The New Spanish Councils

Abstract

Let us imagine that a group of Spanish lawyers, not particularly interested in history, were asked which, in their opinion, was the most important judicial or institutional legacy bequeathed by Napoleon to nineteenth-century Spain. Even if there were constitutional experts in the group, no doubt none of them would recall the Constitutional Statute of Bayonne, whereas, in all probability, all or almost all of them would state quite categorically that throughout the nineteenth century, Spanish legal culture absorbed two things of Napoleonic origin or inspiration, the Civil Code and administrative jurisdiction—the latter understood as a necessary pre-condition for the legal formulation of a new concept of civil administration in Spain, modelled on that of Napoleonic France. It has become commonplace among Spanish legal historians to emphasize the French origin of Spain's legal codification and the administration of justice, just as it is now usual to see them as a year zero in the history of European, and particularly Spanish, judicial-political culture.² These foundations are based on two fundamental premises with a shared logic. Both the Code and administrative jurisdiction permitted a genuine change in the paradigms of the legal culture intrinsic to the Old Regime: on the one hand, the Code revoked the old statutes;³ while on the other, the emergence of the new system of administration destroyed the institutions and procedures that fed the government of justice that had determined and managed the control of order within pre-modern societies for centuries.⁴