Rezumat
The way in which a society deals with its insane persons could be read as its statutory limits to the liberty of men. This paper represents a short introduction in the evolution of the measures of protection of the insane persons in France, aimed at the Romanian reader. Its goal is to provide answers to two simple questions: why and what? Why does the civil law care for the intellectually disabled and the mentally ill? And why are its institutions the way they are today in the Romanian Civil Code. With the Civil Code of 1864 we abandoned our traditions in this field (the κηδεμονικός (kydemonikos) et επιτροπιας (epotropias) were our byzantine modeled measures of protection) by enacting a foreign legislation, inspired by the Napoleonic Civil Code. In 2009, the Civil Code kept its promises with the past and maintained for the mentally ill the Interdiction and the curatorship found in our old Civil Code of 1864, with little or no change in relationship to the capacity of the insane, despite the evolutions in the international human rights and even in the French legal system.
Thus, our study begins: What are the measures of interdiction and curatorship, and how are they related to the legal capacity in the French law, are they evolving and how? Why are we treating the mentally ill the way we do today?