Violence is the most typical and pervasive phenomenon of the modern age. It is rampant in the family, education, and the language itself: it has also invaded the realm of law. Law and violence must be viewed as social relationships. The judicial establishment and the various manifestations of violence are also part of the same structure of social relationships. Society represents the institutionalization of a violence of conflicting interests, in which freedom is not an individual and transcendent gift, but the spoils of a war among groups trying to wrest their freedom from institutions which deny it to them. The law in a capitalist society is a system of communication formulated in terms of norms ensuring the upkeep and reproduction of the capitalist socioeconomic system: it can also be defined as a means of, and an active participant in the exploitation of a social class by another. According to Marx, bourgeois society has an essentially repressive superstructure: the ruling classes use the law, the courts, and the police as weapons to subjugate, plunder, and, if necessary, suppress all those who endanger its interests and survival. In addition to the institutionalized physical violence used to enforce its laws (e.g., police and the army), the bourgeois state subjugates the masses by a more subtle type of violence: the symbolic and ideological constraints represented by the values of family, school, church, labor unions, and the press which embody the bourgeois ideology. This form of domination is enforced with the symbolic violence of traditional unwritten norms to which the masses voluntarily comply, nor because of any fear of repression, but because their minds have been programmed into obedience. This phenomenon is evident in French society, but the dynamics of the symbolic violence of the law as a means to maintain bourgeois hegemony have not been thoroughly investigated. Eighteen references are appended.