Carlos Petit 148 tive adjective commun, which served to give legitimacy to future proposals through the memory of the unitary legal system created in modern France, thanks to the doctrines of Dumoulin and the decisions made in the parliaments concerning the fragmentary basis of the most varied coutumes. Fiowever, Saleilles’s common law referred to a humanité civilisée which, towards 1900, was still limited to a small portion of Europe. Without having read the complete writings of Comparative Law specialists and the vast body of literature on turn-of-the-century international law, one can only advance a few hypotheses,5‘* but it seems evident to me that Saleilles’s horizon of comparative methods, professionally limited as is known, corresponded to the idea of a quintessentially europäisches Völkerrecht in which the Americans could also be found without too many problems, to divulge among Latin jurists the newness of the BGB. At a time when codes were being debated and uniform laws were being made in North America, when codified European lawhad reached even exotic Japan, the present-day reader is surprised to find that the large international participation at the Paris congress should have been confined, without any noteworthy exceptions, to old Europe. Indeed, it might be said that the gestation of a science of Comparative Law, directed in the final analysis to the achievements of unification of laws, was of interest to that same humanity which earlier at the Berlin conference on the Congo (1884-1885) had shown an innocent faith in Europe’s powers to impose universal equilibrium. Lambert’s abandonment of humanité civilisée as a reference of that droit commun which should summarize any worthv essay on droit civil comparé did not aim at providing immediate intellectual bridges towards cultures greatlv remote from the west, despite the narrowness entailed by the legislative requirements of Comparative Law. Fiowever, without any doubt, the omission from his project of what was still a very strong European cultural reference permitted Edouard Lambert, as future research will verify, a progressively more open doctrinal evolution in which the study of other European laws had less and less importance. Let us move on now to 1919. Lambert had lost his loved ones in a violent conflagration had just destroyed Europe. Political geography was undergoing unsuspected changes with empires disappearing and nations becoming states. The old balance of forces had yielded, as Paul Valéry so aptly put it,^^ to a balance of weaknesses, accenting the might of the United States and compelling those with the best of intentions to deposit their hopes of a peaceful future in the League of Nations. However, it was also open territory, stimulating the specialist in Comparative Lawto carry out experiments: there were newStates and constitutions, new codes for nations nowindependent of former empires, Carl Schmitt, El nomos de la tierra y el Derecho de Gentes del lus Publicum Europaeum (1950), trad. Dora Schilling Thon, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1979. Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel et autres essais, Paris, Gallimard, nouv. éd. corr. et augm. 1945'^.
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