The invisible code

by William M. Reddy

Two well-dressed Frenchmen square off in a duel. A count kidnaps his wife to keep her from suing for marital separation. A twelve-year-old boy is hired as an office worker by the powerful Bureau of the Book Trade of the Ministry of the Interior. These actions were not sanctioned by the Napoleonic Code civil and Code penal, legal codes that governed postrevolutionary France. Such behavior nonetheless obeyed, as William Reddy demonstrates, an unwritten code of honor that dramatically shaped the lives of men and women in the postrevolutionary social climate. In this sophisticated and gracefully written study, Reddy attempts to decipher this invisible code of honor. Drawing from legal and archival documents on marriage, bureaucracy, and the fledgling profession of journalism, and from literature from 1814 to 1850, Reddy discovers a cohesive thread of honor and explores the way codes of honor function in these arenas.