NAPOLEON AND HIS CODE 131 There have been amendments and modifications averaging about one for each year®^ but their importance is not generally recog- nized.^ At times a general revision has been mooted^ but as Brissaud ®^ says "up to the present time the idea of a general re- vision seems to find but a cool reception in the world of business. We must hope that the method of partial amendments will suffice for a long time to come." Thus the identity of the Code as a whole is preserved intact. It has outlived all the dynasties and regimes that waxed and waned in France during the nineteenth century. Not even the restored Bourbons attempted to touch its contents; they merely sought to dim the fame of its chief promoter by omitting his name and calHng it simply the Civil Code — an attempt as vain as it was petty. A People's Law It was surely a great achievement to have brought order out of the legal chaos that marked pre-revolutionary France. But to the Code Napoleon belongs an even greater distinction. As one critic observes: "... it has diffused the knowledge of law, and made it comparatively easy for the ordinary Frenchman to become acquainted with the lead- ing principles which govern the law of his own country." ^ Nor has this result been confined to France, If Savigny, founder of the historical school of jurisprudence, thought he saw failure for the Code because it had been "drafted at an unfavorable epoch," ^ Walton, "The New German Code," 16 Juridical Rev. 148, note. Among them was the repeal of the divorce provisions in i8i6. These were mainly restored, however, in 1884, the groimd of incompatibihty by mutual consent being omitted. See Smithers, "The Code Napoleon," 40 Am. L. Reg. (n. s.) 127, 147.
- I CouR DE DROIT CIVIL FRANfAis, 5 ed., 13. Esmein, 6 Encyclopaedia Bri-
TANNiCA, II ed., 634, 635, however, says: "The Code needed revising and com- pleting and this was carried out by degrees by means of numerous important laws."
- "Its entire revision was demanded at an early period; but this movement foimd
little response until, in 1904, at the celebration of the centennial of the Civil Code, the Minister of Justice appointed a special commission to prepare a first draft of a revision.'* I Continental Legal History Series, 298. «* Id., 298-99. «* Fisher, 9 Cambridge Modern History, 161. "The Code has been thumbed and discussed till it has become extremely famiUar, with the result that there are few coimtries in which some knowledge of law is so widely diffused as in France." Walton, "The New German Code," 16 Juridical Rev. 148.
