WP4 - Prosopography of judicial personnel

Partners involved

Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis

General Objectives

This Work Package build on an existing partnership between Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Université catholique de Louvain and Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix within the framework of an FRFC project on the Prosopography of Belgian magistrates, aimed at the creation of an online database for prosopographical research on Belgian magistrates, containing detailed biographical profiles of judges who exercised functions throughout the history of Belgium. WP4 of the IAP project was firstly aimed at the further development of this database, both in terms of perfecting its technical design and in terms of further input of additional data, in order to cover the period 1795-1960.

The work concerned with the collection and input of biographical/prosopographical data on magistrates was based on new scientific research on Belgium’s judicial personnel (bureaucrats, judges, lawyers…). The aim of WP4 was to further the study of the sociopolitical history of the magistracy as a professional group since the time of its formation in 1795 under French control, later to become the subject of the social history of elites in modern Belgium. Legal professionals were thus examined in direct relationship to their backgrounds and networks. This perspective allowed for the cultural analysis of the magistracy as a body creating its own distinctive professional image and culture, while at the same time, it was confronted with internal ideological and political divergences and interpersonal conflicts, that became particularly visible in times of transformation and crisis. Two doctoral subprojects within this WP focused on the examination of the role played by the magistracy within the Belgian State, throughout the entire process of state-formation, between 1830 and 1914, and in times of crisis, under the German occupation of the Second World War (in cooperation with WP5).

Workprogramme:

  • Development of a prosopographical database of Belgian magistrates (1795-1960): In collaboration with IAP coordinator X. Rousseaux and UCL team members Aurore François and Françoise Muller, who coordinated this part of the workprogramme, Jean-Pierre Nandrin and his FUSL team invested in the further development of the prosopographical application for the study of judicial personnel developed earlier within the scope of an FRFC project. This work involved a major technical upgrade of the existing prosopographical database on magistrates (re-engineering to solve remaining imperfections and increase the possibilities, performance and accessibility of the application), its integration into the portal of the IAP project (WP7), and its further extension with additional data. Both WP4 researchers, Drs. Aude Hendrick and Drs. Kirsten Peters, contributed to this input, by encoding prosopographical data collected in the course of their PhD research. Data were also provided by other collaborators of the FUSL, UCL and FUNDP teams, through new research on legal professions: Laurence Montel (UCL), who worked on military judges in the 19th century (FRFC-FNRS), Françoise Muller (UCL), who studied the social and political profile of the magistrates of the Brussels, Ghent and Liège Courts of Appeal and of the Court of Cassation (for 1830-1914) in her PhD, and Catherine Goffin (FUNDP), who thanks to a renewal of the FRFC project in 2008, extended the research on the individual biographies of judges to the periods of Belgian justice under French and Dutch rule, 1795-1830 (which also benefited the WP6 research on the origins of Belgian justice).
  • PhD Research: Both PhD projects within WP4 investigated the professionalization of the magistracy as a long-term transition, involving a growing diversity in the recruitment (from liberal and catholic francophone elites, to Flemish, female and progressive magistrates). Further, they examined the major ideological and judicial debates in which the magistracy engaged by studying the “policy discourses” of the inaugural addresses held in superior courts (WP4a), and both collective and individual expressions of magistrates’ reactions to the brutal transformation of the Belgian legal framework and judicial practice in wartimes, brought about by the German occupation (WP4b).
WP4a: Magistrates' Inaugural Addresses for the Start of the New Judiciary Year in Belgian High Courts (1832-1914)
Within the long 19th-century history, Drs. Aude Hendrick deciphered the significance of the High Magistracy in the functioning of Justice in Belgian through extensive research on the inaugural addresses held in the superior courts in Belgium from 1832 to 1914 (successfully defended in April 2012). She invested considerable efforts in a long process of collection, digitization, OCR’isation and finally correction of all 295 addresses held in the period studied. The resulting corpus of digitized inaugural addresses was integrated into the portal of the IAP project. A. Hendrick submitted this corpus to a thorough discourse analysis, using specialised techniques and software for lexical statistical analysis (Hyperbase, Lexico3 and DTM). Next to information on the persons and careers of magistrates, the Belgian inaugural addresses and installation speeches are characterized by a wide variety of topics reflecting the major concerns of the Belgian High Magistracy, among which legal history or the history of justice, legislation and legal issues, the organisation of the justice system (for example the courts, penitentiary institutions and different types of procedures), and the societal events of the time, the “news”. Drawing on additional sources such as archives of the superior courts, the popular press and the minutes of the ceremonies held at the start of each new judiciary year, certain topics were studied more in-depth, for example: social-economic issues, the reception of the speeches in the popular press and by the larger public, and the ways in which the magistracy defined and portrayed itself.
 
WP4b: The Belgian magistracy during the Occupation of the Second World War, 1940-1944
The second WP4 subproject has been focused onto the Belgian magistracy during the Second World War. In order to successfully address the gaps in the existing knowledge on this topic, Drs. Kirsten Peters has put forward the following aspects in her research approach. First, the study of the individual magistrates, their political opinions and ties with other members of the magistracy. Efforts were invested in obtaining more detailed information about the individual biographies and careers of magistrates active during the 1940-1944 period. This allowed for an examination of not only the attitudes of certain judges and prosecutors towards the German occupier, but also of prosopographical questions such as discipline, traditions and family-relations. Part of these data were encoded in the prosopographical database of Belgian magistrates developed within WP4. Second, a combination of detailed analysis of moments of crisis with attention for more ‘ordinary’, calmer periods. K. Peters has conducted an in-depth investigation of specific incidents concerning the magistracy as a whole, i.e. the judicial crises of summer 1942 and winter 1942/43. Third, an assessment of the impact of the occupier’s policies on the magistracy through a study of German decisions and decrees and their impact on the fate of certain magistrates, drawing on the archives of the “Justiz-und Rechtsstelle” section of the German military administration kept in the Freiburg Federal Military Archives (Germany). Attention has been paid paid, for example, to the question how recruitement and nomation policies within the Belgian magistracy were influenced by the German administration. Fourth, a close examination of the policies of the Secretaries-General in order to guarantee a more comprehensive approach to the topic. The large number of conflicts that arose around the legitimacy of the legislation enacted by the Secretaries-General indicates that the history of the magistracy under the occupation is actually inseparable from that of the Secretaries-General. Finally, specific fields of activity of the magistracy under occupation have been studied more in detail, such as the questions of food-provision, forced work, illegal possession of weapons, illegal abandonment of posts and particular exchanges between the Belgian courts and German control authorities.
Picture: ©Belgian Royal Library (prints and drawings department), King Albert's official visit to the Court of Cassation, Brussels, November 1918

The Interuniversity Attraction Pole P7/22 "Justice & Populations: The Belgian Experience in International Perspective, 1795-2015" (BeJust 2.0) is part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme Phase VII (2012-2017), financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office of the Belgian State.

The IAP VII/22 Justice & Populations www.bejust.be is the outcome of a collaboration between the Cegesoma, the IAP coordination team (CHDJ-UCL) and the Royal Military Academy. Design: tangografix. Powered by Drupal