FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON LAWYERS IN POLITICS

Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945, Volume One: Ambition, Love and Politics (Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1973) ("Republicanism also attracted many doctors and barristers, partly because theirs were were professions in which political independence was possible. . . . A normal liberal education in the mid nineteenth century ended with the study of law. The legal profession was therefore vastly overcrowded. You barristers with clients, living form hand to mouth by private tutoring or literary hack work, were a principal ingredient of the intellectual proletariat of most towns. They were the natural champions of the underdog, Rhetoric was the common language of the Bar and of politics. Barristers were another of the intermediaries between the centre of power and the masses. It was no accident that when the republic was at last established, they should have occupied so prominent a role in it In 1881 41 per cent of the members of the chamber of deputies were lawyers, or 25 per cent if one includes those with a legal training who had not practiced. In 1906 the figure was still 37 per cent (or 40 per cent), 52 per cent of all minister between 1873 and 1920 had legal degrees. But a legal education, of course, was no stimulus to innovation or imagination. The skill of these lawyers was in effecting compromises, in acting as interpreters between classes an powers which could not understand each other in anarchic situations. That is why they were so highly valued in the early years if the Third Republic. They helped to consolidate it, But by winning leadership of it, they also prevented it for becoming genuinely radical. It was no accident that the proportion of lawyers in parliament fell after 1920: they were of less use when new challenges demanded change. A republic of lawyers was even less of a threat to established values and traditional ways of thought than a republic of professors. But their oratory and their youth made it difficult to see just what they were aiming for." Id. 483-484.).