Code Napoléon -- Laying Down the Law in Québec, Louisiana and France

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Napoleonic Code

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One evening, I was reading a passage from the memoirs of French author François-René de Chateaubriand (1746-1848). Though he had come to detest Napoleon Bonaparte, Chateaubriand could not deny his enemy’s greatness. Among other achievements, Napoleon was “great for having created a regular and powerful government, a code of laws adopted in different countries …”

It occurred to me that I’d actually set foot on three of these “countries”: France, where the Napoleonic Code is the law of the land, and Louisiana and Quebec, where the statutes owe much to this “Code Napoléon” (or “Code Civil”).

Irene Delage (in “The French Civil Code or Code Civil, 21 March, 1804: An Overview,” ),
wrote that the kings of France had laws as early as the 1400s.  Their written laws had roots in ancient Roman statutes. The unwritten laws, based on local customs, were so often abused that the common folk would say, “God preserve us from the law.”

In the twilight of the Old Regime (September 2, 1791), the Revolutionary National Assembly decreed a “Code of Civil Laws for the Kingdom,” aiming to reform the nation’s laws.  Ensuing turmoil and the Reign of Terror doomed the Code to failure.

Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, who had headed the ill-fated Legislative Committee of 1791, was appointed to a new commission by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800. The result was the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which, in an amended form, remains the law of France.

 According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, the Napoleonic Code “embodied the private law of France (i.e., law regulating relations between individuals).” Generally, it was a reworking of the Roman law, or civil law, long observed by rulers in continental Europe. This civil law had taken on a distinct French character in many regards and, in the north of the country, had adopted principles of Germanic law.

In the words of The Guide to American Law, many legal scholars consider the resulting Code Napoléon “the first modern counterpart to Roman law.” The ancestor of all modern civil law was the Corpus Juris Civilis, enacted by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I from 529-539 A.D.  This body of laws defined property and personal status, serving as the prototype for the three parts of Napoleon’s Code: people, goods and property.

The Napoleonic Code consists of 36 laws and 2,281 articles. In a way, these statutes changed the status of women –if only to give husbands rather than fathers control over their legal status and property rights. Citoyennes (female citizens) did not even have the right to choose their own professions.  Fathers had authority over any “children” under the age of 25 and could even send them to correctional institutions.  A child whose father was not French did not hold French citizenship if born in France (the mother’s nationality did not matter). 

“Guilty until proven innocent” was a precept of the old Civil Law that continued in the Napoleonic Code. The “Early Canadiana Online” Web Site contrasted this “inquisitorial method” with the “adversarial method” of British and American justice (“presumed innocent until proven guilty”).

None the less, Daniel J. Boorstin and Gerald Parshall called the Napoleonic Code one of the “true watersheds in human affairs.” In “History’s Hidden Turning Points” (U.S. News & World Report, April 22, 1991),  they wrote that the Code “irreversibly strengthened the middle class by sweeping away layer upon layer of aristocratic privileges and other class-based inequities.”

The Napoleonic Code left its mark on all of Europe – not only in the countries that Bonaparte conquered, but in all other nations except England -- which had its own strong Common Law tradition, instead of the Civil Code of the Continent. in the 19th century, the Code Napoléon became the model for codes in 24 countries, including governments in Latin America.