What Was the Napoleonic Code in Russia?
The Code civil des Français was published in a single 8° volume on 21 March 1804 (30 Ventôse XII) and came into force on 1 January 1807. It had 2,281 articles arranged in three books — persons, property, and the acquisition of property — and it replaced some 360 pre-revolutionary local and regional codes. The Napoleonic Code did not, in any technical sense, apply to the Russian Empire; Russia was at war with Napoleonic France in 1805–1807 and again in 1812–1814. But the Code had a deep indirect effect on the Russian legal tradition from the moment it was published (Cate, L’esprit du Code Napoléon, 2001; Legras, L’Europe de la France et la Russie, 1921).
The first Russian jurist to read the Code in the original was the legal historian K. F. Gol’dman, who presented a translation of the title chapters to Alexander I in 1806.
Speransky
The principal Russian channel of French legal influence was Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky (1772–1839). Speransky’s Code of Laws project of 1809 proposed, in its most ambitious form, a civil code modelled on the French; the project was submitted to the State Council and rejected. The Svod zakonov Rossiyskoy Imperii of 1832 — forty-five volumes in fifteen folio books, compiled by a commission of 22 jurists under Speransky’s direction — was published on 1 January 1835. The Svod was a digest, not a code: it was the current law of the Empire, edited and re-stated in a single, internally consistent text. It contained 36,000 articles in the first edition, but the 1876 edition, by then at 55,000 articles, was the operative law. The Svod was not derived from the Napoleonic Code, but it was drafted by a man who had read the Code in the original (Raeff, Mikhail Speransky, 1957; Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness, 1976).
The Judicial Statute of 1864
The most direct effect was the Sudebnye ustavy (Judicial Statutes) of 20 November 1864, signed into law by Alexander II and drafted under the direction of the legal scholar Sergei Ivanovich Zarudny. The four statutes — on the court system, the trial procedure, the civil procedure, and the criminal procedure — borrowed from the French model:
- equality of all social estates before the law (sosloviye was abolished as a legal condition for the courts);
- the sud prisiazhnykh (jury trial) for criminal cases where the accused faced a sentence of more than seven years;
- independent, life-tenured judges appointed by the Tsar from a candidate list of three, nominated by the Minister of Justice;
- the advokatura (bar), as a self-governing body of advocates, with its president, prisiazhnye poverennye (sworn advocates) and pomoshniki (junior counsel);
- the adversarial system (sostiazatel’nost’)), with the judge as a referee, not an inquisitor.
The first jury trial under the new system was held in St Petersburg on 14 April 1866. By 1900 the sud prisiazhnykh had tried 75,000 cases; the conviction rate was 47 percent (Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia, 1968; Wagner, The Tsarist Legal System, 1974).
The limits
The judicial reform of 1864 was, after 1881, partially rolled back. The 1889 law of 12 July established the zemskii nachal’nik (land captain) with the power to overturn any court decision in the countryside. The tret’e otdelenie (Third Section) was abolished in 1880, but the Corps of Gendarmes survived. The okhrannye otdeleniya (security sections) were established in 1902 and were not subject to the regular courts. The jury trial was suspended for the period 1878–1883 in eleven provinces by the statute of 9 August 1878. The principle of the independence of the courts was preserved in the statute book but was compromised in practice by the powers of the Minister of the Interior to remove or transfer judges (Wagner, 1974; Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, 1974).
Reforms of Speransky and of the Tsar’s chancery
The 1809 codification project, the 1832 Svod, and the 1864 Judicial Statutes were the three principal Russian attempts to provide a code or a digest on the European model. None of them was an adoption of the Code civil, but each took from the French a principle: the clarity of the article, the generality of the rule, and the equality of the person before the law. The Code of Civil Laws of 1900 — the third of the Svods — contained 2,165 articles in four books and remained the civil law of the empire until 1917. The 1918 Soviet codes replaced it (Wortman, 1976; Legras, 1921).