Property rights and their violations - La proprit viole

Interest in the history of ownership rights is growing and spreading to different disciplines. Historians are turning their attention mainly to the rise of private and individual ownership as it was codified in 19th-century liberal Europe. In writing this history, however, their perspective has too often ignored the other side of the coin, namely the restrictions which the sovereign imposed on such rights, allegedly in the interest of the community. The papers collected in the present volume suggest that private property is not necessarily the most safeguarded legal model, hence it is not less vulnerable to violation. They construct a close analysis of the most common forms of abuse of private property on record expropriation, seizure, and confiscation perpetrated by public authorities. They also seek to define the uneasy, often intricate relation between legal and legitimate. In a perspective of lights and shadows, the role of confiscation and expropriation changes : now seen as powerful instruments of change, now as enduring factors of conservation in the evolution of private ownership rights. Les droits de proprit sont depuis longtemps au cur de lintrt de diverses disciplines. Lattention des historiens sest focalise surtout sur la naissance de la proprit prive et individuelle telle quelle a t codifie dans lEurope librale du XIXe sicle. Toutefois, son histoire a trop souvent nglig lautre face de la mdaille, savoir les limites fixes ce droit par le souverain au nom de lintrt de la collectivit. Les contributions figurant dans ce volume suggrent que la proprit prive individuelle ne reprsente pas le modle juridique le plus apte la protger face aux risques dinfraction. Au cur des analyses il y a les formes historiques de la violation de la proprit prive expropriations, saisies, confiscations perptres par les autorits et le rapport, souvent complexe et ambige, entre les dimensions de la lgalit et de la lgitimit. Dans un jeu dombres et de lumires, les confiscations et les expropriations se dessinent la fois comme de puissants instruments de changement et de tenaces facteur de conservation dans lvolution des formes de proprit.