eminent jurists, he chaired many of the commission's plenary sessions, and his support was crucial to its enactment.

The code, with its stress on clearly written and accessible law, was a major milestone in the abolition of the previous patchwork of feudal laws. Historian Robert Holtman regards it as one of the few documents that have influenced the whole world.The Napoleonic Code was not the first legal code to be established in a European country with a civil-law