The French Civil Code, Complete

The Civil Code of the French, Complete

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The French Civil Code, usually called the "Civil Code" (often abbreviated as "C. Civ." or "CC") or "Napoleon Code", brings together the laws relating to French civil law, that is to say the set of rules that determine the status of persons (book I), that of property (book II) and that of relations between private persons (books III and IV).

Promulgated on March 21, 1804 (30 Ventôse year XII), by Napoleon Bonaparte, it incorporates some of the articles of Paris custom and the written law of the South of France. Modified and expanded many times from the Third Republic, most of the original articles of Titles II and III remain (more than 1,120 in the early 2000s out of the original 2,281 articles1).

The Civil Code constitutes the status of persons of French nationality (French citizens), their families and their relations, except for French people living in Mayotte, New Caledonia and Wallis-and-Futuna who, by virtue of article 75 of the 1958 Constitution, have not opted for common law status and who have customary civil status. The Code Napoléon is also still in force in Mauritius, left in place after the British conquest, although it has evolved somewhat thereafter.

This text has been greatly modified since the Third Republic but remains, even today, the foundation of French civil law and, more broadly, of all French law. Dean Jean Carbonnier thus said of the Civil Code that it is “the civil constitution of the French”. Its field is in fact extremely broad: the rights of persons (the name, the status of the human person, the legal personality, the incapacities, that is to say the conditions allowing to pass acts, to be the owner of property, etc.), family law (filiation, marriage, PACS, divorce), family property law (matrimonial regimes, gifts, successions), property law (what types of property, movable or immovable, property, possession), the law of obligations and contracts, as well as in Book I of the general principles of law such as the nullity of unpublished laws (art. 1), the question of the non-retroactivity of laws and their character general (art. 2), the mandatory nature for foreigners and their property of security and police regulations, the obligation for the judge to rule on all cases submitted to him (art. 4), the prohibition to give a general and regulatory character to its decisions (art.5 ), the nullity of contracts whose object is contrary to morality or public order (art.6), as well as the principle of thirty-year limitation of rights and actions and its derogations.