On This Day: A step forward from feudalism, a devastating step back for women and slavery - Mar. 21, 1804
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Napoleonic Code approved in France - March 21, 1804
After four years of debate and planning, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte enacts a new legal framework for France, known as the “Napoleonic Code.” The civil code gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws concerning property, colonial affairs, the family and individual rights.
In 1804, General Napoleon Bonaparte, as the new emperor of France, began the arduous task of revising France’s outdated and muddled legal system. He established a special commission, led by J.J. Cambaceres, which met more than 80 times to discuss the revolutionary legal revisions, and Napoleon presided over nearly half of these sessions. In March 1804, the Napoleonic Code was finally approved.
It codified several branches of law, including commercial and criminal law, and divided civil law into categories of property and family. The Napoleonic Code made the authority of men over their families stronger, deprived women of any individual rights, and reduced the rights of illegitimate children. All male citizens were also granted equal rights under the law and the right to religious dissent, but colonial slavery was reintroduced. The laws were applied to all territories under Napoleon’s control and were influential in several other European countries and in South America.
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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/napoleonic-code-approved-in-france
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The Napoleonic Code: Property, Succession, and Gender
Deanna Small
University of Minnesota - Morris
July 2022
The Code seemed to quickly turn away from gains women had made. There was a period of time born out of the French Revolution known as “intermediary law” from 1789-1804 which codified several civil liberties and extended them to women. This period of time marked the end of the Ancien Regime and the beginning of a modern legal system. During this time, the intermediary laws included civil marriage, lowering the age of majority to 21 instead of 25, and equal treatment under the law in cases of adultery. In effect, by 1792 the legislation passed had
curtailed the power of husbands and fathers. During the intermediary law period widows gained new authority as the heads of households, but by the Napoleonic Code the system shifted once again. Their authority was gone as the legal system structured itself around an all-powerful male in the family. Their rapidly changing legal status left French women, particularly widows, in precarious and unsettled positions.
The new role of women in France was a part of the Code’s vision for the country. The Napoleonic Code was carefully constructed by Napoleon and its writers to make a legal framework that worked in a market society based on property ownership. It also reinstated patriarchal power in the family. However the new system went farther than simply undoing the legal work of the revolutionary and intermediary period. Women were placed under the complete authority of their husbands. The lack of legal rights for women, unmarried women and their children in particular, was uniquely severe compared to other legal systems. These unmarried women and their children were unable to appeal for compensation or living allowance from the fathers or to take the father to court to receive such things.
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https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1109&context=horizons
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The French Man Who Signed Slavery Back Into Law : Notes on Napoleon
There’s much wrong with the world as we approach the 252nd birthday of Napoleon Bonaparte. But it is a hopeful sign that there’s more attention these days to his sin of legalizing the crime of slavery.
Kerry Dooley Young
Aug 14, 2021
Napoleon holds a unique and awful record. He made France the only nation in history to make enslaving other humans legal after already having already abolished this crime.
Think about that for a minute. In 1802, Napoleon signed a law that made slavery legal again.
France outlawed slavery in 1794. That victory was the result of years of lobbying by advocates for freedom, who were opposed by people who had profited off the misery and pain of those enslaved in French colonies like Saint-Domingue, which became Haiti.
Napoleon thus condemned about 300,000 people to years of life in bondage, according to an article on the DW.com, the English language site of Deutsche Welle. France did not definitively abolished slavery until 1848, about 27 years after Napoleon’s death.
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https://dooleyyoung.medium.com/the-french-man-who-signed-slavery-back-into-law-notes-on-napoleon-70d59889e1a4
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Napoleonic Code
The Napoleonic Code, officially the Civil Code of the French, is the French civil code established during the French Consulate period in 1804 and still in force in France, although heavily and frequently amended since its inception.
Napoleon himself was not involved in the drafting of the Code, as it was drafted by a commission of four eminent jurists and entered into force on 21 March 1804. The code, with its stress on clearly written and accessible law, was a major milestone in the abolition of the previous patchwork of feudal laws. Historian Robert Holtman regards it as one of the few documents that have influenced the whole world. The Napoleonic Code is often portrayed to be one of the most widespread system of law in the world, claimed to be in force in various forms in about 120 countries, but many of those countries are civil code countries that had their own version of their civil code for centuries.
The Napoleonic Code was not the first legal code to be established in a European country with a civil-law legal system; it was preceded by the Codex Maximilianeus bavaricus civilis (Bavaria, 1756), the Allgemeines Landrecht (Prussia, 1794), and the West Galician Code (Galicia, then part of Austria, 1797). It was, however, the first modern legal code to be adopted with a pan-European scope, and it strongly influenced the law of many of the countries formed during and after the Napoleonic Wars. The Napoleonic Code influenced developing countries outside Europe attempting to modernize and defeudalize their countries through legal reforms, such as those in the Middle East, while in Latin America the Spanish and Portuguese had established their own versions of the civil code.
History
The categories of the Napoleonic Code were not drawn from earlier French law, but instead from Justinian's sixth-century codification of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, and within it, the Institutes. The Institutes divide into the law of:
persons
things
actions.
Similarly, the Napoleonic Code divided the law into four sections:
persons
property
acquisition of property
civil procedure (moved into a separate code in 1806).
Prior codification attempts
Before the Napoleonic Code, France did not have a single set of laws; law consisted mainly of local customs, sometimes officially compiled in "custumals" (coutumes), notably the Custom of Paris. There were also exemptions, privileges, and special charters granted by kings or other feudal lords. With the Revolution, the last vestiges of feudalism were abolished.
Specifically, as to civil law, the many different bodies of law used in different parts of France were to be replaced by a single legal code.
Napoleonic reforms
After these commissions had rejected multiple constitutional drafts, Napoleon came to power in 1799 and set out to reform the confusing and contradictory French feudal and monarchic legal system in accordance with the ideals of the French Revolution. A commission of four eminent jurists was appointed in 1800. The Code was complete by 1801, after intensive scrutiny by the Council of State, but was not published until 21 March 1804. It was promulgated as the "Civil Code of the French", but was renamed "the Napoleonic Code" from 1807 to 1815, and once again after the Second French Empire.
The process developed mainly out of the various customs, but was inspired by Justinian's sixth-century codification of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis and, within that, Justinian's Code (Codex). The Napoleonic Code, however, differed from Justinian's in important ways:
it incorporated all kinds of earlier rules, not just legislation;
it was not a collection of edited extracts, but a comprehensive rewrite;
its structure was much more rational;
it had no religious content
it was written in the vernacular.
The Napoleonic Code marked a fundamental change in the nature of the civil law legal system, making laws clearer and more accessible. It also superseded the former conflict between royal legislative power and, particularly in the final years before the Revolution, protests by judges representing views and privileges of the social classes to which they belonged. Such conflict led the Revolutionaries to take a negative view of judges making law.
This is reflected in the Napoleonic Code provision prohibiting judges from deciding a case by way of introducing a general rule, since the creation of general rules is an exercise of legislative and not of judicial power.
Louisiana
In the United States, the legal system is largely based on English common law. But the state of Louisiana is unique in having a strong influence from French and Spanish legal traditions on its civil code. Spanish and French colonial forces quarreled over Louisiana during most of the 1700s, with Spain ultimately ceding the territory to France in 1800, which in turn sold the territory to the United States in 1803. The 10th Amendment to the US Constitution grants states control of laws not specifically given to the Federal government, so Louisiana's legal system retains many French elements. Examples of the practical legal differences between Louisiana and the other states include the bar exam and legal standards of practice for attorneys in Louisiana being significantly different from other states; Louisiana is the only American state to practice forced inheritance of an estate; also, some of Louisiana's laws clash with the Uniform Commercial Code practiced by the other 49 states.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code
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