Acquiring Legal Literacy by Reading: Popular Legal Literature in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

This chapter discusses French popular legal literature, for example, legal literature addressed to laymen, as a way for laymen to acquire legal literacy to deal with everyday legal matters or to integrate republican ideals. Based on a range of more than a hundred books or periodicals issued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this chapter, by focusing on an alternative way of writing legal literature, raises important epistemological questions, regarding, for instance, the link between knowledge and power or legal literature’s societal impact in democracies.