Chapter 35
NAPOLEON, FIRST CONSUL, resembles the Emperor Napoleon, only as the larva of some bright insect is like its future gorgeous self. The Consul was a man of peace. He was a great administrator. No man ever mastered so thoroughly the minutest machinery of government.
He was soullies and colbert and net-caire in one. A great financier, too, the ruined France of the Directory became prosperous under his management and one of the legislators of all time. He considered the Code Napoleon his most enduring monument, and indeed the others have fallen like the flowers of the field.
As head of the state, he was careful not to offend the democratic sentiment of the French. His first act is a plebiscite, which grounds his government on the consent of the people. He is scrupulous not to overstep his privilege and sometimes exasperates Combe-a-seresse, the second consul, who remembers the speedier methods of the Convention, by the care with which he refers any administrative measure to the control of the Council.
Never a ruler more circumspect than he, more eager to profit by the experience of the great political bodies, the Senate, the Council of State. With them he undertakes the task of definitively reorganizing France and elaborates a constitution which, in its essentials, has resisted more than one change of dynasty because it has the qualities chiefly necessary in national affairs, solidity, simplicity, economy, and
order. The Revolution, in its various attempts at a constitution, had organized the communes, the canton, and the departments of France, but had not discovered the connecting link needed to attach the mechanism of provincial life to the vital center, Paris. At one period during the reign of terror, the ubiquitous Société Populaire, established
in every town, almost in every village of the Republic, had served as an efficient, if non-official, means of communication with the Jacobin government. But whether in town or country, the Jacobins now were in disgrace or nonexistent, the local aristocracy had emigrated or perished on the scaffold, there was a gap between the consuls and the communes, a solution of continuity fatal to unity and order.
Bonaparte revived the intendants, with a difference, instituted, I mean to say, in every department, a prefect, an agent charged with the supervision of all the affairs of a province, the collection and assessing of taxes, local expenditure, the administration of justice and police, the conduct of elections, the execution of the government's decrees, etc. The prefect is the vicar of the central power, the instrument of its will, and also the channel
of its information. The first consul corrected what might seem too rigid in his system by a complete absence of political color in the men he chose to work it. He cast his net very wide. If a man were a good administrator, he took him.
Were he Jacobin or Girondin, Foyon or even aristocrat? Alarache-Foucault was prefect of Seine-et-Marne and the ex-duke of Bethune-Charoste, one of the twelve mayors of Paris. Here we touch the secret of the success of Napoleon's administration. He took account of realities, not of theories.
Napoleon could be more unlike the absolute, the ferocious idealism of a Robespierre or a Saint-Just, which invented a system, doubtless excellent in cloud cuckoo land, and then applied it, relentless to an actual society which, wrapped in the fervor of their dream, they never seemed to have envisaged. Napoleon on the other hand was nothing if not practical and full of compromise.
He took what he found ready to his hand, looked at it well, and turned it to the best advantage. And the result was something at once so supple and so strong, so exquisitely suited to its environment, that for four score years it served France with scarce a change and even today supports solidly all of France's recent superstructures.
Out of this new world of civil servants and state officials, the first consul created, by the choice of the functionaries he appointed, and by the consideration with which he surrounded them, a new aristocracy of his own making. The service of the state was a task so great that it conferred a sort of nobility on the man who performed it adequately.
To be useful to one's country was the one thing needful. Napoleon placed so high the importance of the civil servant that until 1880 or thereabouts the fonctionnaires of France retained the first rank, at any rate in provincial society. Fifty years ago and even thirty years ago, a prefect was a very considerable personage. And even greater than he was Monsieur le Premier Président, the chief magistrate of the local
courts of justice. After a prefect and president came a number of other officials. Collector of taxes, registrar, functionaries of the post office, the rivers and forests, the roads and bridges, the university, the clergy. For Napoleon made his peace with the church and that was perhaps the masterstroke of his
magic wand. By the Concordat or Convention of 1801, it was agreed between the first consul and the pope that the civil power should name the bishops and archbishops subject to the ordination of the pope and that these in their turn should appoint the curé and vicars subject to the ratification of the state.
No claim on the forfeited church lands was to disturb in their rights of possession the holders of bien nationaux. Thus peace was secured and the peasants and the provincial bourgeoisie conciliated by the restoration of a beloved religion which no longer threatened their tenure of its forfeited fields.
Many an honest country lawyer, seated in his comfortable confiscated priory, listened with tears in his eyes to the first peal of those church bells that for the last ten years had hung mute and useless in the belfry. This world of civil servants, magistrates, professors, priests is all the more obedient to orders that it is constantly in movement.
The turning wheel of fortune and of state affairs leaves them no time to root and take on too many local interests. And from one end of France to the other, they will find, where soever they may be appointed, the same order, the same method, the same unity. There is of late in France a strong reaction against the centralization of Napoleon's
But we may suppose it suited the country since it has lasted so long. The French like to depend on the central power for their administration and then to rail at that administration which though evidently imperfect, is, on the whole I think, more efficient than that of any other country. The daily life of the nation still appears singularly well organized on Napoleon's bedrock.
Watch what it must have seemed following on the confusion of the directory. Not since the last days of Henri IV had France enjoyed a period of such promise and prosperity. During the four years in which Bonaparte worked with Portalis, Tonchet, Cambaceres, and the other jurist consults at the making of an unparalleled civil code, France was admirably governed.
One day pacified, the church conciliated, and everywhere Napoleon showed himself open to compromise, respectful of realities, willing to reckon with the force of a tradition. He knew how to make a sacrifice and accept a compensation, how to give and take, and out of shreds and patches he made an enduring fabric as the Romans with their slender bricks built monuments that stand today.
Meanwhile, victory followed victory abroad. The mismanagement of the directory had lost or at least endangered all of Bonaparte's earlier conquests, but the first consul soon redeemed their blunders. His initial dash was to secure that left bank of the Rhine, which to the sons of the revolution seemed the essential bulwark and natural frontier of France.
Next, he pounced on Milan, and acclaimed in Lombardy by shouts of joy, he reasserted the power of France across the Alps by a splendid victory at Marengo. The next battle was at Hoennlinden. These are immortal names. For the second time, the Holy Roman Empire was obliged to recognize and sanction the
pretensions of France and award her Alsace, Belgium, Savoy, and also to admit the existence of her affiliated republics in Lombardy, Switzerland, and Holland. Austria made peace at Luneville in 1801, and England in 1802 signed the Peace of Amiens. France had made short work of her enemies. Victory, peace, success, order, prosperity bring a monarch many friends.
But Napoleon had still irreconcilable foes. They were the same that Louis XVI had feared, the Jacobins, the émigrés. Nothing could reconcile the first to the final loss of liberty. They had curbed their necks for a moment in wartime to a yoke of their own choosing. They had, in Marat's phrase, opposed the despotism of freedom to the despotism of kings, but
that had been a matter of military necessity, a temporary derogation, an interlude. The sovereign people had yielded none of its rights, which now were confiscated by one man, to all intents and purposes a monarch. Napoleon in their sight was as clearly an invading brig-in-chief as in the eyes of the stubbornest defenders of the altar and the throne.
And the ultra-royalists, although they had seen their friends and kinsfolk driven in herds to the place of butchery and slaughtered there like animals, loathed the Corsican usurper even worse than Robespierre. In their eyes, might, though never so seemly, could never stand for right. Strange to think that these obscure royalist conspirators a hundred years ago were fighting
for the same principle, right not might, which the democracies of the world today defend in arms against the encroachments of the central empires. Bonaparte felt the danger of their fervent fanaticism. All around him, his friends compared his rule to those last years of Henri IV, which were the Halcyon time of France.
He could not but remember how the knife of Ravillac had cut short that reign of prosperity. And he too was in constant danger. His own generals, jealous of his supremacy, conspired with his enemies in London. The West Country only nominally pacified was a hotbed of plots and murderous purposes. As for the Jacobins, their one religion was the state.
In defense of their adored republic, the honestest of them would stick at nothing. On Christmas Eve, 1800, an attempt was made to blow up Bonaparte by the explosion of an infernal machine as he drove to the opera. There was an immense sensation in the theater, women shedding tears, everyone cheering the first consul.
The windows of his wife's carriage were shattered. Her daughter's neck was cut by the fragments of glass. Nine persons were killed. Twenty died of their injuries. Brave as he was, Napoleon was superstitious.
And he was not an hereditary king, inured from his childhood to the risks of the métiers de roi. This attempt made a deep impression on his sensibility. He thought it the work of fanatical republicans and transported 130 Jacobins without a particle of evidence against them.
Miserable man, he sent two of them to die on the island of St. Helena. But Fouché, his chief of police, himself an ex-Jacobin, assured the first consul that the real culprits were the émigrés, who in foreign countries devised at their ease the plots they found means to execute in Paris. At the bare idea, Napoleon lost his sang-froid.
Am I a dog, he would say, to be shot down in the street? And are my murderers a sort of sacred animals? This nervous rage must be his excuse. But no, there can be no excuse for the assassination of the duke of Anghiens. It was in 1804 that a fresh conspiracy, vaster and still more formidable, was framed among
the enemies of Bonaparte. Two of his generals, Pichekrew, the conqueror of Holland, Moreau, who gained the victory of Hohenlinden, and a Breton yeoman, Georges Cadoudal, the very soul of the royalist rising in the West, with 300 royalist gentlemen, were affiliated to the plot. Their scheme was to make a dash at Napoleon, sword in hand, kidnap him one evening on the
road to Malmaison, his country house, or assail him in the midst of his consular guards during some ceremony on the Esplanade des Invalides. Revolt rather than murder were their object, and what they chiefly desired was to give the tyrant a taste of English hospitality. War had broken out afresh with England.
While their swords were not for show, and they were prepared to kill him if he resisted, the police were informed in time. One of Georges Cadoudal's friends sold him for a hundred thousand crowns. The consul was all aflame with a passion of wrath and a feverish lust for revenge. It was rumored that one of the younger Bourbon princes was as deep in the affair as Pichekrew
or Georges. The real culprit seems to have been the duke of Paris. But Napoleon's suspicions fell on the duke of Anghien, one of the youngest and most lovable of the Bourbon, at that time living in retirement in the Duchy of Baden, in the society of a woman with whom he was devotedly in love.
Bonaparte had no more evidence of this young man's complicity than he had required four years before when he exiled the Jacobins. He acted on a Corsican impulse. Pichekrew had been arrested in February, Georges on the 9th of March. On the 15th the young duke of Anghien was captured in his own house, a few leagues on
the further side of the Rhine, was hurried in secrecy through France by the picket of dragoons who had carried him off, spirited to the castle of Vincennes just outside Paris, tried there in the dead of night by a hastily assembled court-martial, and shot in a farce of the fortifications at two o'clock in the morning. This lawless, reckless crime which violated the territory of a peaceful neighbour and
outraged all the codes and conventions of international law, never ceased to haunt Napoleon and more than any other action of his life, discredited him in the eyes of Europe. He who loved order and discipline and regularity, he who had organised his country, he who loathed the misrule and anarchy of the revolution, had shown himself in this mad vengeance, this unwarranted vendetta, as utterly estranged from the spirit of law as a marat or a danton.
In later years I think he would have given several of his victories to recall it. He mentions it in his testament, not without remorse. He excuses himself by saying that the Count of Artois maintained sixty paid assassins at his orders in the French capital. In his latter days he laid the blame on Talleyrand and invoked the excuse of the tyrant who sacrificed
Thomas of Becket. Why did my servant give me no chance of recalling the impulse of my wrath?
