The Great Demarcation of Power and Property

Napoleon did not invent these concepts, they were first developed by forward thinking legal scholars under the old regime. But it was napoleon who unified this new legal thinking into a single document and imposed it on the entire country. The great demarcation left a legacy that extends far beyond the french revolution. It created a distinctly modern of seeing. You can find all kinds of important concepts buried in the dull, dry pages of the napoleonic code. And when france's rivals embraced elements of napoleonic law, they were adopting much more than a boring set of regulations on landownership and inheritance.