The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Napoleon’s political philosophy was equally uncompromising. Since all men are born unequal, it is inevitable that the majority of brains will be in a minority of men, who will rule the majority with guns or words. Hence utopias of equality are the consolatory myths of the weak; anarchist cries for freedom from laws and government are the delusions of immature and autocratic minds; and democracy is a game used by the strong to conceal their oligarchic rule.149 Actually France had had to choose between an hereditary nobility and rule by the business class. So, “among nations and in revolutions, aristocracy always exists. If you attempt to get rid of it by destroying the nobility, it immediately reestablishes itself among the rich and powerful families of the Third Estate. Destroy it there, and it survives and takes refuge among the leaders of workmen and of the people.”150 “Democracy, if reasonable, would limit itself to giving everyone an equal opportunity to compete and obtain.”151 Napoleon claimed to have done this by making la carrière ouverte aux talents in all fields; but he allowed many deviations from this rule.

  He was a bit equivocal about revolutions. They release the violent passions of the mob, since “collective crimes incriminate no one,”152 and there is “never a revolution without a terror.”153 “Revolutions are the true cause of regeneration in public customs,”154 but in general (he concluded in 1816) “a revolution is one of the greatest evils by which mankind can be visited. It is the scourge of the generation by which it is brought about; and all the advantages which it procures cannot make amends for the misery with which it embitters the lives of those who take part in it.”155

  He preferred monarchy to all other forms of government, even to defending hereditary kingship (i.e., his own) against doubts expressed by Czar Alexander.156 “There are more chances of securing a good sovereign by heredity than by election.”157 People are happier under such a stable government than under a free-for-all, devil-take-the-hindmost democracy. “In regular and tranquil times every individual has his share of felicity: the cobbler in his stall is as content as the king on his throne; the soldier is no less happy than the general.”158

  His political ideal was a federation of European, or Continental, states, governed in their external relations from Paris as the “capital of the world.” In that “Association Européenne” all the component states would have the same money, weights, measures, and basic laws, with no political barriers to travel, transport, and trade.159 When Napoleon reached Moscow in 1812 he thought that only a just peace with Alexander remained in the way of realizing his dream. He had underestimated the centrifugal power of national differences; but he may have been right in believing that if Europe achieved unity it would be not through appeals to reason but through the imposition of a superior force continuing through a generation. War would then continue, but at least it would be civil.

  As he approached his end he wondered whether he had been a free and creative agent or the helpless instrument of some cosmic force. He was not a fatalist, if this means one who believes that his success or failure, his health or illness, the character of his life and the moment of his death, have been determined by some hidden power, regardless of what he chooses to do;160 nor was he clearly a determinist in the sense of one who believes that every occurrence, including his every choice, idea, or act, is determined by the composition of all the forces and history of the past. But he repeatedly talked of a “destiny”—a central stream of events, partly malleable by the human will, but basically irresistible as flowing from the inherent nature of things. At times he spoke of his will as strong enough to stem or bend the current—”I have always been able to impose my will upon destiny.”161 Too uncertain to be consistent, he also said: “I depend upon events. I have no will; I await all things from their issue”162—as they issue from their source. “The greater one is”—i.e., the higher he is in authority—”the less free will one can have”—the more and stronger will be the forces impinging upon him. “One depends upon circumstances and events. I am the greatest slave among men; my master is the nature of things.”163 He combined his fluctuating moods in the proud conception of himself as an instrument of destiny—i.e., the nature of things as determining the course and terminus of events. “Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is reached I am invulnerable, unassailable”—as borne with the stream. “When destiny has accomplished its purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.”164 He felt himself bound to a destiny magnificent but perilous; pride and circumstance drove him on; “destiny must be fulfilled.”165

  Like all of us he frequently thought of death, and had moods defending or contemplating suicide. In youth he felt that suicide was the final right of every soul; at fifty-one he added: “if his death harms no one.”166 He had no faith in immortality. “There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men. … To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one’s existence, is not to have lived at all.”167

  VII. WHAT WAS HE?

  Was he a Frenchman? Only by the accident of time; otherwise he was French neither in body nor in mind nor in character. He was short, and later stout; his features were stern Roman rather than brightly Gallic; he lacked the gaiety and grace, the humor and wit, the refinement and manners of a cultured Frenchman; he was bent on dominating the world rather than enjoying it. He had some difficulty in speaking French; he retained a foreign accent till 1807;168 he spoke Italian readily, and seemed more at home in Milan than in Paris. On several occasions he expressed dislike of the French character. “The Emperor,” reported Las Cases, “dilated upon our volatile, fickle, and changeable disposition. ‘All the French,’ he said, ‘are turbulent, and inclined to rail. … France loves change too much for any government to endure there.’ “169

  He spoke often—with the emphasis of one not sure—of his love for France. He resented being called “the Corsican”; “I wanted to be absolutely French”;170 “the noblest title in the world is that of having been born a Frenchman.”171 But in 1809 he revealed to Roederer what he meant by his love of France: “I have but one passion, one mistress, and that is France. I sleep with her. She has never been false to me. She lavishes her blood and treasure on me. If I need 500,000 men she gives them to me.”172 He loved her as a violinist can love his violin, as an instrument of immediate response to his stroke and will. He drew the strings of this instrument taut until they snapped, nearly all of them at once.

  Was he the “Son of the Revolution”? So the Allies sometimes called him; but by this they meant that he had inherited the guilt of the Revolution’s crimes, and had continued its repudiation of the Bourbons. He himself repeatedly said that he had brought the Revolution to an end—not only its chaos and violence but its pretenses to democracy. He was the Son of the Revolution insofar as he retained peasant emancipation, free enterprise, equality before the law, career open to talent, and the will to defend the natural frontiers. But when he made himself consul for life, then emperor, when he ended freedom of speech and the press, made the Catholic Church a partner in the government, used new Bastilles, and favored aristocracy old and new—then, surely, he ceased to be the Son of the Revolution. In many ways he remained so in the conquered lands; there he ended feudalism, the Inquisition, and priestly control of life; there he brought in his Code and some rays of the Enlightenment. But, having so dowered these states, he gave them kings.

  Was he rightly, despite his will, called “the Corsican”? Only in his family loyalty, his flair for combat, his passionate defense of France against its foes; but he lacked the Corsican spirit of feud, and his reading of the philosophes far removed him from the medieval Catholicism of his native isle. He was Corsican in blood, French in education, and Italian in almost everything else.

  Yes, after all attempts to answer them, we must go back to Stendhal and Taine, and say that Napoleon was a condottiere of the Italian Renaissance, preserved in mold and type by the isolation, feuds, and wars of Corsica. He was Cesare Borgia with twice the brains, and Machi
avelli with half the caution and a hundred times the will. He was an Italian made skeptical by Voltaire, subtle by the ruses of survival in the Revolution, sharp by the daily duel of French intellects. All the qualities of Renaissance Italy appeared in him: artist and warrior, philosopher and despot; unified in instincts and purposes, quick and penetrating in thought, direct and overwhelming in action, but unable to stop. Barring that vital fault, he was the finest master of controlled complexity and coordinated energy in history. Tocqueville put it well: he was as great as a man can be without virtue, and he was as wise as a man can be without modesty. Nevertheless he remained within the bounds of probability when he predicted that the world would not see the likes of him for many centuries.

  CHAPTER XI

  Napoleonic France

  1800 —1815

  I. THE ECONOMY

  THOUGH raised to be a soldier, Napoleon had a sound sense of economic realities as the fate of families, the subsoil of culture, and the strength and weakness of a state. Generally, despite an itch to regulate, he ranged himself on the side of free enterprise, open competition, and private property. He paid little attention to the socialistic plans of Charles Fourier and others for the communal production of goods and the equitable distribution of the product. He felt sure that in any society the abler minority will soon govern the majority, and absorb the greater part of the wealth; moreover, the inspiration of a communist ideal cannot long take the place of differential rewards in reconciling men to toil; in frank analysis, “it is hunger that makes the world move.”1 Moreover, communal ownership is a perpetual temptation to carelessness. “Whilst an individual owner, with a personal interest in his property, is always wide awake, and brings his plans to fruition, communal interest is inherently sleepy and unproductive, because individual enterprise is a matter of instinct, and communal enterprise is a matter of public spirit, which is rare.”2 So he opened all doors, all careers, to all men, of whatever fortune or pedigree; and until the later years of his rule France enjoyed a prosperity that brought peace to all classes; there was no unemployment,3 no political revolt. “Nobody is interested in overthrowing a government in which all the deserving are employed.”4

  It was a prime principle with Napoleon that state “finances founded upon a good system of agriculture never fail.”5 Overseeing everything, overlooking nothing, he saw to it that protective tariffs, reliable financing, and well-maintained transport by roads and canals should encourage the peasants to labor steadily, to buy land, to bring more and more of it under cultivation, and to provide sturdy youngsters for his armies. Too many French farmers were sharecroppers or hired farm laborers, but half a million of them, by 1814, owned the acres that they sowed. An English lady traveling in France in that year described the peasants as enjoying a degree of prosperity unknown to their class anywhere else in Europe.6 These tillers of the soil looked to Napoleon as a living guarantee of their title deeds, and remained loyal to him until their lands languished in the absence of their conscripted sons.

  Industry too was a prime interest with Napoleon. He made it a point to visit factories, to show interest in processes and products, in the artisans and the managers. He aspired to bring science to the service of industry. He set up industrial exhibitions—in 1801 in the Louvre, and in 1806 under immense tents in the Place des Invalides. He organized the École des Arts et Métiers, and rewarded inventors and scientists. Experiments with steam propulsion were made in 1802 with a clumsy engine on a barge in a canal near Paris; their success was not convincing, but they spurred further efforts. In 1803 Robert Fulton offered a plan for applying steam power to navigation; Napoleon turned it over to the Institut National, where, after two months of experiment, it was rejected as impracticable. French industry developed more slowly than the British, having fewer markets, less capital, and less machinery. However, in 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard exhibited his new apparatus for weaving; in 1806 the French government bought the invention and distributed it; French textile industry became competitive with the British. The silk industry in Lyons, which in 1800 had 3,500 looms, used 10,720 in 1808;7 and in 1810 one textile entrepreneur employed eleven thousand workers in his mills.8 Meanwhile French chemists continued to meet the British exclusion of sugar, cotton, and indigo by making sugar from beetroot, dyes from woad, and linens superior to cotton;9 also they turned potatoes into brandy.

  Napoleon helped French industries with protective tariffs and the Continental Blockade, tided them over financial difficulties with loans on easy terms, opened up new markets for French products in his expanding empire, and took up any slack of employment by extensive public works. Some of these were monuments to the glory of Napoleon and his armies, like the Vendôme Column, the Madeleine, and the triumphal Arcs du Carrousel and de l’Étoile; some were military fortifications or facilities, like the fortress, dike, and port of Cherbourg; some were utilitarian structures artistically designed, like the Bourse, the Bank of France, the General Post Office, the Théâtre de l’Odéon, even the Halles des Blés or des Vins—the stately emporiums of corn or wines (1811). Some were aids to agriculture, like the draining of marshes; some to transport and trade. Here belong the opening of new streets in Paris, like the Rues de Rivoli, de Castiglione, de la Paix, and two miles of quais, like the Quai d’Orsay, along the Seine; more important, 33,500 miles of new roads in France, and countless bridges, including the Ponts d’Austerlitz and d’Iéna in Paris; add the deepening of river beds and the extension of France’s magnificent system of canals. Major canals were dug connecting Paris with Lyons, and connecting Lyons with Strasbourg and Bordeaux. Napoleon fell before two other systems could be completed: canals binding the Rhine with the Danube and the Rhone, and binding Venice with Genoa.10

  The workers who dug the canals, raised the triumphal arches, and manned the factories were not allowed to go on strike, or to form unions to bargain for better working conditions or higher pay. However, Napoleon’s government saw to it that wages should keep abreast of prices, that bakers and butchers and manufacturers were under state regulation, and that—especially in Paris—the necessaries of life should be plentifully supplied. Until the last years of Napoleon’s rule, wages rose faster than prices, and the proletariat, sharing modestly in the general prosperity and proud of Napoleon’s victories, became more patriotic than the bourgeoisie. It gave scant hearing to bourgeois liberals, like Mme. de Staël or Benjamin Constant, preaching liberty.

  Nevertheless there were sources and voices of discontent. As free enterprise progressively enriched the clever, some men perceived that equality withers under liberty, and that a laissez-faire government allows the concentration of wealth to exclude half of the population from the fruits of invention and the graces of civilization. In 1808 François-Marie Fourier issued his Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales—the first classic of Utopian socialism. He proposed that those dissatisfied with the existing organization of industry should unite in cooperative communities (phalanges), each of some four hundred families, living together in a phalanstery, or common building; that all members should spend part of the working day in agriculture (collectively organized), part in domestic or group industry, part in leisure or cultural pursuits; that each individual should perform a variety of tasks, and should change his occupation occasionally; that each individual should share equally in the products or profits of the phalanx; and that each phalanx should have a community center, a school, a library, a hotel, and a bank. This plan inspired idealists in both hemispheres, and Brook Farm, near Boston, was only one of several utopian communities that were soon cut down by the natural individualism of men.

  Napoleon himself was not very fond of capitalism. He called the Americans “mere merchants,” who “put all their glory into making money.”11 He encouraged French commerce by the multiplication and maintenance of all avenues of transport and trade, and by the supply and steadiness of money; but he discouraged it by the thousand and one regulations of the Continental Blockade. Finally yie
lding to complaints, he issued (1810–11) licenses for the export of certain goods to Britain, and for the import of sugar, coffee, and other foreign products. He charged for these licenses, and a good deal of favoritism and corruption entered into their issuance.12 Petty tradesmen fared better in France than wholesale merchants as industry grew; stores were stocked beyond French precedent as agriculture, industry, and transport expanded; and frequented streets blossomed with colorful boutiques; but the great port cities—Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre, Antwerp, and Amsterdam—were in decay, and the merchants were turning against Napoleon and his blockade.

  His greatest success as an administrator was in finance. Strange to say, his wars, till 1812, usually brought in more than they cost; he put upon his enemies the onus of beginning the action; and when he defeated them he charged high fees—and Old Masters—for the lesson. Part of these gleanings he kept under his personal control as a domaine extraordinaire. He boasted in 1811 that he had 300,000,000 gold francs in the caves des Tuileries.13 He used this fund to ease stringencies in the Treasury, to correct dangerous turns in the stock market, to finance public works or municipal improvements, to reward signal services, to distinguish artists and writers, to rescue embarrassed industries, to bribe a friend or an enemy, and to pay for his secret police. Enough remained to prepare for the next war, and to keep taxes far below their level under Louis XVI or the Revolution.14

  “Before 1789,” says Taine, “the peasant proprietor paid, on 100 francs’ net income, 14 to the seignior, 14 to the clergy, 53 to the state, and kept only 18 or 19 for himself; after 1800 he pays nothing of his 100 francs of income to the seignior or the clergy; he pays little to the state, only 25 francs to the commune and département, and keeps 70 for his pocket.”16 Before 1789 the manual worker had labored from twenty to thirty-nine of his working days per year to pay his taxes; after 1800, from six to nineteen days. “Through the almost complete exemption [from taxes] of those who have no property, the burden of direct taxation falls almost entirely on those who own property.”16 However, there were many “extremely moderate” indirect or sales taxes, which fell upon all persons equally, and were therefore harder on the poor than on the rich. Toward the end of the imperial regime the costs of war far exceeded its returns; taxes and prices rose, and public discontent spread.