lus Commune 251 Legal history in France is for a great deal the history of the progressive estrangement of the French legal systemfromany systemof ius commune. How do things stand today? For the past several years, the unification of Europe and the increasing internationalization of university studies on the continent has called a number of old habits into question. After two world wars, the ruin of Europe, the end of nationalist illusions and the beginning of the construction of Europe, jurists and legal historians are finally again taking an interest in finding a “common law” for Europe. Their attitude is, at heart, a political reaction. These jurists and historians are cated to elaborating a new legal “nationalism,” but a Europe-wide one, this time, rather than a narrowly national system. The construction of a new legal system for the continent involves some research into the common legal roots of all the European nations. This modern movement resembles, mutatis mutandis, the evolution of legal scholarship in the 16th and 17th centuries. In France (as in other countries, I suppose), national historians and jurists effectively then backed the efforts of the monarchy to construct the national State. Today, legal historians, fascinated by the ius commune Europtzum, are following the example of their predecessors, but with a continent-wide focus. While this tendency exists in France, it is perhaps weaker than elsewhere, due to the country’s traditional distrust of foreign influence. However, within the academy, one cannot really say that legal history provides an argument for a ius commune. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason is that, since 1896, there is almost complete separation between professors of positive law (both public and private law), on the one hand, and the professors of legal history, on the other. Since legal history has become an autonomous discipline, it has lost all means of influencing the development of general legal scholarship. Those of my colleagues who teach positive law have neither the time nor the desire to teach their students the history of institutions. As a result, legal history is not well represented in the circles which participate in the construction of the current French legal system, which is more or less in tune with current European reality. The second reason is that the history of lawis relatively marginalized in the French university curriculum. Even though legal history is a required subject for all lawstudents, this means that, typically, it is studied only during the first years, when the students are still unformed. Furthermore, the history of lawis still very nationalistically defined in France. The only course that practically all law students attend is “The history of the laws and the institutions of France fromthe Frankish era until the Revolution”. This course lasts, depending on the university, for either a single semester or two semesters. It does not allow for many opportunities to discuss the other legal systems of Europe. However, I do not want to end on a pessimistic note. There are some recent indications that French universities do not completely ignore European aspirations. There a sort of consciousness raising in progress. dedi-
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