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Please join the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now for a talk entitled "The Civil Code, Napoleon's Second Body: The Institution, Empire, and Aesthetic of a New Legal Regime (1804-1816)" by Stefanos Geroulanos (Professor of History, NYU).

Abstract: This talk is part of a project on the French code civil, often called the Napoleonic code, which was instituted in 1804 and which became a major component of the First Empire regime, especially the later years of Napoleon Bonaparte's reign. I am specifically interested in the process of its writing, its deployment, styling, myth, and imperial function in Europe. The secondary literature on the code is small, and my goal is not to produce something comprehensive. Rather, I am invested in a historical epistemology of the law: how the code made a certain kind of knowledge possible, especially knowledge of the state, the population, and its regulation. In the talk I will discuss three things: (1) How the code civil was written, approved, publicized, and effectively "produced" through a process that emphatically identified it with Napoleon, inaugurating a particular myth for both, and a particular understanding of sovereignty. Its authors and advocates (in the Conseil d'État and beyond) imagined the code’s authority flowing out of Napoleon’s military/imperial might. But they also presented the code as instituting imperial sovereignty on the basis of what it regulated: property and family. (2) How the code was understood to have a specific relationship to time and territory—including imperial conquest. (3) How this the code was imagined a New Man, indeed a dual New Man: thanks to it, Napoleon could be envisioned as the "Great Man" (as Lawgiver and Conqueror) but the largely bourgeois and patriarchal “normal” man of the post-Revolutionary Era—a man who (in full consciousness of the paradox) was set free to pursue his civil and economic interests thanks to the intervention of the state

Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and a Professor of History at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (2024) and The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe (co-authored with Todd Meyers, 2018). He serves as the Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, and recently co-edited Power and Time (with Dan Edelstein and Natasha Wheatley, 2020), The Routledge Handbook in the History and Sociology of Ideas (with Gisèle Sapiro, 2024), and William Pietz's The Problem of the Fetish (with Francesco Pellizzi and Ben Kafka, 2022). 

Hosted by the French-Speaking Worlds: Then and Now Research Group, sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages Research Unit and co-sponsored by the  and .

This event is part of .