Joseph Barthelemy 
The Government of France [PDF ebook] 

Originally published in 1919. French institutions of today, considered as a whole, form a composite building on which every new regime for the last hundred years has left its mark. The foundation is provided by the social, legal, judicial and administrative system of the Napoleonic Empire, which was crowned in 1875 by the corner-stone of parliamentary democracy. Many other features has been left by other regimes; thus France owes her general principles of common law and her administrative divisions to the Revolution.