After the Concordat was finally adopted by the Legislative Body, Lucien gave a reception for his brother during which Napoleon sought out the Catholic philosopher and writer François-Réne de Chateaubriand, author of the successful new book Génie du christianisme, an emotional celebration of Catholicism. ‘Rank after rank opened up,’ Chateaubriand recalled in his memoirs,
each person hoping the Consul would stop at him . . . I was then left standing by myself, for the crowd drew back and soon gathered together to form a circle around the two of us. Bonaparte addressed me with simplicity, without paying me any compliments, without any idle questions, without any preamble, he spoke to me straight away about Egypt and the Arabs, as if I had always been a close friend of his and we were simply continuing a conversation we had already begun.33
It was beguiling, and Chateaubriand accepted a diplomatic post to the Vatican soon afterwards. Later his admiration faded: in 1804 he resigned from the diplomatic service and in July 1807 he likened Napoleon to Nero, for which he was banished from Paris.
• • •
At the end of January 1801, Napoleon inaugurated an ambitious project of legal reform whose consequences would outlast even the Concordat. The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north.34 Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.
His first and most important task was to unify France’s forty-two legal codes into a single system. For this monumental undertaking Napoleon had an invaluable ally in Cambacérès, who had been the secretary of the committee which had been given the task of overhauling the civil law code back in 1792 and was the author of the Projet de Code Civil (1796). ‘If the whole Code were to be mislaid,’ Napoleon once quipped, ‘it could be found in Cambacérès’ head.’35 To assist the Second Consul in revisiting this long-overdue reform, a commission was formed of the country’s most distinguished jurists and politicians, including Lebrun, François Tronchet, Félix Bigot de Préameneu and Jean-Étienne Portalis. Napoleon chaired no fewer than 55 of its 107 plenary sessions, frequently intervening on matters of particular interest such as divorce, adoption and the rights of foreigners.36 Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’37 Some meetings started at noon and went on long into the night. Napoleon involved himself intimately in the entire lengthy and elaborate process of getting the new laws onto the statute books, from the initial debates in the Conseil, the drafting process, the critiques and attempted amendments of various interested parties, through the special committees, the subsequent assaults by special interest groups and lobbyists, and then the parliamentary legislative procedures. Nor was ratification a foregone conclusion: in December 1801 the preliminary bill was rejected in the Legislative Body by 142 votes to 139 and fared similarly in the Tribunate. If Napoleon hadn’t shown his resolute personal support, it could never have become law. Although Cambacérès did the groundwork, it deserved to be called the Code Napoléon because it was the product of the rationalizing universalism of the Enlightenment that Napoleon embraced.
Essentially a compromise between Roman and common law, the Code Napoléon consisted of a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian. The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading.38 The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society.39 Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution.
The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within. (‘One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’40) It guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state. It allowed all adult men to engage in any occupation and to own property. Laws had to be duly promulgated and officially published, and could not apply retrospectively. Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law. Fearing the disintegration of the family as the basic social institution, the framers of the Code gave the paterfamilias almost total power, including over the property of his wife. Under Article 148 the father’s permission was required for the marriage of sons up to the age of twenty-five and daughters to twenty-one, and the marriage age was raised to fifteen for women, eighteen for men. Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.
The major criticisms levelled at the Code over the past two centuries have been that it was socially conservative, too supportive of the middle classes, of the individual and of the paterfamilias, that it made wives too dependent on their husbands, and that its inheritance provisions were damaging for an agrarian economy. It was certainly true that the Code was deeply sexist by twenty-first century standards, with a strong patriarchal bias. Article 213 of the Civil Code stated: ‘A husband owes protection to his wife, a wife obedience to her husband.’41 Grounds for divorce were restricted to adultery (and then only if the husband introduced a permanent mistress into the family household), conviction of a serious crime, and grave insults or cruelty, but it could also be obtained by mutual agreement so long as the grounds were kept private.42 A wife could be imprisoned for two years for adultery, while a man would only be fined. A husband would not be prosecuted if he murdered his wife caught in flagrante. The Code protected married and single men from having to support an illegitimate child, or even being identified as the father.43 It also prevented women from making legal contracts, taking part in lawsuits, serving as a witness in court or to births, deaths or marriages. Wives could not sell produce in markets without their husbands’ permission, and were forbidden to give, sell or mortgage property without their husbands’ written consent.44 Unmarried women could not be legal guardians or witness wills. In all this, the Code reflects Napoleon’s profound sexism: ‘Women should not be looked upon as equals of men,’ he said. ‘They are, in fact, only machines for making babies.’45
The Code also dealt a death blow to primogeniture. Property of up to 25 per cent of the total could be bequeathed away from the family, but the rest had to be divided equally among all sons on the death of their father, with no inheritance rights allowed for illegitimate children.46* It displayed a powerful bias towards employers too, whose word was accepted in all points of law.47 On December 1, 1802 a law was passed requiring every worker to keep a livret (passbook), which had to be handed over to the employer at the start of the period of e
mployment and signed by them at the end, without which the worker was unemployable and liable to six months’ imprisonment.48* Napoleon didn’t invent the tough anti-strike and anti-union legislation in the Code, which had been in place since the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 and wasn’t repealed until 1884. He did put it into effect, however. Building workers who went on strike in 1806 were arrested in their beds.49*
The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was only one of several legal reforms promulgated by Napoleon, though undoubtedly the most important. By 1810 it had been joined by the Code of Civil Procedure, the Commercial Code, the Code on Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code. (In the last of these the provisions were extremely tough, but didn’t display the viciousness of Britain’s penal code of the time, under which children could be transported to Australia and adults hanged for the theft of goods worth more than a shilling.) It was this body of law together that came to be known as the Code Napoléon. The Code was extended to almost all parts of the French Empire in March 1804. It was imposed on those parts of Spain that were under martial law in 1808 and on Holland after its annexation in 1810. ‘The Romans gave their laws to their allies,’ Napoleon told his brother Louis, ‘why should France not have its laws adopted in Holland?’50 In some places, such as Naples, it only ever received lip-service. In others, however, it was so popular that it was retained even after Napoleon’s fall.51 It survived in the Prussian Rhineland until 1900, and Belgium, Luxembourg, Mauritius and Monaco, as well as France, still operate it today. Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.52
• • •
Although the Code Napoléon standardized the laws, it would take equally radical reforms to standardize the other aspects of French life that Napoleon wished to rationalize. In the Corbières region of the Languedoc, for example – whose 129 parishes spoke Occitan rather than French, except for three southern villages that spoke Catalan – the administrative, judicial, policing and taxation duties were undertaken by authorities in four cities, namely Carcassonne, Narbonne, Limoux and Perpignan, yet there was no consistency as to which city administered which commune. There were no fewer than ten different volumes for which the term setier (usually about 85 litres) could be used, and fifty different terms to measure area, one of which – the sétérée – differed depending on whether it applied to lowland or highland areas.53 Napoleon didn’t personally admire the metric system that Laplace invented, saying, ‘I can understand the twelfth part of an inch, but not the thousandth part of a metre,’ but he nonetheless forced it through after 1801 in the interests of commercial consistency.54 He also established a standardized coinage: copper coins of two, three and five centimes; silver coins of one-quarter, one-half and three-quarters of a franc, and of one, two and five francs, and gold coins of ten, twenty and forty francs. The silver one-franc piece was to weigh five grams, and quickly became western Europe’s standard unit of currency. Its value and metallic composition remained constant until 1926.
Out of the population of 28 million, 6 million were completely ignorant of the French tongue and another 6 million could only just about make themselves understood in it. Flemish was spoken in the north-east, German in Lorraine, Breton in Brittany, and Basque, Catalan, Italian, Celtic and Languedoc patois elsewhere.55 Although Napoleon didn’t have particularly good French himself he knew from personal experience how important it was to speak the language in order to get on.56 His educational reforms made French the only permitted language of instruction, as it became for all official documents.
Napoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back, as we have seen, in the hands of the clergy, but in secondary education, which began at age eleven, he was revolutionary. In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.57 All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.
Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees.58 Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose. The departmental prefects and presidents of the criminal and appeal courts oversaw the administration of these new schools, and there was a professional inspectorate.59 By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later. The concept was exported far beyond France; it served as a model in Spain and Holland, which accepted French educational ideas even as they denounced French occupation.60
In an unscripted speech to the Conseil in 1806, which he made only because his education minister, Antoine Fourcroy, hadn’t brought his report to the meeting, Napoleon was almost poetic about how education was
the most important of all the institutions, since everything depends upon it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent on the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment . . . Men already differ enough in their inclinations, their characters and everything that education does not give and cannot reform . . . Let us have a body of doctrine that doesn’t vary and a body of teachers that doesn’t die.61
Napoleon planned to institute lycées throughout France. Overall, his educational reforms were, like his architectural plans for Paris, admirable, but cut off long before they could reach fruition. On March 17, 1808 Napoleon took his reorganization a stage further when he promulgated a decree calling for the creation of the Imperial University, which would oversee all education in France. All teachers were to be members of one of its five faculties (Theology, Law, Medicine, Literature, and Maths & Physics). He designed a military-style hierarchical structure, with a strong-willed chancellor in Louis Fontanes, the president of the Legislative Body between 1804 and 1810, and below him a Council of Thirty who controlled all French secondary schools and the universities.62 The Sorbonne had been closed by the Revolution, but in 1808 Napoleon resuscitated it.
Napoleon’s profound sexism emerged in his education provisions as elsewhere. ‘Public education almost always makes bad women flighty, coquettish and unstable,’ he told the Conseil in March 1806. ‘Being educated together, which is so good for men, especially for teaching them to help each other and preparing them by comradeship for the battle of life, is a school of corruption for women. Men are made for the full glare of life. Women are made for the seclusion of family life and to live at home.’63 As with the Code Napoléon, the lack of girls’ formal education needs to be seen here too in the context of his time; at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were very few girls’ schools in England or America, and none run by the state.
• • •
The greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État, which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine.64 ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’ Napoleon g
ave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.65 He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,
He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’66
The Conseil discussed an extraordinary range of issues. On the single day of June 17, 1802, to take an example at random, its agenda covered the examination of surgeons; the organization of chemists; the appointment of sub-prefects to important arrondissements; the state of the harvest; Maltese refugees; a draft law concerning the National Guard; responsibility for roadworks; the government of the commissariat; pawnbroking; larger communes’ accounts; gamekeepers; the chambers of commerce; the law allowing émigrés right of return to specific regions; electoral law; bridge-building in the Ardèche; merging two Corsican departments into one; and demarcating those on the left bank of the Rhine.67
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