part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 336 One of the first reactions to the codification project was in retrospect rather unexpected. By adecree of 4 December 1804, the anti-Napoleonic Swedish kingGustavIVAdolf forbade all information about the new Napoleonic Civil Code in Sweden, thus showing the political dimension.17 Meanwhile, theNorwegianConstitution of 1814 Art. 94 (taken from the French 1791 Constitution) called for a modern codification to respond to the new constitutional principles of the age and the spirit of the new French codifications. Out of that came an immense work spanning four decades that resulted in a criminal code – but nothing more. The story was similar in Sweden and Denmark, even though the new constitutional settings required legislative reforms. All the Nordic countries had constitutions but no codifications. Was all the work on civil codes in the Nordic countries in the first half of the nineteenth century in vain? The simple answer is no, for from the second half the century it resulted in a raft of new legislation that drove social modernization, and, later again, in a common Nordic legislative programme, which paradoxically achieved a certain unified legal regulation in private law among the five Nordic states, which would not have come about if the national codes had succeeded at the beginning of the century. Does it matter whether the law was structured by a comprehensive code or through multiple legislation? The argument has been this: since the Nordic countries do not have formal civil codifications, Nordic private law has been structured differently to the private law in continental Europe. Is it fair to say that Nordic law is more akin to the common law tradition? Does its history lead Nordic and British lawyers to view a European civil code with less interest than their continental colleagues? 17 In fact, even the names of the French Emperor were restricted at the time, and ‘Bonaparte’ was the only legal way to refer to him. See Elmar Nyman, Indragningsmakt och tryckfrihet 1785–1810(Stockholm: Bok- och Reklamtryck, 1963), 122–4; Tore Frängsmyr, Svensk idéhistoria, i: Bildning och vetenskap under tusen år: 1000–1809 (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 2000), 422. For the general context, see Dag Michalsen, ‘Legislators, Journals, and the Public Legal Sphere in Scandinavia around 1800’, in Ellen Krefting, Aina Nøding & Mona Ringvej (eds.), Eighteenth-century periodicals as agents of change: perspectives on northern enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 202–214.
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