| The figure of the combative political lawyer has long been associated with France's republican tradition, and served particularly as a powerful symbol of the early, triumphant Third Republic. Yet, by the time of the Dreyfus Affair, the legal profession appeared at odds with the Republic and strikingly absent from public life. Why was this so? This dissertation considers a variety of institutional sources from the Order of Advocates to the Law Faculty in combination with theoretical writings on the law and debates from the press and Parliament, in order to evoke the growing conflict of the profession with the republican regime. With their prominence in the Parliaments of the Third Republic, firm connection to middle-class values, and professional engagement with the legal system, the Bar was situated at the intersection of the political culture of republicanism, the bourgeois culture of the fin-de-siecle, and the world of the French legal system.;As members of the private corporation of the Bar, lawyers were both agents of the legal system and social intermediaries who represented the interests of civil society before the state. Yet the last decades of the century saw a series of attacks on the legal profession and a proliferation of challenges to the legitimacy of the law itself. The relationship of the Bar to the labor movement and to the policies of the Radical Republic demonstrate the transformation of both social and legal representation in the pre-World War I period. Republican policies also led to a transformation of legal practice, as the Civil Code and doctrine of freedom of contract were both heavily attacked. The case of the Paris Bar exemplifies how the liberal ideal of state and society embraced by moderates in the early years of the Republic was ultimately displaced by an expansive vision of the state as interface of the social and guarantor of social peace. In this way, the crisis of liberal professionalism illustrates the compromise that grounded the durability of the "bourgeois Republic."... |
