Constitution of the Year X

The Constitution of the Year XII (French: Constitution de l’an XII), also called the Organic Sénatus-consulte of 28 Floréal, year XII (Sénatus-consulte organique du 28 floréal an XII), was a national constitution of the First French Republic adopted during the Year XII of the French Revolutionary Calendar (1804 in the Gregorian calendar).

It amended the earlier Constitution of the Year VIII and Constitution of the Year X, establishing the First French Empire with Napoleon Bonaparte — previously First Consul for Life, with wide-ranging powers — as Napoleon I, Emperor of the French. The Constitution established the House of Bonaparte as France's imperial dynasty, making the throne hereditary in Napoleon's family. The Constitution of the Year XII was later itself extensively amended by the Additional Act and definitively abolished with the final return of the Bourbons in 1815.

The Charter of 1815, signed on 22 April 1815, was the French constitution prepared by Benjamin Constant at the request of Napoleon I when he returned from exile on Elba. Officially named the Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, the document extensively amended (in fact virtually replacing) the previous Napoleonic Constitutions (Constitution of the Year VIII, Constitution of the Year X and Constitution of the Year XII). The Additional Act reframed the Napoleonic constitution into something more along the lines of the Bourbon Restoration's Charter of 1814 of Louis XVIII, while otherwise ignoring the Bourbon charter's existence. It was very liberal in spirit, and gave the French people rights which had previously been unknown to them, such as the right to elect the mayor in communes of less than 5,000 in population. Napoleon treated it as a mere continuation of the previous constitutions, and it therefore took the form of an ordinary legislative act "additional to the constitutions of the Empire".