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The same quality of almost pyramidal solidity characterizes another great enterprise of the Napoleonic period, the codification of French law.

The difficulties of this undertaking consisted mainly in the enormous mass of decrees emanating from the National Assemblies, relative to political, civil, and criminal affairs.  Many of those decrees, the offspring of a momentary enthusiasm, had found a place in the codes of laws which were then compiled; and yet sagacious observers knew that several of them warred against the instincts of the Gallic race.  This conviction was summed up in the trenchant statement of the compilers of the new code, in which they appealed from the ideas of Rousseau to the customs of the past:  “New theories are but the maxims of certain individuals:  the old maxims represent the sense of centuries.”  There was much force in this dictum.  The overthrow of Feudalism and the old monarchy had not permanently altered the French nature.  They were still the same joyous, artistic, clan-loving people whom the Latin historians described:  and pride in the nation or the family was as closely linked with respect for a doughty champion of national and family interests as in the days of Caesar.  Of this Roman or quasi-Gallic reaction Napoleon was to be the regulator; and no sphere of his activities bespeaks his unerring political sagacity more than his sifting of the old and the new in the great code which was afterwards to bear his name.

Old French law had been an inextricable labyrinth of laws and customs, mainly Roman and Frankish in origin, hopelessly tangled by feudal customs, provincial privileges, ecclesiastical rights, and the later undergrowth of royal decrees; and no part of the legislation of the revolutionists met with so little resistance as their root and branch destruction of this exasperating jungle.  Their difficulties only began when they endeavoured to apply the principles of the Rights of Man to political, civil, and criminal affairs.  The chief of these principles relating to criminal law were that law can only forbid actions that are harmful to society, and must only impose penalties that are strictly necessary.  To these epoch-making pronouncements the Assembly added, in 1790, that crimes should be visited only on the guilty individual, not on the family; and that penalties must be proportioned to the offences.  The last two of these principles had of late been flagrantly violated; but the general pacification of France now permitted a calm consideration of the whole question of criminal law, and of its application to normal conditions.