Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (3 page)

¹
For British travellers' first impressions of the new France, sec Carr
passim;
Brownlow, 3-12; Berry, II, 125-84; Farington, II, 11-17; Granville, I, 373, 276-7, 406; Aberdeen, 1, 1-19; D'Arblay, III, 213-27; Dyott, I, 232-3; Romilly, II, 75-93; Cartwright, I, 306-7; Crcevey, I, 5;
Ttvo
Duchesses,
178; Glenbcrvie, I, 361.

his black, unlaced hat and plain blue uniform recalled an English sea captain in undress.
¹

Yet it was not of so homely a figure that the little sallow man on horseback made men think, but of Caesar. Behind the facade of Roman Republican forms he was driving fast that summer to imperial power. It was he who embodied the
volonte general
e
which France in its first fine revolutionary rapture had enthroned above custom, morality and law. It was his will—and therefore France's— that had triumphed on the battlefield and was now carrying all before it in council and senate. He personified the Revolution and its' achievements in flesh and blood, the genius of man loosed from the shackles of the past by that great explosion of energy, and the future of the human race at a new and hitherto undreamed of level ,of achievement.

No force less passionate or dictatorial could have healed the wounds of France so quickly. Two years earlier Bonaparte had taken over a country on the verge of collapse, Within a few months he had shattered all her enemies save Britain and restored her national unity. Suspen
ding the laws against the emigre
s, he brought home a hundred thousand exiles and closed the fratricidal strife of a decade. Conciliating the old propertied classes, he drove a wedge between the Bourbon diehards in English pay and the patriotic royalists who put loyalty to France above loyalty to a family. By re-legalising religion he satisfied the traditional piety of a peasantry robbed of its altars by urban doctrinaires. For ten years, two old dames told Fanny D'Arblay, they had lost
le bon Dieu
but now the good Bonaparte had found him. Seeing religion as the cement of society, the shrewd Corsican appealed over the heads of fanatics and pedants to the family and the village.

Yet in his work of restoration Bonaparte parted with none of the unique powers bequeathed by the Revolution. He used the goodwill of the Church and the emigres to widen them. The latter recovered only a fraction of their lands and none of their feudal rights; the new clergy found themselves little more than State pensioners. The Pope, despite his Concordat with the tamer of the terrible Republic, did not resume his old authority: he was rather called in to consecrate the Revolution. In return the First Consul, who made his unwilling pagan generals attend the thanksgiving celebrations in Notre Dame, consecrated, as it were, the Gallican Church. Henceforward it became his practice to grace Mass in the Tuileries chapel for ten

¹
The comparison struck at least two of the English visitors to Paris, Lady Bessborough and Farington. See Granville, I, 390-1; Farington, II, 7, 55;
Two Duchesses,
176-8; Berry, II, 181; D'Arblay, III, 232-3.

minutes every Sunday, piously transa
cting business in an adjoining
chamber with open doors.

Still less had Bonaparte impaired the popular vested interests created by the Revolution. They remained the pillars on which his power depended. The Third Estate continued to inherit untrammelled opportunity; the privilege of birth was in abeyance, the career open to the talents. The peasant's land remained free from seignorial impost: the former properties of the Church in the hands of their new owners. To their enjoyment was now added security and internal tranquillity. The comfort of the blacksmith's shop at Pecquigny which so impressed the unimpressionable Miss Berry, the bright plates and dishes above the cottage dresser, the unwonted bacon hanging from the kitchen ceiling, the bit of garden at the back, these were the material benefits which the Corsican's strong rule assured. As much as his victories and his astonishing genius, they guaranteed his hold over France.

It was a hold that tightened every day. The spring of 1802 saw a new rise in Bonaparte's popularity. Victorious peace on the Cont
inent had been crowned by peace
with England, the end of the blockade and the return of the French colonial empire. During the prolonged negotiations at Amiens an intelligent people had watched with almost incredulous eyes the ease with which their leader niched advantage after advantage from their adversaries. The trickery and bad faith which ultimately shocked and angered the English only excited the admiration of a people whose moral sense had been dulled by revolutionary treachery and violence. At first they had regarded the British concessions as aristocratic tricks to lure the First Consul into demands that would revive popular enthusiasm for the war in England. But after the Treaty had been signed they saw them as marks of weakness. The whole country applauded the wizard's triumph as a masterpiece of cunning.

Bonaparte saw to it that France's gratitude for the twin blessings of peace and victory took the form he desired. The Treaties of Luneville and Amiens were commemorated not by a memorial in stone, but by a plebiscite making their author First Consul for life. By an overwhelming majority he was given powers greater than those of Louis XIV at the height of his glory. A few die-hard republicans like Carnot recorded their dissent, but the opposition was too trifling to excite more than ridicule. Thirteen years of civil upheaval had left the French without respect for anything but strength and success. To whoever commanded these they were ready to grant everything. Colonel Dyott was told by a republican banker that Bonaparte would shortly repudia
te his wife, marry the daughter
of some European monarchical house and make the Consulship hereditary. The man of finance saw nothing shocking in the prospect. Cromwell and Caesar had become the most popular historical characters in Revolutionary France.

Before he seized power Bonaparte told a fellow soldier that if he succeeded the reign of ranting would soon be at an end. With his accession popular clamour ceased to play any part in public affairs. When the terrible
poisardes
who had so often given mob law to Paris waited to congratulate him on his elevation, they were sent about their business with a curt command to attend to their husbands and children: a rebuke on which in pre-revolutionary days no King would have ventured. Even a royalist assassination plot was skilfully used as a pretext to liquidate unwanted Jacobin leaders.

The idea of criticism by, let alone dependence on, an assembly of politicians was utterly repugnant to Bonaparte's mind. He declined to share the powers he derived from popular favour with any one. He used his triumph at Amiens to secure the adoption of a new Constitution—the fifth since 1789—which reduced the Senate to a company of nominated retainers and the Legislative Assembly and Tribune to ciphers—the one "an assembly of mutes" passing laws without discussion, the other "a sort of legislative eunuch" debating without power in secret session, where, he graciously announced till he grew weary of their insolence, " they might jabber as they chose."

Centralisation was the soul of the new government. Everything turned on the will of the First Consul. He appointed the Prefects of the Departments and the Mayors of the larger cities, and his Prefects appointed the Mayors of the smaller towns. It was the despotism of Louis XIV over again without the limitations imposed by local and aristocratic privileges and corporations. For the Revolution admitted of no power which did not derive from the State itself. The State alone was holy and its officers above the law. The
droit administratif
invested every agent who enforced the dictator's will with virtual immunity from punishment.

No one but a great man could have administered such a State without stagnation or confusion. But Bonaparte was a great man. He possessed the supreme quality of genius—inexhaustible energy. He could work eighteen hours a day and take in the most complicated document at a glance. His mind, which could turn swiftly from subject to subject, was almost as universal as the France he controlled. Out of the chaos produced by the Terror, the long, wasting war and the corruption of the Directory, he constructed, almost single-handed, a rationally organised State strong in the allegiance of its members and capable of enduring stress and storm. He endowed it with laws culled from the best systems of the past and published them in a Code of more than two thousand articles covering every department of human activity. He gave France a new system of education. He enriched it with roads, canals, bridges, harbours and magnificent public buildings.

On all that he wrought he left the indelible stamp of a clear, original, logical mind with a strong authoritarian bent. His educational system was as rational as an arithmetic table and directed to one aim: the enlargement of authority. His secondary schools or lycees and the University of Paris which was their apex were dedicated to the task of making obedient administrators, lawyers, officers, writers and teachers who could execute and express the "general will" of the Nation: in other words his own. Training was of a military type; school lessons began and ended with a roll of drums. Its ideal was not independence of thought but the efficiency born of uniformity and punctual subordination. It was devised for an armed nation on the march, which was how Bonaparte, alike interpreting and exploiting the Revolution, saw France. In the same way his legal reforms aimed everywhere at strengthening the forces of authority: of the father, the husband and the official. They subjected the libertarian anarchy of the Revolutionary theorists to the discipline required of the battlefield.

Nor did the French people object.
They gloried in success, and
the new system had brought them success unprecedented. So long as they were free to live their private lives with reasonable continuity, which they had never been under Convention or Directory, and enjoy the material benefits of the Revolution, they left their wonderful ruler to order the forms of government as he pleased. With the abolition of feudal uses, the destruction of hereditary caste and the secularisation of society, the divine discontent of eighteenth century bourgeois and peasant France had been assuaged. Bonaparte's authoritarianism outraged neither its passion for equality nor its Latin logic; unlike the weak rule of the Bourbons, it honoured both. Himself a Latin whose youthful pride had been bruised by the senseless arrogance of the
ancien regime,
he understood both feelings perfectly. When, to strengthen his hold on the country, he created a new privileged order he fashioned it with mathematical symmetry and grounded it on the broad, unenvying base of an egalitarian nation. The Legion of Honour, with its graded functionaries and cohorts, was recruited from the general body of France. It revived rank but not caste, and honoured not birth but talent.

So it was with the Army—the ultimate source of Bonaparte's power. It had repudiated the licence o
f the Revolution for discipline
but retained the Revolution's governing principle of equality. Its officers were drawn almost exclusively from the Third Estate. "I have never appointed even a sub-lieutenant," the First Consul boasted, " unless he was either promoted from the ranks or was the son of a man attached to the Revolution." Off parade privates took snuff with their officers and accosted them as "citoyens." In place of the cowed, rigid drill of the old Prussian school was an air of confident camaraderie; the troops marched with their muskets at as many angles as an English militia regiment.
¹
It was these things that made the Army so popular in the new France. Young Lord Aberdeen, who hated war and militarism, noticed that most of the Paris statues were of Generals.
"A
martial air reigns through the town, soldiers parade most of the principal streets and keep the peace; the utmost respect is paid to everything military."

To an Englishman such a regime seemed " the completest military despotism."
²
In his own country soldiers were regarded as necessary evils allowed only under strict subordination to the civil authority. The creed of France which owed its frontiers and existence to the Army was the exact opposite. " It is the soldier," declared Bonaparte, "who founds a Republic and it is the soldier who maintains it." He voiced the sentiment of millions. They saw the Army and its Chief as the guarantors of the material gains of the Revolution: their defence against the priest, the aristocrat and the foreigner. The glistening bayonets in the streets, the dragoons who marshalled the Paris traffic and kept order in the Opera with drawn swords did not shock Frenchmen. Instead they filled them with confidence and hope of renewed glory.
³

It was because they were impressed by the unmistakeablc solidarity and vigour of this new France that certain of the more uncritical English tourists fell under the Firsf: Consul's spell. They saw the churches reopening, listened to the grateful benedictions of pious peasants and heard the talk—carefully circulated by the authorities—^of his virtuous behaviour, so different from that of the disorderly sadists and rakes who had preceded him. "Yes, Bonaparte," wrote worthy Mr. Carr in his book of travels, "millions of suffering beings, raising themselves from the dust in which a barbarous revolution has prostrated them, look up to thee for liberty, protection and repose!" The same witness during a visit to St. Cloud was told how the Palace architect, inquiring where the First Consul would prefer his separate bedroom, received this stern rebuke from the young imperial philosopher: "Crimes only divide