| Title: | Fundamental law |
| Original Title: | Loi fondamentale |
| Volume and Page: | Vol. 9 (1765), p. 660 |
| Author: | Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt (biography) |
| Translator: | Henry C. Clark; Christine Dunn Henderson |
| Subject terms: |
Political law
|
| Original Version (ARTFL): | Link |
| Source: | Henry C. Clark, ed., Encyclopedic Liberty: Political Articles in the Dictionary of Diderot and D'Alembert. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2016. With permission. |
| Rights/Permissions: |
This text is protected by copyright and may be linked to without seeking permission. Please see http://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/terms.html for information on reproduction. |
| URL: | http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.740 |
| Citation (MLA): | Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Fundamental law." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Henry C. Clark and Christine Dunn Henderson. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2020. Web. [fill in today's date in the form 18 Apr. 2009 and remove square brackets]. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.740>. Trans. of "Loi fondamentale," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9. Paris, 1765. |
| Citation (Chicago): | Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de. "Fundamental law." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Henry C. Clark and Christine Dunn Henderson. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0003.740 (accessed [fill in today's date in the form April 18, 2009 and remove square brackets]). Originally published as "Loi fondamentale," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 9:660 (Paris, 1765). |
Fundamental law, any primordial law of the constitution of a government.
The fundamental laws of a state, in their fullest extent, are not only the ordinances by which the entire body of the nation determines what should be the form of government and how one will succeed to the throne; [1]1 they are also the conventions between the people and the individual or group on whom sovereignty is conferred—which conventions regulate the manner by which one must govern and prescribe limits to sovereign authority.
These regulations are called fundamental laws because they are the basis and foundation of the state, upon which the edifice of government is built, and because the people regard them as producing its entire strength and security.
It is nonetheless only in what might be called an abusive manner that the word laws is applied to them; for properly speaking, they are veritable conventions. But since these conventions are obligatory between the contracting parties, they have the force of laws themselves.
To assure their success in a limited monarchy, however, the entire body of the nation may reserve to itself the legislative power and the nomination of its magistrates; it may entrust the judicial power and the power of establishing taxes to a senate or a parliament; it may give the monarch the military and executive power, among other prerogatives. If the government is set up on this footing by the primordial act of association, this primordial act bears the name of fundamental laws of the state, because they constitute its security and its liberty. What’s more, such laws do not make sovereignty imperfect; on the contrary, they perfect it and submit the sovereign to the necessity of good conduct by making him, so to speak, impotent to engage in bad conduct.
Let us also add that there is a kind of fundamental laws of right and necessity that are essential to all governments, even in states where sovereignty is, so to speak, absolute, and this law is that of the public good, from which the sovereign cannot stray without to a certain extent failing in his duty.
1. Apparent reference to the Salic Law, a part of which governed the succession to the French throne (excluding female succession) and which was widely viewed as constitutive of France’s fundamental law.