Code Napoléon

The Convention, or Third, found almost nothing to destroy, though it was passionately eager to fasten on a hated institution, and though the Revolutionary lawyers, who abounded in it, were the real authors of the legislative provisions, afterwards engrafted on the Code Napoléon, which for ever prevented the revival of feudal ownership in France.

, there has existed, ever since the establishment or introduction of the Code called by his name, a system of publicly registering sales and mortgages of land.

In spite of revolutions at Paris, the fundamental provisions of the Code Napoléon have stood to a great extent unaltered since its publication in 1804, and before 1900 the Code had become invested with a sort of legal sanctity which secured it against sudden and sweeping change.

In some of the French provinces, married women, of a rank below nobility, obtained all the powers of dealing with property which Roman jurisprudence had allowed, and this local law has been largely followed by the Code Napoleon;

’ The passage ends with a provision of which the spirit, strange to say, survives in the modern Code making the loudest claim to civilised principle, the Code Napoléon (Code Pénal, s.

[vi] which is governed, as you know, by its old French law, lately repaired and beautified in a sort of Revised Version of the Code Napoléon.

I have a copy of the Code Napoléon here if any one wants to look at it.

It implies that the law of France, the Code Napoléon, which is the intellectual offspring of one of the greatest jurists known to the modern world—Cambacérès—is disreputable.