Prince Andrey in Speransky’s Commission and the Codes of Napoleon, Justinian and Hammurabi

The Legislative Commission has existed for a hundred and fifty years, has cost millions and has accomplished nothing.

Do you remember how Prince Andrei did not wish to join the commission for the compilation of laws, pleading that it required a legal education, which he did not possess? And Speransky, who favoured the prince, replied: "But nobody has one, so what do you want? It is a vicious circle, and one must break out of it by an effort."

A week later Prince Andrei was a member of the commission for the compilation of the military statute and, what he had in no way expected, head of a section of the commission for the compilation of laws.

Another two hundred years have passed, yet one has the feeling that nobody on the commission for the compilation of laws has a legal education even now. But unlike Prince Andrei, who, working on the section on the Rights of Persons in the first part of the civil code, drew all the same on the very advanced Code Napoléon, though also on the essentially slaveholding Code of Justinian of 529, in our day it is more and more the code of Hammurabi of 2000 BC that is used, together with something like the cruellest of the Old Testament precepts.

And that is the sum of the rights of persons.