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Imported Books, Imported Ideas: Reading European Jurisprudence in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Quebec

Eric H. Reiter



In the early 1860s, during his tenure as one of the commissioners working to codify Quebec private law, Augustin-Norbert Morin compiled a lengthy bibliography of foreign works on law and jurisprudence, filled with obscure German titles from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 The list contains several hundred alphabetically organized entries over 284 pages and includes a wide variety of authors and periodicals, from prominent names like Savigny, Hugo, Thibaut, Puchta, and Zachariae, to more obscure figures like Johann Brunquel and Georg Friedrich Schutzenberger. Such erudition would be an impressive sign of extremely wide reading (not to mention access to a formidable library), except that Morin compiled the entire list from the bibliographies of two general works on jurisprudence: Jules Beving's 1846 French translation of Ferdinand Mackeldey's manual of Roman law, and William Belime's 1856 work on the philosophy of law.2 Moreover, though the majority of titles listed are in German, Morin himself apparently could not read the language and so relied on his French sources both to translate the works' titles and to situate them in particular legal schools.3 1
      A decade earlier, Maximilien Bibaud, the polyglot gadfly of the Mont-real legal community, announced in the pages of the newspaper Mélanges réligieux the program of instruction of his newly founded law school, the first of its kind in Quebec.4 Bibaud confidently advertised that his program would be modeled on those of the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, praising their practice of beginning students with general theoretical orientation before introducing specialized and practical subjects. He went on to describe the Collegia practica at Bonn, in which procedure was taught, and the Repetitoria at Leipzig, discussion sections for small groups. As with Morin, however, Bibaud's knowledge of the German legal world was secondhand. His information on German universities came not from personal experience, nor even from the works of German writers on the subject, but from an article by Édouard Laboulaye in the Revue de législation et de jurisprudence of 1845, a Paris periodical that was important in disseminating knowledge of German developments to francophone (and even anglophone) jurists.5 Again like Morin, Bibaud did not himself read German.6 2
      My point is not to cast doubt on Morin and Bibaud's learning or intentions. Rather, their armchair tours of the German legal world tell us a great deal about how exotic European jurisprudence traveled in the nineteenth century and about the roles such sources played in shaping lawyers' intellectual world views. In particular, they underscore that, though ideas travel easily, they are modified and shaped by the cultural assumptions and expectations of those who encounter them and pass them along. Savigny, for example, who will be a recurring example in this article, occasionally came to Quebec readers directly, but more often as reported by French periodicals. The result was that the Savigny of Quebec lawyers was not the same as Savigny in France or Scotland or Germany, and the same is true of Pothier, Thibaut, and other such iconic figures. This multilevel process of jurisprudential acculturation—in which reception depends on the internalization and translation of legal ideas into the particular local idiom—is an important though often obscure aspect of the formation of legal identity. 3
      Quebec is an interesting case study in this regard, since the reception of the work of foreign jurists there illustrates especially clearly the tensions between ideas and audiences. The legal community in Quebec had a dual nature: both expansive and narrow, open and closed, cosmopolitan and parochial. On the one hand, elite Quebec lawyers—and particularly those involved in the private law codification of the 1860s—were keen observers of the world of European jurisprudence and were aware of the latest fashions in historical jurisprudence and codification theory.7 They subscribed to innovative French periodicals, read the latest imported books on legal philosophy and history, and provided booksellers with an important market for older classic works of jurisprudence from the eighteenth century and earlier. On the other hand, and at the same time, the legal community of Montreal and Quebec City was small, inward-looking, and oriented toward practice. Both sides were important, however, and in the end, even though the interest in contemporary European developments remained insulated from the 1866 Civil Code of Lower Canada, European jurisprudence did help Quebec jurists frame questions, articulate critiques, and clarify their own national program of legal reform. 4
      My goal in this article is to use the case of Quebec in the years before codification to explore this tension between outward-looking curiosity and inward-looking conservatism. To do this—to develop a picture of what foreign jurisprudence actually meant to nineteenth-century readers—we must move beyond the strictly doctrinal realm of ideas and instead examine the material side of legal culture: the books and periodicals that Quebec lawyers read and that provided them with the ideas that informed their debates and controversies. Books give ideas a physical form that grounds them in specific times and places; we get a clearer, more nuanced picture of legal scholarship when we identify exactly which intellectual channels brought particular ideas to particular scholars. The nexus between people and books puts questions of the transmission and reception of legal ideas into the foreground, which allows the historian to bridge the often nebulous connections between people and ideas. This in turn helps elucidate the crucial interplay in any legal system between dependence on foreign models and distinctive homegrown innovations. 5
      This article has four parts. Part I is a case study of legal book culture in Quebec during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, using as evidence surviving records of book collections. One purpose of this case study is to understand more clearly how legal ideas traveled, in particular innovative and current legal theory such as German jurisprudence. More important, this approach suggests how the intellectual constitution of a particular legal culture—here Quebec—influences both which ideas find an audience and how that audience will interpret those ideas. Part II examines the substance of what readers in mid-nineteenth-century Quebec were reading and, in particular, how German jurisprudence was recharacterized and reinterpreted in the (mostly French) books and periodicals to which Quebec readers had access. Part III considers the role that this reinterpreted European jurisprudence played in Quebec legal reform, as both supporters and opponents of codification constructed and used their own versions of European ideas to justify their positions. Finally, Part IV examines the nationalistic nature of early nineteenth-century jurisprudence and legal reform movements, in order to understand the role that European ideas circulating in Quebec played in the Civil Code of Lower Canada. 6
   

I. Legal Book Culture in Quebec before Codification

 
Though like any Western legal system the practice of law in nineteenth-century Quebec retained some aspects of oral culture, but books played a central and defining role in shaping the legal worldview of Quebec lawyers. All aspects of the law displayed a fundamental dependence on the written word as the vehicle through which ideas were transmitted.8 This was obviously true of the written aspects of the law (such as treatises and written judgments), but even oral exchanges (such as pleadings, lectures, and what we know of private conversations) were shaped fundamentally and irrevocably by the mindset engendered by familiarity with legal writing.9 Quebec lawyers moved in a world of books and talk about books, a situation reinforced by Quebec's continuing connection to old French law, which had to be laboriously mined from a vast range of books. In other words, in a culture like nineteenth-century Quebec, when the written word is not in the foreground, it is always in the background. 7
      For the historian, this paradigm places great importance on the material aspects of written culture. It is not enough simply to assert that ideas were in the air: lawyers' reliance on written texts means that ideas were being transmitted through the mediation of physical books read by identifiable individuals. The history of books, a relatively new field, provides a methodology for the study of this material side of intellectual history, and there is a growing body of literature on printing, publishing, and reading in Quebec. Though little has been done on legal book culture in nineteenth-century Quebec (despite Sylvio Normand's 1993 call for further research), and most of the existing literature concentrates on quantitative studies, there is rich evidence on book ownership, library use, and imports of foreign legal materials that awaits qualitative and contextual analysis.10 8
      In this part, I survey the material side of Quebec lawyers' intellectual world to get a sense of how widely they read and thus what range of legal ideas they were drawing on. It is worth expressing a caveat: the lawyers represented here comprised a relatively small group of well-connected, affluent individuals who had both the leisure and the means to read widely. Furthermore, my research is skewed toward elites because records of their book collections are more likely to have survived, since their collections were substantial enough to have been auctioned off after their death. Still, as I argue more fully below, these lawyers exercised influence on Quebec legal culture that was out of proportion to their numbers. If cautiously used, the evidence of their books and reading provides a useful case study in the effects of foreign jurisprudence on Quebec law. 9
   

A. Legal Publishing in Quebec

 
Historians have commented on the paucity of legal literature published in early nineteenth-century Quebec. Codification changed this somewhat by promoting the production of domestic commentaries on the code, but before Pierre-Basile Mignault's Le droit civil canadien at the end of the nineteenth century, the number of treatises by Quebec authors was astonishingly small.11 Aside from the prolific Maximilien Bibaud, discussed below, the pre-codification era produced little more than a few small pamphlets on specific areas of the law12 and a lively culture of newspaper commentary.13 The longer works that were produced tended to be handbooks on the state of the law for practitioners or students, with little engagement with deeper issues of legal history or theory, such as N. B. Doucet's Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada of 1841, written "with the view of assisting Law Students, in directing them in the course of their studies."14 Even after codification, large-scale works on Quebec law were more often reference works like Lorimier and Vilbon's La Bibliothèque du Code civil—written under the influence of the French exegetical school—than analyses or interpretations of jurisprudence or legal history.15 10
      The more wide-ranging commentary—such as there was—tended to be in lecture form. Learned societies, libraries, and academic institutions frequently invited prominent advocates to address them on topics of historical and political interest, and law reform was one such subject.16 The influence of these talks extended beyond the immediate circle of auditors, since they were frequently published as pamphlets or journal articles and circulated among the intellectual community. One example is Chief Justice Jonathan Sewell's lecture on French legal history, presented to the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in 1824, in which he called for public instruction in law based on scientific principles.17 Sewell's lecture gained renewed exposure when it was republished more than twenty years later in the Montreal journal Revue de législation et de jurisprudence.18 Another example is Frederick Torrance's inaugural lecture, upon assuming his chair at the McGill Faculty of Law, in which he surveyed the history of Roman law.19 Given the relatively small community of lawyers in Quebec—divided further into linguistic groups—such special-interest subjects were doubtless more easily covered in the form of lectures or pamphlets than in more large-scale publication projects that would have been less economically viable. 11
      The lack of local periodicals was certainly an important factor limiting commentary. Before codification authors had few outlets where they could publish interpretive works outside of newspapers like the Journal de Québec and La Minerve, and these were limited in the space they could devote to such commentary. The appearance of the Montreal Revue de législation et de jurisprudence in 1845 provided lawyers with a welcome outlet for their thoughts, and from the start the journal published wide-ranging commentary on the state of the law in Quebec and proposals for its reform.20 The journal lasted only three years, however, and already in its second year more emphasis was being put on reports of decided cases than on analysis. The demise of the Revue de législation left a gap that was not filled until the founding of the Revue légale in 1869.21 12
   

B. Imports and Exotica

 
Despite the scarcity of domestic legal literature in the pre-codification period, the Quebec legal community was not starved for intellectual sustenance: ideas can easily cross jurisdictional boundaries, and the influence of imports must be taken into account in reconstructing the mental world of Quebec lawyers. If considered only from the point of view of local writers Quebec legal culture was undoubtedly parochial and limited. Elite lawyers, however, eagerly purchased books and periodicals from elsewhere, particularly from France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and this imported literature opened up wider vistas for intellectually inclined Quebec lawyers and connected them with the latest legal developments, controversies, and approaches from Europe. In what follows, I survey this little-studied aspect of Quebec legal history in an effort to reconstruct some of the paths through which jurisprudential exotica entered mainstream legal discourse.22 13
      Quebec lawyers could easily add foreign exotica to their libraries, though this cachet did not come cheap. A.-N. Morin, for example, spent a significant part of his income on his library, even flirting with financial ruin for a time, and a letter among his papers shows him instructing his Paris bookseller in how the books should be shipped to avoid excessive duties.23 Still, the regularity with which foreign books show up in the libraries of lawyers and notaries is evidence that the difficulties were not insurmountable and that the rewards of access to such material outweighed the expense and trouble of procuring it. 14
      Book auctions thrived in early nineteenth-century Quebec, and lawyers, being relatively affluent and part of a strongly textualized profession, regularly provided the books put up for sale and purchased those offered.24 Interested buyers could pick up copies of anything from sixteenth-century editions of the works of medieval glossators to the latest commentaries on the Code Napoléon coming out of France—some of the sales, in fact, featured far richer collections than the law libraries open to lawyers in Montreal and Quebec City. Many elite lawyers of the codification generation built up impressive collections from the sales of earlier generations' libraries. The collections of F. W. Torrance, Robert Mackay, and R. J. Wicksteed, for example, feature numerous rare and unusual items from the auctions of the collections of James Stuart, Alexander Buchanan, and others.25 The offerings sometimes seem to have outstripped the needs of buyers, however, and many items remained unsold. The huge library of Chief Justice James Stuart, for example, was offered on three different occasions,26 while the collection of Chief Justice Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine was offered twice.27 Copies of the catalogues of some sales annotated with prices indicate that many items regularly remained unsold.28 15
      Booksellers also offered periodic catalogues of law books, which they sold either in their shops, by subscription, or at auction. The booksellers acted as middlemen and importers, often gathering interesting-looking books in Europe and bringing them across the Atlantic to find buyers. The advent of the Code Napoléon in 1804, in fact, provided Quebec lawyers with a bibliographic bonanza of old French law books, as French booksellers diverted the newly obsolete commentaries on the ancien droit toward the Quebec market where they were still relevant.29 One of the earliest such catalogues appeared in 1801 (even predating the French code), promoting an auction in Quebec City of a selection of books from Paris. It allowed Quebec lawyers to benefit from the disorder that saw many French lawyers separated from both their books and their heads. The title page advertises (with a rather suspicious use of the passive voice): "The collection of these books was made at Paris during the last two years: they are generally in very good condition and the best editions; in part drawn from private libraries, when they were not found at booksellers'. They can be seen the day before the sale."30 The sale, which included a number of Roman law works as well as an extensive selection of works of the ancien droit, seems to have been a success.31 This speculative catalogue thus served to introduce a great many rare titles into circulation in Quebec, such as a ten-volume edition of Cujas's Opera omnia (Paris, 1658), which sold for twelve pounds, and a five volume set of the works of Charles Du Moulin (Paris, 1681), which sold for £7 16s.32 Other catalogues included less sumptuous but perhaps more useful offerings, mixing the occasional exotic title with extensive lists of working law books like Pothier's works. J. B. Rolland of Montreal, for example, specialized in imports from France and Belgium. In 1855 he called particular attention to the second edition (Brussels, 1850) of the Strasbourg jurists Aubry and Rau's Cours de droit civil français, a work particularly important in the transmission of German legal ideas to the non-German-speaking world.33 16
      Lawyers were clearly an important and coveted market, and booksellers sought to tap into it where possible. Lawyers also took the initiative themselves, corresponding with booksellers to order the specific titles they needed. F. W. Torrance, for example, was in regular correspondence with the Boston firm Little, Brown & Co., making numerous orders for American works on commercial law.34 A.-N. Morin dealt regularly with the Paris (formerly Montreal) bookseller Hector Bossange, maintaining his book purchases (of both law books and works on his hobby, agriculture) even in the face of personal financial difficulties.35 Morin's library, as discussed below, was filled with up-to-date Parisian works that reveal his keen interest in the European publishing scene. 17
      Periodicals, however, were the most important source of new ideas, as they are today. Ideas could be disseminated more rapidly in scholarly journals than through books, novel and even odd ideas could be tested in print without the relative permanence of book publication, intellectual developments could be followed relatively inexpensively, and journals provided more of a sense of the debate and varied perspectives surrounding key issues. As with books, imported periodicals more than made up for the lack of domestic journals, and the evidence from both institutional and private libraries shows that certain key titles were indispensable in a well-stocked legal library. Little work has been done on the history of the circulation of these periodicals in Quebec, but it is clear that they were widely available in elite legal circles, and informal lending among colleagues doubtless made the ideas in them travel more widely still. 18
      Three French periodicals in particular made up the crucial conduit through which European—and especially German—jurisprudence entered Quebec: Thémis: ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte, the Revue de droit français et étranger, and the Revue de législation et de jurisprudence.36 The earliest of the three is Thémis, which began publishing in Paris in 1819 and lasted only ten volumes, ending in 1830 after the death of its founder and guiding spirit, Athanase Jourdan. Jourdan explicitly modeled Thémis on Savigny's Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft [Journal for Historical Legal Science], which had begun publishing in 1815. He was joined on the editorial board by Leopold August Warnkönig, a German admirer of Savigny's ideas, then professor in Liège. Jourdan saw it as the journal's mission to introduce French lawyers to the exciting developments from across the Rhine: "In 1819 no work published in Germany since Heineccius was known in Paris. In 1826 not a Code, not a book appears but that one month later Thémis has it, and I end this article with a translation of a chapter whose original has not yet appeared in Berlin."37 Jourdan also managed to get contributions from leading German lights themselves, such as Gustav Hugo and Savigny, as well as advance printing of translations of new German works by Savigny and others.38 19
      There was an essential tension in the journal's plan, however, which reflected its liminal role between French and German jurisprudence. In the first issue, Jourdan set out the journal's goals: "To make known the current state of legal science, to help the progress of this science, and to contribute to the perfection of legislation, such is the goal that the publishers of this new journal propose."39 Such a juxtaposition of scientific jurisprudence and faith in legislation would have been anathema to Savigny and his disciples, but to their French admirers it opened a via media that attempted to synthesize the scientific current of German jurisprudence and the "perfection of legislation" deriving from French jurists' admiration for their own code. 20
      After a brief interruption, the tradition of Thémis was continued by the Revue de droit français et étranger, popularly known as the Revue Fœlix after its founder, J. J. G. Fœlix, which began publishing in 1834. Its emphasis was on comparative legislation and private international law, again with particular emphasis on Germany, but ranging much more widely.40 Its contributors included many of the key figures of contemporary Germanophilic jurisprudence, such as Karl-Josef-Anton Mittermaier, Henri Klimrath, Charles Aubry, and Charles Rau on the philosophical side, and Warn-könig and Jules Bergson on the historical side. 21
      A year later the Revue Fœlix was joined by perhaps the most influential of the three, the Revue de législation et de jurisprudence, popularly known as the Revue Wolowski after its Polish-born founder, Louis Wolowski. While Thémis and the Revue Fœlix tended to present their readers with reports of German developments, the emphasis in the Revue Wolowski was the application of new developments in scientific jurisprudence to French law. As such, the journal helped in the domestication of the new jurisprudence of Savigny, Thibaut, Puchta, and others, turning it from a foreign school of jurisprudence into a methodology acceptable to receptive French jurists. 22
      These three journals—along with their successor, the Revue critique de la jurisprudence en matière civile, administrative, commerciale et criminelle41—presented francophone readers with a predigested, as it were, version of German jurisprudence, adapted to the particular needs of the French legal community. Moreover, these journals turn up regularly in the records of the book collections of prominent Quebec lawyers. Alexander Buchanan and F. W. Torrance each had a complete run of Thémis, and Thomas McCord owned five unbound volumes. The Revue Fœlix is rarer, but A.-N. Morin owned ten volumes. The Revue Wolowski was most widely available. Buchanan, George-Etienne Cartier, and La Fontaine each had extensive runs, Dominique Mondelet had ten volumes, and Charles Dewey Day owned two volumes. Finally, both Cartier and Torrance held long runs of the Revue critique, while Day owned ten volumes and McCord three. In addition to these private collections, the library of the Bar of Lower Canada held fifteen volumes of the Revue Fœlix, a complete run (1835–53) of the Revue Wolowski, and an ongoing subscription to the Revue critique, thus making all these journals available to Montreal-area members.42 23
      Knowledge of these periodicals seems to have filtered through the Quebec legal community in various ways, perhaps a combination of word-of-mouth and bookseller notices. A draft letter among the papers of A.-N. Morin provides a glimpse of how one Quebec lawyer gained information about them.43 Written perhaps to Bossange in Paris, Morin inquires about subscribing to a "Revue de Législation" (presumably the Revue critique, since he never owned the Revue Wolowski), noting that "If it is easy to get, I would like also to have what preceded it (unbound), only as far as a new series that is supposed to have started very recently." He continues with a question about the Revue Fœlix: "Also, I want to know if one can still find at Durand's at reduced price the collection of the 'Revue de Droit français et étranger,' and if the work is still being published." Morin's uncertainty about the state of publication of these journals is not surprising, given the ephemeral existence of many periodicals, but he was clearly convinced enough of their importance to expend some energy in making inquiries. 24
   

C. Quebec Lawyers and Their Books

 
Not surprisingly, most collections of law books—even most of the larger collections for which auction catalogues or other inventories survive—contained mainly practice-oriented commentaries and treatises on the law in force in Quebec. Most Quebec lawyers were strictly practitioners bent on earning a living, and Savigny's musings about the organic development of the law across the centuries would have been a useless curiosity, if not utterly incomprehensible to them.44 Alongside these workaday practitioners, however, we find a significant minority of mostly elite lawyers with extensive collections that included many foreign and theoretical works. Moreover, though they were a minority, they were influential: many were high-profile and important lawyers like Cartier, Morin, Day, Bibaud, and McCord who were in a position to influence others and even to steer the course of private law reform in Quebec. Of course, the evidence from surviving books and library catalogues can only ever be impressionistic— the mere presence of a book in a library does not mean that it was read. The sum total of these impressions, however, helps trace the outlines of the mentalité of Quebec lawyers in the pre-codification era. In what follows, we move from considering what was generally available to analyzing what particular individuals had access to: in other words, to make the material connections between individuals and ideas that the history of books allows. 25
      Private libraries are an obvious place to start, since it is reasonably certain that most of the books in them were personally chosen (if not necessarily actually read) by the owners. Moreover, in the case of lawyers or judges their private books were doubtless more frequently consulted, both since they were near at hand and since the paucity of publicly accessible collections made library research difficult. Some private libraries were truly extraordinary and point more to the aesthetic sensibilities of the collector than to the intellectual curiosity of the scholar. The library of Chief Justice James Stuart, for example, was easily the largest private legal library in Quebec, more than twice the size of its nearest rival, that of Augustin-Norbert Morin. It contained 2538 titles, more even than the library of the Legislative Assembly for Lower Canada, and was particularly rich in French ancien droit and in Roman law.45 26
      In the stratosphere of giant collections, the most interesting is that of Alexander Buchanan, judge, founder of the Montreal Advocates' Library, and chair of the 1842 commission to revise the acts and ordinances of Lower Canada.46 Like virtually all Quebec lawyers' collections of the time, Buchanan's library contained a mix of English and French law, covering the standard works of practice like Domat, Pothier, and Chitty, as well as the essential texts of Roman law.47 A closer look, however, reveals certain extraordinary differences between Buchanan's collection and those of most of his contemporaries.48 First, he collected important works of theoretical and historical jurisprudence alongside practically oriented material. Second, he subscribed to the crucial French periodicals through which German ideas entered wider circulation. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, Buchanan seems to have been one of the few Quebec lawyers of the period who could actually read German. His library was filled with the latest works of German scholarship on Roman law, including all of Savigny's major works in the original (among them the only copy of his key work Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft that I have located in any language in Quebec), several of Thibaut's later works, and books by Hugo, Mackeldey, and a host of less well-known authors. He had also collected some of the key German legal periodicals, all extremely rare in Canada, such as Savigny's Zeitschrift (fifteen volumes), the Archiv für die civilistische Praxis (thirty-two volumes), and the Rheinisches Museum (seven volumes). What became of these books is unknown; there certainly would not have been many buyers whose linguistic skills would have allowed them to benefit from them.49 27
      Huge collections like Stuart's and Buchanan's were exceptional, of course, even among elite members of the Quebec legal establishment. More typical of elite lawyers were collections of a hundred or fewer books, weighted toward the needs of the practitioner. Maximilien Bibaud, for example, though hardly an ordinary practitioner, possessed only a modest collection of law books, and his library was probably typical, even among lawyers with an intellectual bent.50 Aside from materials relating to Quebec codification (including an autographed copy of the Civil Code of Lower Canada presented to Bibaud by Cartier), his collection comprised only about a dozen legal texts, surprising for a jurist (admittedly an impecunious one) who flaunted erudition to the extent Bibaud did. His library also tended toward older works, such as Heineccius and Vattel, as befitting a jurisprudential conservative like Bibaud. 28
      Finally, even those lawyers whose means limited them to only the most modest library could be exposed to innovative doctrine by borrowing books, either informally or through the various institutional libraries that collected legal works. Well-connected lawyers could borrow books from the library of the Torrance-Morris law firm, which regularly lent out books and kept a record of their goings and comings.51 One of the first recorded loans was a copy of Savigny's treatise on possession, borrowed by Judge Robert Mackay on 13 March 1860. The chief resource for Montreal lawyers, however, was the Advocates' Library and Library of the Bar of Lower Canada.52 This had a rich and up-to-date collection: by 1871, with more than 8000 volumes, it was the largest library in Montreal.53 Its catalogue shows an extensive collection of French, English, Canadian, and Roman law in French, English, and Latin, covering all of the standard works and many more exotic books as well. In recent European doctrine, the library had Savigny's Droit Romain, Klimrath's Histoire du droit français, Warnkönig's Corpus Juris Romani, Zachariae's Cours de droit civil français (as translated and revised by Aubry and Rau), and the surveys of legal history by Lerminier and Mackeldey, both of which were important in introducing German jurisprudence into the French-speaking legal world.54 In addition, we have already seen that the library subscribed to several of the key French journals of the period. Though access was limited to members and certain others,55 the Advocates' Library and Library of the Bar was in many ways a more publicly accessible reflection of the elite private collections many Quebec lawyers amassed. Though heavily weighted toward the demands of legal practice in the pre-codification era, it nevertheless provided valuable resources for study of the theory and history of the law. 29
      All of these libraries, whether private, public, or somewhere in between, required will on the part of the reader to seek out and read new and unusual books. The audience for this esoteric European doctrine was quite small, especially given the absence of an academic tradition in Quebec law: it never comprised more than a small elite at the top of the Quebec legal profession, those with the money, the leisure, and the inclination to read more widely than the demands of practice required. Among this elite, however, the ideas in these works did have an influence. F. W. Torrance, for example, cited his copies of Irving, Savigny, Lerminier, and the Paris Revue de législation in his inaugural lecture on the Roman law at McGill.56 We have already seen that A.-N. Morin combed through several of his books on legal history to compile his bibliography of works on German law. Maximilien Bibaud indicates a familiarity with the Revue Wolowski in his writings, which he probably used at the Advocates' Library, as well as citing his copy of Heineccius on numerous occasions. 30
      There was certainly an element of ostentation in all this, as elite lawyers sought to impress their peers through such public displays of learning, as Brian Young has pointed out.57 Still, it is clear that new European ideas did circulate in Quebec and that they were discussed, coming out in the more academic jurisprudential writings of elite lawyers. Given that some Quebec lawyers were reading exotic books, what exactly were they reading about? 31
   

II. The Reception of German Jurisprudence outside Germany

 
No Quebec jurist with a modicum of intellectual curiosity could have failed to notice the debates coming out of Germany in the post-Napoleonic era on codification, the proper role of legislation, and the nature of jurisprudence.58 The German codification dispute worked itself out in a series of pamphlets by two leaders of the German academic legal community: Friedrich Carl von Savigny, professor at the University of Berlin, and Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut, professor at the University of Heidelberg.59 Thibaut advocated a single German code to unify the various principalities, while Savigny rejected codification in favor of an evolutionary view stressing the organic development of the German common law, which he saw as the Roman law. Though the intensity of the conflict ebbed and flowed, it remained a current and pressing interest among German academic lawyers into the 1860s, involving many more scholars as it developed. Furthermore, given Savigny's unparalleled reputation in Europe and beyond (he more than any other early nineteenth-century jurist was a household name among lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in France),60 any dispute in which he was involved was bound to be noticed, especially one dealing with a matter of current concern such as codification. 32
      The German debates about the nature of law and the place of legislation in it were followed eagerly outside Germany. This was particularly true in France, whose own ongoing experiment with codified law allowed French jurists to be both curious and smug about the news coming across the Rhine, but Scottish civilians too followed the developments and wrote synthetic works that spread news about German jurisprudence still farther. As we have seen, though the original works of German scholars were barely in evidence in Quebec libraries due to the linguistic barrier, the ideas contained in them were readily available through the translations, summaries, and laudatory reports found in imported books and periodicals. 33
      In considering the problem of intellectual transmission and influence, the views of Thibaut and Savigny themselves are less important than how contemporaries outside Germany perceived and used them. Language barriers were not insurmountable, and a few well-placed interpreters could present the gist of the complex German developments to a non-German-literate audience.61 There was a price, however: ideas are transformed through the process of reception and retransmission, and the German codification debates were no exception. As tends to happen with all influential theoretical models, jurists recreated Savigny and the Historical School in their own likeness, taking what they needed while reinterpreting or simply ignoring the rest.62 The notion of the Volksgeist, the need for an organic connection between a people and their law, and the general historicist message of Savigny's jurisprudence proved most portable, while his more radical ideas on the impotence of legislators and codifiers were left behind. 34
      As the nuances of the actual debates fell away in transmission, contemporaries came to see the dispute as primarily concerning an attitude toward the past (particularly the Roman law) and its implications for the present and future. Warnkönig, for example, a professor of German origin but with close connections to France, offered a typical résumé of Savigny's jurisprudence: "The character of the method which is generally adopted there, is to be critical. While respecting the authority of the great jurisconsults, it believes one can go directly to the sources, study them thoroughly, and make use of everything that history, the study of languages, and philosophy can offer as aid. It sees the study of Roman law as the foundation of all jurisprudence."63 The crux of the dispute, according to Warnkönig, "was to know whether one might hope for more advantages from the establishment of positive legislation than from the perfecting of legal science."64 It was, in other words, a conflict over the proper place within law of history (and history of a particular, source-critical kind), and the ways in which this history could be used to illuminate the present. This comes out more clearly in a later article by Warnkönig in the Revue Fœlix:
The contrast between M. Savigny and his inner circle on one side, M. Thibaut and his friends on the other, centered on the method of exposition of law, and especially Roman law. The Historical School attached to the history of law itself a principal and often exclusive interest, whereas for its opponents, jurisprudence was a practical science, whose principles one studies in order to apply them. In their eyes, the history of law is for the jurisconsult just another means for grasping the true sense of principles; it is an auxiliary science that has no importance in itself.65
Warnkönig was an important translator of German ideas for French consumption: as a German academic (at Freiburg) his judgment was respected, and his linguistic abilities allowed him to occupy a key position mediating between these two legal worlds.
35
      Praise for Savigny (and to a lesser extent Thibaut) came from all over, however. In many ways the most enthusiastic supporters of the Historical School were Scots, and the most ardent of these was undoubtedly David Irving, Keeper of the Edinburgh Advocates' Library. Successive editions of his An Introduction to the Study of the Civil Law presented ever more laudatory surveys of German historicist scholarship, starting in the second edition in 1820. Before his third edition Irving had traveled to Göttingen and made numerous key contacts, including Gustav Hugo. Irving's praise of German scholarship was limited mainly by his aesthetic difficulties with the "very barbarous phraseology" in which it was expressed, though these perceived infelicities were not insurmountable: "Those who shudder at the grim aspect of the German language, may derive a competent knowledge of the German discoveries and speculations from his [Warnkönig's] French and Latin publications."66 36
      Other Scottish jurists too looked to German scholarship for inspiration, and their works proved to be important vehicles for introducing new developments to the anglophone world, especially to the United States. John Reddie, for example, wrote a book on historical jurisprudence in 1826 that praised German jurists,67 while Elias Cathcart published a partial translation of Savigny's history of Roman law in the Middle Ages.68 Finally, though Savigny and the Historical School most captivated the foreign imagination, the Philosophical School was represented as well, as in the Scottish jurist Nathaniel Lindley's An Introduction to the Study of Jurisprudence, based on Thibaut's work.69 37
      French observers of the developments in German jurisprudence were generally more circumspect than Irving and Reddie, even great admirers like Athanase Jourdan and Edouard Laboulaye. Though journals like Thémis, the Revue Fœlix, and the Revue Wolowski eagerly tracked German publications and educational advances and regularly published material about the latest German ideas, this material was rarely presented in the tone of unquestioning admiration that one finds in some of the Scottish writings. When the Historical School and its general conception of jurisprudence were under attack, its French supporters could be as effusively positive as Irving. In 1826, for example, Thémis published an anonymous reader's letter arguing that further study of Roman law had become useless: "The interpretation of Roman law is from now on struck with sterility: six centuries old, tired by the long childbirth of several thousands of volumes, this science finally perished of decrepitude and exhaustion around the middle of the eighteenth century," the reader wrote. The Romanists had literally had their last gasp in the century before:
HEINECCIUS received the last breath of the deceased, and in his Élemens and his Pandectes he drew up the inventory post-mortem. Pothier put into a methodical order the scattered bones of the Roman jurisconsults and of their modern interpreters, and on the Pandectes justiniennes, the veritable in-folio catacombs of Roman jurisprudence, one must carve for the future this inscription: Here lies the science of the interpretation of Roman law.70
Athanase Jourdan responded by drawing a clear line in the sand. Roman law, he argued, is "a science whose death is a blasphemy against the human spirit." One need look no further than the works of Hugo, Savigny, and the historian Niebuhr to find "the whole exterior and interior history of Roman law." Must we, he asks, "abandon all these conquests, strip ourselves of all these riches, in order to bear witness to our veneration for Heineccius and Pothier?"71
38
      In general, however, French historical jurists were more balanced, tempering their enthusiasm for the Historical School's exciting methodology and its promise of scientific rigor with a strong skepticism about the applicability of the German developments to the singular situation in France. The remarks of A. Vuy, in a review of Thibaut's 1838 essay Über die so-genannte historische und nicht-historische Rechtsschule [On the So-called Historical and Non-historical Schools of Jurisprudence], are typical:
Alongside admiration there is legitimate room for blame and critique: the same qualities of learned Germany produced certain almost inevitable excesses.... Finally, what is there to say about those blind admirers of the past who live as strangers in the midst of their contemporaries, of whom they understand neither their ideas nor their sympathies? Absorbed night and day in the contemplation of the dead letter, removed from the affairs and the intellectual movement of our time, they are devoid of practical sentiment and of higher thoughts, without which there is no true understanding of history, but only a haughty and false erudition.72
In this way, the French historicists—on the one hand beguiled by the promise of German scholarship, but at the same time products of the post-code era in France—sought to occupy a middle ground between Savigny's historical and Thibaut's philosophical jurisprudence, a position that would be anathema to a purist like Savigny. At its heart, this position moved closer to Bentham than to Savigny or Thibaut: theoretical jurisprudence was all well and good, but in the end practical results were needed.
39
      An important reason for this never-quite-wholehearted approval of German jurisprudence was quite simply the lingering paternalism and air of superiority of French jurists toward their colleagues across the Rhine. Time and again Savigny, Thibaut, and the others were compared to the glories of Pothier, Cujas, Du Moulin, and others and found wanting. This is especially clear in Charles Giraud's generally positive review of the French translation of Savigny's System du droit romain actuel, which concludes: "There remains perhaps to regret for the learned and generous Germany, peopled with eminent jurisconsults who are its pride and glory, some founders of its practical law such as Domat and Pothier, and a language as clear, as precise as the French language."73 Of course, this French snobbery had its analogue in the lingering resentment in Germany over the Napoleonic wars, which manifested itself in a healthy dose of reverse snobbery that painted the French as dalliers without the scholarly credentials bestowed by German education and the tradition of Wissenschaft.74 40
      This strong admixture of nationalistic polemic and the willful blindness that tended to accompany it meant that the German developments were not always understood, or at least not always entirely accurately reported in the French literature. Victor Chauffour, for example, presented Savigny's historical method as little more than antiquarianism, criticizing "a puerile love for historical study in itself" that "threw the anchor into the past and left the present and the future adrift. Separating the legal idea from its object, which is to govern the world, it made a means out of an end and sought nothing in learning but learning."75 As we saw, Vuy was even more frank in his assessment of what he thought to be Savigny's pedantry, criticizing "these blind admirers of the past" blithely working on history to the utter neglect of the present.76 41
      Remarks like these clearly show the tendancy of French jurists to overemphasize the dependency of Savigny and the Historical School on the past, so as to chide them more effectively for not embracing the future (that is, codification). Even so able an observer as Warnkönig tended to exaggerate Savigny's historicism and Thibaut's presentist practicality.77 Given the situation in France and its experience with codified law, this was hard to resist. Chauffour perhaps betrays this tendancy most plainly: after critiquing Savigny's historical method and its influence on the law, he remarks that "it is incontestable that the true remedy for the situation is codification; but it is also true that this codification must not break with existing law, nor pretend to dethrone science."78 This desire to find a middle way allowed French jurists to take from Savigny what seemed to them most useful (his scientific historicism) and to juxtapose it with their own praise of codification and its results, without dwelling too long on the contradictions this raised. 42
      The Quebec jurists who read about these contested developments were the heirs to this mutual antagonistic admiration. Since they read about German ideas virtually exclusively at second (or third) hand, and since they were not involved in the historic tensions between France and Germany, their impression of German jurisprudence often diverged markedly from the original. Still, this second-hand access did allow innovative ideas to enter circulation among Quebec legal intellectuals. Quebec's own legal writing at this time was hardly cutting-edge. Doucet's Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada of 1841, for example, provides a stark contrast to the state of legal thinking overseas, relying as it does entirely on an eighteenth-century natural-law view of the law and a strongly providentialist historical methodology for its theoretical underpinnings.79 Just how out of touch Doucet was with contemporary developments in jurisprudence is clear from his survey of Roman law, which omits any mention of the discovery of the complete text of Gaius's Institutes in 1816, a find that rocked the scholarly world in Europe and North America alike.80 A work like Irving's, by contrast, dependant as it is on the recent developments in historical jurisprudence in Germany, is far more up-to-date, emphasizing the then-innovative scientific view of historical study as source-based criticism rather than as the unfolding of divine providence. 43
      Still, among some Quebec lawyers there was strong interest in foreign—and particularly German—jurisprudence, despite linguistic obstacles. Morin in particular devoted considerable effort to remaining abreast of the writings of German jurists.81 In addition to his bibliography of German works, he also seems to have served as collection development advisor for the reestablishment of the Parliamentary Library after its destruction in the riots of 1849, and in this capacity he recommended the purchase of various recent works of German jurisprudence by Savigny, Hugo, Thibaut, Warnkönig, Mittermaier, Puchta, and others.82 He also compiled numerous other lists of German books, periodicals, and editions of sources of Roman law.83 44
      If nothing else, this curiosity tells us that Quebec legal elites saw Germany as somehow important in the development of contemporary law, and that an educated lawyer needed at least to be able to drop key names.84 At the same time, however, curiosity about German jurisprudence was more than simply fashion: like the interdisciplinary appeal of French literary theory at the end of the twentieth century, the Historical School and its opponents provided lawyers with a new methodology for illuminating their own particular national law. The German debates over codification presented Quebec lawyers with models of competing methodologies for dealing with historical sources and for understanding the role of legislation in a legal system, both thorny methodological problems confronting codifiers of Quebec private law in the years leading up to 1866. 45
   

III. Codification in Quebec: Private Law, Public Commentary

 
The debates surrounding codification in Europe were echoed in striking ways a few decades later in Quebec. Given the publicity surrounding the dispute between Savigny and Thibaut and the wider European debates about the role of legislation and the desirability of codification, we might anticipate that those involved in Quebec private law codification drew on the European experience as a model or point of departure for their own endeavors. In particular, we might assume that there would be some grappling with the problems of importing non-native legal structures and ideas, which was a central concern in Germany, and which had obvious relevance for Quebec. Instead, the formal process of codification in Quebec proceeded almost without reference to the theoretical and practical concerns voiced in the European debates. This is surprising, since the ideas that underlay the European codification debates certainly circulated among the very legal elites entrusted with carrying out or commenting on private law reform in Quebec. As we will see, however, there was a pronounced gap between the institutionally mandated formal process of codification and the wider public discussion about it in the legal community. European ideas played little role in the former, but they were an important factor in the latter. This rupture between theory and practice needs explanation. 46
   

A. The Codifiers and Their Sources

 
The political and institutional background to the drafting of the Civil Code of Lower Canada has been ably analyzed elsewhere and need not be recounted here in detail.85 After years of calls for law reform, Attorney General George-Étienne Cartier developed a plan to codify Quebec private law and procedure, which was given institutional form in the 1857 An Act to provide for the Codification of the Laws of Lower Canada relative to Civil matters and Procedure.86 Under its terms Cartier appointed three commissioners, judges René-Edouard Caron, Augustin-Norbert Morin, and Charles Dewey Day, who along with secretaries Joseph-Ubalde Beaudry and Thomas Kennedy Ramsay (replaced in 1862 by Thomas McCord) were given the job of reviewing the state of the existing law and proposing a code based on it and following the organization of the Code Napoléon. After issuing seven progress reports for review and discussion (of which there was virtually none)87 the final draft code was submitted to the legislature in January 1865, which recommended a relatively small number of changes and passed An Act respecting the Civil Code of Lower Canada, which was given assent in September 1865.88 The new code came into force on 1 August 1866. 47
      Less familiar than the institutional history of codification, however, is how the debates surrounding the process in Quebec resembled—indeed in some cases depended on—the similar debates in Europe on legal science and legislation that followed in the wake of the 1804 Code Napoléon. Commissioners Morin and Day89 and secretary McCord followed these European debates, but as codification progressed, whatever wide-ranging tendencies the codifiers might have had were largely constrained by statute, by political expedients, and by the institutional dynamic of the commission. The result was a divergence between theory and practice, as the more wide-ranging debate among Quebec lawyers about the commission's work seems to have had relatively little effect on what went on behind the closed doors of the commission's offices. 48
      Statutory constraints were certainly an important force limiting diversity. Had the commissioners gone no further than a strict reading of the Codification Act, they need not have consulted non-French materials at all. The projected advantages of codification were to be realized not by a thoroughgoing rethinking of the entire edifice of private law, but by carefully reworking existing law along the lines of the most successful codification to date, the Code Napoléon. While there was never a question of going so far as simply adopting the French code mutatis mutandis, as an editorial in the Journal de Québec advocated,90 articles VI and VII of the Codification Act made it clear that the commissioners were to look to France and to the law currently in force in Lower Canada and not search out novelty for its own sake. Looking beyond French doctrine was not expressly forbidden, but the Codification Act strongly implied that to do so would be a waste of valuable time. The commissioners were free to propose amendments to the existing law (and this was the window through which more wide-ranging influences could and sometimes did enter the project), but the Codification Act made it clear that this was to be the exception rather than the rule. 49
      Attorney General Cartier, the project's political shepherd, reinforced these principles in his speeches regarding the project. When he presented the draft code to the legislature in 1865, he noted that "this work was done in imitation of the French code, and in walking in its footsteps, there was no fear that we would not succeed."91 50
      In its public face, then, as a legislatively mandated reform of private law, the project was to be—and the commission in fact was—quite conservative in terms of its sources, following Cartier's plan closely. The innovations—and innovations there certainly were—came mainly from the American and English commercial law that strongly influenced Judge Day's reconceptualization of obligations and commercial law, as Brian Young and others have pointed out.92 In the end, the final code shows no visible signs of any engagement with the German historicist ideas that were circulating among elite lawyers in Quebec. 51
      Behind closed doors the situation was only somewhat different. John Brierley's discovery of Judge Caron's working papers for the commission provides an invaluable (though inevitably sketchy and puzzling) glimpse into the provisioning of the commission's offices.93 One of the first jobs was to develop a commission library and to establish an initial list of sources to be consulted, which Caron set out in a detailed working document that outlined the practical aspects of the task ahead.94 Though this official bibliography is only part of the intellectual context in which the codifiers worked, it does give a sense of what parts of the general intellectual milieu were to be carried forward into the work of codification and what parts were to be excluded from the beginning. 52
      Not surprisingly, Caron's plan stayed close to the commission's mandate as described in the Codification Act: Caron was sufficiently practical to realize that the undertaking was vast enough without making it even more complex. In his section "Codification—(Modus operandi)" he provided a general rationale for the hierarchy of sources: "On the subjects left out of the above enumeration it is necessary to consult French jurisprudence before the Revolution, Roman law, the case law in France and [Louisiana]. Pothier, Domat, Merlin, the new Denizart will serve to fill the gaps in our positive law, but above all the Code Napoléon, which it is necessary to follow in all cases in which it did not introduce new law."95 Under "Authors to Consult," Caron included only two categories: "New Works on the Code" and "On the Old Law."96 Not surprisingly, the first authors listed—and the bulk of the list—are new works on the Code Napoléon, particularly the commentaries of Toullier, Troplong, and Merlin, as well as the influential Cours de droit français of Zachariae (as translated and reworked by Aubry and Rau). Complementing these were of course les anciens: Domat, Pothier, and the various commentators on French customary law. 53
      Caron foresaw that the commission would not be able to answer all their questions from these older works and the Code Napoléon itself, and so he (and his co-commissioners) brought various other sources into the mix. Day, of course, needed recent works of English and American commercial law, and a long list of titles were borrowed from the Library of Parliament and shipped to Montreal for his use.97 Caron's notes also call for the Paris Revue de législation, though significantly he included it in the category "New Works on the Code," indicating that he looked to it more for current doctrinal commentary on the French code than for more wide-ranging jurisprudential discussion.98 54
      Caron's notes do not reveal cutting-edge research: the commission would hardly have been able to do their job had they lost themselves in arcane theoretical debates, and so they naturally looked mostly to works that would answer the practical questions they would have to solve. Caron's plan did, however, call on the commissioners to recognize and grapple with basic aspects of the wider debates surrounding their mission. Perhaps the most telling indication of this is a cryptic query in Caron's section "Code Napoléon (Remarks on the)," where he muses "Which example should we follow?" but unfortunately provides no elaboration.99 The only explicit suggestion that the commission would be discussing the debates in Europe over codification (in this case the Benthamite project to reform the Common law in England, rather than the German controversies) is a brief note that an article in the London Quarterly Review of 1859 contains "discussion of the question of whether a well executed revision of a country's laws is not preferable to a Codification of these same laws."100 Beyond this Caron makes no reference to any concerns of a more theoretical nature. 55
      The situation is similar in the commission's published reports. Judging from the authorities provided in the margins of the draft code, the codifiers seem to have used the lists Caron drew up and to have followed Cartier's general directive to stick as close to the text of the French code as possible. A rough indication of the range of these sources can be gleaned from Thomas McCord's list of abbreviations to his edition of the finished code. The majority of cited authors are French (including an extensive list of thirty-six individual abbreviations for the works of Pothier), English, and American. By contrast, the only other Europeans in evidence are the eighteenth-century Roman law commentators Heineccius and Johannes Voet and the more recent jurists Savigny and Zachariae.101 However, only two provisions in the code itself seem to be based directly on Savigny: one in the Preliminary Title on a point of private international law, the other in the title on obligations, where he is simply used to support the point that the civilly dead are incapable of contracting.102 Despite having written a widely known and highly respected work on the Roman law of possession, Savigny is cited neither by Morin in the book on prescription nor by Caron in the book on property. 56
      The commission's first report, however, authored mostly by Day, does suggest in an oblique way some of the more existential issues with which the commission grappled. This is clearest in Day's defense of the commission's departures from their model, which reveals the guiding motivations and justifications of the project. The main problem was the perceived inadequacies of the French code, which the codifiers solved by balancing the demands of the Codification Act with a rough-and-ready historical method:
It would, of course, be inexcusable in the Commissioners to have carried their respect for the model proposed to them so far as to copy its acknowledged faults. They have tried to avoid them, and have sought for the means of doing so in the original sources of legislation on the subject, in the writings of the great jurists of France as well under the modern as the ancient system of her law, and in the careful comparison of these with the innovations which have been introduced by our local legislation and jurisprudence, or have silently grown up from the condition and circumstances of our population.103
In the case of obligations this meant following Pothier in order to restore the "symmetry and logical connection" he brought to the law, which the French codifiers had tampered with.104 Pothier's work, however, must be harmonized with the "condition and circumstances of our population," an idea that perhaps has distant echoes of Savigny's Zeitgeist. This is speculative, however: the codifiers' reports are practical documents presenting the work of the commission for the legislature; whatever theoretical discussions the commission engaged in tended to remain unexpressed in the background.
57
   

B. Discussion of Codification outside the Commission: Supporters and Opponents

 
The deliberations of the commission were but the formal center of a more broadly based and often free-wheeling discussion among Quebec jurists on the desirability of codification, on the role of legislation more generally, and most fundamentally on the nature and status of the Quebec legal system. Some of these debates were directly connected to the codification process, but others were tangential to it and ranged more widely, such as the discussions surrounding the issue of legal education in Quebec. Taken together, these debates reveal an extensive pre-codification legal discourse that left only a few slight traces on the finished code. 58
      Both supporters and opponents of codification used ideas and language that recall the European debates. Savigny's ideas in particular were marshaled both for and against codification: the rhetorical value of historicist legal science was such that it could support a wide range of perspectives (much as it did in Germany), and Savigny's applicability was increased by a certain lack of rigor or accuracy in the reporting of his ideas by participants in the Quebec debates. Thus Savigny and to a lesser extent Thibaut and others were a presence in Quebec legal reform, invoked as icons of either conservative historicism or positivist modernism as appropriate. 59
      Cartier's codification proposal neither came out of the blue nor ran contrary to prevailing opinion. Evelyn Kolish has found calls for codification in Quebec as early as 1831,105 while in 1846 an anonymous author argued vigorously for codification in the Montreal Revue de législation et de jurisprudence in terms that closely anticipated Cartier's own program.106 The author of this piece, who Brierley among others has suggested might have been Cartier himself, paints a bleak picture of the current state of the law in Quebec:
What old, anomalous, contradictory laws subsist in all branches of our legislation! What disorder and uncertainty in the laws that govern persons and things, property, commerce, police! What anachronisms in the most important arrangements of our social order! What mind is big enough to embrace and know this infinite variety of edicts, customs, maxims, ordinances, statutes, jurisprudence of every kind?
Codification is the way out of the morass, which the author characterizes as "this legal Babel" and "[the] chaos of our jurisprudence." The author emphasizes the progressive advantages of codification, arguing that what is needed is "the reformation of the old codes that govern ancient societies" for the purpose of "attaining the level of the progress of civilization."107
60
      To a large extent this anonymous piece seems to have set the tone and the issues for debate, and the reactions of the majority of the interested public were similar. The chaos of the Quebec legal system, in fact, became a topos of Quebec legal discourse, turning up in legal periodicals and newspapers alike, and the idea of legislation as progress too was heard frequently in the Quebec debates.108 The very ubiquity of these ideas, however, makes it difficult to distinguish direct influence from parallel developments. The idea that codification is necessary because of the chaos of existing law is a natural argument to make in support of codification, voiced alike by Thibaut in Germany, Bentham in Britain, and Field in New York.109 Codification is by its very nature an ordering process, if for no other reason than that it gathers laws from disparate sources and collects them in one or at most a few books.110 61
      Despite the often formulaic rhetoric of the Quebec debates, supporters did sometimes use language and ideas that suggest direct debts to European jurisprudence. Given that reaction to the project of codification was generally favorable (though we consider several important critics below),111 many commentators naturally looked to Europe for validation in their efforts to understand and praise the project. 62
      We might expect supporters to turn to Thibaut for inspiration, and indeed it is tempting to hear Thibaut's call for a pan-German code behind, for example, the 1857 letter to the editor of La Minerve by one "Marcus," in which he described the code as "this monument to our nationality."112 If we omit the reference to a code, however, this phrase could just as easily have come from Savigny, who advocated "an organically progressive jurisprudence, which may be common to the whole nation."113 Thomas Ritchie too, whose pamphlet on the title on obligations was one of the most significant commentaries on the draft code, expressed his support of the enterprise in language reminiscent of Thibaut's view of a code (though of course it reflects the general eighteenth-century natural law view of a code as well):
The idea of a Code has been well apprehended by the Commissioners. A Code should be a comprehensive body of practical rules of law, expressed in language pure, concise and unambiguous. It ought to exclude mere definitions and legal axioms; for it can never supply the place of scientific treatises upon legal subjects. Nor ought it to be encumbered with more details and examples than are absolutely necessary to a practical understanding of the rules laid down. It is scarcely necessary to add that the subtleties in which many authors delight, would be entirely out of place in a body of positive legislation such as a Civil Code.... [T]he articles of [a code] ought to be not unlike the jewels composing a diamond necklace, pure, simple and transparent.114
These words have strong parallels to Thibaut's call for clear laws in the face of the current tendency to go deeper and deeper into "philology and history," which has the effect of dulling the people's sense of right and wrong.115 Of course, Ritchie's ideas echo Bentham as well;116 the point is that whether at first or at second hand, they reflect ideas coming to Quebec from overseas. Even Cartier echoed the ideas of the Historical School. In a speech to the Legislative Assembly upon presentation of the finished code, he develops an idea that strongly echoes Savigny's Volksgeist:
The law of a country is not just the result of arbitrariness, and does not form itself by caprice; it is the result of the custom of the people, applied to all acts of life so as to govern them. Our law has the same origins as current French law, and it was drawn from the same sources. It is taken in large part from new law, which is regarded by all who study it as superior to anything that could be produced by other peoples.117
It is interesting that Cartier takes this Savignian notion of the organic development of a national law and adduces it in support of codification; Savigny's notion of the Zeitgeist was eminently portable and could easily be enlisted as a nationalistic argument in favor of codification.
63
      In all these cases, of course, the language in question was general enough that it could have been drawn from any number of sources, including contemporary French descriptions of the Code Napoléon. The influence of the German Historical and Philosophical Schools in France as well as their cachet among intellectually inclined jurists, however, suggests that there might be a more direct influence at work, especially considering that Cartier, at least, had access to these ideas through the French periodicals to which he subscribed. 64
      The echoes of the European debates were not always distant and vague, however, and a number of Quebec lawyers brought these ideas into their writings in support of codification directly. The most striking example is C. F. S. Langlier, professor of Roman law at Laval University, who framed a long defense of the draft code in the Journal de Québec with a discussion of the German codification disputes.118 Langlier's source for this overview of German jurisprudence is unclear but is almost certainly one of the French surveys of the dispute published in the Revue Fœlix or the Revue Wolowski. Not surprisingly, given his strong approval of the work of the Quebec codifiers, Langlier comes out on the side of Thibaut (domesticated to "Thibault") and philosophical jurisprudence. According to Langlier, Savigny's law is effectively static, since it develops entirely divorced from human endeavor, and so from essential progress. Langlier presents Savigny as arguing that the law is what it is, and so it must be good. He writes:
Without doubt, the law of every people, in every epoch of its history, is, to a certain point, the best; but, it is an error to pretend that one can never conceive of something better.... For what does history serve, if not to show us the qualities and the faults of institutions and the government of past peoples, and to engage us, by the means of the consequences that have transpired, to imitate some and avoid others?119
In fact, however, Savigny rejected this very position in Vom Beruf, his initial response to Thibaut. The historical method of jurisprudence, Savigny writes,
does not consist, as some recent opponents have strangely maintained, in an exclusive admiration of the Roman law; nor in desiring the unqualified preservation of any one established system, to which, indeed, it is directly opposed.... On the contrary, its object is to trace every established system to its root, and thus discover an organic principle, whereby that which still has life, may be separated from that which is lifeless and only belongs to history.120
As Savigny expresses it more succinctly, "Law grows with the growth, and strengthens with the strength of the people, and finally dies away as the nation loses its nationality."121 In other words, far from being static, law is in constant development, in much the same way as language is in constant development. To replace this organic historical development with the arbitrary will of the lawgiver, Savigny argues, is to cut law off from the source of its vitality.
65
      By misrepresenting Savigny's ideas in this way, however, Langlier is able to coopt historicism for the purposes of defending codification. He turns around Savigny's conservative use of history to apply it progressively, not as a model for how things should remain, but as a lesson in how things should change. History, then, becomes grist for the legislator's mill:
The true progress in legislation consists in giving to each people the legislation that suits it, its natural legislation.... If the character of a people and its needs can change, one will avow that these changes take time to come about. Moreover, its nature does not change: human nature is today what it will be from now to the end of the world. All laws founded on human nature are thus immutable. Therefore, these are the laws that make up the largest part of a code of civil law.122
In this passage and elsewhere Langlier shows his natural-law assumptions, which bring his ideas more closely in line with Thibaut's. Here again, however, Langlier freely interprets his source: "All the works of jurisconsults must tend toward finding the true formula of the law that best suits the nation, and when this formula is found, one makes from it a code that must never again change."123 This is Langlier, not Thibaut, or at best Thibaut very freely interpreted, and it reveals more about Langlier's assumptions than it does about Thibaut. To Langlier, society can be improved through rationally conceived legislation that draws on the lessons of the past to fine-tune the present. For this reason Langlier criticizes Cartier's plan for codification, because it ordained a code based on the laws actually in force, rather than a code based on "the laws, which in [the commissioners'] judgment the needs of the country require."124 A philosophically based code would be better than a historically based one, since the law is perfectible, not perfect. For this reason Langlier praises the commissioners' amendments, by which they rationally adapted the received law to the current needs of Quebec society.
66
      In contrast to these expressions of support, the process of codification generated surprisingly little opposition from contemporaries, certainly when compared to many modern law reform initiatives. Opinion was not unanimously positive, however, and a small but vocal minority had reservations—sometimes grave—about the proposed code and its predicted effects on Quebec society. Most criticisms of the proposed code were relatively minor technical quibbles with particular doctrines or matters of presentation.125 Two writers, however, had more fundamental ideological objections to the project. Edouard Lefebvre de Bellefeuille, who wrote a long critique of the draft code's provisions on marriage, faulted the commissioners for not following the letter of Catholic canon law and allowing too many innovations from the suspect Code Napoléon to enter.126 His attack on the codifiers reflects the strongly conservative Ultramontane Catholic strain in Quebec legal culture, an ideology that looked with suspicion on French developments and rejected their applicability to Quebec society. In fact, his attack evoked a response from the more moderate Catholic A.-N. Morin.127 More serious, however, were the criticisms of all parts of the code by Lefebvre de Bellefeuille's teacher, François-Maximilien Bibaud. 67
      Bibaud, a fascinating figure deserving a modern intellectual biography, was by far the most vocal and persistent opponent of the new code.128 Possessed of the deadly combination of an absolute certainty in his own intellectual infallibility and a constitutional inability to be diplomatic, his ambitious program to set legal education and private law reform in Quebec on a conservative path of intellectual rigor was doomed to failure.129 Bibaud's frequent contributions to the debate provided some of the most interesting discussions about the nature of law and the place of legislation to appear before the twentieth century. 68
      Bibaud was certainly no friend of codification. His opposition to the proposed code began as soon as Cartier announced the project, and his antipathy is clear in most of his writings of the 1850s and after. Most bluntly, in a manuscript work on the history of Canada, his entry for the year 1866 reads in part: "Publication of a badly digested Civil Code of Lower Canada, the work of judges Day, Caron, and Morin and of the clerk Beaudry; total scrambling of our ancient French laws, where the Conseil Spécial had already sown disorder by the Ordonnance des Bureaux d'Hypothèques: the drafting itself of this repertory of legislation is injurious to French idiom!"130 His specific criticisms would make an interesting study. He had something to say about almost every part of the code, often basing his critique on Catholic canon law and general tenets of morality. To cite just one example, he had strong words about the codifiers' rejection of lesion between persons of full age:
I had not realized that in the treatise on obligations the honorable commissioners have suggested the abolition of lesion between persons of full age! I certainly hope that the legislature will reject this suggestion, improper, because it is from natural law, if not primary, at least secondary, that equality is required in commutative contracts of sale, exchange, etc. The commissioners simply want to abolish commutative contracts, since they believe they have already suppressed by a stroke of the pen unilateral contracts. They want, as in the United States, that one can acquire in a valid manner something that costs one thousand louis for a dollar!131
Here, however, I want to concentrate not on the specifics of his attack on the codification project, but rather on its ideological underpinnings and on his intellectual debts (acknowledged or unacknowledged) to European jurisprudence.
69
      Given his hostility toward the very idea of codification, it is tempting to cast Bibaud in the role of Savigny in the Quebec production of "Codification Disputes" (against a Thibaut played perhaps by Langlier, perhaps by Morin), but to do so would be a distortion. While Bibaud clearly had intellectual affinities with Savigny—both were conservative, suspicious of legislation (particularly as manifested in the French code), and saw the ancien droit as validated by time—their positions differed in important ways, and Bibaud's version of conservative historicist jurisprudence makes an instructive contrast to that of Savigny. 70
      In a general way, Bibaud's critique is reminiscent of Savigny's in that he attacks codification as on the one hand premature, and on the other a dangerous and ill-conceived break with legal tradition. Like Savigny, Bibaud argued that to attempt codification without a full understanding of the Roman law underlying the ancien droit would be premature: "It was a great temerity to undertake a code without knowing Roman law, and one can say without hesitation that the commissioners seem not even to have suspected its existence."132 Again like Savigny, to Bibaud the foundation of any legal system must be its continuity with the past, which is not lightly (if at all) to be overthrown in the name of faddish progress. In a passage dripping with sarcasm, Bibaud attacks the codifiers' audacity: "I admire the presumption of three Canadian legists who have undertaken to denature everything that the collective wisdom of centuries has sanctioned."133 Legislation had to grow naturally out of the existing law, and given the state of the existing law in Quebec, the chances for this were highly unlikely. 71
      Bibaud's application of these general principles, however, diverges markedly from Savigny's. To Savigny Roman law, adapted through organic development to the needs of the Volk, was the essential expression of the Volksgeist. To Bibaud Roman law was important for purely historical reasons, and its applicability to Canada was questionable at best: it could not simply be treated as ratio scripta.134 For Bibaud the expression of the Quebec Volksgeist was not Roman law, but rather the customary law of the ancien droit. Savigny had grave misgivings about the utility of German customary law, which he regarded as distinctly inferior to the Roman law. Bibaud's strong affirmation of customary law reveals some distance from Savigny, despite the strong evocation of an idea akin to Volksgeist:
Law borne by custom is a convention coming from the customs of the nation, appreciated in its bosom, perpetuated by a mutual competition. Such a law represents unceasingly more the customs of a nation than the rigidity of a law.... [Every citizen] received it from his fathers with respect, he observes it with religion and perpetuates its observation scrupulously. A citizen who transgresses, an enemy of this law can thus only be a controversialist hateful in society.135
Over the course of his writings it is clear that among German jurists, Bibaud's guiding spirit was not Savigny but the eighteenth-century jurist and historian Johann Gottlieb Heineccius. Heineccius's writings combined natural law with a historicist impulse that looked back to older humanist jurisprudence,136 and so his views of history and custom would have been more congenial to Bibaud's particular kind of conservatism. Bibaud cited Heineccius on numerous occasions, and it is significant that this was usually in the context of dismissing aspects of the jurisprudential novelties of modern Europe. A telling example is a passage in which Bibaud dismisses both German scholarship and the French periodicals that transmitted it (to himself as well):
If I dare express an opinion, however glorious the avowal of the Revue de Wollowski [sic] might be for Germany, I find singular the assertion that the science from across the Rhine is indispensible, and that France is just a pupil alongside her. I try hard to get and to read translations of German books, to savor their erudition, as long as it appears to me to be moderate; but that the light might arise from fifty, perhaps one hundred treatises which are probably almost as many different systems, that is what is difficult to believe. I would rather follow myself and give you the advice that a German himself gave to his students, one of the most judicious—Heineccius, counsellor to Frederick the Great....137
In general, then, for Bibaud it was les anciens who should be the guides. Despite his often progressive ideas on legal education (apparent in his modeling of his law school curriculum on Bonn and Leipzig, which we saw at the outset), Bibaud had a profound distrust of modernism, and this was his chief criticism of the codification project. Bibaud faulted the commissioners for their reliance on more modern commentators like Toullier, Troplong, Marcadé, and Zachariae, while at the same time chastising them for daring to rework and reorder Pothier.138 Interestingly, Bibaud's respect for les anciens brings his ideas back into harmony with Savigny on at least one point: that the current crop of jurists was far from up to the job of codification. At the end of one of his didactic works, Bibaud lists a veritable who's who of eighteenth-century (and earlier) jurists (including Savigny among them, curiously enough), all at the expense of his current students of law:
Without speaking of the ancients, Grotius, Puffendorf, Heineccius, De Vattel, Savigny among the Germans—chancellor Morus, Sir Mathew Hale, Blackstone, Sir James Marriot, baron Mazères, lord Mansfield among the English—De Thoù, l'Hôpital, Domat, D'Aguesseau, Talon, Pothier, Lamoignon, Le Camus among the French, they were complete men as well as powerful geniuses. Without doubt, no one among you would dare claim—no one among you will find in this province the opportunity to reach the same eminence, whatever great talents that were distributed to you by nature; but you can—you must each shine with the same ray of virtue.139
Bibaud's jurisprudence—and thus the perspective from which he criticized Cartier's codification scheme—was like his educational program: "at once historical, methodical, philosophical, and practical."140 His alternative to the project was in the end not Savigny's plan to purify and perfect the Roman law through textual study, but simply to retain the existing law, since it was the foundation of Quebec society. To discard the ancien droit—especially in favor of a new code modeled on the fundamentally suspect Code Napoléon—would be to endanger the social and particularly the moral underpinnings of Quebec society. Though Bibaud's position was somewhat extreme, and was always expressed in such a way as to guarantee the widest possible opposition, this conservative stance was influential in the debates and helps explain why the Civil Code of Lower Canada was not a more progressive document.
72
   

IV. Legal Theory, Legal Nationalism

 
Why did the European developments in theoretical and historical jurisprudence that many elite Quebec lawyers followed have so little apparent influence on the actual course of Quebec private law reform, despite their obvious relevance? By way of conclusion, I would like to suggest several hypotheses for why the theoretical interests of many Quebec lawyers could remain insulated from the finished code itself. The Quebec experience in turn suggests broader conclusions about the dynamics of the transmission and reception of legal ideas in the nineteenth century.141 73
      On one level, codification in Quebec was a means to an end, a way to achieve legal clarity and predictability and so to answer the chief criticism leveled against the old law, namely its messy, convoluted, and almost unknowable state. Given this utilitarian purpose, the philosophical and historical explorations of Savigny, Thibaut, and their French and Scottish followers were good enough for the drawing room, but for the commissioners to lose themselves in such abstruse and esoteric questions as the nature of the Quebec Volksgeist or organic versus interventionist development of the law would have been well beyond their mandate to create a simplified and workable private law system in Quebec. This puts the codifiers more in the camp of Bentham than of the Germans: to Bentham a code was a utilitarian means to the end of a notorious, concise, clear, compact, complete, intrinsically useful, and justified legal order.142 To both Savigny and Thibaut, however, the law (whether codified or not) was intimately linked with the nationality of its subjects and must express the higher personality of the Volk or be worthless. Bentham in fact preferred that the codifier not be a national of the country whose law he was codifying;143 to Thibaut or Savigny this would be anathema. Bentham's ideas, however, grew out of eighteenth-century natural law jurisprudence, and though elite Quebec jurists certainly knew of them, 144 it would be rash to ignore the direct influence of eighteenth-century thinkers on Quebec lawyers' conception of the nature and purpose of a code. The French codifier Portalis, for example, suggested a similar virtue of codification in his famous Discours préliminaire, and his ideas were well-known in Quebec.145 74
      Certainly there was a rationalist element to the codification debates in Quebec: a search for order is almost always one of the principal reasons for codifying the law, and given the codifiers' dependence on the Code Napoléon it was clear that the Quebec code would be founded on rationalist rather than historicist principles. In a certain narrow sense, however, the codification project in Quebec was a Savignian historicist undertaking. It was based on an exhaustive historical study of the laws in force; it was seen as evolutionary rather than revolutionary;146 and it was explicitly domestic or national in orientation. Moreover, like Savigny's program it was deeply conservative. Even had they not been restrained by statute, the codifiers were not interested in a radical restructuring of the law such as took place in France. Rather, codification in Quebec was intended to rid the civil law of the taint of modernist impulses represented by some of the more forward-looking aspects of the French code. It was to be, in other words, a reformation in the sense of a "re-formation": it would create a private law as it should have been before the deviations of the Code Napoléon, though of course with certain nods to the needs of Quebec commercial elites. Like Savigny, the codifiers looked back to a supposedly more pure source of the law, more in keeping with the needs of Quebec society (its Volksgeist, we might say). Unlike Savigny, however, this pure fount of jurisprudence was not the Roman law but the ancien droit français as analyzed and structured by Pothier. Given the commissioners' purpose and choice of model, German doctrine—like some of the contemporary French commentary on the Code Napoléon—was a novelty with potentially dangerous (or at least uncertain) implications. It was far better to stay within the safe zone represented by Pothier than to foray into the uncharted waters of Savigny and Thibaut, however applicable their ideas might have been in theory.147 75
      Savigny, of course, would have rejected Quebec codification as premature (for many of the same reasons as he rejected the Code Napoléon). If anything, Quebec was even less prepared for codification—according to Savigny's criteria—than was France. Whereas France had an active tradition of domestic jurisprudence going back to Cujas and Donellus in the sixteenth century, through Domat in the seventeenth, and culminating in Pothier in the immediate pre-Revolutionary years, Quebec jurists were not of the same class. This hardly mattered, though. Through a kind of translatio imperii, Quebec jurists could consider themselves the heirs of Domat and Pothier, jurists who came out of the same tradition as did Quebec law and yet managed to pull together the disparate sources of the law into a more-or-less coherent whole that provided a non-revolutionary basis for codification. 76
      This search for legal forebears is an important aspect of any consolidation of a legal order. The jurisprudential models that are followed are important, but equally important are the roads not taken, since such choices reveal deeply held assumptions about the nature and purpose of law in a particular society. The choice in Quebec to follow les anciens and largely to eschew modern doctrinal innovations is an example of this.148 John Brierley has argued that codification was undertaken primarily for legal and political reasons; the iconic status of the code as national symbol of the aspirations of the Quebec people came much later.149 This is certainly true on the level we have been considering—that of the explicit utilitarian program Cartier and the commission devised to reform the law. But on a deeper level the close modeling of the codification project on France was in itself an expression of nationalist ideas. Despite Édouard Laboulaye's remark that "science has no fatherland, any more than does truth, which is its quest,"150 law is always nationally charged: in practice, even Bentham's impartial imported codifier will create a system that both embodies and promotes the expression of certain national ideals. In Quebec, each of the European legal models available to the codifiers resonated in different ways, evoking different responses among the commissioners and the wider legal community. The effect of this was to make it prima facie extremely unlikely that German jurisprudence would ever be more than an intellectual hobby for a small group of elite lawyers. 77
      To start with, the writings these lawyers were reading were never neutral: whether German or French (or other), nineteenth-century jurisprudence was highly—even stridently—nationalistic. Savigny was reluctant to give any credit at all to the French, whose code broke into Germany with Napoleon "and ate in, further and further, like a cancer." The code "served [Napoleon] as a bond the more to fetter nations: and for that reason it would be an object of terror and abomination to us, even had it possessed all the intrinsic excellence which it wants."151 For their part, Savigny's French admirers tended to adopt an air of smug superiority in their criticism of the master. French jurists in particular were in an awkward position. On the one hand they genuinely admired Savigny's historicist jurisprudence, which exported very well to the mixed Roman and customary-law heritage of France, and which provided a sound methodology for the emerging discipline of legal history (as distinct from Savigny's preferred historical law). On the other hand, however, they valued the Code Napoléon as an expression of native French jurisprudence and as a crowning achievement of the French esprit. Their way out of this quandary was to adopt a certain paternalism: they could agree with Savigny that the German states were not yet ready for codification (since their jurisprudence was as yet a pale reflection of Rome's), while at the same time argue that this did not apply in the land of Pothier. Translated to Quebec, the effect of this attitude was that someone like Langlier could praise Savigny's ideas up to a point, but argue that Quebec law and jurisprudence were nonetheless ripe for codification. 78
      This point becomes clearer when we consider how different nineteenth-century jurists treated Pothier, the Quebec codifiers' choice for an intellectual forebear upon which to base their work. Pothier's conception of Roman law was diametrically opposed to Savigny's, and a historicist reading of the law could never coexist with the elevation of Pothier to the level of guiding spirit of the civil law. If Savigny did not actually reject Pothier's work outright, he certainly damned it with faint praise. In his Vom Beruf—colored though it was by its appearance in the wake of the Napoleonic wars—he makes his feelings absolutely clear:
It is universally known, that, with regard to Roman law, Pothier is the polestar of the modern French jurists, and that his works exercised the most immediate influence upon the code. I am far from undervaluing Pothier; rather might the jurisprudence of a nation in which he was one of many, be expected to turn out well. But a juridical literature, in which he stands alone, and is almost revered and studied as the source, must, notwithstanding, be pitiable.152
Pothier's method was antithetical to Savigny's: where Pothier sought to reorder and clean up Justinian's Digest to produce a coherent text in line with modern sensibilities, thus creating in effect a new Digest on the skeleton of the "pure" text, Savigny sought to rid the texts of Roman law of all impurities, whether additions by decadent imperialist Roman jurisconsults, interpolations or interpretations by medieval glossators, or restatements by modern civilians. Given this inherent tension, then, the cult of Pothier in the francophone world precluded a literal and complete application of the new German ideas.
79
      Quebec jurists were very much enamored with Pothier, as is clear from the strong reliance of the codifiers on his work. To R. S. M. Bouchette, speaking in 1846, he was "that great Jurist, whose venerated name has become with us as that of a household God, I mean the profound POTHIER,"153 and in 1858 law student Denis Sénécal devoted the whole of a lengthy lecture—printed in La Minerve—to praising Pothier.154 But the reasons for the codifiers' reliance go deeper than simple veneration. Pothier was familiar to Quebec jurists, while Savigny was foreign. No matter how interested they might be in his ideas, and no matter how much lip service they might pay to the idea of historical jurisprudence, Savigny's "otherness" prevented his ideas from having more than a superficial influence in Quebec. Compare Bouchette's description of Pothier's Pandectae with Savigny's remarks quoted above:
With this splendid work before us, as the production of our own times we have perhaps little to envy in the glory of the Justinian age. The fame of this new compilation of the Digest spread rapidly throughout Europe, and although the savants of Leipsic attempted to question the depth of the learning displayed in the prolegomena, the learned of all countries sought the work with avidity, and the name of the immortal Pothier, our modern Tribonian, became everywhere endeared and venerated.155
Here in a nutshell is the explanation for Savigny's lack of influence among Quebec jurists. Savigny's emphasis on historical rigor and intense study of the sources of law (that is, Roman law) seemed pointless: to Quebec lawyers, the study Savigny saw as a necessary preparation for codification had already been done by Pothier (along with some others) in the last century. Any gaps could be filled by the codifiers themselves, but the pinnacle of legal clarity had already been reached.
80
      For the Quebec lawyers involved in the codification debates, then, Pothier represented the old law the way it should have been, as distinct from the Code Napoléon, which both got Pothier wrong and introduced highly questionable novelties as well. Without being parties to the specific nationalistic polemics between the French and the Germans, Quebec lawyers still had nationalist reasons of their own to prefer Pothier and the old law over the French code and the methodological innovations of the Germans. There is an implicit nationalism involved in the choice of legal models. Cartier's and the codifiers' reliance on Pothier and other exemplars of the ancien droit and their refusal to engage alternative jurisprudential models—whether German or contemporary French—were political choices made largely on the basis of their view of how Quebec society was and how it should be.156 In other words, the code was shaped by a feeling among certain elite Quebec lawyers about what was a proper model for Quebec law and what was foreign, and this feeling was surely an incipient sense of national identity as filtered through the world of jurisprudence.157 81
   

Conclusion

 
In many ways codification is a narrowing process: though it opens some theoretical avenues, many others are closed off by the choices made, and while interpretation might still be expansive, in practice the letter of the code tends to take over and channel discourse.158 In the end, the exotic foreign jurisprudence that some Quebec lawyers were reading in the mid-nineteenth century had little formal influence on the course of private law codification in Quebec: Judge Day cited Savigny once in his section on obligations, Judge Caron made a cursory nod to European codification disputes in his preparatory materials for the codification commission, and Judge Morin spent his spare time compiling long lists of German titles. Beyond this, the codification project never strayed far from the ideas and categories Quebec lawyers were used to dealing with in the pre-codification period.159 82
      This conservatism in application is only part of the story, however. As we have seen, Quebec lawyers were exposed to a broad range of recent legal ideas from Germany, particularly via French legal periodicals, and these mingled with recent French jurisprudence on the one hand and the traditional exemplars for Quebec jurists, notably Pothier, on the other. In the context of a law reform debate, an instrumentalist view of the transmission and reception of legal ideas fails to appreciate that the influence of foreign jurisprudence is more usually complex and subtle than direct. To say that foreign ideas were "in the air" is to underestimate how physical their presence was: they were in the libraries (both open and private), in scholars' notebooks, and in the debates in journals and newspapers that lawyers read. The German debates about the Code Napoléon and the desirability of a code for Germany in particular had obvious relevance for Quebec jurists, since they aired ideas similar to those being discussed in Quebec, and they gave rise to sophisticated methodological and theoretical approaches that allowed contemporaries to understand and critique the process of codification wherever it might take place. The version of these debates that Quebec lawyers read—mostly as translated (linguistically and intellectually) by French academics—is significant, since it allowed them to be slotted nicely into the incipient nationalism of Quebec private law reform. In the search for intellectual models that was a crucial part of the codification process, grappling with the foreign "other," whether Savigny or Thibaut or their French critics and champions, allowed Quebec jurists to sharpen their own nationalist conception of their undertaking. 83


Eric H. Reiter is clerk to the Honorable Louise Otis, justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal <eric.reiter@mail.mcgill.ca>. He would like to thank Nicholas Kasirer, Shannon McSheffrey, Ronald Rudin, and the anonymous reviewers for the Law and History Review, all of whose comments helped focus and strengthen this article. He would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the librarians and archivists at McGill University, Concordia University, and the Fraser-Hickson Institute, and especially of Jean-Noël Dion, archivist at the Séminaire de St-Hyacinthe. For convenience, throughout this article he has used "Quebec" and Code Napoléon rather than following the shifting nineteenth-century terminology. Finally, all translations of quoted materials are the author's unless otherwise noted.


Notes

1. Augustin-Norbert Morin, "Essai d'un catalogue bibliographique de droit autre que français et anglais ... mais surtout allemand," Saint-Hyacinthe, Qc., Séminaire de Saint-Hyacinthe, Centre d'archives (hereafter Saint-Hyacinthe), A Fg 5 D.11. The latest source cited (in a note attached inside the front cover) is Archer Polson's Principles of the Law of Nations (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1860). On Morin, see generally Jean-Marc Paradis, "Morin, Augustin-Norbert," in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, ed. George W. Brown et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–), 9:568–72 (hereafter DCB). Brian Young, The Politics of Codification: The Lower Canadian Civil Code of 1866 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press/Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 1994) provides valuable orientation in Morin's surviving papers.

2. Ferdinand Mackeldey, Manuel de droit romain, contenant la théorie des Institutes précédée d'une introduction à l'étude du droit romain, trans. J. Beving, 3d ed. (Brussels: Société typographique Belge, 1846); William Belime, Philosophie du droit, ou Cours d'introduction à la science du droit, 2d ed. in 2 vols. (Paris: A. Durand, 1856).

3. Morin's frequent spelling errors and haphazard understanding of the umlaut suggest that he was transcribing titles he did not understand.

4. François-Maximilien Bibaud, "Étude du droit: épître ou præmium, à Messieurs les Étudiants en droit du Bas-Canada," Mélanges religieux, politiques, commerciaux et littéraire (15, 18, 22 April 1851). On Bibaud and his school, see generally André Morel and Yvan Lamonde, "Bibaud, François-Maximilien," in DCB, 11:70–71; R. St. J. Macdonald, "Maximilien Bibaud, 1823–1887: The Pioneer Teacher of International Law in Canada," Dalhousie Law Journal 11 (1987–88): 721–43; David Howes, "The Origin and Demise of Legal Education in Quebec (or Hercules Bound)," University of New Brunswick Law Journal 38 (1989): 127–56; Léon Lortie, "The Early Teaching of Law in French Canada," Dalhousie Law Journal 2 (1975–76): 521–32.

5. Edouard Laboulaye, "Quelques réflexions sur l'enseignement du droit en France ...," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Paris] 24 (1845): 289–370. On the Revue, see below, note 36 and accompanying text.

6. As Bibaud noted in 1859, "I try hard to get and to read translations of German books, Imported Books, to savor their erudition"; Commentaires sur les lois du Bas-Canada, ou Conférences de l'école de droit liée au collège des RR. PP. Jésuites ... (Montreal: Cérat et Bourguignon, 1859), 1:28 (Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions [hereafter CIHM] nos. 46876–78). For convenience in accessing copies of early Canadian imprints, many of which are rare or unique, I have cited the CIHM microfiche numbers. Information on the project (including on-line versions of some of the works cited here) can be found at <http://www.canadiana.org>.

7. This is often a characteristic of the small market: lacking the confidence to be arrogantly self-absorbed, it naturally looks to its more powerful neighbors for inspiration and direction.

8. Compare Howes, "Hercules Bound," who sees nineteenth-century Quebec legal culture as shaped by a residual orality.

9. This decisive influence of the written word is evident already in the Middle Ages. See M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2d ed. (Oxford: Black-well, 1993) and Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

10. On the history of books, see especially M. H. Hoeflich, "Legal History and the History of the Book: Variations on a Theme," University of Kansas Law Review 46 (1998): 415–31; Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). On Quebec book culture, see especially Yvan Lamonde, Territoires de la culture québécoise (Sainte-Foy, Qc.: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1991); Yvan Lamonde, Histoire sociale des idées en Québec, vol. 1 (Saint-Laurent, Qc.: Fides, 2000). Legal publishing in Quebec is discussed in Sylvio Normand, "L'histoire de l'imprimé juridique: un champ de recherche inexploré," McGill Law Journal 38 (1993): 130–46. Mainly quantitative studies include Christine Veilleux, "Les gens de justice à Québec, 1760–1867" (Ph.D. thesis, Université Laval, 1990), 447–93 and the contributions to L'histoire de la culture et de l'imprimé: hommages à Claude Galarneau, ed. Yvan Lamonde and Gilles Gallichan (Sainte-Foy, Qc.: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1996). A model of the insights possible from a study of this kind is G. Blaine Baker, "The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire,"Law and History Review 3 (1985): 219–92.

11. Pierre-Basile Mignault, Le droit civil canadien basé sur les "Répétitions écrites sur le code civil" de Frédéric Mourlon avec revue de la jurisprudence de nos tribunaux, 9 vols. (Montreal: Whiteford & Théoret and Wilson & Lafleur, 1895–1916). See generally Normand, "L'histoire de l'imprimé juridique"; Sylvio Normand, "Une analyse quantitative de la doctrine en droit civil québécois," Cahiers de droit 23 (1982): 1009–28.

12. E.g., William Badgley, Remarks on Register Offices (Montreal: Herald Office, 1836) [CIHM no. 51143] (reprinting articles that originally appeared in the Montreal Herald); John Bonner, An Essay on the Registry Laws of Lower Canada (Quebec: John Lovell, 1852) [CIHM no. 47999]; T. W. Ritchie, Codification of the Laws of Lower Canada: Some Remarks on the Title "Of Obligations" as Reported by the Commissioners (Montreal: John Lovell, 1863) [CIHM no. 40464]. Given the tabula rasa that the Quebec legal literary world presented in the early nineteenth century, such practical and local works were far more necessary than interpretive works of jurisprudence, which could readily be supplied through French and English imports.

13. E.g., [C. F. S. Langlier], "Observations sur le projet de Code civil du Bas-Canada," Journal de Québec (27, 30 May; 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 19, 22, 24, 27 June; 1, 15, 20 July; 5, 9 August 1865). On newspaper coverage of legal issues, see especially Michel Morin, "La perception de l'ancien droit et du nouveau droit français au Bas-Canada, 1774–1866," in Droit québécois et droit français: communauté, autonomie, concordance, ed. H. Patrick Glenn (Cowansville, Qc.: Yvon Blais, 1993), 1–41.

14. Nicholas Benjamin Doucet, Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada: As They Existed under the Natives, As They Were Changed under the French Kings, and As They Were Modified and Altered under the Domination of England ([Montreal]: n.p., 1841), title page [CIHM nos. 92324–25], http://www.canadiana.org/ECO/mtq?id=700d059d6danddoc=92324 (9 June 2003).

15. Charles-Chamilly de Lorimier and C. A. Vilbon, La Bibliothèque du Code civil de la Province de Quebec (ci-devant Bas-Canada), 21 vols. (Montréal: Presses à vapeur de La Minerve [and other publishers], 1871–90). Compare the monumental French codal commentaries such as Alexandre Duranton, Cours de droit français suivant le code civil, 4th ed., 22 vols. (Brussels: Société Belge de librairie, 1841–42); Raymond Troplong, Le droit civil ex-pliqué suivant l'ordre du code, 28 vols. (Paris: Charles Hingray, 1838–56); and Charles Demolombe, Cours de Code Napoléon, 31 vols. (Paris: Durand, 1845–82). See also Sylvio Normand and Maxime Saint-Hilaire, "La Bibliothèque du Code civil: un ouvrage au confluent de la tradition et de la modernité," Revue générale de droit 32 (2002): 305–34.

16. On the culture of such societies in nineteenth-century Quebec, see Yvan Lamonde, "Les associations au Bas-Canada: de nouveaux marchés aux idées (1840–1867)," in Lamonde, Territoires de la culture québécoise, 105–16; Yvan Lamonde, "L'association culturelle au Québec au XIXe siècle: méthode d'enquête et premiers résultats," in ibid., 149–60.

17. Jonathan Sewell, An Essay on the Juridical History of France, So Far as It Relates to the Law of the Province of Lower-Canada: Read at a Special Meeting of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, the 31st Day of May, 1824 (Quebec: Thomas Cary, 1824), 34 [CIHM no. 21165].

18. Jonathan Sewell, "Essay Respecting the Juridical History of France: At the Meeting of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society ...," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Montreal] 1 (September, 1846): 477–99.

19. Frederick William Torrance, The Roman Law: A Lecture Delivered ... in the Hall of the Court of Appeals, Montreal, on the 13th January, 1854, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on the Roman Law, in Connection with the Law Faculty of the University of McGill College (Montreal: H. Ramsay, 1854) [CIHM no. 10370]. An earlier example on a similar theme is R. S. M. Bouchette, "An Historical Essay on the Roman Law, as They Came down to Us in Corpus Juris Civilis, Read by R. S. M. Bouchette, Esquire, before the Montreal Law Students Society," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Montreal] 1 (March 1846): 241–56.

20. The very first article was an anonymous survey of the historical development of legal institutions in Canada, "Précis historique des divers systèmes de judicature, établis en Canada depuis la colonisation du pays jusqu'à aujourd'hui," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Montreal] 1 (October and December, 1845): 1–8, 97–102. Other examples are "De la codification des lois du Canada," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Montreal] 1 (May 1846): 337–41 (about which see below, note 106 and accompanying text); M., "Sur la nécessité que les étudians, les avocats et les juges connaissent l'histoire du droit," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Montreal] 1 (December, 1845): 102–6.

21. Other pre-codification legal periodicals, notably Lower Canada Reports (Quebec, 1851ff.) and Lower Canada Jurist (Montreal, 1857ff.), concentrated exclusively on publishing reports of decided cases rather than doctrine. The Examiner: A Monthly Review of Legislation & Jurisprudence (Quebec, 1861) published both doctrine and reports of cases, but lasted only three months. See generally Raymonde Crête, Sylvio Normand, and Thomas Copeland, "Law Reporting in Nineteenth Century Quebec," Journal of Legal History 16 (1995): 147–71.

22. A similar situation prevailed in procedure before its codification in 1867, as judges were forced to look to French writings, given the absence of local Quebec works; Jean-Maurice Brisson, La formation d'un droit mixte: l'évolution de la procédure civile de 1774–1867 (Montreal: Thémis, 1986), 56–58.

23. Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.18, unnumbered sheet (draft of a letter).

24. General orientation on book auctions in Quebec can be found in Yvan Lamonde and Daniel Olivier, Les bibliothèques personnelles au Québec: inventaire analytique et préliminaire des sources (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1983), 7–15.

25. Many of the books of Torrance, Mackay, and Wicksteed are now in the McGill law library, and successive bookplates and inscriptions chronicle their history. To cite just one example, Torrance seems to have purchased W. Vander Meulen, Exercitationes in titulum digestorum de justitia et jure ... (Utrecht: Gulielmus Van de Water, 1723) at the 1868 Stuart sale; see below, note 26.

26.Catalogue of the Library of the Late Hon. Sir James Stuart ... (Quebec: Lovell & Lamoureux, 1854) [CIHM no. 29424]; Catalogue of the Law Library of the Late Hon. Sir James Stuart ... (Quebec: Middleton & Dawson, 1867) [CIHM no. 25120]; Catalogue of the Library of the Late Hon. Sir James Stuart ... (Montreal: John Lovell, 1868) [CIHM no. 54395].

27.Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu Sir L. H. La Fontaine ... (Montreal: Eusèbe Sénécal, [1864]) [CIHM no. 23196]; Catalogue Sale of Rare and Valuable French and English Books ... the Balance of the Books Left Over from the Sale of the Chief Justice's Collection ... (Montreal: John Lovell, 1864) [CIHM no. 91537].

28. Catalogues with manuscript prices indicated (in the copies filmed for the CIHM) include Catalogue de raretés bibliographiques Canadiennes ... (Montreal: Au bureau de l'Ordre, 1869) [CIHM no. 00852]; Catalogue of the Library of the Late Hon. Mr. Justice Ramsay ...(Montreal: n.p., [1887]) [CIHM no. 54198].

29. Normand, "L'histoire de l'imprimé juridique," 141–42.

30.Catalogue des livres de jurisprudence ... (Quebec: J. Nelson, 1801) [CIHM no. 41566].

31. The copy filmed for the CIHM includes manuscript prices; most items appear to have found buyers, including many for relatively high prices.

32.Catalogue des livres de jurisprudence ..., 4. The works mentioned here seem to have been purchased by James Stuart, since identical editions appear in the catalogues of the sales of his collection.

33.Librairie de J. B. Rolland ... (Montreal: J. B. Rolland, 1855), 51 [CIHM no. 34781].

34. G. Blaine Baker, "Law Practice and Statecraft in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal: The Torrance-Morris Firm, 1848 to 1868," in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 4, Beyond the Law: Lawyers and Business in Canada, 1830 to 1930, ed. C. Wilton (Toronto: Butterworths for Osgoode Society, 1990), 57.

35. Jean-Marc Paradis, "Augustin-Norbert Morin (1803–1865)" (Ph.D. thesis, Université Laval, 1989), 402. Some of Morin's correspondance with Bossange can be found in Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.18, a folder containing Morin's wish lists and notes for standing orders of books. On Bossange, who spent time in Quebec before setting up shop in Paris, see Yvan Lamonde, "La librairie Hector Bossange de Montréal (1815–1819) et le commerce international du livre," in Lamonde, Territoires de la culture québécoise, 181.

36. The history of these journals is outlined in Louis-Firmin-Julien Laferrière, "Introduction historique," in Tables analytiques de la Revue de législation et de la Revue critique de législation et de jurisprudence précédées des tables de la Thémis et de la Revue de droit français et étranger, ed. M. Coin-Delisle and M. Million (Paris: Cotillon, 1860), vi–xliv. More recently, see Donald R. Kelley, Historians and the Law in Postrevolutionary France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

37. Athanase Jourdan, "Réponse du rédacteur," Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 8 (1826): 115. Jourdan refers to the translation of chapter 24 of Savigny's Histoire du droit romain pendant le moyen âge.

38. Gustav Hugo, "Exposé de quelques nouvelles découverts faites en Allemagne relativement au droit romain," Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 3 (1821): 278–83; Friedrich Carl von Savigny, "Lettre de M. De Savigny, professeur de droit à l'Université de Berlin, ... sur l'Histoire de Cujas par M. Berriat-Saint-Prix," Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 4 (1822): 193–207. Translations of excerpts from Savigny's works can be found at Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 8.2 (1826): 115–22 and Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 9 (1829): 281–88.

39. "Plan de l'ouvrage," Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 1 (1819): 5–6.

40. J. J. G. Fœlix, "Du système et de l'objet du Journal," Revue étrangère de législation et d'économie politique 1 (1834): 6.

41. The Revue critique (Paris, 1851–1939) was begun by Wolowski and others upon the demise of the Revue Wolowski. It proved to be much longer-lived than any of its predecessors, but largely turned away from their outre-Rhin emphasis. See generally Laferrière, "Introduction historique," xliv–lvii.

42. E. J. Hemming, Catalogue of the Advocates' Library and Library of the Bar of Lower Canada, Section of the District of Montreal (Montreal: John Lovell, 1857), 26, 60 [CIHM no. 50761].

43. Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.18, unnumbered sheet (draft of a letter).

44. It is worth noting, however, that given the varied legal sources comprising pre-codification Quebec law, even the modest working library of the simple practitioner needed some exotica. This was true as well in North America's other hybrid jurisdiction, Louisiana. See the inventories published in Mitchell Franklin, "Libraries of Edward Livingston and of Moreau Lislet," Tulane Law Review 15 (1941): 401–14.

45. See Christine Veilleux, "La bibliothèque du juge en chef James Stuart, 1853," in L'histoire de la culture et de l'imprimé, 173. On Stuart's career, see Evelyn Kolish, "Stuart, Sir James," in DCB, 8:842–45.

46. On his career, see Jacques Boucher, "Buchanan, Alexander," in DCB, 8:109–10.

47.Catalogue of the Library of the Late Alexander Buchanan ... (Montreal: Wm. Salter, 1852) [CIHM no. 54396].

48. Buchanan's eclectic collection compares to that of Joseph Story, which included a mix of civil and Common law works, both old and new. See M. H. Hoeflich, Roman and Civil Law and the Development of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 29–30.

49. I have not located these books in any Quebec collection; probably, like many nineteenth-century Quebec books, they ended up south of the border, where there were buyers anxious to acquire works on the civil law. See, e.g., Michael H. Hoeflich, "Savigny and His Anglo-American Disciples," American Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1989): 17–37.

50. Bibaud's handwritten catalogue to his library survives as Montreal, Fraser-Hickson Library, "Les archives de l'Institut Canadien de Montréal," 7.11 Maximilien Bibaud, "Ma bibliothèque." Interestingly, this catalogue has not been noticed in the literature on Bibaud, though it is noted (but listed as "Maximilien Bidaud" and unindexed) under the Canadian Institute (from where it passed to the Fraser Institute) in Yvan Lamonde, Les bibliothèques de collectivités à Montréal (17e–19e siècle) (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1979), 58. The current location of Bibaud's books is unknown.

51. Montreal, McGill University Archives, MG 4166, "Records of Montreal Judges, Lawyers and Law Firms ca. 1820–1890," container 1, file number 00010, Torrance-Morris Firm, Letterbook. The records cover the years 1860–86, and generally note the date, the name of the borrower, the book borrowed, and whether it was returned. This source is identified and discussed in Baker, "Law Practice and Statecraft," 65–66.

52. A catalogue, Hemming, Catalogue of the Advocates' Library, was published in 1857. See generally Yvan Lamonde, Les bibliothèques de collectivités à Montréal (17e–19e siècle) (Montreal: Ministère des affaires culturelles, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, 1979), 45; G.-Édouard Rinfret, Histoire du Barreau de Montréal, 2d ed. (Cowansville, Qc.: Yvon Blais, 1999), 29–30, 44–45, 203–23.

53. Lamonde, Les bibliothèques de collectivités, 45.

54. Hemming, Catalogue of the Advocates' Library, 20, 34, 36, 38, 60, 64.

55. See Statutes and Rules for the Government of the Corporation of the Advocates' Library, Montreal (Montreal: James Starke, 1841). Access was somewhat loosened when the Advocates' Library came under the control of the Bar library in 1853, though in the early years not even all Montreal lawyers were given access to the collection. See Maréchal Nantel, "La bibliothèque du barreau et les archives judiciaires de Montréal," Revue du Barreau 6 (1946): 59–60.

56. Torrance, The Roman Law, 9, 17, 24, 26, 27.

57. Young, Politics of Codification, 6.

58. For general orientation, see especially Mathias Reimann, "Nineteenth-Century German Legal Science," Boston College Law Review 31 (1990): 837–97, and, for earlier developments, James Q. Whitman, The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era: Historical Vision and Legal Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

59. The main polemical works are reprinted in Thibaut und Savigny: Ihre programmatischen Schriften, ed. Hans Hattenhauer (Munich: Franz Vahlen, 1973). The initial pamphlets that defined the terms of debate were A. F. J. Thibaut, Ueber die Nothwendigkeit eines all-gemeinen bürgerlichen Rechts für Deutschland (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1814), reprinted in Thibaut und Savigny, 62–94; and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1814), reprinted in Thibaut und Savigny, 95–192, translated as Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence, trans. Abraham Hayward (London: Littlewood, [1831]; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975) [all quotations from this work are to Hayward's translation]. The general course of the debate is usefully set out in Hans Hattenhauer, "Einleitung," in Thibaut und Savigny, 9–51.

60. On Savigny's reputation outside Germany, see Olivier Motte, Savigny et la France (Bern: P. Lang, 1983) and Hoeflich, "Savigny," 17–18, who discusses his fame in the United States.

61. Compare M. H. Hoeflich, "Translation & the Reception of Foreign Law in the Ante-bellum United States," American Journal of Comparative Law 50 (2002): 753–75.

62. Compare Motte, Savigny et la France, 189, who makes a similar point with reference to Laboulaye.

63. L. A. Warnkönig, "De l'état actuel de la science du droit en Allemagne, et de la révolution qu'elle y a éprouvée dans le cours des trente dernières années," Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 1 (1819): 23 (emphasis in original). A similar view was voiced in J. J. G. Fœlix, "Du droit privé de l'Allemagne," Revue étrangère de législation et d'économie politique 5 (1838): 695.

64. Warnkönig, "De l'état actuel de la science du droit en Allemagne," 22.

65. L. A. Warnkönig, "De la science du droit en Allemagne, depuis 1815," Revue étrangère et français de législation, de jurisprudence et d'économie politique 8 (1841): 215–16 (emphasis in original).

66. David Irving, An Introduction to the Study of the Civil Law, 4th ed. (London: A. Maxwell, 1837), 149, 147. On Irving and the development of his treatise, see John W. Cairns, "The Influence of the German Historical School in Early Nineteenth Century Edinburgh," Syracuse Journal of International Law and Commerce 20 (1994): 195–98.

67. John Reddie, Historical Notices of the Roman Law and of the Recent Progress of Its Study in Germany (Edinburgh: W. & C. Tait, 1826). On Reddie, see Cairns, "German Historical School," 197–98.

68. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, The History of the Roman Law during the Middle Ages, trans. E. Cathcart, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1829). Only the first volume of this translation ever appeared. Savigny's work was also translated into French as Histoire du droit romain au moyen-âge, trans. Charles Guenoux, 4 vols. in 3 (Paris: Charles Hingray, 1839).

69. Nathaniel Lindley, An Introduction to the Study of Jurisprudence: Being a Translation of the General Part of Thibaut's System des Pandektenrechts (London: W. Maxwell, 1855).

70. "Droit romain: lettre àM...., rédacteur de la Thémis,"Thémis, ou Bibliothèque du jurisconsulte 8 (1826): 109 (emphasis in original).

71. "Réponse du rédacteur," 113.

72. A. Vuy, "De l'école historique et de l'école philosophique, par M. Thibaut," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Paris] 10 (1839): 347–48. Thibaut's essay is "Über die sogenannte historische und nicht-historische Rechtsschule," Archiv für civilistische Praxis 21 (1838): 391–419, reprinted in Thibaut und Savigny, 274–98.

73. Charles Giraud, Book review of Système du droit romain actuel by Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Paris] 12 (1840): 419.

74. Savigny noted that "striving after a scientific foundation is not one of the national tendencies of the French" (Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 170), while Thibaut complained about the errors of "shallow French jurists" (Thibaut, Nothwendigkeit, 69).

75. Victor Chauffour, "De la théorie et de la pratique dans la jurisprudence allemande," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Paris] 26 (1846): 358.

76. Vuy, "De l'école historique et de l'école philosophique," 347–48 (quoted above, note 72).

77. For instance, see the passage quoted above at note 65.

78. Chauffour, "De la théorie et de la pratique dans la jurisprudence allemande," 368.

79. Doucet, Fundamental Principles of the Laws of Canada, esp. 8–10.

80. Kelley, Historians, 75. On the wider influence of Gaius's Institutes, see Donald R. Kelley, "Gaius noster: Substructures of Western Social Thought," American Historical Review 84 (1979): 619–48.

81. American Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, another Germanophile who could not read German, was similar; see M. H. Hoeflich, "Transatlantic Friendships and the German Influence on American Law in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century," American Journal of Comparative Law 35 (1987): 604.

82. See Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.20 No. 1, Augustin-Norbert Morin, "Instructions pour Mr Faribault"; Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.18 No. 24, Augustin-Norbert Morin, "Choix de livres allemands ou de livres de droit latins publiés en pays germaniques." Georges-Barthélémy Faribault was charged in 1851 with purchasing books in London and Paris to replace those lost in the fire at the Legislative Assembly library. In 1867 these books would be sent to Ottawa to form the core of the parliamentary library. See Luc Noppen and Gaston Deschênes, Quebec's Parliament Building: Witness to History, trans. R. Clive Meredith and Audrey Pratt (Quebec: Gouvernement du Québec, 1986), 188–91. I am grateful to Phyllis Rudin for this reference.

83. Saint-Hyacinthe, A Fg 5 D.18 is a folder containing these and other lists by Morin regarding books and booksellers.

84. This picture of Quebec is paralleled in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. See, respectively, Kelley, Historians, 72–84; Cairns, "German Historical School"; Hoeflich, "Savigny."

85. J. E. C. Brierley, "Quebec's Civil Law Codification: Viewed and Reviewed," McGill Law Journal 14 (1968): 521–89 is still indispensible, though now the story is fleshed out in Young, Politics of Codification. Recent work on more specific aspects of codification includes Sylvio Normand, "La codification de 1866: contexte et impact," in Droit québécois et droit français: communauté, autonomie, concordance, ed. H. Patrick Glenn (Cowansville, Qc.: Yvon Blais, 1993), 43–62; Murray Greenwood, "Lower Canada (Quebec): Transformation of Civil Law, from Higher Morality to Autonomous Will, 1774–1866," Manitoba Law Journal 23 (1996): 132–82; Morin, "La perception de l'ancien droit"; John W. Cairns, "Employment in the Civil Code of Lower Canada: Tradition and Political Economy in Legal Classification and Reform," McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 673–709; Sylvio Normand and Alain Hudon, "Le contrôle des hypothèques secrètes au XIXe siècle: ou la difficile conciliation de deux cultures juridiques et de deux communautés ethniques," Revue de droit immobilier (1990): 171–201.

86. S.C. 1857, c. 43 (hereafter Codification Act). The codification of procedure is discussed in Brisson, La formation d'un droit mixte.

87. The seven reports (plus a supplement) were issued between October 1861 and November 1864 and were collected and published as Civil Code of Lower Canada: First, Second and Third [Fourth and Fifth, etc.] Reports (Quebec: George E. Desbarats, 1865).

88. S.C. 1865, c. 41.

89. I have not been able to locate a catalogue of Caron's library, nor have I been able to investigate his papers, held at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City. Caron's plan for the commission betrayed little interest in the arcana of European doctrine, but information about his private views on European jurisprudence must await further study.

90. "Codification des lois," Editorial, Journal de Québec (7 April 1857).

91. George-Étienne Cartier, "Discours de l'hon. M. Cartier sur le Code Civil," La Minerve (4 February 1865).

92. On Day's innovations, see Young, Politics of Codification, 168–72; Brierley, "Quebec's Civil Law Codification," 568–70; Greenwood, "Lower Canada (Quebec)," 178–81.

93. Brierley provides an inventory and analysis of these papers in "Quebec's Civil Law Codification," 575–80.

94. Quebec, Musée de la civilisation, Fonds d'archives du Séminaire de Québec, Fonds René-Edouard Caron, "Notes générales." I have not seen the original, but have used the typescript transcription by J. E. C. Brierley, deposited in the McGill law library.

95. Ibid., 71–72. Brierley's transcription reads "en France & [là]," but the sense suggests Louisiana, whose code and jurisprudence the codifiers studied closely. I thank Nicholas Kasirer for this suggestion.

96. Ibid., 19–22 (emphasis in original).

97. Ibid., 106.

98. Ibid., 19. For example, Caron cites an anonymous article from the journal in his notes on hypothecs (ibid., 65): "Code civil. Livre III, Titre 18. Des privilèges et hypothèques. Notions générales et préliminaires. (Manuscrit inédit de Toullier)," Revue de législation et de jurisprudence [Paris] 5 (1836–37): 190.

99. Caron, "Notes générales," 80.

100. Ibid., 59 (emphasis in original). The article cited is entitled "Lord Brougham & the Law Reform," though I have not been able to verify its exact content.

101. Thomas McCord, "Abbreviations," in The Civil Code of Lower Canada, ed. Thomas McCord (Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1867), xliii–li [CIHM no. 40178].

102. Articles 6 and 986 C.C.L.C. respectively. The passages cited (the former from Savigny's System, the latter from the Droit romain) are set out in Lorimier and Vilbon, La bibliothèque du Code civil, 1:102–6 and 7:673–76.

103.Civil Code of Lower Canada: First Report, 6.

104. Ibid., 8.

105. Evelyn Kolish, Nationalismes et conflits de droits: le débat du droit privé au Québec, 1760–1840 (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1994), 138.

106. "De la codification." The parallels to Cartier's program are pointed out in Brierley, "Quebec's Civil Law Codification," 530, and André Morel, "La codification devant l'opinion publique de l'époque," in Livre du centenaire du code civil I: le droit dans la vie familiale, ed. Jacques Boucher and André Morel (Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1970), 33.

107. "De la codification," 338, 337, 338, 341.

108. On the chaos topos, see Marcus, Letter to the Editor, La Minerve (4 April 1857) (bemoaning "the maze of a jurisprudence"); "Codification des lois" (emphasizing "the pressing necessity of untangling the chaos of our laws"); and "Le Code," Editorial, Journal de Québec (26 November 1864) (complaining about "this maze of our laws"). On the topos of progress, see Langlier, "Observations." See generally Evelyn Kolish, "The Impact of Change in Legal Metropolis on the Development of Lower Canada's Legal System: Judicial Chaos and Legislative Paralysis in the Civil Law, 1791–1838," Canadian Journal of Law and Society 3 (1988): 1–25; David Howes, "From Polyjurality to Monojurality: The Transformation of Quebec Law, 1875–1929," McGill Law Journal 32 (1987): 526–32.

109. Thibaut, Nothwendigkeit, 70 (bemoaning "the entire jumble of wretched dismembered fragments [of Roman law that] leads to a labyrinth of risky, shaky assumptions"); Jeremy Bentham, "Papers Relative to Codification and Public Instruction," in Bentham," Legislator of the World": Writings on Codification, Law, and Education, ed. Philip Schofield and Jonathan Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20; for Field, see Mathias Reimann, "The Historical School Against Codification: Savigny, Carter, and the Defeat of the New York Civil Code," American Journal of Comparative Law 37 (1989): 102.

110. See J. E. C. Brierley and R. A. Macdonald, Quebec Civil Law: An Introduction to Quebec Private Law (Toronto: Emond Montgomery, 1993), 34.

111. On contemporaries' reactions, see generally Morel, "La codification devant l'opinion publique"; Young, Politics of Codification, 106–12.

112. Marcus, Letter to the Editor.

113. Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 182.

114. Ritchie, Codification of the Laws of Lower Canada, 4–5.

115. Thibaut, Nothwendigkeit, 74.

116. See Gerald J. Postema, Bentham and the Common Law Tradition, corrected ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 425–26.

117. Cartier, "Discours." The parallels to Savigny are evident: "The Historical School assumes that the stuff of the law comes from the entire past of the nation, but not through arbitrariness, so that by chance it can be either this or that. Rather, it comes out of the innermost being of the nation itself and its history"; F. C. von Savigny, "Über den Zweck dieser Zeitschrift," Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft 1 (1815): 1–12, reprinted in Thibaut und Savigny, 264.

118. Langlier, "Observations." The work appeared anonymously, but Thomas McCord identifies Langlier as the author in the preface to his edition of the code; Thomas McCord, "Preface," in Civil Code of Lower Canada, ed. McCord, ix–x. The article is a response to an earlier critique on the marriage provisions of the draft code, Edouard Lefebvre de Bellefeuille, "Code civil du Bas-Canada: législation sur le mariage," Revue Canadienne 1 (1864): 602–19, 654–72, 731–48 and 2 (1865): 30–44, but Langlier's piece ranges much more widely, presenting a rambling discourse on the merits of codification in general and the strengths of the Quebec commissioners' work in particular.

119. Langlier, "Observations," 27 May [unpaginated].

120. Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 137.

121. Ibid., 27.

122. Langlier, "Observations," 27 May [unpaginated].

123. Ibid.

124. Ibid., 6 June [unpaginated].

125. Greenwood, "Lower Canada (Quebec)," 174. Examples include "Codification des lois," which argued against bilingualism in favor of a French-only text, and Ritchie, Codification of the Laws of Lower Canada, who suggested numerous changes to the articles on obligations. See also Morel, "La codification devant l'opinion publique," 40.

126. Lefebvre de Bellefeuille, "Code civil du Bas-Canada." See especially the discussion in Morel, "La codification devant l'opinion publique," 31–32; Greenwood, "Lower Canada (Quebec)," 175–76; Young, Politics of Codification, 119.

127. Morel, "La codification devant l'opinion publique," 42.

128. On Bibaud, see the literature cited above, note 4, as well as Young, Politics of Codification, 81–84; E.-Z. Massicotte, "Quelques notes sur Maximilien Bibaud," Bulletin des recherches historiques 52 (1946): 90–93; Arthur Perrault, "Bibliographie des oeuvres de Maximilien Bibaud," Thémis: Revue juridique 2 (1951): 31–33.

129. An example of his working method, which alienated much of the Quebec legal community, is his Notice historique sur l'enseignement du droit en Canada (Montreal: Louis Perrault, 1862) [CIHM no. 26193] and its companion Supplément à la Notice historique sur l'enseignement du droit ([Montreal?]: L. Perrault, [1862?]) [CIHM no. 92948], which comprise a brief historical survey of the state of legal education, followed by a long and only thinly disguised advertisement for his school. Many of Bibaud's other ostensibly scholarly works drift quickly into self-promotion.

130. Montreal, Concordia University, Vanier Library, Special Collections D 7 B5, "Maximilien Bibaud, Manuscripts on History, French Canada, Law, and Religion, 1847–84," no. 12, L'Histoire du Canada ou Annales canadiennes modelés sur l'Abrégé chronologique du Président Hénaut (1868), vol. 4 [unpaginated].

131. François-Maximilien Bibaud, "Développement de deux points des Observations sur le projet de code candien," in Bibaud, Exégèse de jurisprudence (N.p., [1861?]), 16 [CIHM no. 39211].

132. François-Maximilien Bibaud, Corrigé du code civil avec un sommaire des lois nouvelles ([Montreal: Cérat et Bourguignon, 1865?]; "Se vend avec les Commentaires sur les lois du Bas-Canada"), 9–10 [CIHM no. 49003 (misdated as [1854?])].

133. Bibaud, "Développement," 16. Similar ideas appear in an anonymous article, "Du droit du Bas-Canada," The Examiner: A Monthly Review of Legislation and Jurisprudence 1 (January–February 1861): 8–13, 21–26 [CIHM no. 05066–010348], which Michel Morin has suggested was Bibaud's work; Morin, "La perception de l'ancien droit," 23 n.151.

134. Bibaud, "Étude du droit," 18 April [unpaginated].

135. Bibaud, "Observations," 12.

136. On Heineccius's thought, see generally Kelley, "Gaius noster," 639–40; Peter Stein, Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 53–54; Olivia F. Robinson, T. David Fergus, and William M. Gordon, European Legal History: Sources and Institutions, 2d ed. (London: Butterworths, 1994), 219.

137. Bibaud, Commentaires, 28. Bibaud follows this passage with a Latin quotation from Heineccius advocating that students read widely in the works of authors like Ulrich Huber and Arnold Vinnius.

138. Bibaud, "Observations," 8; Bibaud, Corrigé du code civil, 8.

139. François-Maximilien Bibaud, Essai de logique judiciaire: ouvrage qui doit servir d'appréciation, et sur quelques po[in]ts, d'antirrhétique de la Logique juridicaire publiée à Paris, en 1841, par M. Hortensius de St.-Albin ... (Montreal: De Montigny, 1853), 155–56 [CIHM no. 32739].

140. Bibaud, "Étude du droit," 15 April [unpaginated].

141. Useful parallels might be drawn with the reception of foreign jurisprudence elsewhere. See, for example, Stephen Jacobson, "Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective,"Law and History Review 20 (2002): 338–43.

142. Bentham, "Papers Relative to Codification," 117.

143. Jeremy Bentham, "Codification Proposal, Addressed by Jeremy Bentham to All Nations Professing Liberal Opinions," in Bentham," Legislator of the World," 244.

144. Bibaud, for example, mentions Bentham on numerous occasions, and Bentham's writings were regularly reported and translated in French periodicals. See generally Michel Morin, "Portalis v. Bentham? The Objectives Ascribed to Codification of the Civil Law and the Criminal Law in France, England and Canada," in Law Commission of Canada, Perspectives on Legislation: Essays from the 1999 Legal Dimensions Initiative (Ottawa: Law Commission of Canada, 2000), 125–197

145. For Portalis, in preparing a code "the great art is to simplify all while foreseeing all." See Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, "Discours préliminaire sur le projet de Code civil," in Discours, rapports et travaux inédits sur le Code civil (Paris: Joubert, 1844; reprint Caen: Centre de Philosophie politique et juridique, 1989), 6. Articles by and about Portalis appeared periodically in both the Revue Wolowski and the MontrealRevue de législation et jurisprudence.

146. This view of legal change is implicit in the Codification Act, and more explicit evocations of evolutionist ideas can be found for example in many of Bibaud's writings against the commission's work. See also Brierley, "Quebec's Civil Law Codification," 565–66, and see generally Stein, Legal Evolution, 122–23.

147. On the conservatism of the codifiers, especially as regards their use of sources, see especially André Morel, "L'émergence du nouvel ordre juridique instauré par le Code civil du Bas Canada (1866–1890)," in Le nouvel Code civil: interprétation et application. Les Journées Maximilien-Caron 1992 (Montreal: Thémis, 1993), 52–53, 58–59. The same is true of the commissioners' use of Roman law; see Sylvio Normand and Donald Fyson, "Le droit romain comme source du Code civil du Bas Canada,"La revue du notariat 103 (2001): 87–113.

148. It is worth pointing out (though the subject is beyond the scope of this article) that even Judge Day's facilitation of commerce in his reworking of the law of obligations was based closely on Pothier and was certainly not presented as a revolution, but rather as incremental changes "likely to be found practically the most convenient and beneficial"; Civil Code of Lower Canada: First Report, 32.

149. Brierley, "Quebec's Civil Law Codification," 526–42. See also the discussion in Nicholas Kasirer, "Canada's Criminal Law Codification Viewed and Reviewed," McGill Law Journal 35 (1990): 848.

150. Quoted, from his De l'enseignement du droit en France et des réformes dont il a besoin (Paris, 1839), in Motte, Savigny et la France, 119. Laboulaye was urging his fellow French jurists to look to Germany.

151. Savigny, Of the Vocation of Our Age, 18, 73

152. Ibid., 76–77.

153. "An Historical Essay on the Roman Law," 253 (emphasis in original).

154. Denis Sénécal, "Cabinet de lecture Aproissial: lecture de Monsieur Denis Sénécal (étudiant en droit) sur Pothier," La Minerve (20, 23, 27 January 1858).

155. Bouchette, "An Historical Essay on the Roman Law," 254.

156. Moreover, as Brisson points out (La formation d'un droit mixte, 143–44), this conservatism facilitated acceptance of the code (of private law as well as of procedure) by fundamentally conservative judges and lawyers.

157. This is clearly illustrated in the development of Quebec matrimonial property law, as discussed in Jean-Maurice Brisson and Nicholas Kasirer, "The Married Woman in Ascendance, the Mother Country in Retreat: From Legal Colonialism to Legal Nationalism in Quebec Matrimonial Law Reform, 1866–1991," in Canada's Legal Inheritances, ed. DeLloyd J. Guth and W. Wesley Pue (Winnipeg: Canadian Legal History Project, 2001), 409–13, 422–23.

158. This trend toward jurisprudential monism became more pronounced in Quebec after 1866. See especially Morel, "L'émergence du nouvel ordre juridique," 62–63; H. Patrick Glenn, "Quebec: Mixité and Monism," in Studies in Legal Systems: Mixed and Mixing, ed. Esin Örücü, Elspeth Attwooll, and Sean Coyle (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), 1–15; John E. C. Brierley, "Quebec's 'Common Laws' (Droits communs): How Many Are There?" in Mélanges Louis-Philippe Pigeon, ed. Ernest Caparros et al. (Montreal: Wilson & Lafleur, 1989), 119. For a similar phenomenon in common-law Canada, see Baker, "Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought."

159. This jurisprudential comfort factor is explored in Morel, "L'émergence du nouvel ordre juridique," 58–59.


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