ents of
the French Revolution.

Thence the belief that society as a whole is to be submitted to one
single law, equal for all, systematic, logical, consistent. Thence the
conviction that a law guaranteeing to all a legal equality, that is to
say, the privilege of contracting, guaranteed also liberty to all.

The triumph of true law assures the triumph of reason, and the society
which is regulated by a law equal for all is a perfect society!

It is useless to say that there were illusions at the bottom of these
tendencies. We all know to what this universal liberation of men was to
lead. But what is most important here is the fact that these persuasions
arose from a conception of law, which considered it as detached from the
social causes which produced it. Likewise that reason, to which these
ideologies appealed, reduced itself to relieving labor, association,
traffic, commerce, political forms and conscience from all limits and
all obstacles which prevented free competition. I have already shown in
another chapter how the great Revolution of the eighteenth century may
serve us for experience. And if there is still some one to-day who
insists on speaking of a rational law which dominates history, of a law,
in short, which would be a _factor_, instead of being a simple _fact_ in
historic revolution, that means that he is living out of our time and
that he has not understood that our liberal and equalitarian
codification has already, in fact, marked the end and the term of that
whole school of natural law.

By different ways we have arrived in this century at reducing law,
considered previously as a rational thing, into a material thing, and
thus into a thing corresponding to definite social conditions.

In the first place, the interest in history gained in extent and in
depth, and it led students to recognize that to understand the origins
of law, it was not sufficient to stop at the data of pure reason, nor at
the study of Roman law alone. Barbaric laws, the usages and customs of
nations and societies, so despised by the rationalists, have been
theoretically restored to honor. That was the only way to arrive,
through the study of the most ancient forms, at an understanding of how
the most recent forms could have been successively produced.

Codified Roman law is a very modern form; that personality, which it
assumes as a universal subject, is an elaboration of a very advanced
epoch, in which the cosmopolitanism of