by Will Durant
A crisis in finances in 1805 led Napoleon to reorganize the Bank of France, which had been established in 1800 under private management. While he was fighting for his political life at Marengo a group of speculators led by Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard secured control of army supplies. Running into difficulties, they appealed to the bank for a considerable loan; to raise this money the bank, with the permission of the Treasury, issued its own notes as legal currency; these failed to win acceptance in financial transactions, and fell to ninety percent of their face value; the company and the bank faced bankruptcy. On his return to Paris Napoleon rescued the bank with part of the indemnities received from Austria, but he insisted that henceforth it be “under control of the state, but not too much so.” On April 22, 1806, he placed it under a governor and two vice-governors appointed by the government, and fifteen regents chosen by the shareholders. This new Banque de France opened branches at Lyons, Rouen, and Lille, and began a long career of service to the French economy and the state. The government still owns only a minority of the bank’s shares.
Napoleon had small respect for the men who sold supplies to his army and ministries. He took it for granted that every contractor padded his bills, and that some of them offered shoddy materials at first-rate prices. He instructed his appointees to strictly check all bills presented to them, and sometimes he did this himself. “All the contractors,” he told Bourrienne, “all the provision agents, are rogues. … They possess millions, roll in insolent luxury, while my soldiers have neither bread nor shoes. I will have no more of that!”17 At Vienna in 1809 he received complaints of defective clothing and equipment sold to his army; he ordered an inquiry, which showed that the contractors had made large undue profits in these sales; he ordered a court martial; this condemned the embezzlers to death. Every influence was made to save them, but Napoleon refused pardon, and the sentence was carried out.18
By and large, as hostile critics agree,19 the first thirteen years of Napoleon’s rule gave France the greatest prosperity she had ever known. When Las Cases, a titled and forgiven émigré returned in 1805 from a tour of sixty départements, he reported that “France had at no period of her history been more powerful, more flourishing, better governed, and happier.”20 In 1813 the Comte de Montalivet, minister of the interior, claimed that this continuing prosperity was due to “the suppression of feudalism, titles, mortmain, and monastic orders; … to the more equal distribution of wealth, to the clearness and simplification of the laws.”21 In 1800 the population of France was approximately 28 million; in 1813 it was 30 million. It does not seem to be a startling gain, but if the same rate of growth (even uncompounded) had continued till 1870 Napoleon’s nephew would have had 50 million men to meet the challenge of Bismarck’s Germany.
II. THE TEACHERS
We have observed Napoleon, during his Consulate, trying to give a new order and stability to postrevolutionary France by a Code of Civil Law, and a Concordat of peace and cooperation between his government and the traditional religion of the people. To these formative forces he proposed to add a third by reorganizing the educational system of France. “Of all social engines, the school is probably the most efficacious, for it exercises three kinds of influence on the young lives it enfolds and directs: one through the master, another through con-discipleship, and the last through rules and regulations.”22 He was convinced that one reason for the breakdown of law and order during the Revolution was its inability to establish, amid the life-and-death conflicts of the time, a system of education adequately replacing that which the Church had previously maintained. Splendid plans had been formulated, but neither money nor time could be spared to realize them; primary education had been left to priests and nuns, or to lay schoolmasters maintained just above starvation by parents or communes; secondary education had barely survived in lycées dispensing courses in science and history, with scant attention to the formation of character. Napoleon thought of public education in political terms: its function was to produce intelligent but obedient citizens. “In establishing a corps of teachers,” he said, with a candor unusual in governments, “my principal aim is to secure the means for directing political and moral opinions. … So long as one grows up without knowing whether to be republican or monarchist, Catholic or irreligious, the state will never form a nation; it will rest on vague and uncertain foundations; it will be constantly exposed to disorder and change.”23
Having restored the Church to association with the government, he allowed semimonastic organizations, like the Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes, to attend to primary instruction, and nuns to teach well-to-do girls; but he refused to let the Jesuits reenter France. Nevertheless, he admired them for their strict organization as a dedicated guild of teachers. “The essential thing,” he wrote (February 16, 1805), “is a teaching body like that of the Jesuits of old.”24 “While I was with him,” Bourrienne recalled, “he often told me that it was necessary that all schools, colleges, and other establishments for public instruction be subject to military discipline.”25 In a note of 1805 Napoleon proposed that “a teaching order could be formed if all the managers, directors, and professors in the Empire were under one or more chiefs, like the generals, provincials, etc., of the Jesuits,” and if it were the rule that no one could fill a higher position in the organization unless he had passed through various lower stages. It would be desirable, too, that the teacher not marry, or that he defer marriage “till he has secured an adequate position and income … to support a family.”26
A year later (May 10, 1806) Antoine-François de Fourcroy, director general of public instruction, secured from the Corps Législatif a provisional decree that “there shall be established, under the name of the Imperial University, a body exclusively charged with the work of teaching throughout the Empire.” (The University of Paris, founded c. 1150, had been suppressed by the Revolution in 1790.) This new university was to be not merely a union of various faculties—theology, law, medicine, science, and literature; it was to be the sole producer of teachers for the secondary schools of France, and was to include all its living and teaching graduates. These “lycées” were to be established in one or more cities of each département, with a curriculum combining the classic languages and literatures with the sciences; they were to be financed by the municipality, but all their teachers were to be graduates of the university; and no one was to be promoted to a higher post unless he had previously held those below it,27 and had obeyed his superiors like a soldier obeying an officer. To persuade French youths to enter this treadmill, Napoleon provided 6,400 scholarships, whose recipients pledged themselves to the teaching profession and promised to defer marriage at least to the age of twenty-five. As their final reward they were to “have clearly before them the prospect of rising to the highest offices of the state.”28 “All this,” Napoleon told Fourcroy, “is only a commencement; by and by we shall do more, and better.”29
He did better, from his point of view, by restoring (1810), as a branch of the university, the École Normale, where select students, living in common under military discipline, were given special training by a prestigious faculty including such masters as Laplace, Lagrange, Berthollet, and Monge. By 1813 all college teachers were expected to be graduates of the École Normale; science began to prevail over the classics in the college curriculum, and set the intellectual tone of educated France. The École Polytechnique, established during the Revolution, was changed into a military academy, where the physical sciences became the servants of war. Several provincial universities survived the Emperor’s martial sweep, and private colleges were allowed to operate under license and periodical examination by the university. As the authoritarian mood relaxed, individual lecturers were permitted to use university halls to give special courses, and students were allowed to take these as they chose.
At the top of the intellectual pyramid was the Institut National de France. The French Academy, suppressed in 1793, had been restored in 1795 as Class II of the new Institute. Napole
on was proud of his membership in the Institute, but when its moral and political section, in 1801, presumed to discourse on how a government should be run, he ordered Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur to “tell the Second Class of the Institute that I will have no political subjects treated at its meetings.”30 The Institute then contained many old rebels faithful to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, who privately laughed or wept at the official restoration of the Catholic Church. Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy had used the word ideology as the study of the formation of ideas; Napoleon called these psychologists and philosophers “ideologues” as men too immersed in ideas, and reveling in reason, to perceive and understand the realities of life and history. These intellectuals, spreading their notions through countless publications, were, in his judgment, obstacles to good government. “The men who write well and are eloquent,” he said, “have no solidity of judgment.”31 He cautioned his brother Joseph, then (July 18, 1807) ruling Naples: “You live too much with literary people.” As for the intellectuals who were buzzing in the salons, “I regard scholars and wits the same as coquettish women; one should frequent them and talk with them, but never choose one’s wife from among such women, or one’s ministers from among such men.”32
On January 23, 1803, he reorganized the Institute into four classes, omitting the moral and political category. Class I, which he valued most, was to study the sciences. Among its sixty members were Adrien Legendre, Monge, Biot, Berthollet, Gay-Lussac, Laplace, Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Cuvier. Class II had forty members, devoted to the language and literature of France; it replaced the old French Academy, and resumed work on the Dictionnaire; it included the old poet Delille, the famous dramatist Marie-Joseph de Chénier, the young historian Guizot, the Romantic stylist Chateaubriand, the philosophers Volney, Destutt de Tracy, and Maine de Biran. Class III, with forty members, dealt with ancient and Oriental history, literature, and art; here Louis Langlès pursued those studies of Persia and India that had already led to the École des Langues Orientales (1795); and Jean-Baptiste d’Ansse de Villoison discovered the Alexandrian commentators on Homer, so paving the way for F. A. Wolf’s revealing theorem that “Homer” was many men. Class IV—the Académie des Beaux-Arts—included ten painters, six sculptors, six architects, three engravers, and three composers; here shone David, Ingres, and Houdon.
Aside from his distaste for ideologues, Napoleon supported the Institute heartily, eager to make it an embellishment of his reign. Every member of the Institute received from the government an annual salary of fifteen hundred francs; each permanent secretary of a class received six thousand. In February and March each class presented to the Emperor a report of the work done in its department. Napoleon was pleased with the total picture, for (Méneval claimed) “this general review of literature, science, and art … showed that human intelligence, far from going back, did not halt in its constant march toward progress.”33 We may question the “constant,” but there is no doubt that the reorganization of science and scholarship under Napoleon placed their practitioners at the head of the European intellect for half a century.
III. THE WARRIORS
After education, conscription. War had been made more frequent, more homicidal, and more costly by the Revolution: the levy en masse in 1793 established the rule that war should be no longer the sport of princes using mercenaries, but a struggle of nations involving every class—though it was some time before the other governments followed the French in allowing commoners to become officers, even marshals. Rousseau had already laid down the principle that universal service was a logical corollary of universal suffrage: he who would vote should serve. Facing the European monarchies in a struggle to preserve its republic, France, which, before Louis XIV, had been a medley of proud regions with no national spirit binding the whole, was united in 1793 by a common fear. Its response was national and decisive. A large army, calling all men, became necessary; conscription began; and when masses of Frenchmen, inspired as armies had rarely been before, began to defeat the professional soldiers of the feudal monarchies, these countries too enforced conscription, and war became a conflict of masses competing in massacre. The glory of nationalism replaced the pride of dynasties as the tonic of war.
In 1803, faced with the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, and anticipating war with another coalition, Napoleon issued a new law of conscription: all males between twenty and twenty-five years of age were made subject to the draft. Many were exempted: young married men, seminarians, widowers or divorcés with children, anyone who had a brother already taken, and the eldest of three orphans. Moreover, a draftee could pay a substitute to take his place. At first this seemed to Napoleon to be unjust; then he allowed it, chiefly on the ground that advanced students should be left to continue their studies to fit themselves for administrative posts.34
This annual insistence that it is dulce et decorum pro patria mori was borne patiently by the French people in the ecstasy of Napoleon’s victories; but when defeats began (1808), and left thousands of families grieving, resistance grew, evaders and deserters multiplied. By 1814 Napoleon had recruited 2,613,000 Frenchmen for his armies;35 approximately a million of these died of wounds or disease;36 add half a million enlisted or conscripted from foreign countries allied or subject to France. In 1809 Napoleon asked Czar Alexander to mediate between France and England, saying that a general peace would allow an end to conscription; that hope passed. As defeated enemies seemed to rise from their graves for new coalitions and campaigns, Napoleon kept many conscripts beyond their statutory five-year terms, and called up annual classes before their time, until in 1813 he summoned the class of 1815.37 At last the patience of French parents gave way, and the cry of “Down with conscription!” rose everywhere in France.
By such methods grew the Grande Armée, which was Napoleon’s love and pride. He fostered its spirit by giving each regiment its own colorful standard, which some brave youth would carry into the battle to lead and inspire its men; if he fell, another youth would rush up, pick up the flag, and carry it on. Usually this banner became the visible soul of the regiment; almost always it survived to display its remnants in victory parades, and at last to hang as a tattered but sacred trophy in the church of the Invalides. Nearly every regiment had its distinctive uniform and name, once famous from Brest to Nice, from Antwerp to Bordeaux: Grenadiers, Hussars, Chasseurs, Lancers, Dragoons … Above all there were the 92,000 men who formed the Imperial Guard, kept in protective reserve around the Emperor until some crisis called for their lives. Any conscript could rise to membership in the Guard, and even to wield a baton as one of the eighteen marshals of Napoleonic France.
The results of the wars were endless—biological, economic, political, and moral. The old figure of 1,700,000 Frenchmen dead in those campaigns38 has been reduced by later calculations to a million men;39 even so these presumably premature deaths may have weakened France for a generation, until her wombs made up the loss. Economically the wars, and the stimulus of blockaded ports and military needs, accelerated the growth of industry. Politically they strengthened the unification of regional governments and loyalties under a central rule. Morally the constant conflicts habituated Europe to the enlargement of wars, and to a code of slaughter unknown since the barbarian invasions. At the fronts, and then in the capitals, the rulers laid aside the Ten Commandments. “War justifies everything,” Napoleon wrote to General Berthier in 1809;40 “nothing has ever been established except by the sword”;41 and “in the last analysis there must be a military quality in government”;42 without an army there is no state.
To accustom the French people to this martial ethic Napoleon appealed to their love of glory. La gloire became a national fever generating enthusiastic concord and obedience; so Napoleon could say that “the wars of the Revolution have ennobled the entire French nation.”43 For ten years, with the help of the Allies, he kept his people in this hypnotic trance. Let Alfred de Musset, who was there, describe the mood of France in 1810:
&n
bsp; It was in this air of the spotless sky, where shone so much glory, where glistened so many swords, that the youth of the time breathed. They well knew that they were destined to the hecatomb, but they regarded Murat as invincible, and the Emperor had been seen to cross a bridge where so many bullets whistled that they wondered was he immune to death. And even if one must die, what did it matter? Death itself was so beautiful, so noble, so illustrious, in his battle-scarred purple! It borrowed the color of hope; it reaped so many ripening harvests, that it became young, and there was no more old age. All the cradles of France, as well as its tombs, were armed with shield and buckler; there were no more old men; there were corpses or demi-gods.44
Meanwhile, at the front, Napoleon’s soldiers stole and gambled, and drank their fears to sleep; his generals stole according to their station; Masséna amassed millions, and Soult was not far behind. Amiable Josephine, kindly Joseph, brave Lucien, and uncle Cardinal Fesch profited by investing in firms that were selling shoddy goods to French troops. Napoleon colored his war bulletins with exaggeration and concealment, bled the treasuries of defeated nations, appropriated their art, and pondered ways to effect the moral regeneration of France.
