Emperor of France, promulgator of the Napoleonic Code
Emperor of France and a great military commander, yet he thought his most immortal achievement was not any victory but a code of law. The Napoleonic Code (the French Civil Code) of 1804 wrote, for the first time systematically, the French Revolution’s principles — "equality before the law," "protected property rights," "freedom of contract" — into one clear, unified written code. It spread across Europe with the French armies, becoming the model for the civil law of dozens of countries worldwide, an influence far longer-lived than his empire.
The exiled Napoleon said in his later years: "My true glory is not that I won forty battles — Waterloo erased all of that; what will live forever is my Civil Code." He was right: his empire was fleeting, but that code, which wrote the spirit of equality and contract into its articles, is still cited in the courts of many countries two hundred years on.
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