On this day in history, December 2, 1804, French leader Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as France's emperor, ruling the First French Empire established a few months earlier when he was granted the emperor title.
The coronation of Napoleon I, which took place 216 years ago, at the Notre-Dame de Paris Great Cathedral in the presence of Pope Pius VII, made the 35-year-old Corsican-born leader the first Frenchman to hold the title of French emperor in a thousand years.
Known as one of the greatest military strategists in history, Napoleon rapidly rose in the ranks of the French Revolutionary Army during the late 1790s.
Napoleon's Civil Code, established in 1804, is maybe one of his most important and lasting contributions. Mainly but not only reforming French law, it is considered as one of the few documents that have influenced the whole world.
Written at a time in history when discrimination was rampant, the Napoleonic Code also helped to liberate Jews, Protestants and Freemasons by granting them religious freedom, initiating the emancipation of Jews across Europe at the same time.
In countries that Napoleon's ensuing First French Empire conquered during the Napoleonic Wars, he emancipated the Jews and introduced other ideas of freedom from the French Revolution.
For hundreds of years, Jews had been economically and politically marginalized and physically confined in European ghettoes, but thanks to Napoleon, they were free to enter European society for the first time. He revoked old laws restricting Jews to reside in ghettos and lifted laws that limited their rights to property, worship and certain occupations.
In France, for the first time in history, Jewish communities had a legal and political situation recognized by the state, organized on a centralized and hierarchical authority created in 1808, the national Israelite Consistory, integrating French Judaism into "recognized cults," next to Catholicism and Protestantism.
Following the separation in France of religion and state in 1905, the Israelite Consistory lost its public-law status but continued to live on until today as an institution representing the Jewish community in France.