Local and regional jurisdictions, such as those exercised by hundreds of imperial knights in the Holy Roman Empire, and by Church and seigneurial courts, had been supplanted by a system of centralized uniformity administered by a judicial bureaucracy. In all these areas, the Napoleonic Law Code had disposed of existing, often tradition-bound laws and ordinances, introducing a key element of equality before the law, even if in some respects this central principle of the French Revolution had been modified by Napoleon’s more conservative outlook on issues such as the rights and duties of women.
