The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

Besides arranging for legislation to govern France, he attended to the still more difficult task of administration. He divided the work among eight ministries, and chose as their heads the ablest men he could find, regardless of their party or their past; some had been Jacobins, some Girondins, some royalists. In one or two cases he allowed personal fondness to overrule practical judgment; so he made Laplace minister of the interior, but soon found the great mathematician-astronomer bringing “the spirit of infinitesimals into administration”;10 he transferred him to the Senate, and gave the ministry to brother Lucien.

  The basic and almost desperate task of the Ministry of the Interior was to restore the solvency and vitality of the communes or municipalities as the foundation cells of the body politic. Napoleon expressed himself on their condition in a letter to Lucien on December 25, 1799:

  Since 1790 the 36,000 local bodies have been like 36,000 orphan girls. Heiresses of the old feudal rights, they [the communes] have been neglected or defrauded … by the municipal trustees of the Convention or the Directory. A new set of mayors, assessors, or municipal councilors has generally meant nothing more than a fresh form of robbery: they have stolen the byroad, stolen the footpath, stolen the timber, robbed the church, and filched the property of the commune…. If this system were to last another ten years, what would become of local bodies? They would inherit nothing but debts, and be so bankrupt that they would be asking charity of the inhabitants.11

  This was Napoleon in a literary mood, and so a bit exaggerated. If true it might have suggested that the communes should be allowed to choose their own officials, as in Paris. But Napoleon had no liking for what the result had been in Paris. As for lesser communes, “the Revolution,” in the judgment of its latest historian, “had unearthed but few villagers well enough educated and cultivated to possess a sense of integrity and public interest”;12 and too often such locally chosen rulers, like those sent from Paris, had proved to be incompetent or corrupt or both. So Napoleon remained deaf to appeals for communal self-rule. Going back to the Roman consular system, or to the intendants of the late Bourbons, he preferred to appoint—or to have the Interior Ministry appoint—to each département a ruling prefect, to each arrondissement a subprefect, and to each commune a mayor; each appointee to be responsible to his superior, and ultimately to the central government. “All of the prefects” so appointed “were men of wide experience, and most were very capable.”13 In any case they gave Napoleon far-reaching reins of power.

  The civil service—the total administrative body—in Napoleonic France was the least democratic and the most efficient known to history, with the possible exception of ancient Rome. The people resisted the system, but it proved to be a defensible corrective of their acquisitive individualism; the restored Bourbons and the successive French republics retained it; and it gave the country a hidden and basic continuity through a century of political and cultural turmoil. “France lives today,” wrote Vandal in 1903, “in the administrative frame and under the civil laws which Napoleon bequeathed to her.”

  A more immediate problem was the rehabilitation of the Treasury. On the recommendation of Consul Lebrun, Napoleon offered the Ministry of Finance to Martin-Michel Gaudin, who had refused that post under the Directory and had acquired a reputation for ability and honesty. His accession to the ministry guaranteed the support of the financial community for the new government. Substantial loans now came to the rescue of the state: one banker advanced 500,000 francs in gold, and asked no interest. Soon the Treasury had twelve million francs with which to pay its operating expenses and (always a first care with Napoleon) to feed and content the Army, poorly clothed and long unpaid. Gaudin at once transferred from local officials to the central government the power to assess and collect taxes; local corruption in these processes had been notorious. On February 13, 1800, Gaudin united various financial agencies into one Bank of France, financed by selling shares, and empowered to issue paper currency; soon the careful management of the bank made its notes as popular and trustworthy as cash. This in itself was a revolution. The bank was not a state institution; it remained in private hands; but it was buttressed, and partly controlled, by governmental revenues deposited there; and a Minister of the Treasury, Barbé-Marbois, was added to the Ministry of Finance to guard and manage state funds in the bank.

  The most disagreeable part of administration was the prevention, detection, and punishment of crime, and the protection of governmental officials from assassination. Joseph Fouché was just the man for this work; he had had much experience with many forms of skulduggery; and, as a regicide marked out for vengeance by the royalists, he could be relied upon to protect Napoleon as the strongest barrier against a Bourbon restoration. While Gaudin coddled the bankers, Fouché kept the Jacobins in line with hopes that the First Consul would be a true son of the Revolution—protecting the commonalty against aristocracy and clergy, and France against reactionary powers. Napoleon distrusted and feared Fouché, and maintained a separate force of spies whose duties included spying upon the Minister of Police; but he was long at a loss to replace him. He did this gingerly in 1802, restored him in 1804, kept him till 1810. He appreciated Fouché’s moderation in asking for funds, and winked at the sly Minister’s partial financing of his force by confiscations from gambling casinos and contributions from brothels.14 A separate gendarmerie kept watch over streets, stores, offices, and homes, and presumably shared in the income of its wards.

  The defense of the individual—even of the criminal—against the police, the law, and the state did not get as much attention in France as in the England of that time, but some of it was provided by a judiciary efficient and relatively free from the correlation of judgments with gifts. In assigning this branch of administration to the jurist André-Joseph Abrimal, Napoleon said: “Citizen, I do not know you, but I am told you are the honestest man in the magistracy, and that is why I name you Minister of Justice.”15 Soon France was covered with an abundance and diversity of courts, with grand and petty juries, justices of the peace, bailiffs, prosecutors, plaintiffs, notaries, advocates…

  The protection of the state from other states was assigned to a Ministry of War under General Louis-Alexander Berthier, a Ministry of Marine under Denis Decrès, and a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministère des Relations Extérieures) under the indestructible Talleyrand. He was now forty-five years old, with an established reputation for polished manners, intellectual penetration, and moral depravity. We last saw him (July 14, 1790) celebrating Holy Mass at the Champ-de-Mars festival; shortly afterward he wrote to his latest acquisition, Adélaïde de Filleul, Comtesse de Flahaut: “I hope you feel to what divinity I yesterday addressed my prayers and my oath of fidelity. You alone are the Supreme Being whom I adore, and will always adore.”16 He had a son by the Countess, but he quietly attended her wedding as the unseen giver of the bride.17 His passion for feminine beauty was naturally accompanied by an appetite for francs, on which beauty lived. Since he rejected the Christian ethic as well as the Catholic theology, he adjusted his eloquence to lucrative causes, and earned a pretty bouquet from Carnot:

  Talleyrand brings with him all the vices of the old regime, without having been able to acquire any of the virtues of the new one. He has no fixed principles; he changes them as he does his linen, and takes them according to the wind of the day—a philosopher when philosophy is the mode; a republican now because that is necessary in order to become anything; tomorrow he will declare for an absolute monarchy if he can make anything out of it. I don’t want him at any price.

  Mirabeau agreed: “For money Talleyrand would sell his soul—and he would be right, for he would be trading muck for gold.”18

  There was, however, a limit to Talleyrand’s gyrations. When the mob ejected the King and Queen from the Tuileries and set up a proletarian dictatorship, he made no curtsies to the new masters, but took a boat to England (September 17, 1792). He received a mixed reception there: warm from Joseph Priestley and Jeremy Bentham, George
Canning and Charles James Fox;19 cool from aristocrats remembering his share in the Revolution. In March, 1794, English tolerance ran out, and Talleyrand was ordered to leave the country within twenty-four hours. He sailed to the United States, lived comfortably there on the income from his property and investments, returned to France (August, 1796), and became foreign minister (July, 1797) under the Directory. In that capacity he added to his fortune by diverse means, so that he was able to deposit three million francs in British and German banks. Foreseeing the fall of the Directory, he resigned (July 20, 1799), and waited in comfort for Napoleon to call him back to office. The Consul did not wait long; on November 22, 1799, Talleyrand was again ministre des relations extérieures.

  Bonaparte found him valuable as an intermediary between an upstart ruler and decaying kings. Through all his revolutions Talleyrand had preserved the dress, manners, speech, and mind of the old aristocracy: the easy grace (despite the twisted foot), the imperturbable composure, the subtle wit of a man who knew that at need he could kill with an epigram. He was a hard worker, a shrewd diplomat, who could rephrase in courteous elegance the impetuous bluntness of his unvarnished master. He made a principle “never to hurry” in reaching a decision20—a good motto for a lame man; in several instances his delays in forwarding a dispatch allowed Napoleon to recede from dangerous absolutes.

  He wanted, under whatever banner, to live lavishly, seduce leisurely, and gather plums from any tree. When the Consul asked him how he had amassed so great a fortune, he answered disarmingly, “I bought stocks on the seventeenth Brumaire, and sold them three days later.”21 That was but a beginning; within fourteen months of resuming office he added fifteen million francs more. He played the market from “inside” knowledge, and he gathered “tidbits” from foreign powers who exaggerated his influence upon Napoleon’s policies. By the end of the Consulate his fortune was estimated at forty million francs.22 Napoleon found him revolting and irreplaceable. Echoing Mirabeau, he called the graceful cripple “merde in a silk stocking,”23 using a term that carries less odor in French than in its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Napoleon himself was above bribery, having acquired the French Treasury, and France.

  3. The Reception of the Constitution

  The new constitution met with much criticism when it was published (December 15, 1799) with the ingratiating claim, “It is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality, and liberty. The powers which it institutes will be strong and stable, as they must be in order to guarantee the rights of the citizens and the interests of the state. Citizens! the Revolution is made fast to the principles which began it; it is finished.”24 These were spacious words, but Napoleon seems to have considered them justified because the constitution allowed for universal adult male suffrage in the first stages of election; it required more appointments to be made from “notables” directly or indirectly chosen by the voters; it confirmed the peasantry and the bourgeoisie in their possession of property purchased as the result of the Revolution; it confirmed the abolition of feudal dues and ecclesiastical tithes; theoretically, and subject to nature, it established the equality of all citizens before the law and in eligibility to any career—political, economic, or cultural; it set up a strong central government to control crime, end anarchy, corruption, and incompetent administration, and defend France against foreign powers; and it ended the Revolution by making it a fait accompli, a purpose realized within natural limits, a new form of social organization rooted in stable government, efficient administration, national liberty, and lasting law.

  Nevertheless there were complaints. The Jacobins felt that they had been ignored in the “Constitution of the Year VIII”—that the “representative government” which it offered was a hypocritical surrender of the Revolution to the bourgeoisie. Several generals wondered why fate had not chosen one of them, instead of that puny Corsican, for political supremacy; “there was not one of the generals who did not conspire against me.”25 The Catholics mourned that the constitution confirmed the Revolution’s confiscation of church property; rebellion rose again in the Vendée (1800). Royalists fretted because Napoleon was consolidating his position instead of calling Louis XVIII to restore Bourbon rule. As the royalists controlled most of the newspapers,26 they launched a campaign against acceptance of the new regime; Napoleon replied (January 17, 1800) by suppressing sixty out of the seventy-three existing journals of France, on the ground that they were financed by foreign gold. The radical press was also reduced, and the Moniteur became the official organ of the government. Journalists, authors, and philosophers condemned this attack upon the freedom of the press; and now Mme. de Staël, having given up hope of playing Egeria, began a powerful and lifelong attack upon Napoleon as a dictator who was crucifying French liberty.

  Napoleon defended himself by proxy in the Moniteur. He had not destroyed liberty; this had already been shattered by the need for centralized government in war, by the rigged elections of the Jacobins, by the dictatorship of rioting mobs, and by the repeated coups d’état of the Directory years; and what remained of it had been dragged in the mire of political bribery and moral decay. The liberty he was crucifying was the freedom of the crowd to be lawless, of the criminal to steal and kill, of the propagandist to lie, of the judge to take bribes, of the financier to embezzle, of the businessman to play monopoly. Had not Marat advocated—had not the Committee of Public Safety practiced—dictatorship as the only cure for the chaos of a society suddenly released from religious tutelage, class domination, and royal autocracy, and left to the urgency of instincts and the tyranny of crowds? Some discipline must now be found to reestablish that order which is the precondition of freedom.27

  The peasantry did not need such arguments to decide their support of the constitution; they had the land, and secretly applauded any government that would squelch the Jacobins. Here, despite opposite economic interests, the city proletariat agreed with the tillers of the soil. The people of the tenements—workers in the factories, clerks in the shops, peddlers in the streets—those who as sansculottes had fought for bread and power, had lost faith in a Revolution that had lifted them up, thrown them down, and left them shorn of hope; one magic still stirred them—the hero of war; and the conqueror of Italy could be no worse than the politicians of the Directory. And as for the bourgeoisie—bankers, merchants, businessmen—how could they reject the man who had so completely accepted the sanctity of property and freedom of enterprise? With him they had won the Revolution and inherited France. He was, till 1810, their man.

  Confident that the great majority would support him, Napoleon submitted the new constitution to a plebiscite (December 24, 1799). We do not know if this referendum was managed and manacled like so many similar polls before or since. The official count reported 3,011,107 in favor of the constitution, 1,562 against it.28

  Having those ayes behind him, Napoleon, with his family and aides, moved from the crowded Luxembourg to the royal and commodious Tuileries (February 19, 1800). He made the transit in a pompous procession with three thousand troops, generals on horseback, ministers in carriages, the Council of State in hackney coaches, and the First Consul in a coach drawn by six white horses. It was the first example of the many public displays with which Napoleon hoped to impress the public of Paris. He explained to his secretary:

  “Bourrienne, tonight at last we shall sleep in the Tuileries. You are better off than I: you are not obliged to make a spectacle of yourself, but may go your own way there. I must, however, go in procession; that disgusts me, but it is necessary to speak to the eyes…. In the Army simplicity is in the proper place; but in a great city, in a palace, the Chief of the Government must attract attention in every possible way, yet still with prudence.”29

  The ritual was triumphantly completed with but one disturbing note: on one of the guardhouses through which Napoleon passed into the courtyard of the palace he could have seen a large inscription reading “Tenth of August, 1792—Ro
yalty in France is abolished, and shall never be restored.”30 As they walked through the rooms that had once displayed the wealth of the Bourbons, State Councilor Roederer remarked to the First Consul, “Général, cela est triste” (General, this is sad); to which Napoleon replied, “Oui, comme la gloire” (Yes, like glory).31 For his work with Bourrienne he chose a spacious chamber adorned only with books. When he was shown the royal bedroom and bed, he refused to use them, preferring to sleep regularly with Josephine. However, that evening, not without pride, he said to his wife, “Come along, my little Creole, go lie down in the bed of your masters.”32

  II. THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE CONSULATE

  Napoleon had established internal order, and conditions that promised an economic resurgence; but it still remained that France was surrounded by enemies in a war that France had begun on April 20, 1792. The French people longed for peace, but refused to abandon the territories that had been annexed during the Revolution: Avignon, Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Basel, Geneva, Savoy, and Nice. Nearly all of these were comprised in what the French called the “natural boundaries” of their country; and Napoleon, in the oath that he had taken on coming to power, had pledged himself to protect these borders—the Rhine, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the seas—as essentially a return to the boundaries of ancient Gaul. Moreover, France had taken Holland, Italy, Malta, and Egypt; was she willing to give up these conquests as the price of peace, or would she soon reject any leader who negotiated the surrender of these profitable gains? The character of the French united with the character of Napoleon in a policy proud with nationalism and pregnant with war.

  An escape from this destiny was suggested to Napoleon in a letter of February 20, 1800, from the man whom nearly all émigrés and royalists recognized as the legitimate ruler of France—Louis XVIII: