The “National Razor” must have been getting dull by June 23, 1794, at the height of the Terror. The guillotine, which operated on the right bank of Paris, had already cut from the nation hundreds of individuals whose crimes the Revolutionary Tribunal had deemed irreconcilable and unpardonable. That day, its blade added twenty more condemned heads.[1] Meanwhile, across the river, a mere 4.8 kilometer walk from the guillotine, Citizen Brou and Citizen Descotes appeared before a revolutionary court to a much different end.[2] They were attempting to reconcile their differences. Brou had loaned Descotes a horse, which the latter had “unhappily lost.” Now, both citizens hoped that their locally-elected Justice of the Peace, a new revolutionary judge, could mediate a resolution. Brou proposed an indemnity for the mare, which Descotes found just and countered by requesting a repayment plan. Brou consented and the two resolved their dispute without a civil suit.[3]

Historians of the French Revolution have paid far more attention to scenes of conflict, like those at the foot of the guillotine, than to scenes of commonplace reconciliation, like that between Brou and Descotes. In recent years, scholars have turned to studies of violence and nonviolence, battlefield experience, friendships torn apart, and factional maneuvering dripping in the blood of the Terror.[4] These vibrant histories tend to stress the Revolution as a moment of rupture and upheaval, when political changes created significant tears in the social and cultural fabric of society. Although recent historians of Thermidor and the Directory have considered strategies for reconciliation in national politics, the Terror often acts as their point of departure.[5] As such, trauma and its memory continue to orient many narratives.

In contrast, this article asks how everyday citizens reconciled with one another in the context of such strife. Specifically, it examines how citizens forged forgiveness through new judicial audiences without citations at the revolutionary “justice of the peace.” Under the Old Regime, French subjects had had recourse to seigneurial and royal courts for local justice, but the National Assembly drastically overhauled this system in 1789. At new, elected justices of the peace, revolutionary citizens could: resolve conflicts with their neighbors over material resources and crops; collect rent in arrears; confront slanderers; and restore their honor, among other things.[6] Since these new judges could not dispense heavy penalties like imprisonment for civil conflicts, their sentences sought to restore social relationships within neighborhood communities. For the first time, citizens could cooperatively bring their disagreements before their local judge and request that he resolve their civil disputes with a legal judgment or with mediation. In addition, the Assembly required citizens to attempt conciliation in front of a justice of the peace and his judicial team before they could file or appeal a contentious civil suit at the next highest court, the district tribunal.

Using the lens of voluntary audiences (hearings in which both parties came freely), the following case study probes revolutionary forgiveness from two perspectives. First, it focuses on what psychologists have termed “decisional forgiveness,” which produces pragmatic resolutions through practices and procedures. In decisional forgiveness, individuals seek to end conflict and possibly “restore interaction.” As a result, decisional forgiveness buttresses collective “social harmony.” [7] This is not to be confused with “emotional forgiveness,” which requires one party’s “change of heart.” Citizens who compromised to resolve conflicts at the justice of the peace did not necessarily generate warm feelings towards one another. However, they did find common ground and end disputes that had made social or economic relationships untenable. Second, this case study scrutinizes how decisional forgiveness at the justice of the peace was a “more-than-dyadic process.” In other words, it involved many institutions and actors.[8] The visions of state legislators, the composition of local judicial teams, the values of local communities, and, most importantly, the subjectivities of citizens initiating voluntary audiences and electing judges to facilitate their procedures all shaped conciliatory judicial practices.

Although the political landscape informed who citizens elected as judges, citizens’ interpersonal conflicts before the justice of the peace largely transcended factional rivalries from 1790 through 1792. Nonetheless, local resolutions before the justice of the peace engaged national political priorities of forging harmonious relationships among citizens and between the citizen and the state. Judicial mediation and voluntary judgments took shape as both pragmatic strategies and political principles in the hands of the National Assembly and citizen litigants. Given this framework, how did quotidian, cooperative resolutions, like that between Citizen Brou and Descotes, became tools for refashioning the body politic?

This article will first explore the theoretical and administrative impetuses behind inventing the justices of the peace, creating contentious civil procedures without summons, and making attempted conciliation mandatory for large civil disputes. Then, it will inquire how men, women, judges, and their assistants framed such audiences to grapple with the concept of non-adversarial justice. This section will focus on voluntary judgments, a type of case in which both parties came willingly and without citations. Since these audiences were a new type of procedure, the revolutionaries did not have a historical precedent for how to discuss or record them. The deputies spilled much ink detailing jurisdiction and encoding the logistics for filing various procedures at the justices of the peace. However, they only offered a skeletal structure for recording voluntary audiences and gave little insight into how parties might reconcile with one another once inside the courtroom. Therefore, this next section will probe court registers and audience minutes to ask how citizens and their judges characterized, offered, or rejected compromises to resolve local frictions. It will also reveal how the citizens’ courtroom practices harnessed and reinterpreted the deputies’ original visions. Finally, this study will illustrate how, in circumventing lawsuits, voluntary procedures and judicial mediation broke ground for restorative models of civil justice.

When the National Assembly reformed the entire judicial system beginning in August 1789, it sought, on the one hand, to address grievances from French subjects, to correct legal deficiencies from the Old Regime, and to remove privilege from the judiciary. On the other hand, it sought to make courts ubiquitous vehicles for regenerating harmonious social relationships. For most small prerevolutionary disputes and feudal contests, French subjects could bring cases against their neighbors or even lord in local seigneurial courts. However, in their pre-revolutionary cahiers de doléances, citizens across France complained of the many shortcomings of seigneurial and royal justice.[9] In fact, 37% of all Third Estate cahiers demanded reform of the seigneurial justice system.[10] Seeking justice could be a long and costly endeavor in the Old Regime. The plaintiff would need to pay fees to the judge for the audience and to the bailiff for summoning the defendant.[11] Absentee seigneurial judges meant that a significant amount of time could pass between the moment a plaintiff initiated a case and its resolution.[12] Moreover, cases often faced appeal in other seigneurial or royal courts (up to seven total) before parties received a definitive judgment.[13] French subjects had the option to bring some suits to royal courts, but these judicial seats were often in cities more than one day’s journey away for rural inhabitants and required a lost day of work. Any travel expenses would be a risky down payment on an uncertain verdict.[14] Since the seigneurs appointed and paid judicial officials in their courts,[15] disputes with their peasants over feudal issues could more easily end in their favor.[16] Eighteenth-century lords also used their courts to collect more dues to increase their incomes.[17] Of course, both seigneurial and royal courts upheld the Old Regime system of privilege, which applied different law to social, occupational, and religious corporations. By issuing sentences according to estate, guild, and Church status, royal and seigneurial courts protected legal hierarchies.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly in the eyes of the revolutionary deputies, Old Regime courts only resolved adversarial cases, and they multiplied opposing parties to do so. Royal and seigneurial courts only heard lawsuits between subjects. Parties could not jointly petition the courts to decide disputes. Nor did judges mediate conflicts among subjects. This type of adversarial court system played into the hands of lawyers who could profit from the disputing parties. Lawyers prolonged the conflict, generated paperwork, and filed appeals for new cases to multiple their fees.[18] And yet despite these costs in time and money, French subjects were highly litigious. A single family could expect to be involved in four lawsuits for every decade.[19]

Options for other, non-contentious ways to settle civil disputes during the Old Regime had their own drawbacks. French subjects could solicit informal mediators like a parish priest or community leader. These interlocutors could resolve conflicts more quickly and cheaply than seigneurial or royal the courts. However, their availability and reliability were not guaranteed, since no formal institutions or regulations for mediation existed.[20] In the second half of the eighteenth century, Parisians in particular increasingly turned to their neighborhood police as potential conciliators.[21] The neighborhood commissaire sometimes mediated conflicts for free, even holding money or objects in question and acting as a guarantor of compromises. The Parisian guard often mediated bill disputes at the request of wine shop owners.[22] If disputes disrupted communal harmony, opposing parties might find themselves forced to accept mediation by their neighbors.[23] However, all these mediated agreements remained legally weak unless notarized.[24] An arbiter (who could be anyone including a judge) could offer more binding solutions than mediators, but they often charged fees.[25] Because both parties chose the arbiter and agreed to abide by his decision, an arbiter could issue a legally recognized decision that could not be appealed (unless stipulated as a precondition).[26] Parisians sometimes paid police commissaires, most of whom had been trained in law, to formally arbitrate their disputes.[27] Although the monarchy had increased its regulation of arbitration since the sixteenth century,[28] the commissaires and all other arbiters offered their services as private individuals, not as the hand of the state.[29]

As the revolutionary deputies restructured the Old Regime criminal and civil justice systems from August 1789 through 1790, they invented the justices of the peace to address their ideological frustrations with seigneurial civil justice and to rectify its pragmatic shortcomings.[30] The National Assembly drew on prerevolutionary debates, demands from subjects’ cahiers, and historical and foreign precursors to conceptualize this new local court. Some French justices of the peace may have thus been aware of foreign analogues like those of Great Britain and Holland. However, few judges had much knowledge of these courts, and still fewer knew how audiences actually worked inside courtrooms across the Channel and beyond the Département du Nord.[31] And while the barristers and lawyers who became National Assembly deputies would be familiar with Enlightenment debates over judiciary reform, local justices of the peace were likely less versed in these ideas, especially if they did not come from legal professions.[32] Consequently, audiences before the revolutionary justices of the peace were spaces of innovation among citizens and officials. The National Assembly hoped the community judges would: imbue judicial authority with popular legitimacy; make justice quick, economical, and accessible for small-scale contests; and create the fraternal local relations necessary to sustain a harmonious body politic.

In a striking departure from Old Regime legal code, the Assembly decreed that the justices of the peace would serve as free mediators for all citizens with civil conflicts who were not relatives. The deputies reasoned that accessible mediation would reduce lawsuits, limit the need for lawyers, speed up resolutions, reduce arbitration costs, and strengthen communal bonds.[33] Prior to the deputies’ decree, no non-adversarial civil audiences had existed in French law. Judicial mediation thus offered a completely new way to repair and maintain social relationships.[34] Any nonrelative citizens could jointly appear before their justice of the peace to have any conflict mediated that did not concern real property (such as entire buildings and land).[35]

To give teeth to their conciliatory invention, the Assembly required any party who wished to appeal or file a civil suit against another citizen in a district tribunal (for cases over one hundred livres and those involving real property) to first attempt to reconcile their differences before a neighborhood justice of the peace. For issues exceeding a monetary maximum of fifty (and later one hundred) livres among neighbors, the justice of the peace would direct such mandatory attempted conciliation proceedings along with assistants called assessors. This team collectively formed the bureau de paix et de conciliation (bureau of peace and conciliation).[36] Through the deputies’ 1790 invention, attempted conciliation of nonfamily disputes became a mandatory prerequisite to any high stakes, prolonged, civil legal conflict.[37] In one fell swoop, mediation became a judicial tool and conciliation became a common way that French citizens participated in local civil justice. Cloaked with benevolent duties like mediating conflicts and offering quick, small-scale judgments, the justices of the peace were, in the words of one deputy, “essentially conciliators.”[38]

Of course, not all citizens who attempted mediation through the justice of the peace or the bureau de paix et de conciliation could reach a compromise on their private disputes. If citizens requested mediation for small-scale local disputes and the parties failed to find a solution, judges could dispense justice on the spot. Or, the parties could bypass mediation by jointly requesting an immediate judgment and agreeing to abide by its terms. With or without attempted mediation, the justice of the peace could rule on civil cases that “did not involve real property,” were personal, and concerned up to fifty livres without a right to appeal or up to one hundred livres with a right to appeal.[39] The judge could also rule on damages to crops and fields, address property lines and “usurpation” of natural resources, enforce “repairs to rented houses or farms,” order indemnities, assure wages were paid, and take “action for verbal insults, brawls, and assaults” if criminal charges were not filed.[40] To increase court access and speed resolutions, the justice could move to the site of evidence or hear cases anywhere.

Unlike seigneurial courts, the justices of the peace did not collect fees for any of their services. Citizens did pay minimal fees for delivering summons and documents, and they might occasionally pay an expert to value material items. However, before the justices of the peace, citizens could expect to resolve their modest civil disputes at little cost, whether by conciliation, voluntary judgments, or adversarial judgments.[41]

Beyond the purview of civil conflicts, citizens relied on the local judges to legalize non-contentious issues and to quickly address minor criminal infractions. Communities needed judicial authority to emancipate minors, to assign guardianship of children, and to place seals on an individual’s property after death.[42] These crucial non-contentious procedures fell under the umbrella of justice gracieuse.[43] Such procedures had constituted the majority of seigneurial judges’ rulings under the Old Regime. The revolutionary deputies decreed that the justices of the peace would continue seigneurial courts’ paternal tradition of providing justice gracieuse and act as local agents of the benevolent state.[44] The deputies also initially charged the justices of the peace with “correctional” authority. This empowered the justices to try violations or petty crimes whose penalties were a “gesture of contrition,” modest fines, or three days maximum of imprisonment.[45] After the July 1791 Champ de Mars massacre, the deputies further ordered the justices to try people accused of disturbing public order.[46] Thus, the justice of the peace also worked with the local police to resolve minor crimes, regulatory infractions, and public disturbances. In short, the justice of the peace addressed disruptions which frayed communal relationships and required immediate repair.

To legitimize the new justices of the peace, the deputies reimagined how judges would be vested with authority. In August 1789, the National Assembly ended the sale of venal offices, including those in royal courts, and stripped former nobles of their power to appoint local judges.[47] Instead of deriving legitimacy from royal concession, the revolutionaries’ justice of the peace was elected by local citizens every two years, was paid by the state, and enforced nationalized standards for civic equity. Whereas electoral assemblies mediated the appointment of all other nonmunicipal officials, the justice of the peace was so critical to local relationships that citizens directly elected their judge.[48] The elected judge swore his oath of loyalty “to the Nation and the King” before municipal representatives and he promised “to maintain with all [his] power the Constitution of the kingdom, decreed by the National Assembly and accepted by the King.”[49] To be eligible for consideration, citizens needed to be at least thirty years old and pay ten days’ wages in taxes.[50] Although previously resources for local resolutions, priests were barred from election. Legislators deemed the “ecclesiastical functions” of their “public office of religion” “incompatible with those of judges.”[51] One judge sat in most cantons—larger populations received more judgeships—and each section of Paris had its own justice.[52] Six elected and unpaid assessors assisted the Parisian justices with their tasks and one salaried secretary kept registers, recorded audience minutes, and drew up notices. The assessors, like the judges, had two-year terms.[53] Powered by neighborhood elections rather than appointments from above, the justice of the peace system ensured that communal interests and local understandings of conflict resolution informed adversarial and conciliatory audiences.

Unsurprisingly, most communities entrusted their first judgeships to local citizens considered to be legal experts: men already versed in law or who had formerly occupied magisterial positions.[54] Elected in 1790, these initial justices shaped revolutionary conciliation and voluntary judgments by combining litigants’ proposals with Old Regime litigation vocabulary. Conciliation and voluntary judgments were novel civil procedures to the French. In its major decrees of August, September, and October 1790 and its additional decrees of winter and spring of 1791, the Assembly sought to offer administrative directions to the inaugural justices and to clarify their jurisdiction. However, the Assembly’s legislation focused more on regulating how citizens could initiate mediations, start lawsuits, and advance among civil courts than on what happened during an audience inside the courtroom.[55] The deputies offered the elected justices only skeletal procedural formulas for hearing audiences and for recording their courtroom minutes. The Assembly hoped its limited audience directives would remove the need for lawyers, focus on “truths” produced by citizen’s oral testimonies, and reduce costly and time-consuming paperwork.[56] But this left the practice of judicial mediation and requested judgments largely undefined. A few ambitious editors attempted to wrangle the deputies’ initial disparate decrees and instructional procedures into legal guides for justices of the peace.[57] As will be discussed, the new judges, their assessors, and their clerks wrestled with describing what was happening among citizens during audiences despite the word bank provided by barristers’ backgrounds and the revolutionaries’ multi-volume guidebooks.

The Assembly and compiled guides offered the judges a singular procedural path for attempted mandatory conciliation that always assumed the judge, not the parties, drove mediation proceedings. In its formula for successful conciliation minutes as well as in its guiding principles, an instructional Code de la justice de paix (Code of the Justice of the Peace) from 1791 portrayed the justice as the main actor who offered sage suggestions to the parties and led them to mutual agreement. In the sample formula approved by the Assembly, the hypothetical judge and his assessors conclude that “having proposed to them [the parties] the means of arrangement that appeared to us [the judge] the most conforming to equity and the circumstances, accords them.”[58] The Code’s model procès-verbal thus decenters the citizens as actors and portrays them as receiving the action and wisdom granted by the judges. Similarly, guiding principles in the Code assumed that in resolutions, justices would offer “the means of conciliation that appeared the most reasonable to them” and that they “bring them [the parties] to reconcile.”[59] The guidebooks offered even less instruction for procedures in which the parties cooperatively sought out a judgment. Although the Code did offer one such voluntary audience as an example, its only model procedure assumed that the justice would render the final judgment by the himself after the petitioners requested a decision. In short, none of the model procedures and formulas from the Assembly and the 1791 Code de la justice de paix included the possibility of litigants negotiating resolutions along with the judge or leading the proceedings outright.[60] Yet, in reality, the justices frequently took their cues in jointly requested audiences from the citizens before them.

The deputies’ especially thin description of how voluntary judgments would work and their limited vision of how such audiences would unfold render these procedures challenging yet fertile grounds for analysis. On the one hand, since these procedures did not develop according to one standard trajectory and judicial vocabulary morphed to stretch across untrodden judicial terrain, it is difficult to systemically compare voluntary judgments. On the other hand, since citizens and judicial officials forged these unprecedented proceedings through their own practices, the minutes of such audiences offer a rare window into the subjectivities and inventive agency of civil parties as they forged decisional forgiveness in a revolutionary context. Whereas contentious suits involving citations at the justice of the peace drew upon preexisting adversarial structures and well-worn legal terms, non-adversarial procedures offered new territory for citizens and their judges to practice conflict resolution, to reinvent local conciliatory strategies, and to imbue them with revolutionary forms of legitimacy. Left without comprehensive practices for new requested judgments, the early justices of the peace and the citizens before them established their own parameters for compromise, forged cooperative judicial procedures, and shaped a new restorative civil justice in the process.

To ask how revolutionary citizens and judicial officers attempted to conceptualize, articulate, and practice decisional forgiveness at the justices of the peace, the following section analyzes the 174 contentious civil cases that inhabitants of the Parisian Section des Arcis brought before their judge during 1792.[61] In the pre-Terror period of 1792, the streets of the butcher-filled section ran more with animal blood than human blood, but a citizen traversing the section geographically traced the tenuous revolutionary transition.[62] Les Arcis was quite literally sandwiched between the Grand Châtelet, a recently defunct prison and seat of royal justice in the capital, and the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of the city commercial tribunal and new municipal government.[63] Les Arcis was the most densely populated of the Parisian sections. About 12,000 people called the neighborhood home by 1792 of which only 1,800 were active citizens who could vote.[64] However, all men over the age of majority and legally independent women had equal access to the justice of the peace in his neighborhood home or office.[65]

As part of the capital, the Section des Arcis experienced the types of conflict most commonly associated with the Revolution: popular protests, factional disputes, and physical violence.[66] Analyzing a population in the midst of the closely studied confrontations of 1792 enables us to test the conciliatory capacities of judicial reform against the backdrop of revolution-generated contests. In addition, examining the civil procedures initiated at the justice of the peace merely sixteen months after the judges were brought into existence allows us to inquire how citizens envisioned and helped shape voluntary audiences in their infancy.

Examining the full slate of cited and voluntary civil judgments in the Section des Arcis from 1792 also allows us to analyze periods before and after the first transition of office at the justice of the peace. Pierre-Marie Simon, a lawyer, was elected as the first justice of the peace in Les Arcis and, along with the other forty-seven Parisian justices, was sworn in for a two-year term in January 1791.[67] Of his six elected assessors, one was a man of law, two were Châtelet lawyers, two were merchants, and one was an architect.[68] However, when the sans-culottes overthrew the monarchy in August 1792, the Commune removed sitting judicial officials including Judge Simon’s team. New elections quickly took place.[69] Whereas the first Parisian justices of the peace were largely versed in law like Simon, the 1792 elections seated a wider array of artisans, merchants and professionals as judges and assessors. Unlike their predecessors, these judges were often backed by sans-culottes and were elected for their more radical political reputations.[70] Florentin Phulpin, a former school teacher whose wife was a wholesale thread merchant, won the judgeship for Les Arcis.[71] Phulpin had earned recognition by working on the District committee and leading a political club aligned with the Jacobins.[72] He was also one of five new Parisian justices who had attacked the Bastille.[73] All six of Phulpin’s assessors were merchants or artisans.[74] Under both Judge Simon and Judge Phulpin, citizens’ local judicial understandings and tactics strayed from the Assembly’s single-minded notion of judge-led compromise.

Before Judge Simon and Judge Phulpin, 348 neighbors appeared for 174 contentious audiences, arbitration hearings, and voluntary civil judgments.[75] Clerk Dosmond, a lawyer from the section (relative of the architect Dosmond who was an assessor), recorded the minutes of these cases and kept Judge Simon’s register, which listed the summary judgment for each contentious civil case. After the mid-August purge, Dosmond’s elected successor, Clerk Laurent, finished the 1792 register and recorded minutes for the remaining 1792 audiences under Judge Phulpin.[76] The vast majority of citizens arrived with disputes with monetized solutions such as the unpaid court fees that Citizen Garuieu owed Citizen Daras.[77] Like citizens Blandon and Raymond who sought arbitration over back rent, the citizens of les Arcis frequently initiated audiences to collect rent for lodging, to end leases, or to furnish apartments.[78] Such lodging-related issues accounted for fifty cases. Seventeen of the citizens had loaned out a specific sum of money, five asked for a longtime debt to be repaid, two requested repayment for a loan made in time of need, and one sought repayment for an amount due from a prior court case. Unpaid debts for furnishing merchandise, goods, or artisanal objects generated twenty-eight cases. Unpaid compensation for labor, wages, salary, or services accounted for sixteen audiences. Fourteen citizens sought payment for food, thirteen citizens sought the return of or compensation for belongings, and six sought to settle formal contracts and accounts.[79] On average, citizens demanded sixty-two livres, eight sous, and seven deniers for cases with monetary solutions.[80]

For the purposes of recordkeeping, each judge, their assessors, and their clerks classified civil cases as either: arbitration sentences; audiences to nominate arbiters; voluntary appearances (jugements volontaires/comparutions volontaires); or left them unlabeled. The unlabeled group included all cases that were contentious and included summoned parties. In other words, these unlabeled cases were adversarial cases—the only kind of civil cases heard under the Old Regime. As the pre-revolutionary standard case, they needed no further qualification. Such cases always involved citations (summons). The plaintiff requesting damages paid a bailiff to summon the defendant to court where a judgment could be made.[81] For example, Citizen Bauche summoned Citizen Verdier before Judge Simon in order to recoup eighteen livres for rent, loaned money for food, interest on the debt, and the cost of his citation. Since Citizen Verdier did not show up and the requested amount was below fifty livres (within the justice of the peace’s jurisdiction), Clerk Dosmond composed the legal minutes like a suit with a guilty party: he described the judicial officers as “condemning the defaulter to pay” (my emphasis) having “judged” the case.[82]

However, in the Section des Arcis, traditional contentious cases—those with citations—were in the minority in the 1792 audiences not requiring attempted conciliation by law. Rather than summon a neighbor court, the citizens of Arcis jointly petitioned the justice to remedy their disputes more often than not. Neighbors initiated one hundred and fifteen voluntary judgments, requested arbitration in ten additional cases, and jointly nominated an external arbiter in three others. These one hundred and twenty-eight cooperative procedures far outnumbered the forty-nine cases of one hundred livres or less in which neighbors summoned the opposing party to court.[83] In this regard, the deputies appear to have succeeded in offering a compelling place for litigants to appear of their own accord. Appearing without a summons before the justice of the peace allowed citizens to receive on-the-spot arbitration, to attempt to reconcile their differences through mediation, or to request voluntary judgments for modest disputes.

In their legislation, the revolutionary deputies had described the non-adversarial, contentious judgments that proved popular in les Arcis as “voluntary.” However, they had muddied pre-existing notions of judicial agency in doing so. During the Old Regime, the only “voluntary” cases were cases of justice gracieuse (covering issues of guardianship, placing seals, etc.). These cases were, by definition, non-contentious. They focused on issues in which private parties did not make claims on one another[84] and in which judges passed acts on behalf of the state.[85] Old Regime law considered justice gracieuse to be “voluntary” in a paternal sense: seigneurial judges legally “accord[ed]” or “refuse[ed] or retract[ed] graces” to subjects.[86] In contrast to cases of justice gracieuse, all Old Regime civil cases were contentious and took the form of adversarial disputes between private parties. Thus, under the Old Regime, the nature of the judicial issue, rather than any action by the private parties, classified cases as “voluntary” or “contentious”. Herein lay the major problem for conceptualizing, practicing, and recording voluntary judgments at the revolutionary justices of the peace: Since judicial mediation did not exist as an option in the seigneurial courts and all civil cases between private parties had been adversarial, local courts had no foundation for discussing justice willingly initiated by both conflicting parties. For the first time, both parties could appear of their own accord, without a citation, to resolve a civil dispute. This novel type of civil audience necessitated inventing new categories or expanding old ones to characterize cases in the neighborhood registers of justices of the peace.

As it passed legislation and issued procedural guidelines for the justices of the peace, the Assembly wrestled with what “voluntary” might mean in revolutionary justice. It explained that the “noncontentious matters” under justice gracieuse were “call[ed] of voluntary or extrajudiciary jurisdiction, because they are conducted for disagreements and for cases where there is no dispute.”[87] Here, the deputies’ use of “voluntary” seemed to center on the case’s subject matter as it had in the Old Regime. Yet, the deputies also started to use “voluntary” in a different juridical sense: they insisted that the registers of the justice of the peace list all contentious cases and “all the affairs in which the parties present themselves voluntarily before the justice of the peace without citation.”[88] The deputies likewise insisted that “the parties will always be able to present themselves voluntarily and without citation before the justice of the peace, while declaring that they demand judgment from him” (emphasis in original).[89] The revolutionary deputies thus began to harness “voluntary” to describe parties who arrived without citation in search of a judgment.

As 348 litigants converged to resolve civil disputes at their home offices and elsewhere,[90] Judge Simon, Judge Phulpin, their respective assessors, their clerks, and the citizens of the neighborhood struggled to define and characterize these new requested judgments on the ground. The officials’ haziness appears most fundamentally in their ambiguous use of “jugement volontaire” (“voluntary judgment”) and “comparution volontaire” (“voluntary appearance”) to categorize the same kind of cases in their register. By keeping “voluntary” constant across the two terms, officials consistently signaled this adjective as the defining trait for classifying the cases. Since the clerks only used “voluntary” to describe cases whose parties appeared without a citation, their terminology hinged on parties’ willingness to come before the justice of the peace for a jointly requested judgment. Their minutes regularly underscored the cooperative nature of these audiences by introducing the parties as those who “have required from us judgment in relation to a difficulty [or dispute] arisen between them of which here is the object...”[91]

Thus, for the first time, notions of voluntary justice incorporated civil cases in which private disputes existed, but in which both parties came to court of their own accord. This was a completely new way of legally classifying cases. In the pre-revolutionary system, the major divisions in law concerned the type of infraction–civil or criminal–not the disposition of the parties towards one another. Afterall, all contentious civil cases had been adversarial. The revolutionaries kept the practice of first categorizing a dispute as a civil or criminal matter according to the state’s legal parameters. However, in neighborhood courts, the revolutionaries recalibrated the defining trait of civil disputes by focusing on the parties’ confrontational or cooperative legal actions. Contentious disputes could now have cooperative resolutions at the justice of the peace. This dramatic shift in judicial practice highlighted the possibilities for a regenerated body politic built upon local relationships.

In contrast to their consistent use of “voluntary,” the judicial officials from les Arcis were less sure of the procedural noun to describe requested judgments. Would “voluntary judgment” overemphasize the judge’s final legal act (“jugement”) and underemphasize the parties’ initiative, creative agency, and ultimate consent? Would a “voluntary appearance” comparing two parties inaccurately suggest that no contentious legal decision had been rendered? Judge Simon’s clerk could not come up with an internal solution to the conceptual confusion. He and his secretary switched labels for three months. On January 3, 1792, they recorded one requested judgment as a comparution volontaire[92] but labeled a similar audience the next week as a jugement voluntaire.[93] In February, the judicial duo returned to recording an audience settling loaned money as a comparution volontaire[94] only to again use jugement volontaire for like cases mid-March and after.[95] Judge Phulpin and Clerk Laurent continued this precedent of using jugement volontaire (abbreviated as “JV”) even though published Codes de la justice de paix used the term comparution volontaire.[96] A judgment, after all, reinforced that there was a point of contention that was legally resolved, even if the judicial decision had been sought voluntarily. When Phulpin’s clerk started his new register in 1793, he abandoned all attempts to legally classify individual cases. In the new year’s register, Clerk Laurent described all “Causes for Audiences” as generic “Demands,” and gave up denoting case types in the marginal summaries of audience minutes.[97] Requested resolutions seemed difficult to conceptualize as judicial acts.

Officials’ minutes of these new jugements/comparutions volontaires illuminate how people appeared before the justice of the peace by their own design to resolve conflicts and repair local relationships. Jointly appearing before the justice of the peace placed significant procedural power in the hands of the parties since no assessors participated in jugements/comparutions volontaires.[98] Over the course of 1792 in the Section des Arcis, willing parties determined the tone and tactics of their negotiated resolutions and agreed to judgments on their own terms. Their cooperative strategies frequently diverged from the judge-led procedures that the deputies had imagined.

Many parties mutually presented the judge with the most advantageous trajectory for resolving their dispute. For example, on February 14, 1792, citizens Centner and Porcher, both cobblers, voluntarily appeared before Judge Simon with an unusual proposal: they requested to merge elements from cooperative mediation with a legally-binding resolution. Centner and Porcher sought a definitive end to “a difficulty that arose between them,” and, as such “required a judgment from [the court].” In other words, Centner and Porcher desired a mutually-agreed upon decision that was legally binding rather than an unenforceable declaration that would have resulted from mediation.[99] Because of this cooperative goal, however, the case first unfolded like a mediation attempt: Centner testified that he had loaned Porcher eight livres, fifteen sous. Porcher freely “recognized owing” the money but “the impossibility in which he finds himself of satisfying the issue at the present” meant that he needed more time to repay the debt. Porcher promised “to conform himself to” a three-month timeline. Having witnessed the compromise, the judge merely confirmed “we will judge to accord/grant” the offer. [100] Then, each party signed to give his consent.

“Deferring to the parties’ request,” Judge Simon then took the judicial lead to make Porcher and Centner’s agreement legally binding. He adopted procedures to transform their own compromise into his ruling. He “condemn[ed]” Porcher to repay Centner twenty sous each Sunday until free of his debt. In Porcher and Centner’s case, Judge Simon judicially certified the citizens’ plan by closing the audience “Done and Judged by us the justice of the peace.”[101] Yet, Simon’s ruling merely reproduced the parties’ planned compromise. In their cooperative voluntary case, Porcher and Centner creatively harnessed the justice of the peace to overcome a point of contention, to negotiate a legally enforceable repayment plan, and to maintain their relationship.

Citizen Dauptain, a paper merchant, and Citizen Dumenil likewise arrived before Judge Phulpin to develop a personalized plan to solve their dispute in February 1792, and they wished to avoid a case at the district tribunal for the significant sum. Being on the brink of “entering into a lawsuit” over a supply of paper worth 848 livres 16 sous, Dauptain confirmed that he could not “hold himself to his debt without abandoning his [other] interests” but that the two “prefer[ed] to avoid the annoyance and length of a legal suit [and] agree at this moment on these facts” in the judge’s presence. During the audience, the two parties worked to choose an arbiter as well as contingency plans should the arbiter find a discrepancy over the amount owed. In the writeup of this decision, Judge Phulpin’s guiding hand is muted. The justice of the peace is completely absent in the details except as the person to whom Dauptain and Dumenil reported their conflict, outlined their promised compromise to arbitrate, and designated their choice of arbiter. Although ultimately filed as an “arbitration sentence” the final “sentence” is actually an agreement between Dauptain and Dumenil to nominate an arbiter. It stated that if “the parties cannot agree, they declare from that moment to choose and name for their arbiter Mr. Chabot merchant papermaker, rue St. Antoine, to whose decision they promise to hold themselves, without raising any new obstacles.” Instead of having “judged” the case, the clerk recorded the decision as “made and drawn up in accord with these Sirs Dauptain and Dumenil.”[102] As this case and the previous one illustrate, voluntary negotiations at the justice of the peace allowed citizens to resolve disagreements and repair their personal relationships in a manner that favored their own wishes over the directives of law codes or external pressures.[103]

In these early voluntary audiences at the justices of the peace, citizens frequently defined the terms for repairing ruptures. The National Assembly may have set the institutional framework for mediation and requested judgments, but parties and judges set the socio-cultural terms for decisional forgiveness within the courtroom. In local audiences, parties and judges articulated the roles they expected citizens and the state to play in resolving conflict that disrupted a cooperative community of equal citizens. Both groups thus shaped judicial conciliation and voluntary procedures as a political practice. Individuals’ compromises before the justices of the peace reveal the way that citizens and the state practiced decisional forgiveness and forged a reciprocal social contract through everyday conflict. Resolving ordinary conflicts both catalyzed and was informed by extraordinary political change.

When the National Assembly instituted mediation and voluntary judgments at the justice of the peace in 1790, it sought to resolve everyday tensions, to stabilize social relationships, and to encourage order during the regime change. In contrast to the tribunals of the Terror which “abus[ed]... judicial norms for the purposes of sociopolitical transformation,” judicial conciliation sought to transform political relationships among citizens by reconceptualizing personal ones.[104] Non-adversarial and cooperative audiences between citizens who had formerly held assorted corporate privileges and legal statuses provided transitional spaces for “learning” how to inhabit and practice new civil equality.[105] Non-contentious and voluntary civil justice promised to provide pragmatic local resolutions and to foster fraternal relationships across the nation.

The revolutionary transition in decisional forgiveness and its novel approach of redistributing social, political, and judicial agency created conceptual openings for French justice. When the revolutionary deputies made mediation at the justice of the peace a prerequisite for large civil suits and opened the door for voluntary judgment of private conflicts, a nascent system of restorative civil justice dethroned reparative justice as the leitmotif of the state.[106] Reparative justice, which had simply calculated damages, became only one aspect in civil cases.[107] In its place, voluntary civil justice focused on discerning financial and nonfinancial amends and on mending parties’ relationships within communal networks. The French justice of the peace model insisted that civil parties (through elections, cooperative justice, and conciliation attempts) and the state (through court structures) had a responsibility to repair grievances, to stabilize society, and to make relationships functional. These themes reverberate in modern restorative justice, which was invented as part of twentieth-century criminal law. Modern restorative justice seeks to go beyond retribution and “a strictly legal rule-based approach to calculating measurable damages.” Instead, it arranges for all parties harmed “to come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offense” and creates space for “microreconciliation within communities.”[108] Like revolutionary conciliation, modern restorative justice charges both citizens and the state with solving local conflict and laying the foundation for future relationships. The “government is responsible for preserving a just order” by creating fair procedures and institutions while “the community [is responsible] for establishing a just peace” by engaging in flexible dialogue.[109] Restorative criminal procedures, like the revolutionary conciliatory ones that broke ground before it, insist that the parties themselves negotiate interpersonal transgressions to repair relationships.[110]

Other elements introduced by judicial conciliation resurfaced in the transitional justice models of the twentieth century. Transitional justice seeks “to deal with the past in the aftermath of violent conflict or dictatorial regimes” by “redress[ing] past wrongs, vindicat[ing] the dignity of victims, and provid[ing] justice in times of transition.”[111] Unlike revolutionary mediation, transitional justice often involves deep trauma rather than civil disruptions, addresses sustained conflict rather short-term disputes, and is intended to be a temporary type of justice rather than a permanent one.[112] However, transitional justice followed in the footsteps of revolutionary non-adversarial justice by emphasizing accountability, transparency, reparations, and communal repair, to produce a future promise and societal vision. Like its revolutionary forerunner, transitional justice both reforms and institutionalizes egalitarian processes to advance “democracy and the rule of law” during a regime change.[113]

From 1789 through 1792, the revolutionaries reconceptualized corporate law and the exclusively adversarial justice system of the Old Regime. In the National Assembly, the deputies instituted judicial mediation and voluntary judgments to foster egalitarian civil relationships. Local communities shaped this radical transition towards conciliatory justice while resolving everyday disputes at the justices of the peace. The Assembly’s aspirations for fraternal relationships guided by wise judges informed judicial codes, but ultimately conflicting parties offered solutions that they thought aligned with what citizens owed one another. Thus, repairs among citizens were not prescribed by the state: they were imagined by citizens as they reconciled their personal conflicts in the context of the revolutionary project. While compiling their registers and minutes, judicial officials struggled to classify and describe the new conciliatory justice creatively unfolding before them. Their inconsistencies reflect a society wrestling with the nature of judicial authority in an egalitarian environment. In practicing revolutionary mediation and resolving quotidian conflicts, citizens and judges reshaped the tenor of civil justice, created conceptual openings for modern judicial models, and ultimately redefined the equitable and cooperative relationships at the heart of the new body politic.

Notes

The author thanks Micah Alpaugh and Anthony Crubaugh for their productive feedback on the penultimate version of this article. Mette Harder and Ronen Steinberg offered perceptive insights on justice and the Terror. Funding for research was provided by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

    1. Liste des Victimes du Tribunal Révolutionnaire à Paris (Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1911), 84-85.return to text

    2. This distance of 4.8 kilometers refers to the space between the Barrière du Trône and the Luxembourg Gardens. The Convention had moved the guillotine to its eastern location on June 9, 1794. John Wilson Croker, History of the Guillotine: Revised from the “Quarterly Review” (London: John Murray, 1853), 80.return to text

    3. “Procès-Verbal de Conciliation Entre Citoyens Brou et Descotes,” le 23 juin 1794, Box D11 U1 4, Section de Luxembourg, Actes de Juridictions Gracieuses, an II, 5 messidor an II, Archives de Paris (hereafter AdP).return to text

    4. Jean-Clément Martin, Micah Alpaugh, and Arno Mayer have examined violence and nonviolence; Sophie Wahnich has compared modern terrorism and the Terror; and Timothy Tackett and Marisa Linton have unveiled how politics tore relationships apart. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2013); Micah Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution: Political Demonstrations in Paris, 1787-1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Jean-Clément Martin, Violence et révolution. Essai sur la naissance d’un mythe national (Paris: Le Seuil, 2006) ; Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (London New York: Verso, 2012); Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). return to text

    5. Anne Sa’adah, “Forgiving without Forgetting: Political Reconciliation and Democratic Citizenship,” French Politics and Society 10, no. 3 (1992): 94; Ronen Steinberg, “Transitional Justice in the Age of the French Revolution,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 2 (2013): 267-285; Ronen Steinberg, The Afterlives of the Terror: Facing the Legacies of Mass Violence in Postrevolutionary France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019); Laura Mason, “Never was a Plot so Holy: Gracchus Babeuf and the End of the French Revolution.” in Conspiracy in the French Revolution, ed. Peter Campbell, Thomas Kaiser, and Marisa Linton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 172-188; Laura Mason, “Thermidor and the Myth of Rupture” in The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution, ed. David Andress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 521-537.return to text

    6. Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 307-317; Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice: Local Courts and Rural Society in Southwest France, 1750-1800 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 158-159.return to text

    7. Joshua N. Hook, Everett L. Worthington, and Shawn O. Utsey, “Collectivism, Forgiveness, and Social Harmony,” The Counseling Psychologist 37, no. 6 (August 1, 2009): 824, 825.return to text

    8. Joachim Kadima Kadiangandu et al., “Conceptualizations of Forgiveness: Collectivist-Congolese Versus Individualist-French Viewpoints,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 38, no. 4 (2007): 432-433. Parul Bakhshi, Michelle Girard, and Etienne Mullet, “Conceptualizations of Forgiveness,” European Psychologist 9, no. 2 (2004).return to text

    9. Anthony Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, xv; Woloch, The New Regime, 301; Guillaume Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix de Paris: 1790-1838 (Paris: Éditions Loysel, 1994), 23-58.return to text

    10. John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 112. return to text

    11. Since seigneurial justices’ salaries were often inadequate, judges charged parties fees to supplement their income. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 15-16.return to text

    12. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 25.return to text

    13. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 11; Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 24.return to text

    14. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 26.return to text

    15. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 3.return to text

    16. Woloch, The New Regime, 297.return to text

    17. Jeremy Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (Rochester: University Rochester Press, 2008), 3.return to text

    18. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 173.return to text

    19. Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism, ix.return to text

    20. Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism, 120-122. David Garrioch, “The People of Paris and their Police in the Eighteenth Century: Reflections on the Introduction of a ‘Modern’ Police Force” European History Quarterly, 24 (1994), 529.return to text

    21. Garrioch, “The People of Paris and their Police,” 521.return to text

    22. Garrioch, “The People of Paris and their Police,” 518-519.return to text

    23. Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism, 121.return to text

    24. On the use of notaries and contracts to settle disputes out of court, see Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism, 125.return to text

    25. National Assembly, “Loi Sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” reprinted in Lois, et Actes du Gouvernement, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1806), 376-377. Because judges could be hired as private arbiters, local judges could occupy an “infrajudiciary” space in the Old Regime. Xavier Rousseaux, “Entre accommodement local et contrôle étatique. Pratiques judiciaires et non-judiciaires dans le règlement des conflits en Europe médiévale et modern,” in L’infrajudiciaire du moyen âge à l’époque contemporaine, ed. Benoît Garnot (Dijon: Édition universitaires de Dijon, 1996), 99, 102-104.return to text

    26. Carine Jallamion, “Arbitrage forcé et justice d’État pendant la Révolution française d’après l’exemple de Montpellier,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 350 (2007), 69-70.return to text

    27. Garrioch, “The People of Paris and their Police,” 519, 525.return to text

    28. Jean-Jacques Clère, “L’arbitrage révolutionnaire. Apogée et déclin d’une institution (1790-1806)” Revue de l’arbitrage (janvier-février 1981), 4.return to text

    29. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 27.return to text

    30. Michael Fitzsimmons, The Remaking of France: The National Assembly and the Constitution of 1791 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108.return to text

    31. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 102-103, 107-110.return to text

    32. On the barristers who became deputies from Paris and on how barrister deputies influenced early judicial reform, see Michael Fitzsimmons, The Parisian Order of Barristers and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 38-51.return to text

    33. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 18.return to text

    34. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 23.return to text

    35. A. C. Guichard, Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (Dijon: Imprimerie de P. Causse, 1791), 339.return to text

    36. “Loi Sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” reprinted in Lois, et Actes du Gouvernement, vol. 1, 390. return to text

    37. Woloch, The New Regime, 307, 310; Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 176. The deputies created separate “family tribunals” to arbitrate contests among family members like divorce, custody, and inheritance, which they considered special issues. However, the Directory severely limited these tribunals in 1795, sending most family disputes into the hands of the justice of the peace and his assessors. See Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See also Woloch, The New Regime, 313, 316 and Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 187. For the hierarchy of civil and criminal appellate courts, see Xavier Rousseaux, “Un Architecture pour la Justice: Organisation Judiciaire et Procédure Pénale (1789-1815),” in Révolutions et justice pénale en Europe, modèles français et traditions nationales, 1780-1830/Evolution and Criminal justice, French models and national traditions, 1780-1830, ed. Xavier Rousseaux, Marie‑Sylvie Dupont‑Bouchat, and Claude Vael (Paris: L’Harmattan), 1999.return to text

    38. Deputy Pison, le 8 juillet 1790, Archives Parlementaires, Mavidal and Laurent, ed., series 1, vol. 16: 749.return to text

    39. To appeal eligible cases from the justice of the peace, citizens filed their appeal at the district tribunal. Woloch, The New Regime, 309; Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 93. On the right to appeal sums initially from 50 to 100 livres see le 8 juillet 1790, Archives Parlementaires, series 1, vol. 16: 74; Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 10-11; “Loi sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” 383.return to text

    40. “Loi sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” 381.return to text

    41. The justice of the peace and his clerk could charge a maximum of three livres for auxiliary judicial services such as “notifications of judgments, preparation of documents, placing and raising of seals” and up to twelve livres “for total costs of the procedure and judgment.” Richard M. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris, September 1791-November 1794 (Frimaire Year III)” Past & Present 52 (1971): 59, 60. return to text

    42. “Loi sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” 381-382.return to text

    43. Woloch, The New Regime, 310.return to text

    44. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 24.return to text

    45. Woloch, The New Regime, 357-358.return to text

    46. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 64.return to text

    47. Woloch, The New Regime, 303.return to text

    48. Woloch, The New Regime, 36, 61, 308.return to text

    49. “Loi sur l’Organisation judiciaire, le 24 août 1790,” 387-388.return to text

    50. Citizens had to pay ten days’ wages in taxes to qualify for a departmental office. Woloch, The New Regime, 308; Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 89.return to text

    51. On the decree of August 26, 1790, see Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 3.return to text

    52. Woloch, The New Regime, 38; Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 1. Citing the decree of August 16, 1790 Title 3, Article 2.return to text

    53. Justices elsewhere only had four assessors. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 60; le 8 juillet 1790, Archives Parlementaires, series 1, vol. 16: 747. return to text

    54. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 67.return to text

    55. The National Assembly published several supplemental decrees regarding the justice of the peace and his judicial team throughout the winter and spring of 1790-1791. They also outlined procedural instructions and model formulas which editors compiled and sold as justice of the peace codes and manuals.return to text

    56. “Décret contenant règlement pour la procédure en la justice de paix, précédé de l’exposé fait à l’Assemblée nationale, par M. Thouret, au nom du comité de constitution,” in Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 23-25.return to text

    57. Some surviving pre-1793 works include: Code de justice de paix (Paris: Imprimerie de Nyon, 1790); Manuel des Bureaux de Paix et de Jurisprudence charitable, contenant des Instructions et la solution de beaucoup de questions relatives aux Bureaux de Paix., aux fonctions des Membres qui les composent... (Paris: Knapen, 1792).return to text

    58. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 94.return to text

    59. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 202-203.return to text

    60. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 79.return to text

    61. “Registre: Causes d’audience, des Sentences arbitrales, et des Jugements volontaires, Année 1792,” Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis 1791 to 1792, Jugements et Actes de Juridiction Gracieuse, AdP; This box also contains the corresponding minutes from the Section des Arcis from 1792.return to text

    62. Vincent Denis, “Police et ordre public dans les rues du Paris révolutionnaire: les sections des Arcis et du Louvre en 1791” Crime, Histoire & Sociétés / Crime, History & Societies 20, no. 1 (2016): 4.return to text

    63. Richard Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735-1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 26-27; Lucian Faucou et al., “Plan de La Ville de Paris, Période Révolutionnaire (1790-1794): Exécuté Conformément à La Décision Prise Par Le Conseil Municipal de Paris Dans Sa Séance Du 30 Décembre 1887,” 5 x 79 cm, Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, A 315, 99, https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000851744. return to text

    64. Morris Slavin, The French Revolution in Miniature: Section Droits-De-L'Homme, 1789-1795 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 27-28; Ernest Mellié, Les Sections de Paris pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Société de l’histoire de la Révolution française, 1898), 30.return to text

    65. Antoine-Joseph Thorillon (pseud. Minau de La Mistringue), Lettre circulaire au sujet des décrets concernant la juridiction de juge de paix, signée Thorillon (1791), 5, BnF Lb40 1855. return to text

    66. On popular demonstrations in revolutionary Paris, see Alpaugh, Non-Violence and the French Revolution.return to text

    67. Sigismond Lacroix, ed., Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution, le 16 janvier 1791, series 2, vol. 2 (New York: AMS Press, 1974), 151-153.return to text

    68. Laurent D’Houry, ed., Almanach royal de France, Année Commune M.DCC. XCI (Paris: Imprimerie de la Veuve de Houry, 1793), 572.return to text

    69. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 65.return to text

    70. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 62, 67, 70-71. return to text

    71. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 170; Anne Levesque Femme Phulpin, “Le Citoyen Phulpin, Juge de Paix de la Section des Arcis à la Commission” (1794), Box W 120, dossier 1, pièce 55, Archives nationales; “Mémoire to Comité de sûreté générale,” le 13 floréal an II, Box F7 477472, Dossier nº286: Phulpin, Archives nationales. return to text

    72. Andrews, “The Justices of the Peace of Revolutionary Paris,” 77.return to text

    73. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 174.return to text

    74. Almanach national de France, Année Commune M.DCC. XCIII. L’an IIe de la République (Paris: Imprimerie de Testu, 1793), 273.return to text

    75. “Registre: Causes d’audience, des Sentences arbitrales, et des Jugements volontaires, Année 1792,” Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis 1791 to 1792, Jugements et Actes de Juridiction Gracieuse, AdP. Mandatory conciliation attempts are in a separate register and set of minutes.return to text

    76. See the personnel list in Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant la Révolution, le 16 janvier 1791, series 2, vol. 2, 155. According to the initial 1790 legislation, clerks were appointed by the justice of the peace and were irremovable by law. See Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 360. However, the Commune overrode this requirement in August 1792 and ordered elections for new justices of the peace and for new clerks. Métairie, Le monde des juges de paix, 170.return to text

    77. “Jugement: Daras et Garuieu,” le 13 juin 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 90, AdP.return to text

    78. “Sentence arbitrale: Blandon et Raymonde,” le 14 avril 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 61, AdP.return to text

    79. Not included in these numbers are: three cases over goods sold by middlemen; two over dues related to the state; and five over fees for legal issues or court services.return to text

    80. Other cases included: six cases over rentes, contracts, or billets; two cases demanding reparations of honor; one case concerning accidental bodily harm; two cases concerning the reception of caution money; two cases concerning accomodage (services provided by wigmakers and hairstylists); and three cases concerning the nomination of arbiters. Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis 1791 to 1792, Jugements et Actes de Juridiction Gracieuse, AdP.return to text

    81. A summons cost one livre which the plaintiff could recoup if he/she won his/her civil case. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 159; Woloch, The New Regime, 309.return to text

    82. “Jugement: Bauche et Verdier,” le 12 janvier 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 9, AdP.return to text

    83. The contests without citations include all comparutions/jugements volontaires, arbitration sentences, and nominations of arbiters.return to text

    84. Alexandre Lefas, De la Notion de Juridiction Gracieuse en Droit Français: Étude Critique sur son Étendue, ed. Arthur Rousseau, Ph.D. diss. Faculté de Droit de Paris (Paris: Librarie Nouvelle de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1896), 2, Bibliothèque nationale de France F 9146.return to text

    85. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 19.return to text

    86. The juridical contrast is given in the entry for “Contentieûsement” in Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, ed. Jean-François Féraud (Marseille, 1787), Project ARTFL, http://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/dictionnaires-dautrefois, accessed 8 January 2019.return to text

    87. Decree of August 16, 1790, Title 3, Article 11, Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 13-14. return to text

    88. Decree of October 14 and 18, 1790, Title 8, Articles 1 and 2, Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 43. return to text

    89. Decree of October 14 and 18, 1790, Title 1, Article 11. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 29. return to text

    90. Thirty of these 348 litigants appeared in two or more cases in 1792. Justices of the peace could do “on-site inspections” to bypass the time and fees formerly necessitated by written documentation. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 159. return to text

    91. “Comparution volontaire: Centner et Porcher,” le 14 février 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 23, AdP.return to text

    92. “Comparution volontaire: Chevalier et LeMaire,” le 3 janvier 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 1, AdP. return to text

    93. “Jugement volontaire: Passerue et Ledard,” le 10 janvier 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 17bis, AdP.return to text

    94. “Comparution volontaire: Samson et Porignon, Fauvel,” le 9 février 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 18bis, AdP.return to text

    95. “Registre: Causes d’audience, des Sentences arbitrales, et des Jugements volontaires, Année 1792,” Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis 1791 to 1792, Jugements et Actes de Juridiction Gracieuse, AdP.return to text

    96. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (1791), 79.return to text

    97. “Registre: Causes d’audience, des Sentences arbitrales, et des Jugements volontaires, Année 1792,” Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis 1791 to 1792, Jugements et Actes de Juridiction Gracieuse, AdP.return to text

    98. Code de la justice de paix, vol. 1 (Dijon: Imprimerie de P. Causse, 1791), 79.return to text

    99. Woloch, The New Regime, 310. Mediated agreements were not judicial sentences and were not, therefore, legally binding.return to text

    100. “Comparution volontaire: Centner et Porcher,” le 14 février 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 23, AdP.return to text

    101. “Comparution volontaire: Centner et Porcher,” le 14 février 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 23, AdP.return to text

    102. “Sentence Arbitrale: Dauptain et Dumenil,” le 12 septembre 1792, Box D7 U1 1, Section des Arcis, no. 114, AdP.return to text

    103. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 180.return to text

    104. Ronen Steinberg, “Transitional Justice in the Age of the French Revolution,” 275.return to text

    105. Nevin Aiken argues that, for transitional justice processes to work, they need “to serve as crucial catalysts for social and psychological processes of ‘social learning’ between former enemies in the post-conflict environment of divided societies.” Nevin Aiken, “Rethinking Reconciliation in Divided Societies: A Social Learning Theory of Transitional Justice” in Transitional Justice Theories, ed. Susanne Buckley-Zistel et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 40-41.return to text

    106. Crubaugh stresses that the involvement of “an official buttressed by state authority and community legitimacy” in mediation was also a significant judicial shift. Crubaugh, Balancing the Scales of Justice, 196.return to text

    107. Lisa Laplante, “The Plural Justice Aims of Reparations” in Transitional Justice Theories, 70.return to text

    108. Laplante, “The Plural Justice Aims of Reparations,” 71, 74.return to text

    109. Daniel Van Ness and Karen Heetderks Strong, Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice, 5th ed. (Boston: Elsevier, 2015), 47.return to text

    110. Susanne Buckley-Zistel et al., “Transitional Justice Theories: An Introduction” in Transitional Justice Theories, 43, 47.return to text

    111. Buckley-Zistel et al., “Transitional Justice Theories: An Introduction,” 1.return to text

    112. I thank Ann Mische and Asher Kaufman for sharing their expertise on transitional and restorative justice.return to text

    113. Buckley-Zistel et al., “Transitional Justice Theories: An Introduction,” 4-5. Ronen Steinberg extends the lens of transitional justice to the French Revolution to analyze the trial of the king and the reaction to the Terror. He argues that the new political framework altered how the French theorized civic responsibility and necessitated new judicial procedures to expose the truth and “account for the violence.” Steinberg, “Transitional Justice in the Age of the French Revolution,” 269.return to text