Napoleon's Reforms: The Civil Code, the Concordat and What Lasted

Start hereThe 1804 Code says every French person shall enjoy civil rights. The same Code says the wife owes her husband obedience. So did Napoleon build lasting rights, or lasting limits?

Some of what Napoleon built in France has lasted more than 200 years. Between 1799 and 1804 he set up the Conseil d’État, the prefects, the Banque de France, the Concordat, the lycées, the Légion d’honneur and the Civil Code.

The same years brought back slavery in the colonies and put married women under their husbands’ control. This page goes through what he built, what was reversed, and how historians weigh it. It ends with a way to read the 1804 Code in its own words.

011. The reforms at a glance

The Fondation Napoléon, the Napoleon heritage foundation, calls these reforms the “masses of granite”, meant to stabilise France after the Revolution. It writes that most of them “still exist today”.

Reform	Date	What it did
Conseil d’État	13 December 1799	Drafted laws and advised the head of state
Banque de France	18 January 1800	A private company that also served as a “public bank”
Prefects	17 February 1800	An appointed official at the head of each département
Concordat	15 July 1801	A settlement with the Papacy
Lycées	1 May 1802	State secondary schools, for boys only
Légion d’honneur	19 May 1802	A national order for soldiers and civilians
Civil Code	21 March 1804	One civil law for the whole country

022. The Civil Code of 1804

Who wrote it

A commission of four lawyers, set up in August 1800, drafted it: Tronchet, Bigot de Préameneu, Maleville and Portalis. The Conseil d’État then debated it from July 1801, with Napoleon in the chair, or Cambacérès when he was away.

It was promulgated on 21 March 1804, with 36 laws and 2,281 articles. In 1807 it was renamed the Code Napoléon. So he did not write it. But the Fondation writes that he left his mark on it by reimposing “the superiority of the husband and father”.

Property, inheritance and equal rights

The translations below are ours, from the 1804 edition.

• Article 8: “Tout Français jouira des droits civils”, every French person shall enjoy civil rights.
• Article 544 defines property as the right to enjoy and dispose of things “in the most absolute manner”, as long as no law forbids the use.
• Article 545 says no one can be forced to give up property except for public use, and then with fair compensation paid in advance.
• Article 745 lets children inherit from their parents “without distinction of sex or birth order”.

The Fondation’s overview says the new property laws swept away feudal traditions.

Marriage, women and divorce

Inside marriage, the Code was not equal. Article 213 reads: “Le mari doit protection à sa femme, la femme obéissance à son mari.” The husband owes his wife protection; the wife owes her husband obedience.

• A wife had to live with her husband and follow him wherever he chose to live. In return he had to take her in and provide what she needed to live, according to his means (article 214).
• She could not give away, sell, mortgage or acquire property, by gift or purchase, without her husband taking part or consenting in writing (article 217).
• Article 1124 lists married women, “in the cases set by law”, among those unable to make contracts, beside minors and adults under guardianship.
• A son under 25 and a daughter under 21 needed their parents’ consent to marry, and if the parents disagreed, the father’s consent was enough (article 148).

Divorce stayed, on unequal terms.

• A husband could seek a divorce for his wife’s adultery (article 229).
• A wife could do so for her husband’s adultery only when he had kept his mistress in the family home (article 230).
• Either spouse could seek it for violence, cruelty or grave insults, or when the other received a dishonouring criminal sentence (articles 231 and 232).
• Divorce by mutual consent was allowed (article 233). It was possible only after two years of marriage, and not after twenty years or once the wife was 45 (articles 276 and 277).
• Mutual consent was not allowed if the husband was under 25 or the wife under 21. It also always needed the consent of their parents or other living ascendants (articles 275 and 278).

The historian Thierry Lentz writes that Napoleon “approved and even supported” the rules that made wives and daughters legal minors. He adds that Napoleon was not alone in this: Cambacérès, Portalis and most of the Council defended them too. Lentz dates the end of part of this legal inequality to 1946, and full legal and political equality to the 1970s.

033. The Concordat of 1801

The Concordat, signed on 15 July 1801, was a diplomatic agreement between the Papacy and the French state. It did not make Catholicism the state religion. It called it the religion of “the majority of the French”.

• The Church agreed not to reclaim property the state had taken during the Revolution.
• In return, Napoleon promised the clergy fair wages.
• Existing bishops were required to resign, though several refused.

The peace did not last. The Organic Articles were added to the agreement without Pope Pius VII’s knowledge.

French troops occupied Rome on 2 February 1808, and a decree of May 1809 annexed it. The Pope answered with an excommunication that did not name Napoleon. On the night of 5–6 July 1809 French soldiers arrested him.

The historian Peter Hicks writes that Napoleon’s letters “do not amount to ordering the kidnapping”, yet Napoleon kept the Pope under house arrest for the next five years. He was held first at Savona and then at Fontainebleau.

In one corner of France, part of this system outlived both men. A law of 1905 separated the Churches and the State and repealed the 1802 law that had put the Concordat into force.

That 1905 law was never applied in Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin and Moselle. In 2013 France’s Constitutional Council ruled that a rule from the 1802 law on paying Protestant pastors there was in line with the Constitution. The decision explains that laws of 1919, 1924 and 1944, passed after French sovereignty was restored there, kept the local religious law in force as a provisional measure.

044. Prefects and the Conseil d’État

A law of 17 February 1800 organised the country into départements (which dated from 1790), new arrondissements, and communes.

• Prefects, sub-prefects and the mayors of communes with more than 5,000 people were appointed by the head of state.
• The prefect chose the mayors of smaller communes.
• The councils that worked beside them were not elected.

Lentz lists the system’s defining features as rejecting the election of administrators, a professional civil service and a fixed hierarchy. He writes that the law stayed on the statute books, with amendments, until 1982. Large parts of it still survive, he adds, including the prefects.

The Conseil d’État, created on 13 December 1799, drafted bills and advised the head of state. The Fondation calls it an important institution still today.

055. The Banque de France

The bank was founded on 18 January 1800 by a group of bankers, at the instigation of the First Consul. Thirty shares were bought on his behalf.

• In 1803 it won the privilege of issuing banknotes for Paris.
• After a crisis in 1805, it was run by a Governor and two Deputy Governors appointed by the head of state.
• It gained the monopoly of banknotes across France only in 1848.
• It was nationalised by an act of 2 December 1945.

Today the bank describes itself as “the French pillar of the Eurosystem”.

066. The Légion d’honneur

The order was created on 19 May 1802 over real opposition. It passed by 56 votes to 38 in the Tribunat and 166 to 110 in the Corps législatif. From the first awards, Napoleon honoured, in his own words, “his soldiers and his scholars”. Until the Second Empire, soldiers made up about 75% of its members.

It also had a political purpose. Roederer told the Corps législatif it was “a political institution which places intermediaries in society”.

The first woman to receive it was Marie-Angélique Duchemin, on 15 August 1851, for her fighting in the Revolutionary wars. It is still France’s highest national distinction, and its civil promotions have followed strict parity between men and women since 2007.

077. The lycées

The lycées were created on 1 May 1802, for boys only. Latin, Greek, mathematics, chemistry and moral philosophy were compulsory. Discipline was military in style, with pupils divided into companies. By 1808 there were 35 of them.

088. What was reversed or criticised

Slavery restored in 1802

The Convention abolished slavery on 4 February 1794. On 25 December 1799 the consuls promised Saint-Domingue that “the sacred principles of liberty and the equality of the blacks will never be infringed or modified”.

A law of 20 May 1802 provided that slavery would be maintained in the colonies returned to France under the Treaty of Amiens. It also restored the slave trade to them, under the rules from before 1789.

• Formally, the law only “maintained” slavery where it had not been abolished.
• But Bonaparte asked his captains general to re-establish it everywhere, when they judged it appropriate.
• The Fondation’s page says they did so in Saint-Domingue, Guyana and Guadeloupe.
• Lentz names Guadeloupe and Guyana, and notes that in Saint-Domingue independence was proclaimed instead.

In Guadeloupe, Colonel Louis Delgrès called for a mass uprising against the expedition. Surrounded at Matouba, he blew himself up with about 300 of his companions. A military commission passed 250 death sentences, and about 5,000 Black people were expelled from the island.

The Fondation Napoléon calls the re-establishment of slavery and the repression that followed “a stain on the posterity of the consular regime”.

A Library of Congress research guide notes that slavery was abolished during the French Revolution. It adds that “many of the gains were eliminated when Napoleon took over as First Consul (1799-1804), and then Emperor (1804-1814)”. He abolished the slave trade by a decree of 28 March 1815, during the Hundred Days, and France abolished slavery again in 1848.

Haiti

Napoleon’s forces regained control of Saint-Domingue in 1802 and attempted to restore slavery, which led to a new wave of rebellion.

• General Leclerc’s expedition of 20,000 soldiers left Brest on 14 December 1801.
• Toussaint Louverture submitted on 6 May 1802 and died at the Fort de Joux on 7 April 1803.
• At the beginning of August 1802 news reached the island that slavery had been re-established in the colonies, and the Black population, who had not been disarmed, revolted.
• General Rochambeau’s command was marked by torture, dogs trained to hunt Black people, mass drownings and summary executions.
• Rochambeau surrendered on 28 November 1803, and Haiti’s independence was proclaimed on 1 January 1804.

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence names the fear of being enslaved again. In Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus’s translation, it says “we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government”.

The Fondation cites historians’ estimate of 100,000 deaths in the Caribbean colonial wars of 1802 to 1804, about 70% of them Black. It writes that Bonaparte’s instructions and letters “encouraged great severity” but gave no orders for massacre, and that he “did not publicly disavow his subordinates, which is already serious enough”.

The United States did not recognise Haiti until 1862.

Censorship and the worker’s record book

A decree of 5 February 1810 set up a formal censorship office for books and other non-periodical publications. Until then, the historian Victor Coffin wrote in 1917, police supervision had been “all-powerful over all agencies of public expression”. By Coffin’s count of the office’s weekly reports, from 1810 to 1814 it examined 2,262 manuscripts, ordered 272 corrections and banned 116.

From 12 April 1803 the worker’s record book, the livret ouvrier, became compulsory. It let the government track people’s comings and goings. An employer could refuse to sign it and so stop a worker from leaving. It was abolished only in 1890.

The 1808 decrees on Jews

Napoleon convened an assembly of Jewish notables in Paris on 15 July 1806, then a “Grand Sanhedrin” of 71 members, including 45 rabbis. Decrees of 17 March and 20 July 1808 organised Jewish worship through consistories.

One decree of 17 March 1808 set special rules for ten years:

• Debts owed to Jews could be reduced or even cancelled.
• Jews who wanted to trade needed a special licence, renewed each year.
• Jews not already living in the Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin could no longer settle there, unless the Emperor gave special permission (article 16).
• The decree did not apply to Jews in Bordeaux and in the Gironde and Landes départements (article 19).

Lentz writes that historians “continue to debate whether it was beneficial, intermediate or ‘infamous’”. Emmanuelle Papot and Irène Delage, also writing for the Fondation, note that it was called “infamous” because it introduced differences between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, contrary to the Civil Code.

Lentz writes that “as unfair and severe as it may seem”, in the long run it had positive results. This is a judgement about values, so the evidence alone will not settle it.

099. How historians weigh it

Historians credit him with a durable state.

• Lentz writes that Napoleon created “what could be called the ‘administrative constitution’ of contemporary France”.
• The Fondation’s overview says the Code fixed ideas such as equality, citizenship and the protection of property in people’s minds, both in France and in continental Europe.
• Lentz notes that others have made much of how these local institutions affirmed government authority, “giving rise to a sort of ‘authoritarianism’”. He argues that less has been said about their role in France’s national unity.

They also criticise him, often in the same pages.

• On women, Lentz writes: “By codifying inequality, Napoleon made it more difficult, but such was the mentality of his time”.
• On slavery, some of the sharpest words on this page come from the Napoleon heritage foundation itself.

Our reading: both lists come from one aim, a strong and orderly state run from the centre. A useful question for any reform is who it served and who it left out.

1010. Read the 1804 Code yourself

The original text is free to read online.

1. Open the 1804 edition of the Code civil des Français on the Internet Archive, a scan of a copy held by the Bavarian State Library.
2. Turn to page 50 for articles 212 to 214, on the duties of husband and wife.
3. Turn to page 54 for the grounds for divorce, articles 229 to 233.
4. For each article, ask the question above: who did this rule protect, and who did it bind?

Our page on Napoleon’s life covers the wars and the empire, and our page on the “there is nothing we can do” meme covers the quote people search for.

11Quick answers

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How we checked this · Last checked October 2026

• We read every article of the 1804 Civil Code we quote on the page images of a Paris 1804 edition, because the scan's machine-read text is unreliable. The English translations are ours.
• Where a summary and the text itself differ, we give the text. That means the 1804 Code for marriage and divorce, and the decree of 17 March 1808, read in a scan of the Bulletin des lois, for the rule on Alsace.
• For slavery and Haiti we used the Fondation Napoléon's pages alongside a Library of Congress guide, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's Slavery and Remembrance site, and Duke University's text of Haiti's Declaration of Independence.
• We could not open France's official legal database, which showed a bot check, so the page says nothing about how the Code reads today.

How we check every article →

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