The Napoleonic Civil Code: The Belgian Case

Abstract

When the armies of the French republic poured into Belgium in the summer of 1794, they stampeded across a landscape which had been ravaged successively by civil strife, repeated invasion and economic disaster. Only two years prior to the first French conquest of 1792, the Austrian Netherlands had been struggling in its fight for independence from the Habsburgs and the internecine battle for power between the conservative Statists and the more progressive Vonckists. The French Revolution, therefore, struck a country which was already at war with itself over breaking with the past. By the time the Civil Code was promulgated in 1804, therefore, Belgium had undergone the shock of its own revolution, followed by successive military occupations and the annexation to the French Republic, all of which was a transformative experience for Belgian society. Consequently, the Napoleonic order was a break with both Belgium's ancien régime past and its more recent and traumatic history. It is in this context that one can consider whether or not Napoleonic law represented a new form of liberal order, or merely the instrument of French domination.