Promulgation of the Civil Code

Before 1789 northern France lived under customary law, the south under written Roman law; Voltaire quipped that one changed laws more often than horses. Four revolutionary attempts at codification had failed. In August 1800 Cambacérès and the First Consul entrusted the work to a commission of four jurists — Portalis, Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu, Maleville — who delivered their draft in four months.

Discussion filled one hundred and two sittings of the Council of State, fifty-seven of which Bonaparte chaired. He intervened on adoption, divorce, paternal authority and the civil status of soldiers; his often blunt interventions shaped the family articles. The thirty-six separately voted laws were gathered on 21 March 1804 under the title Civil Code of the French, renamed the Napoleonic Code in 1807.

The Code enshrined the gains of 1789: equality before the law, freedom of conscience, property "inviolable and sacred", a secular civil registry, the abolition of feudalism. It also enshrined a reaction: the married woman was legally incapable, placed under her husband's authority; paternity suits were forbidden; the natural child inherited only half.

Carried by the armies, adopted or imitated in Belgium, the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Italy, Poland and Louisiana, it would inspire the codes of Latin America, Quebec and Japan. "My true glory," Napoleon said at Saint Helena, "is not having won forty battles… it is my Civil Code."