This British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship aims to help citizens today understand how far liberal democracies have fuelled inequality in a capitalist economy. Dr Joseph La Hausse de Lalouvière is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024–2027. Image Illustration from L’Interdiction (1839) by Honoré de Balzac. The rise of citizenship in France, from the Revolution of 1789 to the First World War, went hand in hand with the legal disenfranchisement of many French citizens. Successive legal codes enshrined civic equality but also allowed the state to suspend or remove the civil rights it had granted to individuals. Throughout this era, magistrates, officials and private citizens used the legal procedures of civil death, civic degradation, criminal interdiction, and judicial interdiction (like a conservatorship of persons deemed incapable) to control others. In doing so, they updated the established practice of erasing the civil personhood of enslaved people and political outlaws. Officeholders and citizens resorted to these new procedures not just to exclude but also to expropriate. For example, state officials extracted labour from, and reassigned the property of, disenfranchised convicts. Meanwhile, families claimed rights over the assets of adult relatives ruled legally incapable of managing their estates. This project will analyse such expropriation through court records, administrative correspondence and legal commentary concerning people who experienced these disenfranchising procedures. By exploring how citizenship laws enabled expropriation in the paradigmatic modern citizenry - the French - the project aims to help citizens today understand how far liberal democracies have fuelled inequality in a capitalist economy. This article was published on 2024-06-19
