It was France's first penal code, and was influenced by the Enlightenment thinking of Montesquieu and Cesare Beccaria.
In the spirit of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria summarized the principles that were to be the foundation of the procedural system.
As a consequence, the function of the judge was conceived as being strictly distributive: qualification of an act, infliction of the pre-set sanction.
The Code of 1791 was straightforward in this respect; most definitions were clear, leaving little room to the interpretation of the judge.
Its sponsor, Louis-Michel le Peletier, presented it to the Constituent Assembly saying that it only punished "true crimes", not the artificial offenses condemned by "superstition".