nowadays called humanism) was a general historical movement, with its roots in the fifteenth century, marked by an interest in the critical study of history and philology. In the legal context, this meant looking criti­cally at the ways in which the Roman texts were used. We have seen that the Glossators and Commentators took the Roman texts as they stood and freely adapted them to meet contemporary needs. The Humanists, however, criticised what they saw as a distortion of the Roman sources, which had already been distorted by Justinian. They were aware that the Justinianic

texts preserved the developing law at different stages, and were interested in drawing out the historical layers of the texts in order to understand their original meaning. As with Irnerius, the first prominent Legal Humanist, Lorenzo Valla (1405—57), was brought to study of the Roman texts through study of philology. They were interested in the relationship between law and society, seeing legal developments as reflecting changes in society. This rep­resented a move away from the view of the law as the product of reason, to a position where the law was seen as reflective of the society that produced it.

The Humanists were very influential in the academic study of Roman law. They can be said to stand at the beginning of the discipline of juris­prudence, or legal philosophy. However, although many Humanists were prominent in legal practice, Humanist ideas had little direct influence on legal practice.

By implication, the Humanist approach challenged the idea of a ius commune, as it denied any claim to universal applicability, and was linked to the development of nationalist sentiment on the Continent. None of these developments led to the emergence of a national French legal system, however. A truly national system did not exist in France until Napoleon’s Code Civil of 1804, based on Roman law but with modifications.