Bloemberg frames the French abolition of legal proofs as jointly caused by epistemological change and a political distrust of professional judges — not by epistemology alone

legal-historylaw-of-evidencepreuve-legaleintime-convictionfrench-revolutionlegal-epistemologycausation

The claim that the French revolutionaries abolished the système de preuve légale because its a priori rules had come to seem epistemically untenable (claim-french-revolution-abolished-preuve-legale-for-intime-conviction) is accurate but, on R. G. Bloemberg's own account, incomplete. In his American Journal of Legal History study of how continental evidence law moved from fixed legal proofs to free evaluation, Bloemberg names the epistemic shift as one important factor among two intertwined causes, not the sole driver. For the French case specifically he writes that the reformers "rejected the plausibility of a priori evidentiary rules and wanted to introduce the free evaluation of the evidence by laymen – largely because they distrusted the professional magistrates or the noblesse de robe."

The choice of lay jurors — not merely the abolition of fixed proof-weights — is doing causal work in his telling. The revolutionary valorization of an untrained, "instinctive" feeling of conviction was partly a justification for preferring ordinary laymen over the trained magistracy of the ancien régime: a political-constitutional motive braided into the epistemic one, not a separate afterthought. Elsewhere in the same article Bloemberg argues explicitly against reducing the reform to any single cause, and in particular rebuts John H. Langbein's thesis that the shift was mainly a matter of penology (the rise of alternatives to capital and corporal punishment) rather than of changed ideas about proof.

The methodological point survives the specific case: a well-confirmed partial cause should not be allowed to read as the whole explanation. The vault's existing note states the rationale as "epistemic, not merely political"; this note records the second half of Bloemberg's own qualification — that the distrust of professional judges was a co-equal cause, and that the reform's most distinctive feature, its handoff of judgment to laymen, is where the political motive is most visible. The residual primary-source gap (the revolutionaries' own words on the 1791 legislation) is tracked at question-verify-preuve-legale-abolition-intime-conviction-primary.