132 HARVARD LAW REVIEW a successor, and perhaps greater than Savigny, in the same school, testifies to its phenomenal success: "The highest tribute to the French Codes is their great and lasting popularity with the people, the lay-public, of the countries into which they have been introduced. How much weight ought to be attached to this symptom our own experience should teach us, which surely shows us how thoroughly indifferent in general is the mass of the public to the particular rules of civil life by which it may be governed, and how extremely superficial are even the most energetic movements in favour of the amendment of the law. At the fall of the Bonapartist Empire in 1815, most of the restored Governments had the strongest desire to ex- pel the intrusive jurisprudence which had substituted itself for the ancient customs of the land. It was foimd, however, that the people prized it as the most precious of possessions: the attempt to subvert it was persevered in in very few instances, and in most of them the French Codes were restored after a brief abeyance. And not only has the ob- servance of these laws been confirmed in almost all the countries which ever enjoyed them, but they have made their way into numerous other communities, and occasionally in the teeth of the most formidable polit- ical obstacles. So steady, indeed, and so resistless has been the dif- fusion of this Romanized jurisprudence, either in its original or in a slightly modified form, that the civil law of the whole Continent is clearly destined to be absorbed and lost in it. It is, too, we should add, a very vulgar error to suppose that the civil part of the Codes has only been found suited to a society so peculiarly constituted as that of France. With alterations and additions, mostly directed to the enlargement of the testamentary power on one side, and to the conservation of entails and primogeniture on the other, they have been admitted into countries whose social condition is as vmlike that of France as is possible to con- ceive. A written jurisprudence, identical through five-sixths of its tenor, regulates at the present moment a community monarchical, and in some parts deeply feudalized, like Austria, and a community dependent for its existence on commerce, like Holland — a society so near the pin- nacle of civilization as France, and one as primitive and as little culti- vated as that of Sicily and Southern Italy." ^' And as Esmein ®^ observes with evident and just national pride, "Its ascendency has been due chiefly to the clearness of its pro- visions and to the spirit of equity and equaUty which inspires them." «^ Maine, Village Communities, 7 ed., 357-59. " 6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ii ed., 634, 635.
