Document Type : Original Article
Author
PhD student, History of Iran after Islam, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
The transformation of public law in Iran during the Constitutional era cannot be explained without understanding the role of farang‑raftagān (Iranian intellectuals and officials who had studied or lived in Europe) and their lived experience of Western civilization and political thought, particularly in France. Focusing on the process through which Iranian intellectuals and diplomats became acquainted with modern concepts such as sovereignty, law, the separation of powers, and the social contract, this article demonstrates how the farang‑raftagān, as carriers of modern public‑law concepts, played a fundamental role in translating, adapting, and localizing these ideas. Drawing on Persian sources (treatises and works by Mostashar al‑Doleh, Talebof, Malkom Khan, and Taqizadeh) as well as contemporaneous French texts (Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Constitutions of 1789 and 1791), the study employs a descriptive–analytical method and library‑based research to reconstruct the trajectory through which concepts of public law were transmitted and transformed from Paris to Tehran. The central hypothesis of this research is that the transfer of public‑law thought to Iran occurred not merely through textual translations, but primarily through the lived experiences of farang‑raftagān within French intellectual milieus and their direct engagement with Western educational, cultural, and political systems. Upon their return, through authorship, translation, and institution‑building, they provided the epistemic foundations necessary for the emergence of the Constitutional Constitution. In this sense, they may be regarded as cultural intermediaries between two intellectual traditions: Iran’s juristic–monarchical tradition and France’s republican tradition. The findings indicate that, by selectively interpreting and translating the French Constitution, the farang‑raftagān laid the theoretical groundwork for the formation of a law‑based state in Iran and forged a conceptual bridge between Iran’s bureaucratic tradition and modern institutions of governance.
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