Napoleonic Code

Napoleonic Code, French Code Napoléon, French civil code enacted on March 21, 1804, and still extant, with revisions. It was the main influence on the 19th-century civil codes of most countries of continental Europe and Latin America.

More than two centuries after its promulgation, the Napoleonic Code is still living law in a great part of the world. History has thus partly justified the melancholic words uttered by Napoleon in exile: “My real glory is not the forty battles I won, for Waterloo’s defeat will destroy the memory of as many victories.…What nothing will destroy, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.”