For many people, certainly for the French, Napoleon was the greatest statesman and military genius the world has ever seen. If, on the one hand, he was a ruthless dictator and conqueror, he also introduced modern, liberal reforms wherever he conquered, and supported scientific progress against religious obscurantism. Thanks to Napoleon we have decimal measures, meters and centimeters, kilos and grams, etc. Wherever he conquered, Jews acquired the civil rights they had been denied under local monarchies, and in many cases lost again after Napoleon's fall.
For the Brits, of course, he was a "Corsican tyrant" who sought to destroy all that was good in the "natural order of things," which for England meant a form of democracy based on a rigid class system and monarchy. The restoration of Europe after the fall of Napoleon is today seen as a pretty shabby reinstatement of old-style feudal regimes.
I too would like to hear a more informed view of the Civil Code. From what I understand, it was the establishment of a legal system from scratch, to replace the accumulation of laws and customs accumulated over the centuries, which is what England still has today as Common Law. I've heard Italian lawyers praise Common Law as a positive example of pragmatic common sense, compared to the Civil Codes used in most continental countries.