Contravention and Creation of Law during the French Revolution

Moments of infraction of international law can generate new law. These can also be important examples of contingency in the history of international law, if the process occurs as an unintended consequence of actors’ aims. The French Revolution was just such an instance. The transmission of sovereignty from the person of the king to the collective populace of France was a central feature of the Revolution. Unplanned by revolutionaries, the principle of popular sovereignty bled into international law and became a new justification for claims to territory—a precept which, by the twentieth century, came to be called national self-determination. This chapter explores how the will of the people became a force in international law, inadvertently from the perspective of revolutionaries, as a result of changing public opinion, claims of jurisprudential and moral legitimacy, and military force.