Recent
revisionist history has questioned the degree of social change attributable
to the French Revolution. In Balancing the Scales of Justice,
Anthony Crubaugh tests this claim by examining the effects of revolutionary
changes in local justice on the inhabitants of one region in rural
France.
Crubaugh illuminates two poorly understood institutions in eighteenth-century
France: seigneurial justice and the revolutionary justice of the
peace. He finds that justice was typically slow and expensive in
the lords' courts, thus making it difficult for rural inhabitants
to benefit from official channels of justice. By contrast, revolutionary
reforms gave people the opportunity to submit quarrels to trusted
and elected justices of the peace who adjudicated disputes quickly
and inexpensively.
By juxtaposing seigneurial justice in the ancien régime
with the institution of the justice of the peace after 1789, Crubaugh
highlights how revolutionary changes in the system of dispute resolution
profoundly affected members of rural French society and their relations
with the French state. Over time rural dwellers came to accept the
primacy of the state in resolving disputes, and the state thereby
partially achieved its long-standing goal of penetrating rural areas.
