Victory
belongs to the most persevering.
--Napoleon
Bonaparte, French general and emperor (1769-1821)
If
that isn't the credo of all collection personnel, it
should be! Napoleon could have had a future in credit
and collections. Read on, you may find that this 18th
century General is still having an effect on your
receivables!
Napoleon
Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 in Ajaccio on
the Mediterranean island of Corsica. He is both a
historical figure and a legend-and it is sometimes
difficult to separate the two.
Napoleon
decided on a military career when he was a child,
winning a scholarship to a French military academy.
His meteoric rise shocked not only France but all of
Europe, and his military conquests threatened the
stability of the world.
Napoleon's
own opinion of his career is best stated in the
following quotation:
"I
closed the gulf of anarchy and brought order out of
chaos. I rewarded merit regardless of birth or wealth,
wherever I found it. I abolished feudalism and
restored equality to all regardless of religion and
before the law. I fought the decrepit monarchies of
the Old Regime because the alternative was the
destruction of all this. I purified the
Revolution."
Napoleon
may well be impacting your collections! Among his
achievements was the formalization of Civil Law, known
as the Napoleonic Code.
Code
Napoléon is a designation officially applied in 1807
to the code of French civil law originally enacted in
March 1804 as the Code Civil des Français and still
in force in France. Properly, the term applies to the
entire body of French law, as contained in five codes
dealing with civil, commercial, and criminal law,
promulgated between 1804 and 1811. An initial draft
completed in 1793, following the outbreak of the
French Revolution, was a protest against the extreme
diversity in the laws then in force in different parts
of France. This draft was rejected by the National
Convention, but finally the task of preparing another
draft was entrusted in July 1800 to a commission
consisting of the most eminent jurists of France. The
new draft, with some conservative features, was
completed in four months. It encountered considerable
opposition before it was finally enacted. It was named
in honor of Napoleon, emperor of France, who had
participated in the formulation.
The
Code Napoléon was a compromise between the customary
law, basically Germanic, of the northern provinces of
France, and the essentially Roman law of the southern
and eastern regions of the country. In arrangement,
the code corresponds to the Institutes, contributions
made by the Byzantine emperor Justinian I to the Roman
Corpus Juris Civilis, or body of Civil Law. Among the
merits of the French code are its simplicity and
clearness of statement. It has required many judicial
interpretations, however, and has been frequently
modified by legislative amendment. As a result of the
Napoleonic conquests, the code was introduced into a
number of European countries, notably Belgium, where
it is still in force. It also became the model for the
civil codes of Québec Province, Canada, the
Netherlands, Italy, Spain, some Latin American
republics, and the state of Louisiana.
David
Ward, CEO
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