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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In 1800, General Napoleon Bonaparte, as the new dictator of France, began the arduous task of revising France’s outdated and muddled legal system.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 682. Every proprietor whose fields are surrounded, and who has no outlet to the public road, may claim a passage over the fields of his neighbors for agricultural purposes of his estate, on condition of an indemnity proportioned to the injury which he may occasion.
Article 683. The road ought regularly to be taken on that side where the passage is the shortest from the farm surrounded to the public highway.
Article 684. Nevertheless it ought to be fixed in that spot where it can occasion the least injury to him over whose farm it is granted.
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