1801

The avowed object of the Bank of France was the support of trade and industry. To its capital of thirty million francs the government subscribed five millions, which it took from the guarantee bonds given by its employees on their assuming positions of trust. The operations of brokers and money-lenders were then subjected to the strictest control, and the enterprises of agriculture and manufactures were regulated and encouraged by the reëstablishment of chambers of commerce and by public rewards for excellence. In the first year of his financial administration Gaudin inaugurated the success which continued for the rest of his term. In every department a new and equitable system of tax-collecting was instituted, and the assessments were so fixed for a definite period at moderate rates as to awaken public confidence. In a single year the returns from the public forests were doubled, and the reorganization of the customs produced similar results.

For the control of expenditures, Barbé-Marbois was appointed state treasurer; Mollien was made director of a special office for the gradual payment of the public debt. To this office was assigned the management of about a quarter of the remaining public lands for the purchase of state securities; and when their price rose, as it soon did, to fifty per cent. of their par value, new obligations were issued, and quickly subscribed at the same rate. The floating debt was soon wiped out. Of the remaining public funds a hundred and twenty million francs were assigned for the maintenance of public instruction, and forty million for the pension list. The victorious army remained quartered abroad. The effect of all these wisely calculated measures was electrical. Taxes were promptly and willingly paid, the public credit was revived, and the moneyed classes became the stanchest supporters of the Consulate.

CHAPTER XX

The Code and the University[21]

The Preparation of the Code — The Men who Made it — Its Defects — The Changes it Wrought — The Benefits it Conferred — French Education under Royalty — Schemes of the Revolution — Bonaparte's Aims in Education — His Preliminary Measures — The University of France.

The climax of these beneficent changes was a corresponding reform and simplification of the laws. The name of Napoleon has been erased from many of his institutions, but it still endures on that splendid system of jurisprudence known as the Code Napoléon, and in the annals of law-making it vies in luster with that of Justinian. The monarchy, before its fall, had become aware of the inconvenience attaching to the diversity of legal practice in the various French provinces. At one extreme was the old customary law of the northern inhabitants, at the other was the nearly pure Roman law of the south, and between them every variety of peculiar and complicated local practice. One of the meanings of the Revolutionary watchword "Equality" was the reform of this inequality; but the turmoil prevalent during the years of the Assembly, the Convention, and the Directory had made it impossible to complete the work. Nevertheless, those years had been full of discussion, and Cambacérès had a project in readiness. So convinced was Bonaparte of the urgency of reform that on the very night in which he assumed the reins of government the two commissions were charged with the performance of the repeated promises which every republican government had made. A statute was formulated, and passed on August twelfth, 1800. In accordance with its provisions, a committee of three great jurists—Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu, and Portalis, with Malleville as secretary—was appointed to make a draft. This was completed in four months, submitted to the courts of appeal for suggestions, and then in the council of state, the sessions of which Bonaparte regularly attended, was speedily revised into its final form. In the following year the code was promulgated.

The famous body of laws owes its solid value to its historical foundation; for it is a compound of the ancient customs, the Roman law, and the experiences of the Revolution, the third element dominating the other two. Cambacérès's project is its basis, the deliberations of the commissions molded its form, its paragraphs were polished in the council of state according to the opinions of Boulay de la Meurthe, Berlier, Treilhard, Cambacérès, and Lebrun, and Bonaparte himself was the author of many radical regulations concerning marriage, divorce, and property. Simplicity, directness, comprehensibility, and appropriateness are the marks of the entire structure, as they are confessedly characteristic of the First Consul's mind. His good sense and his diligence are stamped on every page. On the other hand, in many places it bears also the marks of his unscientific and untrained intellect; and Savigny, the Prussian jurist, went so far as to characterize it as a "political malady."

This remark is true, but only in the sense that, as in the Roman empire, so in Napoleonic France, civil liberty developed in an inverse ratio to political liberty. Austin thought the code was compiled in haste and ignorance, and that its lack of definitions to the terms employed, together with the absence of expositions either of principles or of distinctions, gave it a "fallacious brevity." Nevertheless, this very simplicity and brevity have been its strength, and to this day—with, of course, many substantive modifications, but still in an undisturbed identity—it successfully dominates France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, and many important parts of Germany. Believing it to be the most enduring portion of his labors, Bonaparte to the latest day of his life claimed the exclusive credit of its creation, to the unjust disparagement of the other great minds which coöperated in its formation.

A few of the more easily comprehensible changes which it wrought will illustrate its character. There are four divisions—one introductory, the other three treating respectively of the law of persons, the law of things, and the law of property and inheritance. The subject of the civil law, the ego, the object of the civil law, the objective or natural world, the relation between the two, or property—such is, in a word, the method; the equality of all men before the law is its principle; the respect for property and the directness of litigation are its aims. Hereditary nobility and primogeniture were definitely abolished—every child, of either sex, having equal rights of inheritance before the law. The right of testamentary disposition was extended so as to give greater liberty while not interfering with the principle of family solidarity. To Jews were given the complete rights of all other citizens, under a series of far-seeing and wise provisions, set forth in special statutes, which destroyed many of their antiquated customs, and all the shifts by which they had hitherto avoided many civil obligations and still evaded the performance of duties which weighed heavily on others. Every religious confession was recognized, and all were alike supported by the state; but the members of all were obliged to submit to official registration, and to consent to the rite of civil marriage. While, on the one hand, the necessity of divorce under certain conditions was recognized and provisions were made for it; on the other, a series of stringent and even barbarous regulations knitted the family more closely together than ever before, or elsewhere in the world, and made it a social rock against which political storms beat in vain to shake the established order. Napoleon's iron will alone realized the notions of regenerating feudal society which philosophers had formed and agitators had sought in vain to establish.