The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  The Code represented the usual historical reaction from a permissive society toward tightened authority and control in the family and the state. The leading authors of the legislation were men of years, alarmed by the excesses of the Revolution—its reckless rejection of tradition, its easing of divorce, its loosening of family bonds, its allowance of moral laxity and political riot among women, its communal encouragement of proletarian dictatorships, its connivance at September Massacres and Tribunal terrors; they were resolved to halt what seemed to them the disruption of society and government; and in these matters Napoleon, anxious for a steady France under his hand, gave these feelings his resolute support. The Council of State agreed with him that there should be a limit and early cloture on public debate over the 2,281 articles of the Civil Code; the Tribunate and the Legislature fell in line; and on March 21, 1804, the Code—officially the Code Civil des Français, popularly the Code Napoléon—became the law of France.

  2. The Concordat of 1801

  Even so, the young Lycurgus was not satisfied. He knew from his own intense nature how little the soul of man is prone to law; he had seen in Italy and Egypt how close man remains, in his desires, to his animal and hunting past, violent and free; it was one of the marvels of history that these living explosives had been kept from shattering the social frame. Was it the policemen who had tamed them? It could not be, for policemen were few and far between, and a potential anarchist was hidden in every second citizen. What, then, had restrained them?

  Napoleon, himself a skeptic, concluded that social order rested ultimately on the human animal’s natural and carefully cultivated fear of supernatural powers. He came to look upon the Catholic Church as the most effective instrument ever devised for the control of men and women, for their grumbling or silent habituation to economic, social, and sexual inequality, and for their public obedience to divine commandments uncongenial to human flesh. If there could not be a policeman at every corner, there could be gods, all the more awesome because unseen, and multipliable at will and need into mystic beings, hortatory or minatory, ranged through grades of divinity and power from the desert anchorite to the ultimate commander, preserver and destroyer of stars and men. What a sublime conception!—what an incomparable organization for its dissemination and operation!—what a priceless support for teachers, husbands, parents, hierarchs, and kings! Napoleon concluded that the chaos and violence of the Revolution had been due, above all, to its repudiation of the Church. He resolved to restore the association of Church and state as soon as he could take the fangs out of horrified Jacobins and mortified philosophers.

  Religion in the France of 1800 was in a confused flux not unrelated to the moral chaos left by the Revolution. A large minority of the people in the provinces—probably a majority in Paris—had become indifferent to the appeals of priests.61 Thousands of Frenchmen, from peasants to millionaires, had bought from the state the property confiscated from the Church; these purchasers were excommunicated, and looked with no friendly eye upon those who denounced them as receivers of stolen goods. There were then eight thousand active priests in France; two thousand of these were constitutionels, who had sworn fealty to the confiscatory Constitution of 1791; the other six thousand were nonjurors who rejected the Revolution, and labored devoutly to annul it; and they were making progress. The nonemigrant nobles, and many of the bourgeoisie, were working to have religion restored as a bulwark to property and social order; many of these—some of them scions of the Revolution—were sending their children to schools managed or taught by priests and nuns who (they believed) knew better than ungowned laic teachers how to make respectful sons and modest daughters.62 Religion was becoming fashionable in “society” and literature; soon (1802) Chateaubriand’s massive eulogy, Le Génie du christianisme, was to become the talk of the time.

  Seeking every aid to his rootless rule, Napoleon decided to win the spiritual and structural support of the Catholic Church. Such a move would at last quiet the rebellious Vendée, please the provinces, add six thousand priests to his spiritual gendarmerie; it would enlist the moral and spiritual influence of the Pope; it would take from Louis XVIII a major argument for a Bourbon restoration; and it would reduce the hostility—to France and Napoleon —of Catholic Belgium, Bavaria, Austria, Italy, and Spain. “So, as soon as I had power, I … reestablished religion. I made it the groundwork and foundation upon which I built. I considered it as the support of sound principles and good morality.”63

  This apertura a destra was resisted by the agnostics in Paris and the cardinals in Rome. Many ecclesiastics were reluctant to sanction any agreement that would tolerate divorce, or would abandon the claims of the French Church to its confiscated property. Many Jacobins protested that to recognize Catholicism as the national religion, protected and paid by the government, would be to surrender what they considered one of the major achievements of the late Revolution—the separation of state and Church. Napoleon frightened the cardinals by implying that if they rejected his proposals he might take a leaf from Henry VIII of England and completely divorce the French Church from Rome. He tried to quiet the skeptics by explaining that he would make the Church an instrument of the government in maintaining internal peace; but they feared that his proposal would become another step in the retreat from revolution to monarchy. He never forgave Lalande (the astronomer) “for having wished” (Bourrienne reports) “to include him in a dictionary of atheists precisely at the moment when he was opening negotiations with the court of Rome.”64

  These began at Paris November 6, 1800, and continued through eight months of maneuvering. The cardinals were experienced diplomats, but Napoleon had learned of the Pope’s eagerness for an agreement, and held out for every condition favorable to his own power over the reconciled Church. Pius VII made one concession after another because the plan offered to end a decade of disaster for the Church in France; it would let him depose many bishops who had flouted the papal authority; it would enable him, with the help of French intervention, to get rid of the Neapolitan troops that had occupied his capital; and it would restore to the Papacy the “Legations” (Ferrara, Bologna, and Ravenna—usually ruled by papal legates) which had been ceded to France in 1797. —Finally, after a session that lasted till 2 A.M., the representatives of the Roman Church and the French state signed (July 16, 1801) the Concordat that was to govern their relations for a century. Napoleon ratified it in September, Pius VII in December. Napoleon, however, signed with the proviso that he might later make some “regulations providing against the more serious inconveniences that might arise from a literal execution of the Concordat.”65

  The historic document pledged the French government to recognize—and finance—Catholicism as the religion of the Consuls and the majority of the French people, but it did not make Catholicism the state religion, and it affirmed full freedom of worship for all the French, including Protestants and Jews. The Church withdrew its claims to confiscated ecclesiastical property, but the state agreed in recompense to pay the bishops an annual salary of fifteen thousand francs, and to pay lesser stipends to parish priests. The bishops, as under Louis XIV, were to be nominated by the government, and they were to swear fealty to the state; but they were not to function until approved by the pope. All “constitutional” bishops were to resign their sees; all orthodox bishops were restored, and the churches were officially (as they had been in fact) opened to orthodox worship. After much debate Napoleon yielded a precious point to the Church—the right to accept bequests.

  To appease the more amiable of his skeptical critics, Napoleon unilaterally added to the Concordat 121 “Articles Organiques,” to protect the preeminence of the state over the Church in France. No papal bull, brief, or legate, no decree of a general council or national synod, was to enter France without explicit permission from the government. Civil marriage was to be a legal prerequisite to a religious marriage. All students for the Catholic priesthood were to be taught Bossuet’s “Gallican Articles” of 1682, which
affirmed the legal independence of the French Catholic Church from “ultramontane” (over-the-mountains) rule.

  So modified, the Concordat was presented to the Council of State, the Tribunate, and the Legislature on April 8, 1802. Not yet in terror of Napoleon, they openly and vigorously opposed it as a betrayal of the Enlightenment and the Revolution (it was essentially consistent with the Constitution of 1791). In the Tribunate the philosophe Count Volney engaged in spirited debate with the First Consul on the Concordat; and the Legislature elected to its presidency Charles-François Dupuis, author of a strongly anticlerical treatise, L’Origine de tous les cultes (1794). Napoleon withdrew the Concordat from discussion by the assemblies, and bided his time.

  At the next nomination of members to the Tribunate and the Legislature many of the critics failed of reappointment by the Senate. Meanwhile Napoleon spread among the public the story and contents of the Concordat; as he had expected, the people cried out for its ratification. On March 25, 1802, Napoleon rose to overwhelming popularity by signing peace with England. So fortified, he again submitted the Concordat to the assemblies. The Tribunate passed it with only seven dissentient votes; the Legislature voted 228 for it, 21 against. On April 18 it became law; and on Easter Sunday, in a solemn ceremony in Notre-Dame, both the Peace of Amiens and the Concordat were proclaimed amid the groans of the revolutionists, the laughter of the military, and the joy of the people. A caricature ran the rounds of the barracks showing Napoleon drowning in a font of holy water; and an epigram said: “To be King of Egypt he believes in the Koran; to be King of France he believes the Gospel.”

  Napoleon consoled himself with the conviction that he had expressed the will of the great majority of Frenchmen, and that he had strengthened his power at the base, though he had weakened it at the top. He had restored the clergy, but since he appointed the bishops, and salaried them and some three thousand priests, he calculated that he could hold them with an economic leash; the Church, he thought, would be one of his instruments, singing his glory and supporting his policies. A little later he saw to it that a new catechism should teach French children that “to honor the Emperor is to honor God Himself,” and that “if they should fail in their duties to the Emperor … they would be resisting the order established by God, … and would make themselves deserving of eternal damnation.”66 He expressed his gratitude to the clergy by attending Mass dutifully, but as briefly as possible.

  He had, in these victorious moments, the conviction that he had won the whole Catholic world to his side. Actually the French clergy, never forgetting the loss of their lands, and resenting their salaried bondage to the state, looked more and more to the Pope for support against the ruler whom they secretly considered to be an infidel. “Gallican” by law, they became ultramontane in feeling; when the Emperor dispossessed Pius VII of lands that the Papacy had held for a thousand years—still more when the Pope was evicted from Rome and imprisoned in Savona and Fontainebleau—the clergy and the populace of France rose in defense of their Pontiff and their creed; and Napoleon found, too late, that the power of the myth and the word was greater than the might of the law and the sword.

  IV. THE PATHS OF GLORY

  Amid his projects and triumphs he had always to guard against challenges to his power and his life. The royalists in France were relatively quiet, for they hoped to persuade Napoleon that his safest course was to restore the Bourbons and accept some sinecure in return. They encouraged writers like Mme. de Genlis, whose historical romance Mademoiselle de La Vallière painted a pleasant picture of France under Louis XIV. They played on the secret royalism of Napoleon’s secretary Bourrienne, and through him they sought to win Josephine. The pleasure-loving Creole had had a surfeit of political excitement; she feared that Napoleon, unless he changed his course, would seek monarchical power, and would divorce her to marry a woman more likely to give him an heir. Napoleon tried to quiet her fears with some amorous moments, and forbade her to meddle in politics.

  He thought that the chief threat to his power lay not from royalists or Jacobins, but from the jealousy of the generals who led the Army on which his power ultimately had to rest. Moreau, Pichegru, Bernadotte, Murat, Masséna, had given open expression to their discontent. At a dinner hosted by Moreau some officers denounced Napoleon as a usurper; General Delmas called him “a criminal and a monster.” Moreau, Masséna, and Bernadotte drew up a demand upon Napoleon to content himself with the government of Paris and its vicinity, and to divide the rest of France into regions to be allotted to them with almost absolute powers;67 none of them, however, would undertake to deliver this proposal to the First Consul. Bernadotte, who controlled the Army of the West at Rennes, was repeatedly on the verge of rebellion, but lost his nerve.68 “If I should suffer a serious defeat,” said Bonaparte, “the generals would be the first to abandon me.”69

  It is against the background of this military plotting that we must interpret the antimilitaristic speech of Napoleon before the Council of State on May 4, 1802:

  In all countries force yields to civil qualities: the bayonet is lowered before the priest, … and before the man who becomes master by his knowledge…. Never will military government take hold in France unless the nation has been brutalized by fifty years of ignorance…. If we abstract from other relationships, we perceive that the military man knows no other law than force, reduces everything to force, sees nothing else…. The civil man, on the contrary, sees only the general good. The character of the military man is to will everything despotically; that of the civil man is to submit everything to discussion, reason, and truth; these are often deceptive, but meanwhile they bring light…. I do not hesitate to conclude that eminence belongs incontestably to the civil…. The soldiers are the children of the citizens, and the [true] army is the nation.70

  Irked by a sense of insecurity, and always reaching for power, Napoleon suggested to his intimates that his plans for the further improvement and embellishment of France would require a longer tenure than the decade already granted him. On August 4, 1802, the Senate announced a new “Constitution of the Year X” (1801); this enlarged the Senate from forty to eighty members—all the new members to be named by the First Consul; and it made him consul for life. When his admirers proposed that he be given also the authority to choose his successor, he demurred with exceptional modesty; “hereditary succession,” he said, “is irreconcilable with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, and impossible in France.”71 But when the Senate, after debating the proposal, approved it by a vote of twenty-seven to seven, the misguided seven covered their error by making the decision unanimous; and Napoleon graciously accepted the honor on condition that the public approve. On August 17 all adult males who were registered as French citizens were asked to vote on two questions: Should Napoleon Bonaparte be made consul for life? Should he be allowed to choose his successor? The reply was 3,508,885 yes, 8,374 no.72 Presumably, as in other plebiscites, the government had means of encouraging an affirmative reply. The sentiment of the propertied classes was revealed when the Bourse reacted to the vote: the value index of traded shares, which had been seven on the day before Napoleon’s coming to power, now rapidly rose to fifty-two.73

  So fortified, he made some changes in his entourage. He chose a small group of men to be his Privy Council, through which, as his authority be came indisputable, he could issue decrees in addition to the senatus consulta which were open to his use. He reduced the Tribunate from one hundred members to fifty, and required that its debates henceforth be secret. He dismissed the clever but incalculable Fouché as minister of police, and merged that ministry into a Department of Justice under Claude Régnier. Having discovered that Bourrienne was using his position to make a fortune, he dismissed him (October 20, 1802), and relied henceforth on the devoted service of Claude Méneval. Thereafter Bourrienne’s Memoirs became unreliably hostile to Napoleon, and Méneval’s Memoirs were unreliably favorable; however, taken in their algebraic sum, they still constitute the most
intimate account of the miniature colossus who was to bestride Europe for the next ten years.

  Perhaps it was the Plebiscite of 1802, added to the diverse triumphs at Marengo and Amiens, that ruined, in Napoleon, the moderation and perspective without which genius skirts the edge of madness. For each of the steps that raised him to vertiginous powers he found persuasive or forceful arguments. When the leaders of the Cisalpine Republic, centered in Milan, asked his help in drawing up a constitution, he offered one in which three electoral colleges—manned respectively by landowners, businessmen, and the professions—would choose a commission empowered to appoint the members of a legislature, a senate, and a council of state; these would choose a president. Meeting at Lyons in January, 1802, the delegates ratified this constitution, and invited Napoleon—whom they considered to be an Italian stranded in France—to be the first president of the new state. He came from Paris to address them—in Italian—and on January 26, by acclamation, the First Consul of France became the head of the Republica Italiana. All Europe wondered what would come next out of this new stupor mundi, this hypnotic marvel of the world.74