Shameful Penalties towards the End of the Old French Regime: Normative and Doctrinal Approach

Abstract

The french punitive system of the late modern period had a category of penalties named «infamous penalties» for almost two centuries. However, that category is not a new thing since it already appeared in the legal sources of the Ancien Régime. The fact that codified law regarding this subject have clearly been influenced by traditional French laws invites us to know when and why these penalties were created. In order to fully learn the features of such group of penalties we need to know what infamous penalties consisted of, which penalties were considered infamous, which features made them different from other penalties and therefore their role in their time. Such objectives can be obtained by studing normative sources, both legal and customary law, together with contemporary legal doctrine to the extent that those were the sources of origin and interpretation of law par excellence and it was thanks to such sources that we could get to learn the French Roman and canon law of that time. After looking into such sources we can see that such a category was created by the Ancien Régime legal doctrine based on a roman law institution. This new category led to the origin of a category of penalties of great importance in the Ancien Régime both because of amount of sentences that it comprised and because of the amount of cases involved.