The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

He agreed not to initiate any restoration of land confiscated during the Revolution to the Church, the nobility or the Crown. Half a million people had purchased this property, and it was politically impracticable to force them, or the people to whom they had sold it on, to disgorge it. The Napoleonic Law Code was retained. The rights of hereditary nobles to posts in the military and the civil administration, abolished by the introduction of the ‘career open to the talents’ during the Revolution, were not restored. Freedom of religious practice remained in force despite the regime’s proclamation of Catholicism as the state religion. The Revolution’s division of the country into départements was left intact, as was its organization of Paris into arrondissements, both originally introduced in 1790.