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 ponders the apparent neglect of the history of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) by jurists and historians alike and ventures to offer some explanations. It also provides an overview of the Age of Institutionalization, from approximately the 1920s to the 1950s. This period witnessed the creation of arbitral institutions, such as the Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in 1923 and the American Arbitration Association in 1926. These institutions not only administered cases but also established rules and principles, such as the ICC Rules of Arbitration. Through such codification efforts, they also developed international commercial arbitration from within. The Age of Institutionalization was marked by a much more internationalist spirit or legal consciousness. It lasted until the 1950s, when the 1958 Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (the New York Convention) ushered international commercial arbitration into a new era.

This chapter is divided into two sections. The first probes the origins of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and its Court of Arbitration, from the Atlantic City Conference (1919) to the foundation of the ICC (1920) and its Court of Arbitration (1923). The creation of the Court, a body set up to administer arbitration cases, was a clear sign that international commercial arbitration was becoming more institutionalized. The second section explores the tension between renewal and anxiety in the Age of Institutionalization. It presents the Geneva Protocol on Arbitration Clauses (1923) and the Geneva Convention on the Execution of Foreign Awards (1927) as expressions of that anxiety and the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1958) as signaling the swing toward renewal. Along the way, this chapter hopes to demonstrate that the key “builders” of the current regime of international commercial arbitration were not the “grand old men” described by Dezalay and Garth in their seminal book Dealing in Virtue, but predominantly private business leaders and members of arbitral institutions.