do anything; first there was his military talent, then his diplomatic skill,
next his administrative ability and finally his prowess as a legislator.
The provisions of the new Civil Code began to be promulgated in 1802
and the final clauses were published in 1804. Later there would follow a
Commercial (1807), Criminal (18o8) and Penal (1810) Code. Napoleon's
intentions in framing the Civil Code have been much disputed, but he
declared that he genuinely wanted to create a civil society, with a middle
range of institutions between the individual and the State; this was
needed, he claimed, because the Revolution had introduced a spirit of
excessive individualism. His famous declaration in the Council of State
was that the Revolution had turned the French into so many grains of
sand, so that it was now his task 'to throw upon the soil of France a few
blocks of granite, in order to give a direction to the public spirit.'
The essence of the Code was its eclecticism and its clear intention to
benefit the new bourgeoisie, the bulwark of Napoleon's power. Essentially
a compromise between old and new law, between the modalities of pre-
1789 and the new circumstances and conceptions of the Revolution, it
mixed customary and statute law, intertwined legal and philosophical
concepts and at times emerged with the worst of both worlds. The
Tribunate, in particular, found the various drafts hurriedly prepared and
ill-digested and thought that too many Revolutionary principles had been
sacrificed to those of the ancien regime. The Code was meant to benefit
wealthy men of property and had nothing to say to the propertyless.
Philosophically, it was designed to extirpate feudalism and to enthrone
bourgeois privilege, seeing property as an absolute and transcendental
right, logically prior to society.
It is sometimes said that the Code was progressive, but such a view
does not survive a scrutiny of the various clauses. The propertyless
emerged with very few rights at all. The Code proclaimed freedom of
labour but did nothing whatever to safeguard workers' rights; in any
labour dispute the word of the employer was to be taken as gospel.
Napoleon's anti-worker stance was in any case overt. By decrees of 1803
and 1804 he placed all proletarians under police supervision, obliged
them to carry identity cards, prohibited unions and strikes on pain of
imprisonment and charged the Prefect of Police with the arbitrary
settlement of wage disputes. Amazingly, in the years of his success
Napoleon was not perceived as being anti-labour. The workers supported
him because of his policy of low food prices - to ensure which he placed
bakers and butchers under state control - and the rising wages caused by
a revival of industry. His victories in the field attracted their working-
marcin
(Marcin)
#1