“Si la France le savait...”: a utilização do estado de sítio na França (1791-1918)

The state of siege as an institution is a French legal creation of the late eighteenth century and it lies in the field of exception. With the French regulation, the measure reaffirmed the transitional sense of the institute, because the state of siege flirts with authoritarianism by hypertrophying power in the Executive and allowing more severe measures of repression. The article works with French sources (military, legislative and juridical documents) to, after presenting the notions of constitutional formulation of the institute, analyze its use in France from the French Revolution to the First World War. The measure, which was not a cold letter of the law, was present in the political regimes following the revolutionary phase and gained great repercussion in other legislations. Methodologically, the normative perspective is used to define the state of siege institute, evaluating its development as well as promoting quantitative and qualitative analyses. The data are put into dialog with the most recent international historiography, especially the French one, about the matter. The article concludes that its transposition from a military notion of battlefield to a fictitious notion applied in a political context was full of applications enabling a significant use of arbitrariness by legal means.