no Incontrast to Germany (see Chapter 8), in France no great debate on the desirability of free evaluation of evidence took place. Whereas in Germany, some of the legal professionals had already begun at the beginning of the 1800s to envisage the possibility of conferring the free evaluation of evidence upon the judiciary, in France the pre-revolutionary context of discussion was quite different. As David Bell has shown, the active legal profession of avocats and procurateurs radicalized towards the Revolution and actively began to take advantage of the nascent publicity. The barristers, thus, become the core of the French middle classes, and they stood in clear opposition to the socially higher noblesse de robe, whose broad arbitrarv powers epitomized ancien régime unjustness and atrocities.-'^ Under these circumstances, it was felt that the free evaluation of evidence, if deemed desirable, should be vested in a jury of laymen. Furthermore, although “Britische Freiheit” held much appeal in the late eighteenth-century German public discussion, it was the French development that for seemed more interesting to the German intellectuals.It is, therefore, understandable, that it was the French version of free evaluation of evidence, “Fintime conviction,” and the jury that served as models and points of reference for the German and most other continental European legislation and scholarly work on the subject-^; this German discussion, then, came to bequeath a great influence on Finland. Therefore, it is necessary to study briefly the development of French legislation concerning the jury and free evaluation of evidence in the late 1700s and the 1800s. In France, the fiercest criticismof the criminal law of theancien régime came fromthe Enlightenment philosophers, and later, also from the radical lawyers, avocats ^ndprocureurs.-'^ In contrast to Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, French legal scholars and practitioners took no active part in the concrete debates over the reshaping of the legal system. They were more interested in politics.-® The discussion thus remained rather abstract.-'^ The reason for this is simple enough: in pre-revolutionary France, no modern legal profession had yet developed. Well into the 1800s, the matters of criminal procedure remained largely detached from the professional interests of French jurists; in nineteenth-century Germany, these two sets of themes were already closely related to each other. -•* Bell 1994 pp. 180-181. -5 In Germany, there had been a French cultural dominance ever since the seventeenth century. Haikala 1985 pp. 31—32. The French jurv itself was, of course, modelled after its English counterpart. Langbein 1987 p. 13; cf. Schwinge 1926 pp. 134-139 and Krieter 1926 p. 8. Avocat was a rough equivalent of the English barrister; procureur, more or less, equals solicitor. Bell 1994 pp. 30, 180. Cramer 1966 pp. 10—12; Lombard 1993 p. 151. It w'as only after the famous Galas case that the general public joined the critical voices. Cramer 1966 p. 12. Lombard 1993 p. 151.
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