Solone vs Licurgo? Il mito dei legislatori antichi nella Francia rivoluzionaria

How much the myth of Rome and Greek classicism influenced the French revolutionaries has long been discussed and studied by generations of scholars, each of whom has reconstructed the revolutionary experience projecting it on the needs and conflicts of their time. However, the reflection of men (and, in limited cases, of women) appears to be less studied on the role of ancient legislators and more generally on the idea of law that moved from the level of myth to that of political planning, in a context which, par excellence, was that of building a new world. The nascent political and legal architecture was built on the exaltation and at the same time on the distancing from the world of the past: Athens, Sparta and Rome were considered by some as an infinite archive from which to draw from to think about the future, by others as experiences unable to offer a rule or to serve as a model. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries mirror the myth of the ancient legislator as a political weapon to be opposed to their opponents, in an alternation of signifiers of the revolutionary public discourse on the ancients: aristocrats, demagogues and tyrannical ones, in some cases, courageous, bold and far-sighted in others. From a first investigation it appears therefore that not only the French legislator, or rather the constituent, was inspired by Spartan and Athenian myths and legislations, or by the refinement (no less mythological) of Roman law, but it emerges, something less known and above all more stimulating, how much the texts of the moderns overlapped, in a constant conversation made up of references and “inventions”, to those of the classics to the point of not distinguishing the former from the latter, and how the “legislation of the ancients” represented, in extreme synthesis, the inclined plane on which the “law of the moderns” was maturing.