The civil law code promulgated in France in 1804, drafted at Napoleon's direction to replace the country's tangle of feudal, regional, and Roman law with one clear written system. It gave ordinary men equality before the law, secure property, and freedom of contract, and it spread across much of the world as the model of modern civil law — even as it made married women legal dependents of their husbands and served a state that had restored slavery in the French colonies in 1802.
Napoleon won forty battles. Near the end of his life, exiled on a rock in the South Atlantic, he reportedly said his real glory was none of them. It was his Code. He was probably right. The empires fell, the borders moved back, but the rulebook he ordered written in 1804 outlived all of it, and a large share of the world still organizes its civil law around it. That same Code gave ordinary men equality before clear written rules and stripped married women of nearly every legal right they had. It was liberation and a cage, signed at once.