Studies on Celtic Law

FIRST PART. CHAP. I.

—ably, the relationships of citizens among themselves, to punish every crime committed by one citizen against another, and to compel anyone who has seized the property of their fellow citizen to make restitution.

The second obligation of the State concerns external relations: it is to protect the persons and property of citizens against attacks from foreigners, to defend territory threatened with invasion by the national enemy, and to punish as they deserve the traitors or cowards who do not provide their assistance in ensuring the security of the fatherland against the foreigner.

Of these two roles of the State, the second was the only one understood at the dawn of societies. At the time of the Roman conquest, the Celtic world still attributed no other function to the State than to maintain the independence of the city-state cité While we usually think of a "city," the author uses "cité" here in the classical sense of a "civitas" or sovereign community of people. and the integrity of the property of the people or the nation against the aggression of neighboring peoples or nations. The State, the city-state, was a group of families allied against the foreigner, but the families that composed the State regulated their relationships among themselves as they saw fit, without the State having the right to intervene to determine the nature of those relationships.

Political and religious conceptions are interdependent. In primitive societies, one does not have the idea of the State sentencing a citizen’s murderer to death and carrying out the execution, or compelling a thief to make restitution; nor does one have the notion of a god,

Vocabulary: State, citizen, external relations, Roman conquest, Celtic world, city-state, families, primitive societies