Résumé
France, the homeland of codes, is currenlly in the throes of enthusiasm over codificaiion, both among government authorities and in the compilation of doctrine. For the past fifty years, a vast movement of law renewal through codification has been undertaken, while, at the same time, several codes have received in-depth revitaiization, e.g. the Penal Code and the Code of Civil Procedure, while the Civil Code has been the subject of a partial and particularly successfll renovation.
The critical factor underlying these various codifications is, in the first place, a technical one, namely to settle for a codificaiion-compilation or a codificaiion-modification in an attempt to remedy in the best possible manner a crisis in the sources of law that affecss us by restoring a measure of jural security. Nonetheless, the issue of codificaiion extends beyond the confines of substantive law and its stakes are also politica.. Codiffcation ensures the geographcc and sociological cohesion of a nation, even to the extent of making it possible to fend off cultural incursions from abroad, as seen in the French example.