through a sharp, polemical lens. The opening of the treatise argues that the French strive to be irresponsible and first targets legal ideas and customs. It claims that, since the Revolution, judges are reduced to automatic applicators of statutes, shedding moral responsibility, unlike the old French magistrates, English judges, or Roman praetors who shaped law and felt its burdens. Beccaria’s case for strict textualism is invoked to show how fear of “the spirit of the law” also shelters judges from blame. The author defends the Ancien Régime’s sale of judicial offices (following Montesquieu and La Beaumelle against Voltaire) as a paradoxical guarantee of independence, and argues the Revolution annexed justice to the executive, making government the true judge. He then illustrates politicized judging: the Paris court’s condemnation of Cardinal Luçon, allegedly based on ministry assurances and a distorted quotation, and the 1906 Court of Cassation in the Dreyfus affair, said to have inverted a legal article to avoid a new court-martial—thus appeasing power while keeping the case unresolved. The narrative widens to show executive and parliamentary encroachment, the sway of deputies and local “governments,” and echoes of Guizot and Poincaré on the danger of politics in the courts. In sum, the beginning portrays a judiciary doubly shielded—by literalism and by obedience—leaving justice in the hands of an irresponsible authority. (This is an automatically generated summary.)