PRESS REVIEW

Recent articles published elsewhere on First and Second Empire themes.
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Two recent articles on Napoleon

- "Was Napoleon a Benevolent Dictator? An Economic Justification for Codification",
Sophie Harnay, in European Journal of Law and Economics, Volume 14, Number 3 November 2002, p. 237 - 251

Abstract 
Legal history has seen important codifications, among others the Code Napoleon of 1804. These are usually justified by the search for legal harmonisation and coordination. We refine the argument by claiming that a legal rule can be understood as a standard with network externalities. In that view, codification may be analysed as a means to internalise adoption externalities when the market is characterised by legal inertia or instability, in particular when agents adopt opportunistic and free riding behaviours. We also argue that codification should not be systematically opposed to market coordination but may on the contrary provide a useful complement to the market process so as to achieve an equilibrium in the legal market. We then provide a few illustrations and discuss the behaviour of the codification authorities.
 
- Pannabecker, John R. "School for Industry: L'Ecole d'Arts et Metiers of Chalons-sur-Marne under Napoleon and the Restoration", in Technology and Culture - Volume 43, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 254-290

Excerpt
On 1 April 1826, students at the Ecole d'Arts et Métiers (school of arts and crafts) de Châlons-sur-Marne revolted violently against the repressive management of the ultraroyalist school administration appointed by King Charles X. In December, the student leaders were acquitted, defended by an attorney hired by the liberal Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, benefactor and former inspector of the school and opponent of the ultras. A few months later, the eighty-year-old Liancourt died. As students from Châlons bore his coffin toward his grave in Paris, an anonymous official of the ultras gave a secret order for troops to intervene. In the scuffle, the coffin fell into the mire, triggering a flurry of publicity that helped expose the ultras' vindictiveness and ineptitude in trying to impose a return to the Old Regime. 1 [End Page 254]
 
Since taking power early in the 1820s, the ultras had suspected the school of Châlons of being a hotbed of political resistance because of Liancourt's long association with the school, its emphasis on shop practice, and Napoléon Bonaparte's role in its founding. Student unrest, which from time to time tarnished the school's reputation, exacerbated the political problems that resulted in the ultras' demise in the Revolution of 1830. The progressive leaders of the July Monarchy (1830-48) looked more favorably on the school's training of leaders for industry. Today a network of eight Ecoles Nationales Supérieures d'Arts et Métiers, all descended from the school at Châlons, is the largest source of engineers in France, producing a thousand graduates each year. How and why did the school of Châlons, with such modest and presumably lower-class beginnings, survive the disinterest or opposition of powerful bureaucrats and politicians under Napoléon and then during the Restoration? 2 [End Page 255]