The short-lived influence of the napoleonic civil code in 19th century Greece

During the Greek War of Independence (1821-1827) from the Ottomans-which had a nationalistic and liberal character-and for the first decades after the liberation, a number of liberal French-educated politicians and scholars attempted unsuccessfully to introduce the Napoleonic Civil Code (or some clone of it) as the Greek Civil Code. Despite the fertile political and intellectual ground for such an introduction, they failed to achieve their goal due to the "temporary" introduction of Justinian's Roman law as the Greek civil law. This led the Greek academic community to Pandektenrecht and the predominance of the 19th century German legal theory (boosted by its organized propagation on the part of a number of German-educated legal scholars). © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.