The Age of Codifications
There is a period in the history of European law that historiography calls “the age of codification” or “codifications,” using the plural to stress the nationalistic connotations inherent in the connection between that phenomenon and the constitution or extension of the various European nation states, and using the singular to accentuate the unity of that phenomenon as a point of reference for an ideology and a method.
The time-span is not short: it includes all of the last century and a good part of our own. The “age of codifications” began in the eighteenth century with a few preliminary projects, some of them left in the planning stage, some put into effect. These compilations attempted to extract the most important provisions from the incalculable variety of particular norms of the nation states, with the idea that a body of selected precepts would be more useful than a disconnected congeries of sometimes contradictory dispositions. The attempt to bring order from disorder was by no means a new one; it had a famous predecessor, centuries before, in Gratian’s Concordia discordantium canonum y or Dccretumy of 1140—42. But the new attempt had a specific and particular historical significance, one that affected the outcome of later initiatives. After the sorting process that led to a “consolidation” in which a number of provisions were collected together, there came a concerted effort to draw up a body of rules articulated within an orderly and carefully crafted outline—a “code” authoritatively imposed to constitute the precept, mark the limit, and state the guarantee it offered all the citizens of a state. Thus historiography usually shows a period of incubation and of “consolidations” preceding a period of revitalization and “codifications.”
Scholars have scoured remote and in some cases insignificant corners of the eighteenth-century scene in search of attempted codifications conceptualized or realized at that time.
They have rediscovered some figures with a conscious will for reform who operated in the context of a responsibly launched movement for renewal and who worked within organisms and magistracies that had the authority to act; they also encountered professorial dreamers and would-be philo- sophes closed within their private worlds fantasizing about a utopian new age and thinking their efforts had helped to bring them about. Even when these movements were conveniently labeled “consolidation” and “codification,”1 historians have often confused the two phenomena in studying regions of Europe that did not and could not have experienced them. They have even done so despite a warning: “The code,” Tullio Ascarelli wrote in 1945, “is characterized by a claim to construct a 'new,5 'complete,5 and 'definitive5 legal order that includes among its formulations solutions for all possible cases; it is precisely this characteristic that distinguishes it from the legislative consolidations of the previous epochs, whose only purpose was to reorganize the law in force.”22.