In “Rights- for Women?” author Rosalind Miles summarizes the treatment of women under the Napoleonic Codes: “by marrying they were signing up to a lifetime ban on even going out to buy food at the market unless their husbands agreed”. The implementation of the Napoleonic Codes halted the feminist movements of Mary Wollstonecraft and Marquis Concordat and, undoing the progress made. If women divorced their husbands or vice versa, men received complete ownership over the children, and if women committed adultery, they faced the death penalty, a penalty not applicable to men. They could not initiate a lawsuit without permission from their husbands however they could be prosecuted without their husbands’ permission. As a result, women lost control over property, money, and their own children. Napoleon openly stated that “the wife obedience to her husband,” implying that women were inferior to men.

In France, these codes impacted women negatively due to patriarchal restrictions. The codes also reinstituted slavery in French colonies in order to boost France’s economy and profits at the expense of free labor, marking a setback in the French abolition movement. Those who disagreed with Napoleon’s laws were prosecuted.

Napoleon implemented secret police along with increased censorship in order to suppress anyone who questioned the legitimacy of his rule. Īlthough Napoleon’s global wars resulted in increased nationalism and foreign trade, they also led to his downfall at the scorched earth in Russia. The codes improved France by enforcing religious toleration, improving working conditions, and creating middle-class education in the form of “lycées”. With these codes, the upper class, known as the former first and second estates, no longer enjoyed tax exemptions. Primogeniture, hereditary nobility, and class privileges were also repealed. The Napoleonic Codes created a fair tax and hiring system that abolished exemptions based on social status, repealing the three estates system from feudal times. These laws ensured equal legal rights for all men however they also restricted many areas of women’s lives. In the early nineteenth century, the newly-crowned emperor Napoleon Bonaparte implemented a set of laws known as as the Napoleonic Codes.

4 The Restoration of Louis XVIII Bourbon.

The rise of napoleon