While Chapter 3 sought to situate international commercial arbitration in the broader context of international adjudication, this chapter focuses on a specific context – that of France. It uses a key concept, the arbitration clause, to explore a wider set of attitudes toward international commercial arbitration that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first part of this chapter explores the movement from renewal to anxiety in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France – the largely pro-arbitration regime of the French Revolution and the current of hostility toward arbitration that emerged during the Consulate and the First Empire. The second part of this chapter explores the pendulum movement from anxiety to renewal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This seminal period for arbitration saw French legislators recognize the validity of arbitration clauses in commercial contracts and create a special regime for international commercial arbitration. In short, this chapter is about the “saga” of the arbitration clause, which offers a unique means of exploring the dynamic of renewal and anxiety in the Age of Aspirations.

This chapter provides an overview of the third period in the modern history of international commercial arbitration. This period, which started in the 1950s, is the Age of Autonomy. It has been marked by at least three types of autonomy. The first is the autonomy of the mercatocracy, a distinct class of professionals who, having devoted an increasing amount of time and attention to international commercial arbitration, see themselves as experts in international arbitration. A second (and related) type of autonomy is that of the field as a whole. Lawyers, scholars, and professors who had hitherto considered international arbitration as a subcategory of civil procedure or international law started viewing the discipline as a full-fledged field of practice and research. The third kind of autonomy is that of the law expounded by these experts and academics through such concepts as lex mercatoria and the arbitral legal order, which can be seen as attempts to give arbitration a theoretical foundation and explain its development as a system of law in its own right.

This chapter explains the background and objectives of the study. A general objective is to explore the history of international commercial arbitration and divide this history into three broad waves or periods: the Age of Aspirations, the Age of Institutionalization, and the Age of Autonomy. A more specific objective is to demonstrate that the history of international commercial arbitration has witnessed a kind of pendulum movement between broad periods of renewal and anxiety. Along the way, this book challenges key aspects of one of the most successful and enduring works about the modern evolution of international commercial arbitration, Dezalay and Garth’s Dealing in Virtue, by contesting these scholars’ argument that the opposition between “grand old men” and “young technocrats” was a key force in structuring the modern field of international commercial arbitration.