Zoom - Philippe Pichot-Bravard : Le droit naturel
Philippe Pichot-Bravard est docteur en droit, historien du droit et maître de conférences. A travers un ouvrage incisif il revient sur la notion de droit naturel. De manière didactique, il donne un éclairage nouveau à une notion finalement méconnue du grand public. A l’heure où des lois sociétal bouleverse nos société, cette ouvrage donne des clés de compréhension pour comprendre l’histoire mais aussi notre temps.
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00:00 [Music]
00:06 My guest today is Philippe Pichot-Bravard.
00:08 He presents his book "Natural Law".
00:10 He is a doctorate in conference law.
00:12 He teaches the history of public law and the history of political ideas.
00:16 Hello, Master Pichot-Bravard.
00:18 Hello, Olivier.
00:20 What is natural law?
00:22 Natural law is a law that stems from the natural order,
00:30 which stems from what is man, from the nature of man,
00:34 combined with the concern for justice, the concern for equity.
00:42 It is this combination between what is man and this concern for justice
00:48 that allows us to approach what is natural law.
00:52 Saint Thomas Aquinas defines natural law as the translation of fundamental aspirations of man,
01:01 including the aspiration to preserve his being, the aspiration for good, the aspiration to know the truth.
01:09 So why did this famous natural law disappear from university thinking or debate?
01:16 You mention this question in the introduction of your book.
01:18 It is the disappearance of this notion of natural law.
01:21 Is it a political reason? Can you explain it to us?
01:24 Indeed, natural law has disappeared.
01:26 There are no more natural law courses.
01:31 When Monsignor Freppel created the Catholic University of the West in Angers,
01:36 there was a course on the history of natural law in law that was dispensed by the rector,
01:40 which underlined its importance.
01:43 Today, natural law is taught only in philosophy or history of law courses by certain professors.
01:56 The reason is that the authority of natural law is not recognized in our Constitution.
02:08 Natural law has lost.
02:10 Against whom?
02:12 Against another conception of law, which is the positivist conception of law,
02:17 which was consecrated by the founding text of our political system,
02:23 which is the Declaration of Human Rights and the Citizen.
02:25 Article 6 founds this legal positivism by defining law as the expression of the general will.
02:33 By defining law as the expression of the general will,
02:36 Article 6 of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Citizen defines law in relation to its origin
02:42 and no longer in relation to its purpose, the search for what is right.
02:47 This completely transforms the office of the judge and the office of the legislator.
02:54 Before the Declaration of Human Rights,
02:57 the judge had the mission to seek the most equitable solution.
03:05 By mobilizing all the knowledge that was available to him,
03:10 the custom, the royal ordinances, the right to know, the right to be Roman, the right to know, the right to be Roman and the right to be canon.
03:17 He was looking for the most equitable solution.
03:21 Now, since the Declaration, the judge is supposed to apply the law.
03:28 He is the food of the law.
03:30 So, to respect the will of the legislator.
03:32 As for the legislator, he has only one will to express,
03:36 while before this Declaration, the king had to look for a solution that was fair.
03:51 To discern where justice was, where equity was.
03:57 Knowing that when the king moved away from what was called the law of reason and justice,
04:03 the term law of reason being the expression that Cicero used to qualify natural law,
04:08 the chancellors first, the parliaments were there to remind him of the requirements of natural law.
04:16 - You mention Cicero, it's interesting because often when we talk about natural law,
04:20 we think of the Catholic Church, but in your book you talk about Aristotle, the Roman law.
04:26 What are the origins of this natural law?
04:29 - The most distant origin is found in a play that was played in Athens 2,500 years ago, Antigone by Sophocles.
04:41 And then this concern described by Sophocles in Antigone,
04:50 it is at the heart of certain discussions that oppose the Sophists and Socrates.
04:55 And that's why the disciples of Socrates themselves have gone deeper into this reflection.
05:03 They have underlined that the law is ordered to a purpose which is the search for justice.
05:11 And that it does not express only the will of those who exercise power.
05:17 Plato and Aristotle have made a significant contribution to this reflection.
05:25 Aristotle distinguishes between natural justice and legal justice.
05:30 And this reflection led by Aristotle is taken up two and a half centuries later by Cicero.
05:38 Cicero who wanted to apply the law, which until then was only a practical tool,
05:45 intended to provide concrete answers to concrete situations, to concrete difficulties.
05:50 Cicero wanted to make law an art.
05:53 And he applied to the law the method applied by Aristotle to the other disciplines of the mind.
06:00 And he applied this notion of purpose to the law.
06:06 And Cicero gave from this law that he called the right reason, in the De Republica,
06:14 a definition that remains the richest, the most complete, the best written,
06:21 and which has been imposed in our legal tradition.
06:24 There is a true law, the right reason, immutable, eternal,
06:28 whose orders invite to duty and prohibitions evade evil.
06:33 And this definition continues to be applied.
06:37 And Cicero concluded that man cannot ignore this law without denying his nature.
06:45 And so natural law was defined in pagan antiquity.
06:53 And how is this natural law absorbed, reinterpreted, reused by Christian thought?
06:59 There was a kind of natural encounter between this reflection,
07:05 led by Aristotle and Cicero, then by the Roman jurisprudence and Christian thought.
07:13 If not that Christian thought enriched the reflection on natural law,
07:18 first by developing a conception of man even higher than that developed by Aristotle and Cicero,
07:27 by enriching the definition of what man is,
07:32 and then what led Christian thought to evacuate certain scories
07:46 that veiled the definition of natural law.
07:51 What we see in the Corpus Iuris Civilis,
07:55 written in the order of Emperor Justinian around 530,
08:01 which gives a definition of natural law that integrates the fruit of this Christian influence.
08:10 And in particular, what we see in the Corpus Iuris Civilis
08:14 is the affirmation that slavery, which until then was in pagan thought
08:19 considered relevant to natural law,
08:23 is a practice of human rights contrary to natural law,
08:28 since natural law makes every man born free.
08:32 What were the attacks that took place over the centuries
08:38 against this notion of natural law?
08:40 Are there other schools that opposed it?
08:44 Of course, in the history of legal thought,
08:48 there are two major concepts of law that have been opposed since the duel between Antigone and Creon.
08:55 There are those who consider that law is a tool for reaching justice,
09:01 which is a very important element of the common good,
09:06 since it allows to achieve true peace.
09:09 And then there are those who consider that law simply expresses the will of those who exercise power.
09:15 And this concept of law has resurfaced in certain eras,
09:23 and in particular in the 14th century under the pen of Guillaume de Cam,
09:29 who is the great thinker of nominalism.
09:34 And from Guillaume de Cam, this concept of the positive view of law
09:39 began to spread very slowly in the minds.
09:43 It was reinforced in the 16th century by the Protestant Reformation,
09:49 and it was in the 16th century that we see that the notion of law
09:54 is imposed in discourse with much more insistence.
09:59 And then Cartesian thought has contributed
10:03 to the idea that it would be necessary to define pre-established rules
10:09 which, in a perfectly rational way, would then be applied to all circumstances,
10:19 to all cases of species.
10:21 And then there are the theories of the social contract,
10:24 which themselves stem from nominalism,
10:26 and which found the legal order on the social contract and the expression of the general will.
10:32 - What is the place of natural law in the French Revolution?
10:36 Because it is the subject of a chapter in this book.
10:39 - In fact, natural law, during the French Revolution,
10:44 is ruled out.
10:46 The founding text, which is the Declaration of the Rights of the People,
10:49 composed by the National Constituent Assembly in August 1789,
10:54 excludes the authority of natural law.
10:56 So there is a slightly delicate point, which is the formulation of Article 2,
11:01 which says that the natural, unviolable and sacred rights of man
11:06 are liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression.
11:10 This formulation made many believe that it was a question of natural law.
11:16 In reality, not at all.
11:18 And what shows it very well is that this list that is given,
11:23 liberty, property, security, resistance to oppression,
11:27 is a list that does not go by itself.
11:29 Why these rights and not others?
11:32 20 years earlier, Louis XVI,
11:36 discussing the same subject of human rights,
11:38 speaking of the rights that men hold dear to God,
11:41 he speaks well of human nature,
11:44 says that these rights are life, honor, liberty, and property.
11:49 The list is not the same.
11:51 The source of inspiration is not the same.
11:53 In the future Louis XVI, it is the Decalogue.
11:55 Among the constituents of 1889, it is John Locke's liberal philosophy.
11:58 The source is not the same.
12:00 And the fact that the list is not the same
12:03 shows that this list given does not proclaim rights that would be natural,
12:15 but rights that a deliberative assembly has declared natural.
12:19 Which is not at all the same thing.
12:21 These rights are the fruit of a deliberation,
12:24 therefore express a will.
12:26 The Constituent National Assembly has said that natural rights are these.
12:31 But these are not natural rights.
12:34 And Article 6 confirms this analysis
12:38 by underlining that the law is the expression of a general will.
12:42 At this point, the law is defined by its origin,
12:45 and no longer by its purpose.
12:47 Today, what about natural rights?
12:50 Is it true that the Church, which in its formula, refers to natural rights?
12:56 The Church, since the pontificate of Leo XIII,
13:03 enriching the definition of a social doctrine,
13:07 insists on the authority of natural law,
13:12 and on the importance of the recognition of its authority for the balance of society,
13:17 and especially as underlined by Benoît XVI in the speech given at the Bundestag in September 2011,
13:24 to preserve our societies from totalitarian drift.
13:28 Because the stake is there.
13:31 The Church is not the only institution that today defends the authority of natural law.
13:38 There are a few states that recognize in their constitution the authority of natural law,
13:42 notably Hungary, since the reform that took place ten years ago.
13:47 Is this notion of natural law properly Western?
13:54 No, it is not properly Western.
13:57 Natural law is linked to what man is.
14:01 But it is found in Asian countries, African countries.
14:03 It is found in Asian countries.
14:05 When we look at Confucius' writings,
14:09 Confucius' thought,
14:12 certain notions are linked to what we call natural law.
14:18 The entire Asian, Chinese or Japanese civilization
14:26 is based on filial piety, which is the first virtue.
14:30 Filial piety is a principle of natural law,
14:34 a principle found in the heart of the Roman world,
14:39 and which is found in the heart of the decalogue "You will honor your forefathers".
14:43 The idea that we have a debt to those to whom we have received life and education,
14:52 to those who preceded us,
14:54 and that this debt commits us to respect certain duties.
15:02 The entire Japanese civilization is based on this.
15:06 So, to not scare our viewers, this book is a little less than 200 pages long.
15:12 It is divided into chapters that follow each other logically,
15:17 but which can also be read separately to come back to certain notions.
15:21 It is essential for law students.
15:25 It is accessible for people who have not had the pleasure of doing law studies.
15:30 To understand the political issues, it seems essential.
15:33 What would be the consequences of rediscovering and reapplying natural law today?
15:40 Wouldn't it be revolutionary to rediscover this treasure of law?
15:46 I don't know if it would be revolutionary, but it is absolutely urgent and necessary.
15:50 A revolutionary word, please.
15:52 We are facing the transhumanist project, which is an extremely dangerous project,
16:00 a destructive project that does not respect human nature and which exposes us to totalitarian drift.
16:09 The way to counter this transhumanist project
16:15 and, therefore, to make good use of scientific and technological discoveries,
16:22 is to rediscover this tradition of natural law and to realize that man has a nature
16:28 and that this nature must be respected, that it is imposed at our will.
16:33 You have also been the author of other books, a book on the French Revolution
16:38 and a novel called "The Vendée's Epoch" which was published in 2020
16:43 and which is also available in our shop.
16:46 A question to open and end this exchange.
16:49 What is your next book project and is there one?
16:53 Yes, there are several projects that are moving forward.
16:57 I don't know yet which one will be the first.
17:01 So a theme that could be likely.
17:03 But I work a lot around the notion of totalitarianism.
17:08 It will be with pleasure that you will come to talk to us about totalitarianism
17:13 if we still have the right to speak on this occasion.
17:15 Thank you very much, Philippe Pichot-Bravard.
17:17 I repeat, the natural law, at the Via Romana editions with a preface by Cardinal Burke.
17:23 [Music]