ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Jean-Louis Halpérin presents the book he has coauthored with Frédéric Audren, La Culture juridique franéaise. Entre mythes et réalités XIXe-XXe siécle (Paris: CNRS, 2013). Rejecting any idea of an identity-based and nostalgic approach of one French legal culture, the perspective considers that legal education, as structured since 1804 after the French Revolution, shaped a plurality of legal cultures in France. Whereas notaries and attorneys gained access to their professions through clerkships, judges, lawyers, and professors acquired the bedrock of their legal culture in state faculties that were long featured by the exegetic teaching of the Napoleonic Code. The Paris Law Faculty, which first experimented in Europe with a higher education for thousands of students and was self-financing, favored an academic culture that evolved slowly after the 1880s. The interwar period highlighted some of the weakness in this invention of French legal culture, and the post-1945 era saw the development of professional cultures. In a relative ignorance of the history, French jurists continue to represent their legal culture through myths.
