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Civis and Citoyen*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Claude Nicolet
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Extract

GREEK AND ROMAN ANTIQUITY IS SO EVIDENTLY PRESENT IN French revolutionary and imperial imagery that we are inclined to assign to it the role of a conscious model for a great number of ideas and even of institutions. The Frenchmen of the Republic and of the ‘Grande Nation’ would be, in short, resurrected Greeks and Romans, who would awaken the ‘dead world’ as Saint-Just called Rome. Indeed this received view is not wholly false or arbitrary. Perusal of the political literature – speeches, pamphlets, theoretical works – reveals that the allusions or references to Antiquity were something more than a fashion: from the ideological or cultural point of view, whether it is to identify with or get away from it, we think insistently and continuously of Sparta, Athens and Rome.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1986 , pp. 177 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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Footnotes

*

This is an abridgment of the article ‘Citoyenneté fraçaise et citoyenneté romaine: Essai de mise en perspective’, which was published in Da Roma a la Terza Roma, Documenti e Studie II, April 1982, Edizione Scientifiche Italiane, 1985, pp. 145–73.

References

1 de Saint‐Just, A., ‘Rapport sur Danton’, Archives Parlementaires, LXXXVII, p.638, 11 Germinal year IIGoogle Scholar.

2 See the full bibliography in Raskolnikoff, M., ‘L’adoration des romains sous la revolution francise et la réaction de Volney et des idéologues’, Roma, Constantinopoli, Mosca (Da Roma alla Terza Roma), Studie I, Naples, 1983, pp. 199–213 Google Scholar.

3 The basic work is still Vanel, M., Evolution historique de la notion de français d’origine du XVIe sicle au Code Civil, Paris, 1945 Google Scholar.

4 Declaration of 26 August 1789, art. 6; Constitution of 3 September 1791, ch. II, art. 2; ch. III, sect. 2, art. 2.

5 Speech by Clootz in the Convention, 5 February 1793 (Moniteur, XV, pp. 368–9); 24 April 1793, op. cit. XVI, pp. 251–55. On Clootz, whose thought is more original and coherent than is usually believed, see Soboul, A., ‘Anarcharsis Clootz, l’orateur du genre humain’, Annales historiques de la révolution française, 1980, pp. 29–56 Google Scholar.

6 See my observations in L’idée réppublicaine en France, pp. 400 ff.

7 Renan, E., Nouvelle lettre à M. Strauss, Paris 1871 Google Scholar.

8 The formal rejection of any distinction of birth, and of any religious allegiance external to the consensus implicit in French citizenship, is stated in part 6 of Ch. II of the Constitution of 1791, repeated in part 12 of Ch. II of the Constitution of the year III.

9 Constant, B., De la liberté chez les modernes, Ecrits Politiques, ed. M. Gauchet, Paris 1980, pp. 494–5Google Scholar.

10 de Chateaubriand, R., Mémoires d’Outre‐Tombe, part IV, bk. II, 6 ed. Levaillant, vol. IV, p. 93 Google Scholar.

11 Contrat Social, I., 6: ‘Those who are associated in it take collectively the name of people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing in the sovereign power, and subjects as being under the laws of the State’.

12 Constitution of 1791, ch. 2, art. 2.

13 Constitution of 1793, art. 4, art. 5.

14 Constitution of the year III, Ch. II, art. 8, art. 9, art. 10, art. 11, art. 12.

15 See for instance Duguit, L., Traité de Droit Constitutionnel, II., 3. ed., Paris 1928, pp. 638 ff., 712, 768 Google Scholar.

16 The question had already been raised in 1793 during the constitutional debates (report of Lanjuinais, Archives Parlementaires, LXIII, p. 566). For the reasoning behind Daunou’s draft in 1795 see Moniteur, XXV, p. 224 (Creuzd Latouche) and above all pp. 243–8.

17 The luminous pages of Portalis in the Discours Préliminaire (Fenet, Recueil, I., pp. 472–4) are still to a great extent at the base of French judicial practice. For the dominant influences, far more modern than is usually believed, i.e. deriving from jurists of the Ancien Regime and Natural Law, see the summing up by A.‐J. Arnaud, Les Origines doctrinales du Code Civil français, Paris, 1969. Arnaud shows that the influence of antiquity, if it exists, reflects stoic philosophy more than Roman positive law, and insists on the borrowings from Pothier, Domat and Pufendorf, etc.

18 Moniteur, XVI, p. 251.

19 Op. cit., Xxv, p. 224.

20 Op. cit., XVI, p. 358.

21 Op cit., 11, p. 102.

22 Sherwin‐White, A.N., The Roman Citizenship, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1973 Google Scholar, remains the most convenient synthesis, together with the long report of Seston, W., ‘La citoyenneté romaine’, XIIIe Congrs International des Sciences Historiques, Moscow, 16–23 10 1970 Google Scholar, I. 3, pp. 31–52. See also the comments on the Table of Banasa (cf. W. Seston, ‘Un dossier de la chancellerie romaine: la Tabular Banasitana, Etude de diplomatique’, Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1971, pp. 468–90, and in particular the re‐examination of the papyrus of Giessen).

23 See above all W. Seston, ’La lex Julia de 90 av. J.‐C. et l’intégration des Italiens dans la citoyenneté romaine’, Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1978, pp. 529–42.

24 One may note for instance the fact that in the second century AD the legal textbooks define citizenship only in relation to the freedmen — indeed to that inferior category of freedmen, the dediticii, who are not those referred to in the constitutio antoniniania (Gaius, I., pp. 12–35). It was a social status, as we shall see.

25 See Hignett, C., A History of the Athenian Constitution to the End of the Fifth Century BC, Oxford, 1962 Google Scholar, and Osborne, M.J., Naturalisation in Athens, Rome, 1981 Google Scholar.

26 See Nicolet, C., Le métier de citoyen, pp. 508–9Google Scholar.

27 This concept excludes any notion of political ‘representation’. No one can exercise ‘will’ on behalf of the Roman people. This realist and empirical conception is quite unlike the sophisticated idea of ‘nation’ among the French constituants.

28 Cicero, Pro Balbo, 28–30; Pro Caec. 100.

29 Cicero, De Republica, I. 49; De Officiis, III, 21–33. I have tried to explain the application to Rome of the Grcek doctrine of ‘geometric equality’ in Le métier de citoyen, pp. 77–85. See also my ‘L’idéologie du systeme centuriate et l’influence de la philosophie politique grecque’ in La filosofia greca e il diritto romano, (Accademia dei Lincei, Quaderni No 221, Rome, 1976, pp. 111–37).

30 Tacitus, Annals, III, 27.

31 Cf. n. 29 above.

32 It is not an accident that Rousseau devotes so many pages to the analysis of Servius’s constitution. This ‘democrat’ in any case approved of the constitution of Geneva, which distinguished between ‘habitants’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘citoyens’. See Confrat Social, IV, 4.

33 The men of the eighteenth century had not waited for Marx to point to slavery as a fundamental and deplorable trait of classical societies. See Volney, , Lesons d’histoire, ed. Gaulmier, Paris, 1980, p. 141 Google Scholar; and Raskolnikoff, M., ‘Volney et les idéologues: le refus de Rome’, Revue historique, 267 (1982) pp. 357–73Google Scholar.

34 I have for a long time dwelt on this point, borrowing terms from sociologists (segmentary) or from ethnologists (holist); see my ‘Les classes dirigeantes romaines sous la Republique’, Annales ESC, 1977, pp. 726–55; Les structures de l’Italie romaine, 2nd ed. Paris, 1979, pp. 185–235, and finally the collective work edited by me, Des ordres à Rome, Presses de la Sorbonne, Paris, 1984.

35 See in the fwst place Oliver, J.H., ‘The Ruling Power. A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ through the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 43, Philadelphia, 1953, pp. 900 and 919 Google Scholar.

36 This institutional and semantic evolution was not limited to the term civis romanus; it applies also to Latinus, and to dediticius (Gaius, I. 12). We have learnt recently that there existed even an ‘italic right’ which could be conferred on individuals and not only collectivities. See Triantaphyllopoulos, J., ‘Jus italicurn personnel’, Iura, 14, 1963, p. 108 Google Scholar.

37 See Nicolet, C., ‘Augustus, government and the possessing classes’, in Caesar Augustus, Syme Colloquium, Oxford, 1984 Google Scholar.

38 G. Gardascia, ‘L’apparition dans de droit des classes d’honestiores et d’humiliores’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 26 (1950), pp. 305–37; 461–85; also his ’La distinction entre honestiores et humiliores et le droit matrimonial’, Studi Albertario, II, Milan, 1953; P. Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire, Oxford, 1970.

39 Discours Préliminaires, Fenet, Recueil, I., p. 480.

40 The formula was noted by Sájka‐Zieliska, K., ‘Le droit romain et l’idée de codification du droit privé au sicle des Lumires’, Le Droit romain et sa réception en Europe, Warsaw, 1978, p. 181–94Google Scholar.