ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the fundamental cause of women’s subordination to men was the teaching of many of the world’s most influential religions. Counterbalancing Napoleon’s creation of a militarised, increasingly anti-democratic regime, the Civil Code would provide a legal and a national foundation for civil society in France that would endure well into the twentieth century. The quotation is an accurate reflection of what had happened in France since 1789 – the peasantry had destroyed what remained of feudalism; Napoleon had legalised its historic victory over the nobility. Catholicism had ceased to be the official religion of France; henceforth it would be described, accurately, as ‘the religion of the majority of Frenchmen’. The monarchy’s task had been complicated by the fact that France was a ‘warrior state’: by the late eighteenth century, its reach extended to the farthest corners of Europe and the wider world.
