Overview

Reflection on the First World War has taken various historiographical paths. For a hundred years, this conflict has been perceived from a military and diplomatic point of view, and then in its social and cultural dimension. The daily life of the actors of the war, on the front, in the trenches and in the rear, has been shown, notably through the restitution of numerous testimonies. The actors this virtual exhibition focuses on are students and law school professors.

Dealing with the history of law schools during the first world conflict implies making the choice to consider these institutions as imbricated in a social, economic, intellectual and political time period, but also to deal with diverse and complementary legal history in this first quarter of the 20th century. This time period must also be observed in the light of the evolution of legal science, notably the intellectual reflections on the war of a particular community, that of teachers, both within their community and as jurists in European networks and relationships.

The law faculties placed themselves on the “legal front”. This online exhibition intends to shed some new light on the Great War through jurists, their actions, their speeches and their ideas within the different institutions, considered separately or comparatively. Strictly speaking, it is not a history of law schools during the First World War. Nor is it a social history of students and teachers. Through the prism of certain strong themes, it aims to observe the daily life of actors trained or training within an institution, the possible tensions between scientific position and patriotic discourse, the mobilization in the legal war and the commitment to the construction of peace, the affirmation of speeches by the vector of the deans’ authority and the rhetorical expression of conceptions of law, or even the manufacture of an institutional memory.

This site is an online exhibition. In the center of the home page, and in the tabs at the top, the user will find access to the various articles, grouped by theme. On the right, a series of galleries : always with a reference to the previously mentioned texts, they present the iconographic or textual documents which illustrate, complete and serve as bases for these analyses. An order, which seemed logical to the creators of the exhibition, is proposed. The visitor is free to follow it or not.