laws which were then compiled; and yet sagacious observers knew that
several of them warred against the instincts of the Gallic race. This
conviction was summed up in the trenchant statement of the compilers
of the new code, in which they appealed from the ideas of Rousseau to
the customs of the past: "New theories are but the maxims of certain
individuals: the old maxims represent the sense of centuries." There
was much force in this dictum. The overthrow of Feudalism and the old
monarchy had not permanently altered the French nature. They were
still the same joyous, artistic, clan-loving people whom the Latin
historians described: and pride in the nation or the family was as
closely linked with respect for a doughty champion of national and
family interests as in the days of Cæsar. Of this Roman or
quasi-Gallic reaction Napoleon was to be the regulator; and no sphere
of his activities bespeaks his unerring political sagacity more than
his sifting of the old and the new in the great code which was
afterwards to bear his name.

Old French law had been an inextricable labyrinth of laws and customs,
mainly Roman and Frankish in origin, hopelessly tangled by feudal
customs, provincial privileges, ecclesiastical rights, and the later
undergrowth of royal decrees; and no part of the legislation of the
revolutionists met with so little resistance as their root and branch
destruction of this exasperating jungle. Their difficulties only began
when they endeavoured to apply the principles of the Rights of Man to
political, civil, and criminal affairs. The chief of these principles
relating to criminal law were that law can only forbid actions that
are harmful to society, and must only impose penalties that are
strictly necessary. To these epoch-making pronouncements the Assembly
added, in 1790, that crimes should be visited only on the guilty
individual, not on the family; and that penalties must be proportioned