Napoleonic Code
나폴레옹 법전
The common name of the French Civil Code (Code civil des Français), in force from 21 March 1804. Drafted by a commission of jurists that Napoleon appointed in 1800, it replaced the patchwork of local customs and feudal privileges with a single written law. It made property the most absolute of rights, required inheritances to be divided equally among the children and established the husband's supremacy in the family. It became the model for the civil law of many countries in Europe and Latin America and, heavily amended, is still in force in France.
In depth
Before the Napoleonic Code France had no single body of law. Law consisted mainly of local customs, the Custom of Paris being the best known, alongside exemptions, privileges and charters granted by kings and lords. The Revolution abolished the last vestiges of feudalism and promised a single civil code for the whole country. The National Convention charged Cambacérès with drafting it in 1793, but his drafts of 1793, 1794 and 1796 were all rejected.
Having consolidated his power with the victory at Marengo, Napoleon appointed a commission of Maleville, Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu and Portalis on 12 August 1800, and himself chaired many of its plenary sessions. When the Legislative Body rejected the draft by 142 votes to 139 in December 1801, he suspended all bills and cowed the assemblies into giving him a majority. The code came into force on 21 March 1804. It was divided into persons, property and the acquisition of property; civil procedure became a separate code in 1806.
The code allowed only duly promulgated and published laws to be applied, ruling out secret laws, and prohibited ex post facto laws. It forbade judges to refuse to judge on the ground that the law was insufficient, and equally forbade them to make general rules of a legislative kind. Article 544 defined property as "the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner, provided that one makes no use of them prohibited by laws or regulations". The hiring of labour was treated, like the hiring of things, as a lease left to the free will of the parties. In the family the husband stood over his wife and children, a married woman was treated as a minor, and divorce by mutual consent was abolished in 1804. Inheritances had to be divided equally among all the children, so that a family's land was split with every generation.
It was the first modern code adopted with a pan-European scope. The codes of the Two Sicilies (1819), the Netherlands (1837), Romania (1864), Italy (1865), Portugal (1867) and Spain (1889) drew on it, as did Louisiana (1808), Haiti (1826), Lower Canada (1866) and the countries of Latin America; its use in the Rhineland fed into the German Civil Code. In France it was heavily amended in the twentieth century: the head of the family was abolished in 1970, children born outside marriage gained equal rights in 1972, and divorce by consent was made easier again in 1975.
Marx mocked the code twice in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Louis Bonaparte, he wrote, bore the name Napoleon "in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: 'Inquiry into paternity is forbidden'", a dig at the rumour that he was not a true son of the Bonaparte family. And speaking of the ruin of the small-holding peasants, he wrote: "The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions."