If you’re familiar with GitHub, you’re probably aware that, these days, it’s used to store and manage many things beyond just software code. Now, thanks to the efforts of one developer, it also includes a piece of living history that’s had a global impact for two hundred years: namely, the French civil code.

Steeve Morin recently created a GitHub repository to store the collection of French laws first created under Napoleon (originally known as the Napoleonic Code), which subsequently influenced the legal systems in many other countries around the world. The repository not only contains the codes as they are currently constituted, but also the entire history of changes to the laws going back to the early 19th century, tracking modifications as commits to the various articles.

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