Political Order and Political Decay Read Online Free Page A

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    The violence of the revolution and the violence of the counterrevolution engendered a deep polarization in French society that made incremental political reform of a British sort much harder to achieve. The French would experience the July Revolution of 1830, the Revolution of 1848, and then, in the 1870s, occupation by Prussia and the Paris Commune, before a more enduring limited-franchise democracy could be established. By this point, there had been democratic elections under varying restrictive rules in many other European countries, including the archconservative Prussia. France, which had led the way toward democracy in 1789, proved to be something of a laggard. Worse, one of the revolution’s legacies was a French left that in the twentieth century was prone to glorify violence and attach itself to totalitarian causes from Stalin’s to Mao’s.
    So the question is reasonably asked, What did the French Revolution achieve? If the answer was not establishment of democracy in France, it did have a great, immediate, and lasting impact in the other institutional domains. First, it led to the development and promulgation in 1804 of Europe’s first modern law code, the Civil Code or Code Napoléon. And the second was the creation of a modern administrative state, through which the code was implemented and enforced. Even in the absence of democracy, these constituted major advances that made government less arbitrary, more transparent, and more uniform in its treatment of citizens. Napoleon, looking backward after his defeat at Waterloo, claimed that the Civil Code constituted a greater victory than any he had won on the battlefield, and he was right in many ways. 8
    French law up to that point was a pastiche of rules that varied from region to region, some inherited from the Roman law, some based on customary law, as well as the countless accretions that had been added over the centuries from ecclesiastical, feudal, commercial, and secular sources. The resulting tangle of laws was often self-contradictory or ambiguous. The Code Napoléon replaced all this with a single modern code that was clear, elegantly written, and extremely compact.
    The Code Napoléon cemented many of the gains of the revolution by eliminating from law feudal distinctions of rank and privilege. All citizens henceforth were declared to have equal rights and duties that were clearly laid out ex ante. The new Civil Code enshrined modern concepts of property rights: “the right to enjoy and to dispose of one’s property in the most absolute fashion, provided that it is not used in a manner prohibited by law.” Land was freed of feudal and customary entails, opening the way for development of a market economy. Seigneurial courts—courts controlled by the local lord, over which peasant grievances had boiled forth during the revolution—were abolished altogether and replaced with a uniform system of civil magistrates. Births and marriages now had to be recorded with civil rather than religious authorities. 9
    The Code Napoléon was immediately exported to the countries France was then occupying: Belgium, Luxembourg, the German territories west of the Rhine, the Palatinate, Rhenish Prussia, Geneva, Savoy, and Parma. It was subsequently forcibly introduced into Italy, the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic territories. The Civil Code was voluntarily accepted by many of the smaller German states. As we will see in chapter 4, this body of law was to become the inspiration for the reform of the Prussian Code that took place after the defeat by the French at Jena. It was used as a model for countless other civil codes outside Europe, from Senegal to Argentina to Egypt to Japan. While legal codes forcibly imposed on other societies do not have a great record of success, the Code Napoléon did: countries like Italy and the Netherlands that resisted its adoption eventually ended up with laws that were very similar in substance