VI. Freedom of Testation in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Legislation

Summary Contrary to what one could have deduced from art. 2 and 17 of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, where property had been elevated as a natural right, imprescriptible, inviolable, and sacred, and art. 537 and 544 of the Code civil, where the owners had been given the right to use in the most absolute way and dispose freely of their property, neither the Revolutionary nor the Napoleonic lawmakers thought of the right of disposing freely of one’s property upon death as self-evident. Although there had been a long tradition of testamentary succession in the South of France, the right to dispose freely of one’s properties by testament led to tensions as to its articulation with the pro-intestate customs of the Northern provinces – in 1789–1804 French private law(s) had indeed not yet been unified and the unification process had given rise to several rearguard arguments in favour of local idiosyncrasies –, but most importantly, it led to tensions as to its articulation with the institution of family, one of the pillars, along with property, of the new social order that had emerged from the ruins of the Ancien Régime: the bourgeois society.