From the French Revolution to the Napoleonic Code civil

The tumultuous events of 14 July 1789 signaling the beginning of the French Revolution produced a violent break with the past and toppled the previous structures. The decapitation of a king was the decapitation of an image of power, and, by imposed or self-imposed exclusion, it brought with it the fall of the entire “order” or “estate” of the nobility.

In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte promulgated a code destined to enjoy an extraordinary success, the Code civil, which became the model for many other codes and which followed Napoleon’s victorious armies, for some time mingling its destiny with the emperor’s.

The vast changes brought on by the French Revolution encour­aged the emergence of the bourgeoisie, a class that for some time had been gaining strength within the structures of traditional society. It was the bourgeoisie that bent to its advantage the revolution in which it had participated, but that also held in check and exploited the ex­treme and intransigent violence that had been loosed for an implaca­ble destruction of the old structures of power and society.

Henceforth the bourgeoisie occupied the army posts gradually abandoned—by constraint or by choice—by the nobility. The bour­geoisie staffed the administration and the judiciary, a bureaucratic ap­paratus that had so grown in personnel, functions, and professional specialization (if not in efficiency) that it could endow its officehold­ers with a respected and coveted noblesse de robe.

Thus the military apparatus, politics, Napoleon’s campaigns, and the creation of an empire that stretched beyond the frontiers of France to expand over much of Europe worked together to consoli­date, buttress, and increase the spiritual and economic strength of the bourgeoisie. The army needed to be backed up by a civil administra­tion ever more open to vast horizons; the professional competence of that administration was in turn challenged to search for practical solutions to the new demands of empire. The merging of the politico­military apparatus with the bureaucratic-administrative and econom­ic-speculative apparatus in imperial France made it possible for the wiliest of the bourgeoisie to rise to the top. Such men found fertile terrain in the major state agencies for cultivating their prosperity, and they found a guarantee of security and stability in the social order that the empire had brought to pass.

The judiciary and the more prominent lawyers played an important role in the “era of the triumphant bourgeois.”^[13] Often the same bour­geois families used their interlocking relations and fortunate combi­nations of talent and vocation to place their kin in the army, the ad­ministration, and the judiciary.

With the nobility thrust aside or excluded and the common people stripped of political and economic responsibility, the bourgeoisie was on the threshold of its golden age. The Napoleonic Code civil was the image of its triumph. The simplification brought on by a unified ju­ridical subject and the possibility of an equal status and a sole and identical juridical capacity for all (a capacity dynamically defined as an ability to act that could be blocked only for reasons of pathological incapacity, gender, or age) signaled the elaboration and imposition of a “model” to which every individual’s reality must correspond.

The “certainty of the law” became, and continued to be, the cer­tainty of a social order. The vocation for justice became, and contin­ued to be, a vocation for legality. For the judge, being a “servant of the law” was more important than being a “servant of the prince”: it assured a degree of decorum, dignity, and respectability direcdy pro­portional to the abstraction of the law.

In every branch of public administration and throughout the world of the lawyers and the liberal professions, new, class-based, and cere­monial attitudes sprang up, borrowed from traditionally aristocratic ideals in decline but never rejected. Some of these—severity, self-con­trol, detachment, courtesy, authority, paternalism, dignity of gesture and demeanor—permeated the fabric of daily life in social comport­ment and in parental and familial relations, affecting even the intimacy of the home in relations between husband and wife and between par­ents and children. No institution regulated by the French Code civil— the subject, property, legal transactions, obligations, personal and pat­rimonial relations within the family, succession—failed to reflect this new world. No silence in the code failed to document the disappear­ance or neglect of the old aristocracy and the juridical institutions it found congenial, such as primogeniture, Adeicommissum, the exclu­sion from inheritance of dowered daughters, and so forth.

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