At the end of January 1801, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon inaugurated an ambitious project of legal reform whose consequences would outlast even the Concordat:
The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north. Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.
His first and most important task was to unify France’s forty-two legal codes into a single system. For this monumental undertaking Napoleon had an invaluable ally in Cambacérès, who had been the secretary of the committee which had been given the task of overhauling the civil law code back in 1792 and was the author of the Projet de Code Civil (1796). ‘If the whole Code were to be mislaid,’ Napoleon once quipped, ‘it could be found in Cambacérès’ head.’
[…]
Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’
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The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading. The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society. Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution.
The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within. (‘One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’) It guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state. It allowed all adult men to engage in any occupation and to own property. Laws had to be duly promulgated and officially published, and could not apply retrospectively. Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law. Fearing the disintegration of the family as the basic social institution, the framers of the Code gave the paterfamilias almost total power, including over the property of his wife. Under Article 148 the father’s permission was required for the marriage of sons up to the age of twenty-five and daughters to twenty-one, and the marriage age was raised to fifteen for women, eighteen for men. Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.
The major criticisms levelled at the Code over the past two centuries have been that it was socially conservative, too supportive of the middle classes, of the individual and of the paterfamilias, that it made wives too dependent on their husbands, and that its inheritance provisions were damaging for an agrarian economy.
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The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was only one of several legal reforms promulgated by Napoleon, though undoubtedly the most important. By 1810 it had been joined by the Code of Civil Procedure, the Commercial Code, the Code on Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code.
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It was this body of law together that came to be known as the Code Napoléon.
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It survived in the Prussian Rhineland until 1900, and Belgium, Luxembourg, Mauritius and Monaco, as well as France, still operate it today. Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.
We could use a military dictator, honestly.
“‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’”
What more could be asked of a nations lawmakers?
“We could use a military dictator, honestly.”
Really!? How do you change power? Where is the separation of powers?
U.S. executive agencies have their own laws (“regulations”), their own courts (“administrative law judges”), and their own domestic standing armies (“law enforcement”). Where is the separation of powers?
They are not elected. How do you change power?
“How do you change power?”
OH, I KNOW THIS ONE.
“…for wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice, it is stil violence and injury, however coloured with the name, pretences, or forms of law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to a all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven.”
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