114 After 1815, the jury became, even more than before, a central point of political debate between liberals and conservatives. In 1831, the liberals having taken power in 1830, the qualifications of potential jurymenwere considerably widened again.The lawof April 28, 1832, brought another significant faculty to the juries: they were allowed to reduce the legal punishment if there were attenuating circumstances. The revolutionary year 1848 brought universal suffrage to the Second Republic. Because potential jury membership had depended on the right to vote, universal suffrage resulted in general jury eligibility as well. The traditional tie between tax-paying ability, the right to vote, and jury recruitment was thus in principle broken. However, mainly because jury service was unpaid, the institution continued to be as little narrowly based as it had been before the reform.52 Even these partial reforms soon proved short-lived, for already as a result of new political convulsions in 1848 further limitations upon jury membership were introduced in 1853. For instance, vagabonds and beggars, and those sentenced to prison for political crimes, such as being a socialist, were excluded for a minimumof five years.53 The Third Republic brought subsequent changes to the jury institution in 1870. The law of 1848, was reinstated by the lawof 1872 and, thus, the electoral base of the jury members was extended. Furthermore, precautions against the extreme left were taken by stating that those having been imprisoned for “a public and religious moral outrage, attack against the principleof property and the rights of the family” were unsuitable to serve as jurors.5‘* Regardless of the democratic image of the jury of the Third Republic, the social composition of the jury remained centered in the middle-class.55 From the 1880s onwards, the jury was attacked from two sides: its traditional enemy, the conserv'ative bourgeoisie; and a new one, scientific criminology and penology, represented by eminent and influential scholars like Gabriel Tarde in France and Rafaelle Garofalo and Enrico Ferri in Italy. They believed that crime was a sickness that could not be cured without sufficient knowledge of medicine, sociology, and psychology.5^ Logically, the new criminological school assumed a critical posture towards extensive lay participation in courts. As in contemporary Germany, a vivid debate arose on the possibility of organizing the lay representation on the principle of échevinage {SchöffenSchnapper 1987 pp. 182, 186. Ibid. p. 187. ^2 Ibid. pp. 194-200; Lombard 1993 pp. 209—215. Schnapper 1987 p. 207. Ibid. pp. 209-210. -'’5 Lombard 1993 pp. 244-245. Schnapper 1987 p. 213, 220-221; Lombard 1993 pp. 260-261.
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