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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In 1800, General Napoleon Bonaparte, as the new dictator of France, began the arduous task of revising France’s outdated and muddled legal system.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 723. The law regulates the order of succeeding between legitimate heirs; in defect of such, the property passes to natural children [born out-of-wedlock], afterwards to the father or mother surviving; and if there be neither of those, to the state.
Article 745. Children or their descendants succeed [inherit] to their father and mother, grandfathers, grandmothers, or other ancestors, without distinction of sex or primogeniture [birth order], and although they be the issue of different marriages.
They succeed by equal portions and by heads when they are all in the first degree and called in their own right: they succeed by stocks, when they come all or in part by representation.
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