Napoleon's Civil Code in the Political Discourse of the Alexander Era

Abstract

Napoleon's "Civil Code" is a fundamental work of European legal thought. M.M. Speransky, appointed by Emperor Alexander I to the Commission for Drafting Laws, of course, could not help but refer to this text; moreover, he actively used it when drafting his famous "Draft Civil Code", but revised many of its provisions when adapting it to the class-based Russian society. Nevertheless, the influence of the Code on Speransky's "Draft" was so noticeable that it caused sharp rejection in conservative circles. The main opponents of the Secretary of State were N.M. Karamzin and A.S. Shishkov, who criticized the "Draft". When writing this article, the main method was the method of discourse analysis. This method, the subject of which is traditionally defined as "speech immersed in life", made it possible to study the extralinguistic aspects of the texts of participants in the communicative field in political disputes around the legislative initiatives of M.M. Speransky in terms of their correlation with Napoleon's Civil Code. Also used were such methods as content analysis, biographical method, comparative-historical and contrastive. Despite all the similarities, the positions of Karamzin and Shishkov differed. If Shishkov categorically did not accept any changes to Russian statehood, defending the need to preserve its absolutist inviolability, then Karamzin, who admired Robespierre in his youth, then idolized Napoleon, openly declared his republicanism. The ambiguity of his position, which has been repeatedly noted by researchers, is fully explained by the phenomenon of the development of republican thought of that time, which is shown in the article. Speransky, responding to criticism of the "Project Code", stated that all such projects are similar, since they have Roman law as their source. But this was not important for his opponents, who used all available tools to discredit him.