Ordre Public: A Research into the Origin and Evolution of a Legal Metaphor

The chapter analyses the origin and evolution of the legal metaphor ordre public through a two-pronged approach that combines a comparative perspective of the legal context of discourse with a cognitive–linguistic perspective of metaphors. After a methodological caveat, the first sections of the paper trace the origin of the locution back to an early speech by Montesquieu, and then consider the metaphorical function the expression ordre public was meant to serve, and the legal meaning it shaped, through a reconstruction of the semantic fields surrounding the words ordre and public at that time. The middle sections analyse the locution in the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1789), in the Code civil (1804), and finally in the Code pénal (1810) and how these documents polarised the concept, by bringing to the fore different facets of it. The final sections look at how the concept ordre public has evolved in Continental Europe during the Age of Nation States, leading to its present-day use.