Natural law and individual rights in France in the 19th Century

The individual rights which were consecrated in France by the declarations of rights from the revolutionary era brought about all through Nineteenth century a body of law which aimed at organizing the legal exercise of these rights. Public law professors made an important effort at that time to theorize this novel body of law through books, scholarly reviews and teaching. It is striking thus to notice that very few memories were kept of this effort. We have far better knowledge today of the several discourses on individual rights which marked the revolutionary era than of the Nineteenth century thinking on these same rights. For instance, contemporary thought remains familiar with intellectual influences on French revolutionaries such as Locke's, the Modern School of natural law's or the French Encyclopedia's. On the contrary, the reflection led by Nineteenth century public law scholars on individual rights has been forgotten because it has become estranged from us from a cultural point of view. Indeed, the intellectual and moral framework within which the theory of individual rights was developed at that time collapsed by the turn of the Twentieth century, thus opening the way to the unrivaled domination of legal positivism. The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to allow a renewed access to this specific moment of the French thinking on individual rights, by setting the theory of individual rights developed by Nineteenth century public law scholars within the wider framework of the legal culture of their time. To this end, the dissertation adopts a wide perspective which includes contributions of both history of philosophy and history of legal science. Indeed, the Nineteenth century legal theory of individual rights becomes fully intelligible only when related to the very specific doctrine of natural law which dominated during a century within French universities, a doctrine which deeply marked the legal culture of that time.