Napoleonic Code
Revolutions tend to create opposite if not entirely equal forces of reaction. In France, such forces weakened progress toward democracy. Napoleon began installing himself in power in 1799, establishing a male meritocracy in which military and civil service promotions were based at least in part on actual performance rather than family origin.
He also established a new legal code and a national educational system that featured secondary schooling for boys. These innovations helped provide a training ground for a new middle class. But Napoleon aspired to empire, and overreached on the battlefield. After his defeat at Waterloo the Bourbon monarchy returned to the throne. Despite small movements in a democratic direction in 1830, and later in 1848, France remained in the grip of a small, if somewhat factionalized political elite.The French Civil Code of 1803 formalized many of the traditional prerogatives of patriarchal power. Men enjoyed the right to use physical force to compel the obedience of their wives and minor children and to control their earnings. Married women were allowed to retain some rights over property they brought into the marriage, but all income generated from such property belonged by law to their husbands. A man could force a woman who conceived his child out of wedlock to marry him if he chose, but an unmarried mother could make no claims upon the father of her child either for marriage or support. The right to divorce was heavily restricted and based on an explicit double standard (a wife's adultery, but not a husband's, provided grounds). Only single women retained any of the rights the Revolution had bestowed, remaining entitled, alongside their brothers, to an equal share of their parents' estates.3
Napoleon, famously outraged by his wife Josephine's infidelities, once referred to women as ‘‘mere machines for making children.''4 France's political economists were not quite so blunt, but Jean-Baptiste Say prescribed restrictions on women's opportunities (see Chapter 9).
Catholics, invoking Pope XIII's Encyclical Rerum Novarum, declared that women were best suited to work as wives and mothers. Anti-clericalists often agreed with them on this point. Jules Michelet, the most famous historian of the period, reiterated Rousseau's fears that women would inevitably cause political disorder.5 The artist and illustrator Honore Daumier caricatured the ‘‘femmes nouvelles'' who sought rights for themselves as neurotic hags.Many French republicans, even the so-called anarchists, hoped to keep their women under control at home. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, famous for his rejection of inherited privilege and his slogan that ‘‘property is theft” called for a decentralized economy based on agricultural production and handicrafts. He proclaimed that every man should be master of his own home, where women should serve their husbands and children and refrain from any contact with other men.6 Separation of the male and female spheres seemed even more important to these French men than to prominent British thinkers.