LEGAL SOCIALISM IN THE HISTORY OF FRENCH POLITICAL AND LEGAL THOUGHT OF THE 19TH–20TH CENTURIES

Abstract

The article investigates the characteristic features of legal socialism as one of the popular directions of French political and legal thought during the period of existence of the French Third Republic (1870–1940). For the fi rst time in the Russian science the similarities and differences of French legal socialism with the related political and ideological systems (Marxism, solidarism) and also with some foreign legal doctrines (legal socialism of Anton Menger von Wolfensgrün, Ferdinand Lassalle) are highlighted. The article focuses on the political and legal views of Emmanuel Levy, a prominent French jurist and socialist, who, according to many contemporaries, was the founder of legal socialism in France. On the basis of the analysis of literary sources of the epoch as well as modern publications, the author of the article evaluates Emmanuel Lévy’s contribution to the substantiation of socialism in legal categories (legal description of the logic of socialism). To achieve this goal, the author of the article considers Lévy’s ideas about the relative nature of law, about class antagonism as a factor of social life, about the absorption of individual law by collective law, about the triumph of collective law as the fi nal chord of the historical epoch of industrialisation, about the understanding of law as a social function and about the expansion of the boundaries of legal responsibility. Lévy’s ideas about the parameters of a peaceful and non-violent social revolution, the realization of which was linked to the growing infl uence of socialistically thinking judges in the French judicial hierarchy, were also studied. Responding to the social markings of the epoch and the demands of public opinion, these judges were to promote the establishment of a socialist legal order in the state by means of free interpretation of bourgeois laws (in the interests of poor classes).