THE NINETEENTH CENTURY saw a high point in the dialectical conflict between civilization and barbarity that began with the eighteenth-century “Enlightened” philosophers. This opposition was decidedly not neutral but moral and exerted a powerful influence on the nineteenth-century view of the recent and more distant past. This represented a worldview. The grand aspiration of European nations was to disown barbarity and create a civilized society. This required certain ideals of unity and virtuous customs, none of which could be instituted without a set of laws wisely and rigorously administered by a strong, centralized state. In such an environment, historians looked back to Antiquity, particularly the Roman world, where, through study of laws, they discovered a society “arranged” by a “state” that enforced the law.

Traditional legal history has concerned itself with the correct application of laws and has attempted to discover the “legal state” of the Early Middle Ages, an institution like the one (they believed) existed before the ruin of the Western Roman world, which could be found in the modern world. I intend to look at the approach of a number of nineteenth-century French historians through one exemplary topic. A core aspect of any legal question concerns ways of resolving conflicts and through this prism I want to focus not on ordeals, judgements, and the like, but revenge or faida.

The “Natural State” of the Early Middle Ages

With this intellectual framework, it is no surprise that French nineteenth-century historiography had already made a value judgement about the medieval judicial system. The “Roman State,” diluted in the last centuries of the Empire, would, according to certain historians, degenerate into a “natural state” in the West. This is an interpretative paradigm, a set of ideas organized through a logic or, if one prefers, a pre-existing framework of references, to analyze the events of the past. So, the theory by which this particular past is interpreted also responds to the conditions imposed by its historical setting.

With regard to the theme of revenge, the context is a typical nineteenth-century debate, loaded with nationalism, that confronted German historians attempting to highlight the sense of justice—not barbarity—of the ancient Germans, and French historians who sought to demonstrate the strong Romanization the Gallo-Roman population had already undergone before the Germanic invasions, compared with the primitive customs the latter introduced into Gaul.