Penal Code — 12 février 1810

The Penal Code established the legality of offences and punishments, but retained branding, hard labour and a highly repressive scale against attacks on property and the state. It completed the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1808, which organised the jury and the public prosecutor's office. This edifice, amended many times, remained in force in France until 1994.

The last of the great codes

The codification begun with the Civil Code in 1804 ended with the criminal law. The Code of Civil Procedure of 1806, the Commercial Code of 1807 and the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1808 had preceded it; the Penal Code, promulgated on 12 February 1810, came into force on 1 January 1811 along with the last of these.

The code of 1808 organised the judicial machine: investigating magistrate, public prosecutor, trial jury, assize courts. That of 1810 said what was punished and how. Together they formed French criminal justice for almost two centuries.

Legality of offences, harshness of penalties

The founding principle was taken from the Revolution: no penalty without law, no offence not defined by a text. Crimes, misdemeanours and contraventions were classified, penalties fixed in advance, the judge's discretion bounded.

The content, however, markedly hardened the code of 1791. It restored branding with a hot iron, the pillory, forced labour for life and civil death; it provided for the amputation of the hand of a parricide before execution. The scale of penalties protected property and the security of the state first: aggravated theft could lead to the galleys, conspiracy to the scaffold.

A hundred and eighty years of application

The most archaic penalties fell quickly: branding and amputation disappeared in 1832, the pillory later, civil death in 1854. The text itself remained. Amended by every regime, it governed punishment in France until 1 March 1994, the date on which the present code came into force.

Like the others, it travelled: carried by armies and administrations, then chosen for its own sake, it served as the matrix for the penal codes of Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain and several countries of Latin America and the Near East.