en, then a senator, Napoleon staged a coup d'etat, and on the ninth of November 1799, the day of the coup d'etat, the Napoleonic Era began (Wolf 144). The laws created under Napoleon, known as the Civil Code, excluded women from citizenship and borrowed many of its rules on women's rights from the royal, feudal, military, and ecclesiastical courts of the ancien rgime (Moses 19). Article 213 of the Napoleonic Code states, "Le mari doit protection sa femme, la femme obissance son mari (The husband owes protection to his wife and the wife obedience to her husband)," (Wolf 146). Simon de Beauvoir says of Napoleon in her work The Second Sex, "Like all military men, Napoleon preferred to see in woman only a mother," (4). French men revered the Napoleonic Code. It finally provided for them a stable form of government after so much revolution and war. John Wolf notes in his work France 1814-1919, "The Civil Code, which in 1807 became the Code Napoleon, gave France a logical, uniform, legal system," (6-7). Theodore Zeldin notes in his story of France that, "Thiers declared that the Civil Code was impossible to improve - at most he could suggest only a few stylistic changes," (Zeldin 199). Women were unable to make many advances during the Napoleonic era for the fact that they were discriminated against under the Napoleonic Code, and that they were viewed under the nineteenth century romantic view of women that revered them superficially and reduced them to childlike, subordinate women dependent on men for survival. After Napoleon's regime ended, France's paternalistic laws remained unchanged, leaving women unable to make much progress.Class Separations: The State of Women in France During the Industrial RevolutionThe working woman of 19th century France faced a life of terrible hardship. As the Industrial Age was dawning, more jobs were made available to women, but working-women survived on wages that were barely subsistence, and work...
