Inaugural Address. lil 
I am conscious, it will be found imperfect,) will neverthe- 
less be favorably received, as an attempt to elucidate a sub- 
ject which, in Lower-Canada, cannot be thought to be un- 
interesting. 
The conquest of Gaul by the Roman power—the entire 
subversion of the Roman Government by the Franks—the 
nearly total annihilation of the power of the Crown at the 
close of the eleventh century, and the subsequent re-estae 
blishment of that power, are the events which more imme- 
diately affected the Laws of France, and occasioned their 
successive mutations. To these events, therefore, and to the 
greater effects which they have respectively produced in her 
legal polity, our inquiries will at present be confined. 
Of the state of Gaul before the Roman conquest, (which 
was effected under the immediate command of Casar, about 
fifty years before the birth of our Saviour,) but little can be 
said with any degree of certainty. The inhabitants were 
then governed by a few unwritten customs and usages, pecu- 
liar to themselves, barbarous in the extreme and not meriting 
the appellation of Laws. Their manners were simple, and 
produced but few causes of contention, and such controver- 
sies asarose, were decided by their Druids, who, as among 
the ancient Britons, were both Priests and Judges.(1) 
A consequence of the Roman conquest was, the introduc- 
‘tion of the Roman Law, and for five entire centuries, during 
which Gaul remained a Province of the Empire, her people 
were wholly governed by that system. (2) ‘The Roman Law, 
however, of thatday was not the Justiaian Code, for that 
was compiled near a hundred years after the expulsion of the 
Romans.(3) It consisted of the several Constitutions of the 
preceding Emperors, and of the writings of certain Civilians. 
i % The 
(1) Cesar de BelloGal: Liber, 5&6. 
(2) Histoire du Droit Frangois, by Abbé Fleury, p. 9 & 10, Vide 
also, at the beginning of Ist vo). of Henry’s, a learned ‘Dissertation, by 
Bretonnier, which establishes this fact. 
(3) Fleury, p. 10. 
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