Even for capital crimes like murder, the compensation is a weregeld, a fixed amount depending on the sex and social status of the victim. What is the literal meaning of the word Wergild? What was a patriarch in the Byzantine state? There were also men called bishops in the major cities of the Empire. In the Byzantine Empire, emperors had power over the church, because they selected the patriarch.
What did belisarius accomplish? He was instrumental in the reconquest of much of the Mediterranean territory belonging to the former Western Roman Empire, which had been lost less than a century before. What year did Clovis converted to Christianity? According to some sources primarily Gregory of Tours his later victories over the Alemani in and CE influenced his decision to convert to Christianity. Why was the Wergild so important?
During the Anglo-Saxon period the people aimed at compensating those who were harmed by crime. Tradition allowed and individual and their family to make amends for a crime by paying a fine wergild to the family of another man whom he had injured or killed.
When did the Wergild end? Payment of the weregild was gradually replaced with capital punishment due to Christianization, starting around the 9th century, and almost entirely by the 12th century when weregild began to cease as a practice throughout the Holy Roman Empire.
How did the Catholic Church affect the new European civilization? How did the Catholic Church affect the emerging medieval European civilization? The Church was the center of village social life. Monasteries preserved ancient documents and provided education and health services. But to give priority to Germanic law, it is my point of view one has to erase all traces of Roman law from the modern world. Roman law as a basis for modern laws is a disgusting absurdity and contrary to the German spirit.
In these times, our courts are still infested with Roman law, the Napoleonic code, Jewish laws …. Today, we would have never let off Dimitrov; he would have been found guilty … according to Germanic law. This novella, entitled Roman Law Is No More , suggests a profound knowledge on the part of Louis Aragon of the debates, developments and in-fighting in the world of Nazi jurists. Most often legal teachers, their authors, were brought up in the culture, if not the cult, of Roman law, model and birth mother to national law: It was from these chains they wanted to liberate German law.
In this debate, the National Socialist movement at its inception took its position in the context of a document that would mark its birth and its constitution. In the Nazi programme of February , one comes across a slightly surprising article, which, by virtue of its theoretical nature, sits almost incongruously in between the catalogue of political and economic entitlements.
Roman law serves a materialistic world order. What are we to make of it? In the context of , greatly enhanced by feelings of national humiliation after Versailles, in its Article 19 the NSDAP programme reinvigorated an old theme of German nationalism: the dichotomy between Germanity and Latinity. The dialectic between Germanity and Romanity subsequently took the form of a war between the Germans and revolutionary and imperial France, between Ludwig of Prussia, where Fichte defended German freedoms, and the Gallo-Romanic tyrant Napoleon.
The war continued with Bismarck, who in his Kulturkampf confronted papists, ultramontani and other political Catholics. For this, we have to look at the context of the article, or, in other words, we have to read the rest of the text. Here we touch on a topos reiterated over and over again in Nazi discourse: Only the Nordic spirit can reach the ideas as expounded in the immortal and sublime works of Plato, Bach and Kant.
Individualistic, egoistic and nomadic, the Jew as presented by the Nazis is incapable of conceiving of any interest other than the private one, of thinking about and valuing the common good. The last part of Article 24 as cited previously refers, among other things, to a supposed fundamental maxim of Germanic law, turned into a Nazi slogan repeated ad nauseam : Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz , the common good before the individual good, the community before the individual.
From this point forwa rd, the theoretical aspects of Article 19 are less surprising once one sees them from the Nazi standpoint that law is a culture, and it contains a conception of the world, of mankind and of the relations between members of the human race. Upon reading the NSDAP programme, one may wish that jurists had lent a helping hand in expounding the primary doctrinal corpus of the Nazi party. The premier cause of our distress lies with our right of ownership over the earth.
The abolition of Roman law, dominant up until now, which is to be replaced by a German common law [ Deutsches Gemeinrecht ]. Our right of ownership of the earth rests within Roman law …. Roman law was introduced in Germany years ago by the princes and the high members of the clergy; the people opposed it, without success.
The people know well that this foreign law estranges them from their land and their other possessions. Relentlessly the farmers demanded reinstatement of ancient Germanic law. Today, we state the same demand. It is only due to you, the people of Germany, that it does not remain ignored. This question is more important than anyone can fathom: it is the cornerstone of our future way of living and our existence [ Bestehen ]. Roman law was conceived in an era when Rome, in all her decadence, was flooded with Jews.
It is antisocial and protects private profit at the cost of the community. It is a law for knaves and the ill-willed. On that legal foundation, Germany always loses faced with the Jew. The facts confirm what we are claiming. This is the way the German people need to be provided with a law that corresponds to their race and their culture that respects the old principle: the common good takes precedence over the individual good.
Merely viewing this article shows that it contains several themes and structural obsessions of the German extreme right with respect to the law. In this text, one finds that the question of Roman law is connected to that of the land and its ownership. It is Roman law that, by introducing the principle of individual property, had separated the blood from the soil, and by doing so alienated land previously owned by the racial community. Only the Jews are able to manipulate Roman law, by virtue of their well-known intellectual and moral degeneracy.
The discourse of the Nazi Rechtswahrer [8] is utterly replete with these themes, which I will now proceed to discuss. The first attack the Nazi jurists addressed to Roman law concerns the transformation of traditional Germanic law, with Roman law considered an alienation of this law, the cultural alienation of a race that does not recognize itself in the legal formulations it imposes.
One has to conclude that the reception of Roman law has exerted an overall malicious influence over the development of Germanic law.
It is not true that what was good for ancient peoples remains good for the German people. Frank suggests here that, with life being in a constant state of flux, popular law Volksrecht has to be as lively as the life of the people itself. One cannot impose on a living organism the mummified corset of a dead law, like Roman law, formulated in other times, in other circumstances, for other peoples. Frank also maintains that the German people should be proud of their Germanic past instead of giving credence to the Greuelpropaganda making the Germanists into brute savages.
The Nazi discourse aims to soothe: for a nation humiliated by the peace of , its purpose is to reinstate the reasons for it to idealize itself and its history.
Just as the Germans are not caricature barbarians, homage needs to be paid to Germanic law, desired as the foundation for the new law and as a substitute for Roman law.
The alienation of the German peoples by Roman law has its historical causes. The Nazi jurists became its etiologists and diagnosed Roman imperialism to a greater degree than it had been. Rosenberg merely repeats the claims of anti-Romanist legal historians who exposed gaps in the process of reception of Roman law in the fifteenth century: To enrich themselves with the ownership of land, the Church and the State privatized what had been communal before, if not the land in general, at least that of the communities.
The introduction of legal individuality it is the individual who is the holder of rights, not the community, the Gemeinschaft and private property had transformed the land, birth mother and property of the race, from its pure form: an immovable good quickly changed to a movable one through the demonic mechanism of sureties.
The practice of mortgage had made the land into a pure paper title Wertpapier that usurers, bankers and other parasites had quickly turned into an object of speculation. Thus the injection of Roman law and its categories not only removed the Volk from its land, and separated Blut from Boden , but at the same time turned the soil into an abstract value, given over to commerce.
The holy alliance between the usurer, the prince and the doctor of laws left Germans in the net of an intellectual construction from which they could no longer find their way out. The presence of these considerations in the works of Rosenberg nonetheless well shows that they were not limited to the legal profession but were made into the object of a larger campaign. In this heavily circulated and widely read daily, the quoted article respectively and supposedly compares the laws of land ownership of the Romans and the Germans: The private property of the land with the Romans is juxtaposed to the communal ownership of the Germans, where the farmer is no more than the operator and the usufruct, because the actual owner is the community of the people.
In Germanic legal culture, the farmer is thus subordinated to the Gemeinschaft. One may comprehend that, beyond even this question of the law of land ownership, the explicit juxtaposition between Roman and Germanic laws is one of two ways in which to view the world, where confrontation offers vast pedagogical perspectives.
Moreover, one may conclude that the question is nothing but a scholarly matter, and that it acquired a didactic function important enough to figure in a teaching manual for SS officers:. What is noteworthy about the text, apart from the audience it addresses, is that it summarizes the essential features of the attacks that Nazi jurists addressed to Roman law.
This entails, according to them, rendering a good as an absolute, conceived as a good in itself, an absolute good, that is to say not relative to its utility for the community, making it flawed. Roland Freisler, for instance, had long before conceived this argument in several of his texts [12] Should the same legal regime be applied to a ball- point pen, a car and the land?
Asked 6 years, 2 months ago. Active 2 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 8k times. I only recently started appreciating the differences between Civil Law and Common Law. The following map on wikipedia shows the distribution of different legal systems around the world, which makes a distinction between Napoleonic law and Germanic law: The respective articles articles on wikipedia are a bit too obtuse for my limited intelligence.
Improve this question. BlueDogRanch You mean, apart from one is of French origin and the other is of German origin? Of course! I'm French, and I certainly know who Napoleon is. Do you mean "was"? DaleM Haha! Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Germanic Law Germanic Law refers in the first to those law codes written by the Germanic people in the early middle ages which were influenced by roman law, ecclesiastic law and tribal customs, and in the second to the different legal codes written in the 18th century primarily the Codex Maximilianeus bavaricus civilis Bavaria, , the Allgemeines Landrecht Prussia, , and the West Galician Code Galicia, then part of Austria, Henri Henri 21 1 1 bronze badge.
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