Code Napoleon

Consequently, this greatest of modern generals would create public parks and the Bank of France, organize his adopted country into prefectures, establish the lycee system of education, curb bureaucratic corruption and formulate the Civil Code — later called the Code Napoleon — to ensure equality before the law for all citizens.

The Code Napoleon was “a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France,” rendered “in prose so clear that Stendahl said he made it his daily reading.”

This may be liberating, but it can also look and sound like a kind of mirror-imperialism, a Code Napoleon of dissent, perhaps in its way as intolerant of cultural difference as other US exports such as Coca-Cola or Walmart.

Guided by the same intelligence which framed the new judicial system, Egypt has adopted the Code Napoleon.

The Code Napoleon lays down the principle that of two persons who perish by the same calamity, if they were both children, the elder probably survived the younger by a brief space, on account of having superior vital energy; whereas, if they were elderly people, the younger probably survived the elder.