The Consulate -a despotic political regime- defined France between two centuries: from the putsch (18 Brumaire, that is 9 November 1799) to the First Empire (18 May 1804) and the gossips used the Latin formula “Hic, Haec et Hoc (this one, this one and this thing)” to indicate the leadership (Napoleon Bonaparte, Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, Charles-François Lebrun). The irony dissolves the misunderstanding joined to the second lemma and guarantees the gender identity perceived by Duke Cambacérès, famous homosexual. This tendency was also the impulse to persuade the people to confer on the Second Consul the authorship on the decriminalization of homosexuality inscribed in the Napoléon Code (21 March 1804).
The story unravels the riddle and covers up the false myth spread by the community. The penal code punished prohibited sexual conduct. Cambacérès was the author of three civil code projects (substrate to the “Code civil des français” still valid today and a source of considerable influence on similar collections of many countries in the world). The bilateral treaty (15 July 1801) signed by the First Consul and Pope Pius VII dissociated homosexuality from crime: the State delegated to the Church the control and sanction of deviant sexual conduct without disturbing public order. The legislative approach was transmitted to every Catholic country invaded by the General (except two Italian States) and to the New Christian World: Europe included the area extraneous to the crime of homosexuality among adults spread in intimate space.
The Enlightenment combined witchcraft, heresy, sodomy with the list of imaginary crimes, and the abolition of sanctions against homosexuality (1791) was defended by the Napoléon Code. The Code introduced restrictive police measures to punish, without subdivision of sex, the crime of corruption of minors and public indecency (Book III, Title II, Chapter I, Section 4: “Attacks on customs”).
History as the teacher of life exalts the periodicity linked to today’s debate because it is impossible to rationalize the feeling and to separate any decree from the writer endorsed by the leadership.
