Magistrates and Juries in France, 1791-1952

Bibliographic Data

ID8940414
AuthorsJames M Donovan (0000-0003-4336-0658, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume22
Issue3
Pages379-379
Publication date1999-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/286713
OpenAlexW2330310788
LanguageEN
Citations received7

When the men of the Revolution introduced trial by jury in France in 1791, they saw it as an expression of the sovereignty of the people. It was based on the assumption that citizen-judges, guided by their common sense, were competent to administer justice. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, the jury systemonce seen as essential to the protection of the people's liberty-had been nearly destroyed in France. Justice was now administered almost entirely by professional magistrates. It was, in fact, the magistrates themselves who were primarily responsible for this outcome. Their principal means of achieving it was a procedure known as correctionalization (i.e., transferring cases that would normally be tried by the cours d'assises, the trial courts for felonies and the only French tribunals to use juries, to the tribunaux correctionnels, the trial courts for misdemeanors, which used panels of judges only).' A number of jurists and historians have discussed how magistrates used this procedure to better assure convictions and free the judiciary from most of the limitations juries imposed on its power. Yet no one seems to have provided a systematic analysis of all the factors that contributed to the evolution of the conflict between magistrates and juries, a conflict which began in the Napoleonic period and did not end until the mid-twentieth century. For the character of the magistrates' attack on the juries was hardly static: though influenced to some extent by prerevolutionary French legal traditions, which had

Political science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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