Michel de L'Hospital and the Traite de la Reformation de la Justice

This article is a tribute to the power of the printed word. In 1824 P. J. S. Dufey began the publication of the works of Michel de L'Hospital, chancellor of France between 1560 and 1568. Included in this five-volume collection was a previously unknown work, the Traiti de la reformation de la justice, which Dufey discovered in the Bibliotheque royale. Several historians and librarians in the nineteenth century concluded that Dufey's attribution of this work to L'Hospital was in error. Nevertheless, it continues to be listed in catalogs and bibliographies as L'Hospital's work, historians routinely use it as the genuine expression of L'Hospital's ideas, and a reprinting of Dufey's edition has recently appeared which threatens to continue the unexamined attribution of this work for a long time.1 The unwary researcher can easily be led astray. Lucien Romier, in attacks on the legendary aspects of L'Hospital's reputation, did not use the Traite, but neither did he directly address its authenticity.2 This is unfortunate, because the Traiti is a major reinforcement of the L'Hospital legend. L'Hospital's twentieth-century biographers relied on the Traite, as have writers on political and constitutional thought of the sixteenth century.3 L'Hospital's role in the transfor

Misattribution of memory · Political science · Psychiatry · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Philosophy · Psychology

• Judicial Corruption and Legal Reform in Early Seventeenth-Century France

  Open Access•Jeffrey K Sawyer•Law and History Review•1988

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• Constitutions old and new

  Open Access•J H M Salmon•The Historical Journal•1995

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