School of natural law in western Switzerland

The French- speaking natural law school ( École romande du droit naturel ) comprised French-speaking Swiss representatives of natural law who contributed to the spread of German natural law in France and in the Anglo-Saxon world. For Switzerland they made a contribution to the discussion of natural law and the social and state foundations.

history

The Enlightenment was not a uniform movement in Switzerland. French-speaking Switzerland went other ways than German-speaking Switzerland. Significant contributions to natural law were made in Geneva , Lausanne and Neuchâtel . The chairs for natural law at the universities there were the only ones in the French-speaking area. Since the doctrine of natural law was banned in France, they had a broadcast as far as France.

Representative

The French- speaking natural law school played a central role in the spread of modern natural law in European intellectual history as a mediator between German ( Pufendorf , Thomasius , Wolff ) and French ( Montesquieu , Voltaire , Rousseau , Diderot , d'Alembert ) cultures.

Its first representative was Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744), a Huguenot who taught natural law at the Academy in Lausanne until the Bernese forbade this and he fled to Holland. He became known through French translations by Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius . His commentary on Pufendorf's main work was later translated into German.

The two works of his pupil, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694–1748), son of a Geneva patrician (descendant of Calvin admitted Italian religious refugees), who gave lectures at the academy in Geneva, Principles of Natural Law ( Principes du droit naturel ) and Principles of Political law ( Principes du droit politique ) received a lot of attention in the French and English-speaking areas, in contrast to German.

The Neuchâtel Emer de Vattel (1714–1767), son of a pastor and one of Burlamaquis’s most important students, created with his main work of 1758 The international law or principles of natural law, applied to the behavior and affairs of states and heads of state ( Droit des gens, ou principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux affaires des nations et des sovverains ) a standard work of international law during his lifetime and thus became one of the world's most influential scholars of international law. He developed an idea of human rights based on natural law and approaches to international humanitarian law .

Teaching building

The Swiss scientists adopted secular or modern natural law from Pufendorf , which was based on Christian natural law and a mathematical and scientific worldview and formed the basis for the systematic derivation of the rights and obligations of the individual in the natural state ( status naturalis ) and in the state of society ( status civilis ). Starting from a personal image of man , they erected various rationalistic and individualistic teaching buildings that strongly influenced the American and French human rights declarations of the 18th century. By starting from the human being as a person , it formed the origin, carrier and goal of all social institutions and at the same time, due to its social nature, it required social life.

Their system was based on common sense ( le bon sens ) as the sole criterion for the human and world view. On this basis, the school postulated inviolable rights, especially freedom of conscience . If these rights were violated, people would have the right to resist tyrannical rule. They saw the pursuit of happiness ( eudaemonism ) as a human right based on human nature and as the goal of human existence. If man acts in accordance with natural law, he will be happy and all forms of government are legitimate, provided that they elevate happiness to the purpose of the state.

Basic posts

The natural law school in western Switzerland took up the debate about the mixed form of government , the struggle for modern natural law and the idea of a right of resistance and made fundamental contributions to it. This left a lasting mark on the ongoing dispute about human and civil rights and the basic democratic order in Europe. It was groundbreaking for the American Revolution .

The world's first written declaration of fundamental rights , the Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 12, 1776, made clear reference in the first article to natural law and the personal image of man. She had a great influence on the formulation of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson , James Madison , John Adams and James Wilson , who knew the books of the French-speaking natural law school and incorporated modern natural law principles, the personal image of man and the right of resistance in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 .

The right of resistance adopted in the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence served as legitimation for resistance against the governments of the individual states and against the English king. The power-sharing theory of Burlamaqui and Montesquieu was first included in a declaration of fundamental rights. Legislative (legislative), executive (executive) and judicial power (judiciary) should be clearly separated. The distribution of power among several power carriers, checks and balances in order to prevent abuse of power and to guarantee security, freedom and a politics geared to the common good were now part of the basic consensus of democratic movements. The description of popular sovereignty was recorded in the second article: All power belongs to the people and is consequently derived from them . According to Article 7, the establishment of a representative democracy was meant.

The declaration of human and civil rights ( Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen ) of the French Revolution was based on the development of the American constitution and declared in the first article that modern natural law is the basis of the declaration. It also defined the right of resistance, the division of powers and popular sovereignty, with the latter being more based on Rousseau . With his social contract ( Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique ), Rousseau created a systematic concept of democracy and popular sovereignty, referring to Burlamaqui's theory of natural law . Rousseau thus took the step from a cooperative to a modern democracy.

literature

Ferdinand Elsener: The Swiss Schools of Law from the 16th to the 19th Century . Schulthess Verlag, Zurich 1975
Alfred Dufour : L'ambivalence politique de la figure du contrat social chez Pufendorf et chez les fondateurs de l'École romande du droit naturel au XVIIIe siècle . In: Social Freedom and Contractual Binding in Legal History and Philosophy, edited by J.-F. Kervégan, H. Mohnhaupt, 1999, 35-74
Alfred Dufour: The École romande du droit naturel : its German roots W. de Gruyter, 1979
Simone Zurbuchen: The natural law school in western Switzerland. From Jean Barbeyrac to the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon , in: Patriotism and Cosmolitism. The Swiss Enlightenment between tradition and modernity, Chronos Verlag Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-03-400661-6 .
René Roca: The Western Swiss School of Natural Law , in: If popular sovereignty should really become a truth ... Swiss democracy in theory and practice - the example of the canton of Lucerne . Writings on Democracy Research, Volume 6. Center for Democracy Aarau and Verlag Schulthess AG, Zurich - Basel - Geneva, 2012, ISBN 978-3-7255-6694-5 .
[1] Andreas R. Ziegler : The development of international legal theory and science in Switzerland - an overview . Swiss Review of International and European Law, Schulthess Verlag, Volume 26, Zurich 2016.