Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/125

Rh which bordered on stupidity. The famous law of the 22nd Prairial, with which he has been so often reproached and which gave so rapid a pace to the revolutionary courts, is the masterpiece of his type of mind; the whole of the Old Régime is found in it, expressed in clear-cut formulas.

One of the fundamental ideas of the Old Régime had been the employment of the penal procedure to ruin any power which was an obstacle to the monarchy. It seems that in all primitive societies the penal law, at its inception, was a protection granted to the chief and to a few privileged persons whom he honoured with special favour; it is only much later that the legal power serves to safeguard, indiscriminately, the persons and goods of all the inhabitants of a country. The Middle Ages being a return to the customs of very ancient times, it was natural that they should reproduce exceedingly archaic ideas about justice, and that the courts of justice should come to be considered as instruments of royal greatness. An historical accident happened to favour the extraordinary development of this theory of criminal administration. The Inquisition furnished a model for courts which, set in motion on very slight pretexts, prosecuted people who embarrassed authority, with great persistence, and made it impossible for them to harm the latter. The monarchy borrowed from the Inquisition many of its procedures, and nearly always followed the same principles.

The king constantly demanded of his courts of justice that they should work for the enlargement of his territories; it seems strange to us nowadays that Louis XIV. should have had annexations proclaimed by commissions of magistrates; but he was following the old tradition; many of his predecessors had used Parliament to confiscate feudal manors for very arbitrary motives. Justice, which seems to us nowadays created to secure the prosperity of production, and to permit its free and constantly