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French Civil Code, 1804
After four years of debate and planning, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte enacts a new legal framework for France, known as the “Napoleonic Code.” The civil code gave post-revolutionary France its first coherent set of laws concerning property, colonial affairs, the family, and individual rights.
In 1800, General Napoleon Bonaparte, as the new dictator of France, began the arduous task of revising France’s outdated and muddled legal system. He established a special commission, led by J.J. Cambaceres, which met more than 80 times to discuss the revolutionary legal revisions, and Napoleon presided over nearly half of these sessions. In March 1804, the Napoleonic Code was finally approved.
It codified several branches of law, including commercial and criminal law, and divided civil law into categories of property and family.
Article 663. Each inhabitant of a town or suburb can compel this neighbor to contribute to the construction and reparation of the enclosure forming the boundary of their houses, courts, and gardens situated within the said towns and suburbs: the height of the enclosure shall be fixed according to particular regulations or constant and acknowledged usages; and in defect of such usages or regulations, every boundary wall between which two neighbors shall for the future be constructed or rebuilt, must be at least thirty-two decimeters [ten feet] high, including the coping, within towns containing fifty thousand souls and upwards, and twenty-six decimeters [eight feet] in others.
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