ANNOUNCEMENT: Publication of CoLeCo 25-26 Student Blogs

(image: UPF Barcelona's campus of the 'Ciutadella', where the peak event took place)

After almost ten months of hybrid, online, and in-person collaboration, the individual and collective blog posts produced by students from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), CY Cergy Paris Université, the University of Ljubljana, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel are ready to be published over the coming weeks.

We begin with a contribution by Klara Babić, entitled The Role of Telecommunications in Establishing the New Authorities of the Slovene National Government at the End of the First World War and the Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her contribution will be followed by those of her fellow students and colleagues across the EUTopia network. The Ljubljana students worked under a common thematic umbrella in 2025-2026 (From a state of war to a state of peace via (new) communication technologies and media: the establishing of authorities, institutions, laws and the reframing of constitutional values).

This year's theme, “The End(s) of War”, has inspired students to explore a wide range of topics from international, European, transnational, constitutional, regional, and even municipal perspectives. In keeping with the EUTopia alliance's commitment to multilingualism, several contributions also highlight the importance of national languages in shaping legal concepts and, more broadly, political and legal culture.

At the heart of the EUTopia CoLeCo blog is the discussion of a legal or legally relevant source. Students are invited to communicate their findings to a wider audience of peers while adhering to established academic standards of citation and attribution. At the same time, the digital format of the blog offers opportunities to move beyond the traditional academic paper by integrating historical printed sources, images, videos, and other forms of digital content.

We hope that these contributions will not only showcase the diversity of legal-historical research undertaken within the Connected Learning Community, but also stimulate further discussion about the many ways in which societies experience, regulate, and remember the end of conflict.

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CY CASE: Death Penalty: The Fight for Abolitionism in France and Canada

A guillotine (image source: pixabay ) For as long as we know, the death penalty was used in France as the capital penalty for a various list of crimes, which changed through time, from the most insignificant to the most serious infraction. Various methods were used, and it was often savagely cruel. After the guillotine came into use in April 1792 (five months before the abolition of monarchy and the establishment of the First Republic), it has been the most symbolic way to carry out the death penalty. But there were other means, especially during the Middle Ages with quartering, burning people alive on a pyre (such as Jeanne d’Arc in France), hanging, crucifixion, beheadings with different types of weapons. The specificity of the executions in France is that they were public, which is not by itself a specificity, but it became an entertainment for the people who came to witness the death of the convict. The executions took place on the Place de Grève , in Paris (nowadays the s...

LJUBLJANA CASE: The Sokol Association in Ljubljana, the capital of Carniola: Physical Education as a Means of Political Engagement in the 19th century?

Picture 1: Comparison between the Turnvereins and Sokols establishment The gymnastics association Južni Sokol (Southern Falcon), founded in Ljubljana in 1863, marks the beginning of the so-called Sokol movement on the (present-day) Slovenian territory. Despite its somewhat misleading name, the association served other purposes besides gymnastics, mainly political ones. Its development thus serves as an excellent case study of how the legal framework for associations at that time was applied in practice. In the 19th century, national-cultural associations such as Sokol soon became one of the key tools of national awakening. Its history is closely connected to another such association, the Narodna čitavnica v Ljubljani (reading club of Ljubljana), founded in 1862. The cultural field in which the reading club was active expanded to such an extent that it started setting up several different associations, Sokol being one of them. In addition to the fact that a significant number of t...

CY CASE - Women and union organization in France (19th - 20th century)

Women and labor Restrictions and incapacities Since the middle ages, a woman is under male authority, she is economically dependent of men who control all her life: since her birth, she receives the authority of her father; authority is given to her husband when she marries, for their domestic life; masculine authority follows her at work, under the orders of her employer… When they had the chance to have a job outside of the family home, women were slowed by corporations (in the early modern period), because most did not accept the settlement of women in a male-dominated social world of work. It is only at the end of the 18 th century that corporations ended, especially in France with the d’Allarde decree in march 1791, and in Great Britain : from then on, women could join easily the industry. Therefore, they were seen in feminine fields such as in millinery or lingerie industries. Les ouvriers du livre, Rébérioux Madeleine, 1981 Marriage and Civil code T...

EUTopia CoLeCo Legal History: The End(s) of War

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