IF'RANCE IS A COUNTRY of most venerable codification; long before Napoleon, French jurists sought to secure greater certainty in law by incorporating it in general and written formulae. In the 16th century, the majority of the coutumes which were in effect in the different provinces of the realm were stated in official texts, and at the end of the 17th century Louis XIV and his minister Colbert promulgated the great ordonnances constituting veritable codes: ordonnance civile sur la procedure, ordonnance sur le commerce de terre, ordonnance sur la marine, etc. The Napoleonic codification borrowed very largely from these, as well as from the drafts of codes which had been prepared during the revolutionary period. This, however, in no wise diminishes either the value or the merit of the five great codes drafted at the beginning of the 19th century on the initiative of Napoleon, particularly of the Code civil. Due to the lucidity and precision of the style employed by their authors, the unification of law that they effected in the interior of France, the introduction that they brought about in private law of the great revolutionary principles of liberty and equality of individuals, these monuments of law continue to form the basis of French legislation and that, regarded as "written reason," they have exercised a significant influence in the entire world. But law is only a translation of the needs and the ideals of a society at a moment in its existence, and no code, no more than any law, can claim permanence. The Napoleonic codes have not escaped this sociological law; they have suffered the inevitable influence of the social and economic evolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. This influence has been manifested, in the first instance, by the promulgation of more and more numerous new laws, which either are integrated in the codes, amending or completing them, or indeed have subsisted alongside of them, sometimes even forming the object of separate codifications, such as the Code rural or the Code du travail. It has been manifested also in the increasing r6le of the jurisprudence of the Court of Cassation and the courts and tribunals, which, assisted by the doctrine, has accomplished a remark-