ABSTRACT
Extracts of works written at different times by authors coming from distinct disciplines and professions, the quotations indicate the remarkable continuity of particular representations of others and of the world; they also show the spirit of an age whose contemporaries–exceptions are rare–profess a radical political and juridical relativism. The juridical order which authorised this exception thus became legal, and for many legitimate, simultaneously favouring the emergence of a colonial law which contemporaries found to have proliferated extraordinarily, while remaining both complex and variable. Again, the dispositions saw the disappearance, in the corpus of colonial law, of the concepts of the individual and the man. Administrative internment, collective responsibility and sequestration—the last was considered as a legal spoliation—were the measures which proved that the body and the property of the ‘indigenous’ could be seized in accordance with the summary proceeding which was opposed to all the principles proclaimed since 1789.
