Carlos Petit Taction”. It was a science of action, of a final and technical orientation by the national legislator and guide to the national judges themselves, but, above all, a legal science of action, designed to draw up a droit commun législatif understood as a “depot de maximes communes” which would have to address itself to “provoquer un rapprochement continu entre les legislations que forment Tobjet du travail de comparaison”. Today’s reader of Lambert’s work can clearly distinguish two main points in his rapport which deserve attention. In the first place, one finds a cultural project for a future which, although still ill-defined, was nonetheless in clear contrast to the past. That past was what could be termed the juridical folklore of men such as Josef Kohler, still present at the Paris congress but who soke a language distinctly redolent of the nineteenth century.**- Even more antiquated was the primitivism of Henry Sumner Maine - not entirely absent from the Paris gathering, thanks to the continuous invocations of Frederick Pollock**-* - who, as is known, sparked a bitter discussion of the origins of property which was so embarrassing for the anthropological fundations of contemporary law.**"* One might say that Lambert’s officiating an actiofinium regundorumat the inception of Contemporary Law concerning some previous comparative essays in which archaeology, folklore and history seemed to blend together, in order to discuss the individual himself and individual property, was an elusive but effective response in favour of individual and State references as categories of contemporary legal experience. Nevertheless, if the cancellation of certain possibilities for comparative studies under the rubric of “sociological method” (less interesting to the jurist) staved off the most extreme developments in the criticism of code culture, which the minutes of that very congress reveal to have been prevalent at that time,**-"’ Lambert’s Comparative Law, with its significant nucleus of a positive and doctrinal droit comrnun législatif, also found a very concrete technical dimension in the France of 1900. We would do well to remember that this was a time when discussion of the systemof sources of the so-called legal absolutism was finding its utmost expression in Frani^ois Gcny and his Méthode d’interpretation et sources en droit privépositif (1899). The restless Lambert 144 Joset Kohler, “De la méthode du Droit compare”, en Proces-verbaux dcs seances et docurnents cit. I, 227-237. Frédéric Pollock, “Le Droit comparé; Prolégoménes de son histoire”, ibd. 248-261. Paolo Grossi, ‘Un altro modo di possedere’. L'cmmcrsione di forme alternative di proprietd alia coscienza giuridica postunitaria, Milano, Giuffre (=Per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno. Biblioteca, 5), 1977. Cfr. Rudolf Sohm, “Le Code civil frani^ais et le Code civil allemand”, in Proees-verbaux des seances et documents cit. I, 261-268, p. 268: “Dans le Code civil, nous parle I’esprit du temps oii nous vivons, I’esprit bourgeois. De la, la force vitale qui, aujourd’hui encore, parcourt ses paragraphes. Le Code civilcontient un droit bourgeois, et nous sommes encore enveloppés aujourd’hui dans 1’époque du droit bourgeois”.
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