Volume 1, Draft Civil Code - Digital exhibitions & collections - McGill ...

XXV
the past, would serve as a defence against outside influences
which threatened the integrity of the Civil Law; it would
guarantee the survival of a legal system that was distinctive
but exposed due to its isolation within a continent in which the
Common Law held sway. Regarded, like the French Civil
Code, as the embodiment of Justice and Reason, it seemed
inconceivable that its principles could be shaken by the
vicissitudes of life. It was believed that the Civil Code would
escape the effects of the passage of time.
Nevertheless, far from remaining sheltered from the
drastic changes of the past century, this country has experienced
all the social upheavals brought about by the industrial
revolution, two world wars, major scientific and technological
discoveries, urbanization, the advent of a consumer society
and the age of obsolescence - phenomena which have profoundly
changed the way of life of a century ago and altered
traditional outlooks and even the institutions of the private
law, whether it be the family, ownership, contracts, or civil
responsibility.
In this connection, instead of putting the law into a
strait-jacket, the Code should have been the means of updating
legislative policy. However, both on account of its image
and the role assigned to it in Quebec society, the Code had
ceased to be a symbol of permanence, and has instead become
one of rigidity, the reflection of a static, even stagnant,
conception of a certain social order. The result was an everwidening
gulf between law and life.
There should not be underestimated, however, the
importance of various legislative innovations in the area of the
Civil Law, the number of which has naturally tended to
accelerate in recent decades. Under the pressure of the
requirements of a society undergoing change, it was necessary
to attempt to find solutions to the most urgent problems
arising from modern life where the Code's solutions were