the Week of Proper 26 / Ordinary 31
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Bible Encyclopedias
Geofroi Jacques Flach
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or Irlande (1886).
His chief efforts, however, were concentrated on the history of ancient French law. A celebrated lawsuit in Alsace, pleaded by his friend and compatriot Ignace Chauffour, aroused his interest by reviving the question of the origin of the feudal laws, and gradually led him to study the formation of those laws and the early growth of the feudal system. His great work, Les Origines de l'ancienne France, was produced slowly. In the first volume, Le Regime seigneurial (1886), he depicts the triumph of individualism and anarchy, showing how, after Charlemagne's great but sterile efforts to restore the Roman principle of sovereignty, the great landowners gradually monopolized the various functions in the state; how society modelled on. antiquity disappeared; and how the only living organisms were vassalage and clientship. The second volume, Les Origines communales, la feodalite et la chevalerie (1893), deals with the reconstruction of society on new bases which took place in the 10th and 11th centuries. It explains how the Gallo-Roman villa gave place to the village, with its fortified castle, the residence of the lord; how new towns were formed by the side of old, some of which disappeared; how the townspeople united in corporations; and how the communal bond proved to be a powerful instrument of cohesion. At the same time it traces the birth of feudalism from the germs of the Gallo-Roman personal comitatus; and shows how the bond that united the different parties was the contract of the fief; and how, after a slow growth of three centuries, feudalism was definitely organized in the 12th century. In 1904 appeared the third volume, La Renaissance de Petal, in which the author describes the efforts of the Capetian kings to reconstruct the power of the Frankish kings over the whole of Gaul; and goes on to show how the clergy, the heirs of the imperial tradition, encouraged this ambition; how the great lords of the kingdom (the "princes," as Flach calls them), whether as allies or foes, pursued the same end; and how, before the close of the 12th century, the Capetian kings were in possession of the organs and the means of action which were to render them so powerful and bring about the early downfall of feudalism.
In these three volumes, which appeared at long intervals, the author's theories are not always in complete harmony, nor are they always presented in a very luminous or coherent manner, but they are marked by originality and vigour. Flach gave them a solid basis by the wide range of his researches, utilizing charters and cartularies (published and unpublished), chronicles, lives of saints, and even those dangerous guides, the chansons de geste. He owed little to the historians of feudalism who knew what feudalism was, but not how it came about. He pursued the same method in his L'Origine de l'habitation et des lieux habit-es en France (1899), in which he discusses some of the theories circulated by A. Meitzen in Germany and by Arbois de Jubain ville in France. Following in the footsteps of the jurist F. C. von Savigny, Flach studied the teaching of law in the middle ages and the Renaissance, and produced Cujas, les glossateurs et les Bartolistes (1883), and Etudes critiques sur l'histoire du droit romain au moyen age, avec textes inedits (1890) .
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Geofroi Jacques Flach'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/g/geofroi-jacques-flach.html. 1910.
