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Title: The Modern Regime, Volume 1

Author: Hippolyte Taine

Annotator: Svend Rom

Translator: John Durand

Release date: June 22, 2008 [eBook #2581]
Most recently updated: January 10, 2013

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Svend Rom and David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MODERN
REGIME, VOLUME 1 ***

THE ORIGINS OF
CONTEMPORARY FRANCE,
VOLUME 5

THE MODERN REGIME,
VOLUME 1 [NAPOLEON]

by Hippolyte A. Taine

Text Transcriber's Note: The numbering of Volumes, Books, Chapters
and Sections are as in the French not the American edition.
Annotations by the transcriber are initialled SR.

Svend Rom, April 2000.

HTML Producer's Note: Footnote numbering has been changed to
include as a prefix to the original footnote number, the book and
chapter numbers. A table of contents has been added with active
links.

David Widger, June 2008

Please note that all references to earlier Volumes of the
Origines of Contemporary France are to the American edition.
Since there are no fixed page numbers in the Gutenberg
edition these page numbers are only approximate. (SR).

CONTENTS

PREFACE

BOOK FIRST. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF HIS
CHARACTER AND GENIUS.

I. Napoleon's Past and Personality.
II. The Leader and Statesman
III. His acute Understanding of Others.
IV. His Wonderful Memory.
V. His Imagination and its Excesses.

CHAPTER II. HIS IDEAS, PASSIONS AND
INTELLIGENCE.
I. Intense Passions.
II. Will and Egoism.
III. Napoleon's Dominant Passion: Power.
IV. His Bad Manners.
V. His Policy.
VI. Fundamental Defaults of his System.

BOOK SECOND. FORMATION AND
CHARACTER OF THE NEW STATE.

CHAPTER I. THE INSTITUTION OF
GOVERNMENT
I. The Institution of Government.
II. Default of previous government.
III. In 1799, the undertaking more difficult
and the materials worse.
IV. Motives for suppressing the election of
local powers.
V. Reasons for centralization.
VI. Irreconcilable divisions.
VII. Establishment of a new Dictatorship.

CHAPTER II. PUBLIC POWER
I. Principal service rendered by the public
power.
II. Abusive Government Intervention.
III. The State attacks persons and property.
IV. Abuse of State powers.
V. Final Results of Abusive Government

Intervention

CHAPTER III. THE NEW GOVERNMENT
ORGANIZATION.
I. Precedents of the new organization.
II. Doctrines of Government.
III. Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.
IV. Napoleon's barracks.
V. Modeled after Rome.

BOOK THIRD. OBJECT AND MERITS OF THE
SYSTEM.

CHAPTER I. RECOVERY OF SOCIAL ORDER.
I. Rule as the mass want to be ruled.
II. The Revolution Ends.
III. Return of the Emigrés.
IV. Education and Medical Care.
V. Old and New.
VI. Religion
VII. The Confiscated Property.
VIII. Public Education.

CHAPTER II. TAXATION AND CONSCRIPTION.
I. Distributive Justice in Allotment of
Burdens and Benefits.
II. Equitable Taxation.
III. Formation of Honest, Efficient Tax
Collectors
IV. Various Taxes.
V. Conscription or Professional soldiers.

CHAPTER III. AMBITION AND SELF-ESTEEM.
I. Rights and benefits.
II. Ambitions during the Ancient Regime.
III. Ambition and Selection.
IV. Napoleon, Judge-Arbitrator-Ruler.

IV. The Struggle for Office and Title.
V. Self-esteem and a good Reputation.

BOOK FOURTH. DEFECT AND EFFECTS OF
THE SYSTEM.

CHAPTER I. LOCAL SOCIETY.
I. Human Incentives.
II. Local Community.
III. Essential Public Local Works.
IV. Local associations.
V. Local versus State authority.
VI. Local Elections under the First Consul.
VII. Municipal and general councillors
under the Empire.
VIII. Excellence of Local Government after
Napoleon.

CHAPTER II. LOCAL SOCIETY SINCE 1830.
I. Introduction of Universal suffrage.
II. Universal suffrage.
III. Equity in taxation.
IV. On unlimited universal suffrage.
V. Rural or urban communes.
VI. The larger Communes.
VII. Local society in 1880.
VIII. Final result in a tendency to
bankruptcy.

PREFACE
The following third and last part of the Origins of Contemporary France
is to consist of two volumes. After the present volume, the second is to treat
of the Church, the School and the Family, describe the modern milieu and
note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in
this new milieu: here, the past and the present meet, and the work already
done is continued by the work which is going on under our eyes.—The
undertaking is hazardous and more difficult than with the two preceding
parts. For the Ancient Régime and the Revolution are henceforth complete
and finished periods; we have seen the end of both and are thus able to
comprehend their entire course. On the contrary, the end of the ulterior
period is still wanting; the great institutions which date from the Consulate
and the Empire, either consolidation or dissolution, have not yet reached
their historic term: since 1800, the social order of things, notwithstanding
eight changes of political form, has remained almost intact. Our children or
grandchildren will know whether it will finally succeed or miscarry;
witnesses of the denouement, they will have fuller light by which to judge
of the entire drama. Thus far four acts only have been played; of the fifth
act, we have simply a presentiment.—On the other hand, by dint of living
under this social system, we have become accustomed to it; it no longer
excites our wonder; however artificial it may be it seems to us natural. We
can scarcely conceive of another that is healthier; and what is much worse,
it is repugnant to us to do so. For, such a conception would soon lead to
comparisons and hence to a judgment and, on many points, to an
unfavorable judgment, one which would be a censure, not only of our
institutions but of ourselves. The machine of the year VIII,1101 applied to us
for three generations, has permanently shaped and fixed us as we are, for
better or for worse. If, for a century, it sustains us, it represses us for a
century. We have contracted the infirmities it imports—stoppage of
development, instability of internal balance, disorders of the intellect and of
the will, fixed ideas and ideas that are false. These ideas are ours; therefore
we hold on to them, or, rather, they have taken hold of us. To get rid of
them, to impose the necessary recoil on our mind, to transport us to a

distance and place us at a critical point of view, where we can study
ourselves, our ideas and our institutions as scientific objects, requires a
great effort on our part, many precautions, and long reflection.—Hence, the
delays of this study; the reader will pardon them on considering that an
ordinary opinion, caught on the wing, on such a subject, does not suffice. In
any event, when one presents an opinion on such a subject one is bound to
believe it. I can believe in my own only when it has become precise and
seems to me proven.
Menthon Saint-Bernard, September, 1890.

BOOK FIRST. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF
HIS CHARACTER AND GENIUS.
If you want to comprehend a building, you have to imagine the
circumstances, I mean the difficulties and the means, the kind and quality of
its available materials, the moment, the opportunity, and the urgency of the
demand for it. But, still more important, we must consider the genius and
taste of the architect, especially whether he is the proprietor, whether he
built it to live in himself, and, once installed in it, whether he took pains to
adapt it to how own way of living, to his own necessities, to his own use.—
Such is the social edifice erected by Napoleon Bonaparte, its architect,
proprietor, and principal occupant from 1799 to 1814. It is he who has made
modern France; never was an individual character so profoundly stamped
on any collective work, so that, to comprehend the work, we must first
study the character of the Man.1102

I. Napoleon's Past and Personality.
He is of another race and another century.—Origin of his
paternal family.—Transplanted to Corsica.—His maternal
family.—Laetitia Ramolino.—Persistence of Corsican
souvenirs in Napoleon's mind.—His youthful sentiments
regarding Corsica and France.—Indications found in his
early compositions and in his style.—Current monarchical or
democratic ideas have no hold on him.—His impressions of
the 20th of June and 10th of August after the 31st of May.
—His associations with Robespierre and Barras without
committing himself.—His sentiments and the side he takes
Vendémiaire 13th.—The great Condottière.—His character and
conduct in Italy.—Description of him morally and physically
in 1798.—The early and sudden ascendancy which he exerts.
Analogous in spirit and character to his Italian ancestors
of the XVth century.

Disproportionate in all things, but, stranger still, he is not only out of the
common run, but there is no standard of measurement for him; through his
temperament, instincts, faculties, imagination, passions, and moral
constitution he seems cast in a special mould, composed of another metal
than that which enters into the composition of his fellows and
contemporaries. Evidently he is not a Frenchman, nor a man of the
eighteenth century; he belongs to another race and another epoch.1103 We
detect in him, at the first glance, the foreigner, the Italian,1104 and
something more, apart and beyond these, surpassing all similitude or
analogy.-Italian he was through blood and lineage; first, through his
paternal family, which is Tuscan,1105 and which we can follow down from
the twelfth century, at Florence, then at San Miniato; next at Sarzana, a
small, backward, remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to
son, it vegetates obscurely in provincial isolation, through a long line of
notaries and municipal syndics. "My origin," says Napoleon himself,1106
"has made all Italians regard me as a compatriot.... When the question of the
marriage of my sister Pauline with Prince Borghése came up there was but
one voice in Rome and in Tuscany, in that family, and with all its
connections: 'It will do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves, it is one of
our own families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about coming to Paris to
crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave prevailed against the
Austrian party by supporting political arguments with the following slight

tribute to national amour propre: 'After all we are imposing an Italian
family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on
the Gauls.'" Significant words, which will one day throw light upon the
depths of the Italian nature, the eldest daughter of modern civilization,
imbued with her right of primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the
transalpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique
patriotism.1107
From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes
himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken and
subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici,
then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule,
municipal independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political
adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral
principalities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent
repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain species of
public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the energy and ambition, the
vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages begins to run down and then dry
up in the shriveled trunk,1108 a small detached branch takes root in an
island, not less Italian but almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs,
and passions belonging to the primitive medieval epoch,1109 and in a social
atmosphere sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and
harshness.—Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of
the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and
mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to
Sarténe,1110 a Corsican canton par excellence where, in 1800, hereditary
vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the
permanent strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where,
in many villages, nobody stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and
where the houses were crenellated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia
Ramolini, from whom, in character and in will, he derived much more than
from his father,1111 is a primitive soul on which Civilization has taken no
hold. She is simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and
graces of a worldly life; indifferent to comforts, without literary culture, as
parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a
band. She is powerful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger,
ready in desperate resolutions. She is, in short, a "rural Cornelia," who
conceived and gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat,

in the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback,
nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry.1112
"Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and
braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders."
Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to the
last, he was of his people and country.
"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,1113 "even the very
smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes shut; nowhere
had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there again in early
infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth, amidst precipices,
traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow defiles, enjoying the honors
and pleasures of hospitality, "treated everywhere as a brother and
compatriot," without any accident or insult ever suggesting to him that his
confidence was not well grounded." At Bocognano,1114 where his mother,
pregnant with him, had taken refuge, "where hatred and vengeance
extended to the seventh degree of relationship, and where the dowry of a
young girl was estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and
made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become
a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in
a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly
extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared
themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,1115" was a great man. He
loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him
for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have
followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his
youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very
little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always
moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof
from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library,
and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do
you Frenchmen all the harm I can!"—"Corsican by nation and character,"
wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if
circumstances favor him."1116—Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at
Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old
bitterness returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born
when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our

shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood—such was the
odious spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying,
the shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from
my birth... I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the
brush of infamy.... vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"1117 A little later, his
letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly and principal agent
in the annexation to France, is one long strain of renewed, concentrated
hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain it within the bounds of cold
sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching
invective.—From the age of fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his
regiment, he finds refuge in imagination in the past of his island;1118 he
recounts its history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he
dedicates his work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and
dedicates the abridgment to Abbé Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style,
with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its
revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public and
domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves, and murders,—
in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish highlanders, while the style,
still more than the sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this
work, as in other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors
in vogue—Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy imitation
of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their humanitarian
grandiloquence. But these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not
fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine; they require too much
circumspection in walking; he does not know how to put them on, and they
rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he does
not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words, the
propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance of imagery;1119
he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities,
incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along
through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor
and of heat;1120 his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion,
indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the Academy,
the professor of belles-lettres1121 notes down that "in the strange and
incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see granite fused in a
volcano." However original in mind and in sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to
the society around him, different from his comrades, it is clear beforehand

that the current ideas which take such hold on them will obtain no hold on
him.
Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it
might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other, although
accepting neither.—Pensioner of the king, who supported him at Brienne,
and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also supported his sister at
Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the benefactor of his family; to whom,
at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother's
signature—he does not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his
mind to take sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a
gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of noble
cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.1122—Poor and tormented
by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking
together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the
jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a
decent, academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the
club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains no other
feeling than disgust for the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace.
—At Paris, in April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and
the revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful
speculation,"1123 and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the
20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the
Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head,
exclaims, so as to be heard," Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How
could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them
with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin
sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes
to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at
his ease all the occurrences of the day.1124 Finally, the chateau is forced and
he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafés, and that is
all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or royalist
inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke many hostile and
distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and suspicious."—Similarly,
after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows
that if he condemns the departmental insurrection it is mainly because he
deems it futile: on the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position
tenable, no cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops,

full of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances
are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of
the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a battle
and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hardship, economy, and
happiness become the soldier's prey."1125 Here was something with which
the Girondists could be converted!—None of the political or social
convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds have any
hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a "republican
montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence, "the favorite and
confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder
Robespierre,1126 intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th
of Thermidor has passed, he frees himself with bombast from this
compromising friendship: "I thought him sincere," says he of the younger
Robespierre, in a letter intended to be shown, "but were he my father and
had aimed at tyranny, I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to
Paris, after having knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron.
Barras, the most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and
contrived the death of his two former protectors.1127 Among the contending
parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and free to
dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause and concerning
himself only with his own interests.—On the evening of the 12th of
Vendémiaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and noticing the preparations
of the sectionists,1128 he said to Junot:
"Ah, if the sections put me in command, I would guarantee to place them
in the Tuileries in two hours and have all those Convention rascals driven
out!"
Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the Conventionalists, he takes
"three minutes" to make up his mind, and, instead of "blowing up the
representatives," he mows down the Parisians. Like a good condottière, he
does not commit himself, considers the first that offers and then the one
who offers the most, only to back out afterwards, and finally, seizing the
opportunity, to grab everything.—He will more and more become a true
condottière, that is to say, leader of a band, increasingly independent,
pretending to submit under the pretext of the public good, looking out only
for his own interest, self-centered, general on his own account and for his
own advantage in his Italian campaign before and after the 18th of
Fructidor.1129 He is, however, a condottière of the first class, already

aspiring to the loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or
the scaffold,"1130 "determined1131 to master France, and through France
Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the night," he
plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments, exploiting people with
incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is, in the choice of means as of
ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in glamour, seductions, corruption, and
intimidation, fascinating, and yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly
released among a herd of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong
and was uttered by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a
competent diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear
general, I call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize his
figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and all that he
has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."1132
At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of a
recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from life,
one physical, by a truthful painter, Guérin, and the other moral, by a
superior woman, Madame de Staël, who to the best European culture added
tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so perfectly that each
seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw him for the first time,"1133
says Madame de Staël, "on his return to France after the treaty of Campo-
Formio. After recovering from the first excitement of admiration there
succeeded to this a decided sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had
no power, for it was even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him
with a good deal of suspicion." People regarded him sympathetically, and
were even prepossessed in his favor;
"thus the fear he inspired was simply due to the singular effect of his
person on almost all who approached him. I had met men worthy of respect
and had likewise met men of ferocious character; but nothing in the
impression which Bonaparte produced on me reminded me of either. I soon
found, in the various opportunities I had of meeting him during his stay in
Paris, that his character was not to be described in terms commonly
employed; he was neither mild nor violent, nor gentle nor cruel, like certain
personages one happens to know. A being like him, wholly unlike anybody
else, could neither feel nor excite sympathy; he was both more and less than
a man; his figure, intellect, and language bore the imprint of a foreign
nationality.. .. far from being reassured on seeing Bonaparte oftener, he
intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression that

he was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or affection. He
regards a human being as a fact, an object, and not as a fellow-creature. He
neither hates nor loves, he exists for himself alone; the rest of humanity are
so many ciphers. The force of his will consists in the imperturbable
calculation of his egoism. He is a skillful player who has the human species
for an antagonist, and whom he proposes to checkmate... Every time that I
heard him talk I was struck with his superiority; it bore no resemblance to
that of men informed and cultivated through study and social intercourse,
such as we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact
of circumstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His spirit
seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds. I felt a
profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful could escape,
not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose suffrages he
sought... "—"With him, everything was means or aims; spontaneity,
whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent."
No law, no ideal and abstract rule, existed for him;
"he examined things only with reference to their immediate usefulness; a
general principle was repugnant to him, either as so much nonsense or as an
enemy."
Now, if we contemplate Guérin's portrait,1134 we see a spare body, whose
narrow shoulders under the uniform wrinkled by sudden movements, the
neck swathed in its high twisted cravat, the temples covered by long,
smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features intensified
through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks hollow up to the
inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones, the massive, protuberant
jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed together as if attentive, the large, clear
eyes, deeply sunk under the broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique
look, as penetrating as a rapier, and the two creases which extend from the
base of the nose to the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and
determined will. Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries1135 who
saw or heard the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating,
imperious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment
they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which seizes them, presses
them down, holds them firmly and never relaxes its grasp.
Already, at the receptions of the Directory, when conversing with men, or
even with ladies, he puts questions "which prove the superiority of the

questioner to those who have to answer them."1136 "Are you married?" says
he to this one, and "How many children have you?"to another. To that one,
"When did you come here?" or, again, "When are you going away? He
places himself in front of a French lady, well-known for her beauty and wit
and the vivacity of her opinions, "like the stiffest of German generals, and
says: 'Madame, I don't like women who meddle with politics!'" Equality,
ease, familiarity and companionship, vanish at his approach. Eighteen
months before this, on his appointment as commander-in-chief of the army
in Italy, Admiral Decrès, who had known him well at Paris,1137 learns that
he is to pass through Toulon: "I at once propose to my comrades to
introduce them, venturing to do so on my acquaintance with him in Paris.
Full of eagerness and joy, I start off. The door opens and I am about to press
forwards," he afterwards wrote, "when the attitude, the look, and the tone of
voice suffice to arrest me. And yet there was nothing offensive about him;
still, this was enough. I never tried after that to overstep the line thus
imposed on me." A few days later, at Albenga,1138 certain generals of
division, and among them Augereau, a vulgar, heroic old soldier, vain of his
tall figure and courage, arrive at headquarters, not well disposed toward the
little parvenu sent out to them from Paris. Recalling the description of him
which had been given to them, Augereau is abusive and insubordinate
beforehand: one of Barras' favorites, the Vendémiaire general, a street
general, "not yet tried out on the field of battle,1139 hasn't a friend,
considered a loner because he is the only one who can thinks for himself,
looking peaky, said to be a mathematician and a dreamer!" They enter, and
Bonaparte keeps them waiting. At last he appears, with his sword and belt
on, explains the disposition of the forces, gives them his orders, and
dismisses them. Augereau has remained silent; It is only when he gets out
of doors does he recover himself and fall back on his accustomed oaths. He
admits to Massena that "that little bastard of a general frightened him." He
cannot "comprehend the ascendancy which made him feel crushed right
away."1140
Extraordinary and superior, made for command1141 and for conquest,
singular and of an unique species, is the feeling of all his contemporaries.
Those who are most familiar with the histories of other nations, Madame de
Staël and, after her, Stendhal, go back to the right sources to comprehend
him, to the "petty Italian tyrants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries," to
Castruccio-Castracani, to the Braccio of Mantua, to the Piccinino, the

Malatestas of Rimini, and the Sforzas of Milan. In their opinion, however, it
is only a chance analogy, a psychological resemblance. Really, however,
and)historically it is a positive relationship. He is a descendant of the great
Italians, the men of action of the year 1400, the military adventurers,
usurpers, and founders of governments lasting their life-time. He inherits in
direct affiliation their blood and inward organization, mental and moral.1142
A bud, collected in their forest, before the age of refinement,
impoverishment, and decay, has been transported into a similar and remote
nursery, where a tragic and militant régime is permanently established.
There the primitive germ is preserved intact and transmitted from one
generation to another, renewed and invigorated by interbreeding. Finally, at
the last stage of its growth, it springs out of the ground and develops
magnificently, blooming the same as ever, and producing the same fruit as
on the original stem. Modern cultivation and French gardening have pruned
away but very few of its branches and blunted a few of its thorns: its
original texture, inmost substance, and spontaneous development have not
changed. The soil of France and of Europe, however, broken up by
revolutionary tempests, is more favorable to its roots than the worn-out
fields of the Middle Ages and there it grows by itself, without being subject,
like its Italian ancestors, to rivalry with its own species; nothing checks the
growth; it may absorb all the juices of the ground, all the air and sunshine
of the region, and become the Colossus which the ancient plants, equally
deep-rooted and certainly as absorbent, but born in a less friable soil and
more crowded together, could not provide.

II. The Leader and Statesman
Intelligence during the Italian Renaissance and at the
present day.—Integrity of Bonaparte's mental machinery.
—Flexibility, force, and tenacity of his attention.—Another
difference between Napoleon's intellect and that of his
contemporaries.—He thinks objects and not words.—His
antipathy to Ideology.—Little or no literary or
philosophical education.—Self-taught through direct
observation and technical instruction.—His fondness for
details.—His inward vision of physical objects and places.
—His mental portrayal of positions, distances, and
quantities.

"The human plant," said Alfieri, "is in no country born more vigorous
than in Italy"; and never, in Italy, was it so vigorous as from 1300 to 1500,
from the contemporaries of Dante down to those of Michael Angelo, Caesar
Borgia, Julius II., and Macchiavelli.1143 The first distinguishing mark of a
man of those times is the soundness of his mental instrument. Nowadays,
after three hundred years of service, ours has lost somewhat of its moral
fiber, sharpness, and versatility: usually the compulsory specialization has
caused it to become lop-sided making it unfit for other purposes. What's
more, the increase in ready-made ideas and clichés and acquired methods
incrusts it and reduces its scope to a sort of routine. Finally, it is exhausted
by an excess of intellectual activity and diminished by the continuity of
sedentary habits. It is just the opposite with those impulsive minds of
uncorrupted blood and of a new stock.—Roederer, a competent and
independent judge, who, at the beginning of the consular government, sees
Bonaparte daily at the meetings of the Council of State, and who notes
down every evening the impressions of the day, is carried away with
admiration:1144
"Punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours,
discussing before and afterwards the subjects brought forward, always
returning to two questions, 'Can that be justified?1145' 'Is that useful?'
examining each question in itself, in these two respects, after having
subjected it to a most exact and sharp analysis; next, consulting the best
authorities, the pasts, experience, and obtaining information about bygone
jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV. and of Frederick the Great.... Never

did the council adjourn without its members knowing more than the day
before; if not through knowledge derived from him, at least through the
researches he obliged them to make. Never did the members of the Senate
and the Legislative Corps, or of the tribunals, pay their respects to him
without being rewarded for their homage by valuable instructions. He
cannot be surrounded by public men without being the statesman, all
forming for him a council of state."
"What characterizes him above them all," is not alone the penetration and
universality of his comprehension, but likewise and especially "the force,
flexibility, and constancy of his attention. He can work eighteen hours at a
stretch, on one or on several subjects. I never saw him tired. I never found
his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body, nor when
violently exercised, nor when angry. I never saw him diverted from one
matter by another, turning from that under discussion to one he had just
finished or was about to take up. The news, good or bad, he received from
Egypt, did not divert his mind from the civil code, nor the civil code from
the combinations which the safety of Egypt required. Never did a man more
wholly devote himself to the work in hand, nor better devote his time to
what he had to do. Never did a mind more inflexibly set aside the
occupation or thought which did not come at the right day or hour, never
was one more ardent in seeking it, more alert in its pursuit, more capable of
fixing it when the time came to take it up."
He himself said later on:1146
"Various subjects and affairs are stowed away in my brain as in a chest of
drawers. When I want to take up any special business I shut one drawer and
open another. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this incommode
me or fatigue me. If I feel sleepy I shut all the drawers and go to sleep."
Never has brain so disciplined and under such control been seen, one so
ready at all times for any task, so capable of immediate and absolute
concentration. Its flexibility1147 is wonderful, "in the instant application of
every faculty and energy, and bringing them all to bear at once on any
object that concerns him, on a mite as well as on an elephant, on any given
individual as well as on an enemy's army. ... When specially occupied, other
things do not exist for him; it is a sort of chase from which nothing diverts
him." And this hot pursuit, which nothing arrests save capture, this
tenacious hunt, this headlong course by one to whom the goal is never other

than a fresh starting-point, is the spontaneous gait, the natural, even pace
which his mind prefers.
"I am always at work," says he to Roederer.1148 "I meditate a great deal.
If I seem always equal to the occasion, ready to face what comes, it is
because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it. I
have anticipated whatever might happen. It is no spirit which suddenly
reveals to me what I ought to do or say in any unlooked-for circumstance,
but my own reflection, my own meditation. ... I work all the time, at dinner,
in the theatre. I wake up at night in order to resume my work. I got up last
night at two o'clock. I stretched myself on my couch before the fire to
examine the army reports sent to me by the Minister of War. I found twenty
mistakes in them, and made notes which I have this morning sent to the
minister, who is now engaged with his clerks in rectifying them."—
His associates weaken and sink under the burden imposed on them and
which he supports without feeling the weight. When Consul,1149 "he
sometimes presides at special meetings of the section of the interior from
ten o'clock in the evening until five o'clock in the morning.. .. Often, at
Saint-Cloud, he keeps the counselors of state from nine o'clock in the
morning until five in the evening, with fifteen minutes' intermission, and
seems no more fatigued at the close of the session than when it began."
During the night sessions "many of the members succumb through
weariness, while the Minister of War falls asleep"; he gives them a shake
and wakes them up, "Come, come, citizens, let us bestir ourselves, it is only
two o'clock and we must earn the money the French people pay us." Consul
or Emperor,1150 "he demands of each minister an account of the smallest
details: It is not rare to see them leaving the council room overcome with
fatigue, due to the long interrogatories to which he has subjected them; he
appears not to have noticed, and talks about the day's work simply as a
relaxation which has scarcely given his mind exercise." And what is worse,
"it often happens that on returning home they find a dozen of his letters
requiring immediate response, for which the whole night scarcely suffices."
The quantity of facts he is able to retain and store away, the quantity of
ideas he elaborates and produces, seems to surpass human capacity, and this
insatiable, inexhaustible, unmovable brain thus keeps on working
uninterruptedly for thirty years.

Through another result of the same mental organization, Napoleon's brain
is never unproductive; that's today our great danger.—During the past three
hundred years we have more and more lost sight of the exact and direct
meaning of things. Subject to the constraints of a conservative, complex,
and extended educational system we study
* the symbols of objects rather than on the objects themselves;
* instead of the ground itself, a map of it;
* instead of animals struggling for existence,1151 nomenclatures and
classifications, or, at best, stuffed specimens displayed in a museum;
* instead of persons who feel and act, statistics, codes, histories,
literatures, and philosophies;
in short, printed words. Even worse, abstract terms, which from century
to century have become more abstract and therefore further removed from
experience, more difficult to understand, less adaptable and more deceptive,
especially in all that relates to human life and society. Here, due to the
growth of government, to the multiplication of services, to the entanglement
of interests, the object, indefinitely enlarged and complex, now eludes our
grasp. Our vague, incomplete, incorrect idea of it badly corresponds with it,
or does not correspond at all. In nine minds out of ten, or perhaps ninety-
nine out of a hundred, it is but little more than a word. The others, if they
desire some significant indication of what society actually is beyond the
teachings of books, require ten or fifteen years of close observation and
study to re-think the phrases with which these have filled their memory, to
interpret them anew, to make clear their meaning, to get at and verify their
sense, to substitute for the more or less empty and indefinite term the
fullness and precision of a personal impression. We have seen how ideas of
Society, State, Government, Sovereignty, Rights, Liberty, the most
important of all ideas, were, at the close of the eighteenth century, curtailed
and falsified; how, in most minds, simple verbal reasoning combined them
together in dogmas and axioms; what an offspring these metaphysical
simulacra gave birth to, how many lifeless and grotesque abortions, how
many monstrous and destructive chimeras. There is no place for any of
these fanciful dreams in the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor
find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political
abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.1152 That which was
then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone

through calculation, but still more through an instinctive demand for what is
real, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the
great Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide,
which is ticklish." Every idea entertained by him had its origin in his
personal observation, and he used his own personal observations to control
them.
If books are useful to him it is to suggest questions, which he never
answers but through his own experience. He has read only a little, and
hastily;1153 his classical education is rudimentary; in the way of Latin, he
remained in the lower class. The instruction he got at the Military Academy
as well as at Brienne was below mediocrity, while, after Brienne, it is stated
that "for the languages and belles-lettres, he had no taste." Next to this, the
literature of elegance and refinement, the philosophy of the closet and
drawing-room, with which his contemporaries are imbued, glided over his
intellect as over a hard rock. None but mathematical truths and positive
notions about geography and history found their way into his mind and
deeply impressed it. Everything else, as with his predecessors of the
fifteenth century, comes to him through the original, direct action of his
faculties in contact with men and things, through his prompt and sure tact,
his indefatigable and minute attention, his indefinitely repeated and
rectified divinations during long hours of solitude and silence. Practice, and
not speculation, is the source of his instruction, the same as with a mechanic
brought up amongst machinery.
"There is nothing relating to warfare that I cannot make myself. If
nobody knows how to make gunpowder, I do. I can construct gun-carriages.
If cannon must be cast, I will see that it is done properly. If tactical details
must be taught, I will teach them."1154
This is why he is competent right from the beginning, general in the
artillery, major-general, diplomatist, financier and administrator of all kinds.
Thanks to this fertile apprenticeship, beginning with the Consulate, he
shows officials and veteran ministers who send in their reports to him what
to do.
"I am a more experienced administrator than they,1155 when one has been
obliged to extract from his brains the ways and means with which to feed,
maintain, control, and move with the same spirit and will two or three

hundred thousand men, a long distance from their country, one has soon
discovered the secrets of administration."
In each of the human machines he builds and manipulates, he perceives
right away all the parts, each in its proper place and function, the motors,
the transmissions, the wheels, the composite action, the speed which
ensues, the final result, the complete effect, the net product. Never is he
content with a superficial and summary inspection; he penetrates into
obscure corners and to the lowest depths "through the technical precision of
his questions," with the lucidity of a specialist, and in this way, borrowing
an expression from the philosophers, with him the concept should be
adequate to its purpose.1156
Hence his eagerness for details, for these form the body and substance of
the concept; the hand that has not grasped these, or lets them go, retains
only the shell, an envelope. With respect to these his curiosity is
"insatiable."1157 In each ministerial department he knows more than the
ministers, and in each bureau he knows as much as the clerks. "On his
table1158 lie reports of the positions of his forces on land and on water. He
has furnished the plans of these, and fresh ones are issued every month";
such is the daily reading he likes best.
"I have my reports on positions always at hand; my memory for an
Alexandrine is not good, but I never forget a syllable of my reports on
positions. I shall find them in my room this evening, and I shall not go to
bed until I have read them."
He always knows "his position" on land and at sea better than is known
in the War and Navy departments; better even than his staff-officers the
number, size, and qualities of his ships in or out of port, the present and
future state of vessels under construction, the composition and strength of
their crews, the formation, organization, staff of officers, material, stations,
and enlistments, past and to come, of each army corps and of each
regiment. It is the same in the financial and diplomatic services, in every
branch of the administration, laic or ecclesiastical, in the physical order and
in the moral order. His topographical memory and his geographical
conception of countries, places, ground, and obstacles culminate in an
inward vision which he evokes at will, and which, years afterwards, revives
as fresh as on the first day. His calculation of distances, marches, and
maneuvers is so rigid a mathematical operation that, frequently, at a

distance of two or four hundred leagues,1159 his military foresight,
calculated two or four months ahead, turns out correct, almost on the day
named, and precisely on the spot designated.1160 Add to this one other
faculty, and the rarest of all. For, if things turn out as he foresaw they
would, it is because, as with great chess-players, he has accurately
measured not alone the mechanical moves of the pieces, but the character
and talent of his adversary, "sounded his draft of water," and divined his
probable mistakes. He has added the calculation of physical quantities and
probabilities to the calculation of moral quantities and probabilities, thus
showing himself as great a psychologist as he is an accomplished strategist.
In fact, no one has surpassed him in the art of judging the condition and
motives of an individual or of a group of people, the real motives,
permanent or temporary, which drive or curb men in general or this or that
man in particular, the incentives to be employed, the kind and degree of
pressure to be employed. This central faculty rules all the others, and in the
art of mastering Man his genius is found supreme.

III. His acute Understanding of Others.
His psychological faculty and way of getting at the thought
and feeling of others.—His self-analysis.—How he imagines
a general situation by selecting a particular case,
imagining the invisible interior by deducting from the
visible exterior.—Originality and superiority of his style
and discourse.—His adaptation of these to his hearers and
to circumstances.—His notation and calculation of
serviceable motives.

No faculty is more precious for a political engineer; for the forces he acts
upon are never other than human passions. But how, except through
divination, can these passions, which grow out of the deepest sentiments, be
reached? How, save by conjecture, can forces be estimated which seem to
defy all measurement? On this dark and uncertain ground, where one has to
grope one's way, Napoleon moves with almost absolute certainty; he moves
promptly. First of all, he studies himself; indeed, to find one's way into
another's soul requires, preliminarily, that one should dive deep into one's
own.1161
"I have always delighted in analysis," said he, one day, "and should I ever
fall seriously in love I would take my sentiment to pieces. Why and How
are such important questions one cannot put them to one's self too often."
"It is certain," writes an observer, "that he, of all men, is the one who has
most meditated on the why which controls human actions."
His method, that of the experimental sciences, consists in testing every
hypothesis or deduction by some positive fact, observed by him under
definite conditions; a physical force being ascertained and accurately
measured through the deviation of a needle, or through the rise and fall of a
fluid, this or that invisible moral force can likewise be ascertained and
approximately measured through some emotional sign, some decisive
manifestation, consisting of a certain word, tone, or gesture. It is these
words, tones, and gestures which he dwells on; he detects inward
sentiments by the outward expression; he figures to himself the internal by
the external, by some facial appearance, some telling attitude, some brief
and topical scene, by such specimen and shortcuts, so well chosen and
detailed that they provide a summary of the innumerable series of

analogous cases. In this way, the vague, fleeting object is suddenly arrested,
brought to bear, and then gauged and weighed, like some impalpable gas
collected and kept in a graduated transparent glass tube.—Accordingly, at
the Council of State, while the others, either jurists or administrators, see
abstractions, articles of the law and precedents, he sees people as they are—
the Frenchman, the Italian, the German; that of the peasant, the workman,
the bourgeois, the noble, the returned émigré,1162 the soldier, the officer and
the functionary—everywhere the individual man as he is, the man who
plows, manufactures, fights, marries, brings forth children, toils, enjoys
himself, and dies.—Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the
dull, grave arguments advanced by the wise official editor, and Napoleon's
own words caught on the wing, at the moment, vibrating and teeming with
illustrations and imagery.1163 Apropos of divorce, the principle of which he
wishes to maintain:
"Consult, now, national manners and customs. Adultery is no
phenomenon; it is common enough—une affaire de canapé... There must be
some curb on women who commit adultery for trinkets, poetry, Apollo, and
the muses, etc."
But if divorce be allowed for incompatibility of temper you undermine
marriage; the fragility of the bond will be apparent the moment the
obligation is contracted;
"it is just as if a man said to himself, 'I am going to marry until I feel
different.'"
Nullity of marriage must not be too often allowed; once a marriage is
made it is a serious matter to undo it.
"Suppose that, in marrying my cousin just arrived from the Indies, I wed
an adventuress. She bears me children, and I then discover she is not my
cousin—is that marriage valid? Does not public morality demand that it
should be so considered? There has been a mutual exchange of hearts, of
transpiration."
On the right of children to be supported and fed although of age, he says:
"Will you allow a father to drive a girl of fifteen out of his house? A
father worth 60,000 francs a year might say to his son, 'You are stout and
fat; go and turn plowman.' The children of a rich father, or of one in good
circumstances, are always entitled to the paternal porridge. Strike out their
right to be fed, and you compel children to murder their parents."

As to adoption:
"You regard this as law-makers and not as statesmen. It is not a civil
contract nor a judicial contract. The analysis (of the jurist) leads to vicious
results. Man is governed by imagination only; without imagination he is a
brute. It is not for five cents a day, simply to distinguish himself, that a man
consents to be killed; if you want to electrify him touch his heart. A notary,
who is paid a fee of twelve francs for his services, cannot do that. It requires
some other process, a legislative act. Adoption, what is that? An imitation
by which society tries to counterfeit nature. It is a new kind of sacrament....
Society ordains that the bones and blood of one being shall be changed into
the bones and blood of another. It is the greatest of all legal acts. It gives the
sentiments of a son to one who never had them, and reciprocally those of a
parent. Where ought this to originate? From on high, like a clap of
thunder!"
All his expressions are bright flashes one after another.1164 Nobody, since
Voltaire and Galiani, has launched forth such a profusion of them; on
society, laws, government, France and the French, some penetrate and
explain, like those of Montesquieu, as if with a flash of lightening. He does
not hammer them out laboriously, but they burst forth, the outpourings of
his intellect, its natural, involuntary, constant action. And what adds to their
value is that, outside of councils and private conversations, he abstains from
them, employing them only in the service of thought; at other times he
subordinates them to the end he has in view, which is always their practical
effect. Ordinarily, he writes and speaks in a different language, in a
language suited to his audience; he dispenses with the oddities, the irregular
improvisations and imagination, the outbursts of genius and inspiration. He
retains and uses merely those which are intended to impress the personage
whom he wishes to dazzle with a great idea of himself, such as Pius VII., or
the Emperor Alexander. In this case, his conversational tone is that of a
caressing, expansive, amiable familiarity; he is then before the footlights,
and when he acts he can play all parts, tragedy or comedy, with the same
life and spirit whether he fulminates, insinuates, or even affects simplicity.
When he is with his generals, ministers, and principal performers, he falls
back on the concise, positive, technical business style; any other would be
harmful. The keen mind only reveals itself through the brevity and
imperious strength and rudeness of the accent. For his armies and the
common run of men, he has his proclamations and bulletins, that is to say,

sonorous phrases composed for effect, a statement of facts purposely
simplified and falsified,1165 in short, an excellent effervescent wine, good
for exciting enthusiasm, and an equally excellent narcotic for maintaining
credulity,1166 a sort of popular mixture to be distributed just at the proper
time, and whose ingredients are so well proportioned that the public drinks
it with delight, and becomes at once intoxicated.—His style on every
occasion, whether affected or spontaneous, shows his wonderful knowledge
of the masses and of individuals; except in two or three cases, on one
exalted domain, of which he always remains ignorant, he has ever hit the
mark, applying the appropriate lever, giving just the push, weight, and
degree of impulsion which best accomplishes his purpose. A series of brief,
accurate memoranda, corrected daily, enables him to frame for himself a
sort of psychological tablet whereon he notes down and sums up, in almost
numerical valuation, the mental and moral dispositions, characters,
faculties, passions, and aptitudes, the strong or weak points, of the
innumerable human beings, near or remote, on whom he operates.

IV. His Wonderful Memory.
His Three Atlases.—Their scale and completeness.

Let us try for a moment to show the range and contents of this intellect;
we may have to go back to Caesar to his equal; but, for lack of documents,
we have nothing of Caesar but general features—a summary outline. Of
Napoleon we have, besides the perfect outline, the features in detail. Read
his correspondence, day by day, then chapter by chapter;1167 for example, in
1806, after the battle of Austerlitz, or, still better, in 1809, after his return
from Spain, up to the peace of Vienna; whatever our technical shortcomings
may be, we shall find that his mind, in its comprehensiveness and
amplitude, largely surpasses all known or even credible proportions.
He has mentally within him three principal atlases, always at hand, each
composed of "about twenty note-books," each distinct and each regularly
posted up.—
1. The first one is military, forming a vast collection of topographical
charts as minute as those of an general staff, with detailed plans of every
stronghold, also specific indications and the local distribution of all forces
on sea and on land—crews, regiments, batteries, arsenals, storehouses,
present and future resources in supplies of men, horses, vehicles, arms,
munitions, food, and clothing.
2. The second, which is civil, resembles the heavy, thick volumes
published every year, in which we now read the state of the budget, and
comprehend, first, the innumerable items of ordinary and extraordinary
receipt and expenditure, internal taxes, foreign contributions, the products
of the domains in France and out of France, the fiscal services, pensions,
public works, and the rest; next, all administrative statistics, the hierarchy
of functions and of functionaries, senators, deputies, ministers, prefects,
bishops, professors, judges, and those under their orders, each where he
resides, with his rank, jurisdiction, and salary.
3. The third is a vast biographical and moral dictionary, in which, as in
the pigeon-holes of the Chief of Police, each notable personage and local
group, each professional or social body, and even each population, has its

label, along with a brief note on its situation, needs, and antecedents, and,
therefore, its demonstrated character, eventual disposition, and probable
conduct. Each label, card, or strip of paper has its summary; all these partial
summaries, methodically classified, terminate in totals, and the totals of the
three atlases, combined together, thus furnish their possessor with an
estimate of his disposable forces.
Now, in 1809, however full these atlases, they are clearly imprinted on
Napoleon's mind he knows not only the total and the partial summaries, but
also the slightest details; he reads them readily and at every hour; he
comprehends in a mass, and in all particulars, the various nations he
governs directly, or through some one else; that is to say, 60,000,000 men,
the different countries he has conquered or overrun, consisting of 70,000
square leagues1168. At first, France increased by the addition of Belgium
and Piedmont; next Spain, from which he is just returned, and where he has
placed his brother Joseph; southern Italy, where, after Joseph, he has placed
Murat; central Italy, where he occupies Rome; northern Italy, where Eugène
is his delegate; Dalmatia and Istria, which he has joined to his empire;
Austria, which he invades for the second time; the Confederation of the
Rhine, which he has made and which he directs; Westphalia and Holland,
where his brothers are only his lieutenants; Prussia, which he has subdued
and mutilated and which he oppresses, and the strongholds of which he still
retains; and, add a last mental tableau, that which represents the northern
seas, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, all the fleets of the continent at sea
and in port from Dantzic to Flessingen and Bayonne, from Cadiz to Toulon
and Gaëta, from Tarentum to Venice, Corfu, and Constantinople.1169—On
the psychological and moral atlas, besides a primitive gap which he will
never fill up, because this is a characteristic trait, there are some estimates
which are wrong, especially with regard to the Pope and to Catholic
conscience. In like manner he rates the energy of national sentiment in
Spain and Germany too low. He rates too high his own prestige in France
and in the countries annexed to her, the balance of confidence and zeal on
which he may rely. But these errors are rather the product of his will than of
his intelligence, he recognizes them at intervals; if he has illusions it is
because he fabricates them; left to himself his good sense would rest
infallible, it is only his passions which blurred the lucidity of his intellect.—
As to the other two atlases, the topographical and the military, they are as
complete and as exact as ever; No matter how much the realities they

contain will swell and daily become ever more complex, they continue to
correspond to it in their fullness and precision, trait for trait.

V. His Imagination and its Excesses.
His constructive imagination.—His projects and dreams.
—Manifestation of the master faculty and its excesses.

But this multitude of information and observations form only the smallest
portion of the mental population swarming in this immense brain; for, on
his idea of the real, germinate and swarm his concepts of the possible;
without these concepts there would be no way to handle and transform
things, and that he did handle and transform them we all know. Before
acting, he has decided on his plan, and if this plan is adopted, it is one
among several others,1170 after examining, comparing, and giving it the
preference; he has accordingly thought over all the others. Behind each
combination adopted by him we detect those he has rejected; there are
dozens of them behind each of his decisions, each maneuver effected, each
treaty signed, each decree promulgated, each order issued, and I venture to
say, behind almost every improvised action or word spoken. For calculation
enters into everything he does, even into his apparent expansiveness, also
into his outbursts when in earnest; if he gives way to these, it is on purpose,
foreseeing the effect, with a view to intimidate or to dazzle. He turns
everything in others as well as in himself to account—his passion, his
vehemence, his weaknesses, his talkativeness, he exploits it all for the
advancement of the edifice he is constructing.1171 Certainly among his
diverse faculties, however great, that of the constructive imagination is the
most powerful. At the very beginning we feel its heat and boiling intensity
beneath the coolness and rigidity of his technical and positive instructions.
"When I plan a battle," said he to Roederer, "no man is more spineless
than I am. I over exaggerate to myself all the dangers and all the evils that
are possible under the circumstances. I am in a state of truly painful
agitation. But this does not prevent me from appearing quite composed to
people around me; I am like a woman giving birth to a child.1172
Passionately, in the throes of the creator, he is thus absorbed with his
coming creation; he already anticipates and enjoys living in his imaginary
edifice. "General," said Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre to him, one day,
"you are building behind a scaffolding which you will take down when you

have done with it." "Yes, Madame, that's it," replied Bonaparte; "you are
right. I am always living two years in advance."1173 His response came with
"incredible vivacity," as if a sudden inspiration, that of a soul stirred in its
innermost fiber.—Here as well, the power, the speed, fertility, play, and
abundance of his thought seem unlimited. What he has accomplished is
astonishing, but what he has undertaken is more so; and whatever he may
have undertaken is far surpassed by what he has imagined. However
vigorous his practical faculty, his poetical faculty is stronger; it is even too
vigorous for a statesman; its grandeur is exaggerated into enormity, and its
enormity degenerates into madness. In Italy, after the 18th of Fructidor, he
said to Bourrienne:
"Europe is a molehill; never have there been great empires and great
revolutions, except in the Orient, with its 600,000,000 inhabitants."1174
The following year at Saint-Jean d'Acre, on the eve of the last assault, he
added
"If I succeed I shall find in the town the pasha's treasure and arms for
300,000 men. I stir up and arm all Syria.... I march on Damascus and
Aleppo; as I advance in the country my army will increase with the
discontented. I proclaim to the people the abolition of slavery, and of the
tyrannical government of the pashas. I reach Constantinople with armed
masses. I overthrow the Turkish Empire; I found in the East a new and
grand empire, which fixes my place with posterity, and perhaps I return to
Paris by the way of Adrianople, or by Vienna, after having annihilated the
house of Austria." 1175
Become consul, and then emperor, he often referred to this happy period,
when, "rid of the restraints of a troublesome civilization," he could imagine
at will and construct at pleasure.1176
"I created a religion; I saw myself on the road to Asia, mounted on an
elephant, with a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran, which I
composed to suit myself."
Confined to Europe, he thinks, after 1804, that he will reorganize
Charlemagne's empire.
"The French Empire will become the mother country of other
sovereignties... I mean that every king in Europe shall build a grand palace
at Paris for his own use; on the coronation of the Emperor of the French
these kings will come and occupy it; they will grace this imposing

ceremony with their presence, and honor it with their salutations."1177 The
Pope will come; he came to the first one; he must necessarily return to
Paris, and fix himself there permanently. Where could the Holy See be
better off than in the new capital of Christianity, under Napoleon, heir to
Charlemagne, and temporal sovereign of the Sovereign Pontiff? Through
the temporal the emperor will control the spiritual,1178 and through the
Pope, consciences."
In November, 1811, unusually excited, he says to De Pradt:
"In five years I shall be master of the world; only Russia will remain, but
I will crush her.1179... Paris will extend out to St. Cloud."
To render Paris the physical capital of Europe is, through his own
confession, "one of his constant dreams."
"At times," he says,1180"I would like to see her a city of two, three, four
millions of inhabitants, something fabulous, colossal, unknown down to our
day, and its public establishments adequate to its population.... Archimedes
proposed to lift the world if he could be allowed to place his lever; for
myself, I would have changed it wherever I could have been allowed to
exercise my energy, perseverance, and budgets."
At all events, he believes so; for however lofty and badly supported the
next story of his structure may be, he has always ready a new story, loftier
and more unsteady, to put above it. A few months before launching himself,
with all Europe at his back, against Russia, he said to Narbonne:1181
"After all, my dear sir, this long road is the road to India. Alexander
started as far off as Moscow to reach the Ganges; this has occurred to me
since St. Jean d'Acre.... To reach England to-day I need the extremity of
Europe, from which to take Asia in the rear.... Suppose Moscow taken,
Russia subdued, the czar reconciled, or dead through some court
conspiracy, perhaps another and dependent throne, and tell me whether it is
not possible for a French army, with its auxiliaries, setting out from Tiflis,
to get as far as the Ganges, where it needs only a thrust of the French sword
to bring down the whole of that grand commercial scaffolding throughout
India. It would be the most gigantic expedition, I admit, but practicable in
the nineteenth century. Through it France, at one stroke, would secure the
independence of the West and the freedom of the seas."
While uttering this his eyes shone with strange brilliancy, and he
accumulates subjects, weighing obstacles, means, and chances: the

inspiration is under full headway, and he gives himself up to it. The master
faculty finds itself suddenly free, and it takes flight; the artist,1182 locked up
in politics, has escaped from his sheath; he is creating out of the ideal and
the impossible. We take him for what he is, a posthumous brother of Dante
and Michael Angelo. In the clear outlines of his vision, in the intensity,
coherency, and inward logic of his dreams, in the profundity of his
meditations, in the superhuman grandeur of his conceptions, he is, indeed,
their fellow and their equal. His genius is of the same stature and the same
structure; he is one of the three sovereign minds of the Italian Renaissance.
Only, while the first two operated on paper and on marble, the latter
operates on the living being, on the sensitive and suffering flesh of
humanity.

1101 (return)
[ Reforms introduced by Napoleon after his coup d'état 9
Nov. 1799. (SR.)]
1102 (return)
[ The main authority is, of course, the "correspondance de
l'Empereur Napoléon I.," in thirty-two-volumes. This
correspondance, unfortunately, is still incomplete, while,
after the sixth volume, it must not be forgotten that much of
it has been purposely stricken out. "In general," say the
editors (XVI., p.4), "we have been governed simply by this
plain rule, that we were required to publish only what the
Emperor himself would have given to the public had he
survived himself, and, anticipating the verdict of time,
exposed to posterity his own personality and system."—The
savant who has the most carefully examined this
correspondence, entire in the French archives, estimates that
it comprises about 80,000 pieces, of which 30,000 have been
published in the collection referred to; passages in 20,000 of
the others have been stricken out on account of previous
publication, and about 30,000 more, through considerations
of propriety or policy. For example, but little more than one-
half of the letters from Napoleon to Bigot de Préameneu on
ecclesiastical matters have been published; many of these
omitted letters, all important and characteristic, may be
found in "L'Église romaine et le Premier Empire," by M.
d'Haussonville. The above-mentioned savant estimates the
number of important letters not yet published at 2,000.]
1103 (return)
[ "Mémorial de Sainte Héléne," by Las Casas (May 29,
1816).—"In Corsica, Paoli, on a horseback excursion,
explained the positions to him, the places where liberty
found resistance or triumphed. Estimating the character of

Napoleon by what he saw of it through personal observation,
Paoli said to him, "Oh, Napoleon, there is nothing modern in
you, you belong wholly to Plutarch!"—Antonomarchi,
"Mémoires," Oct. 25, 1819. The same account, slightly
different, is there given: "Oh. Napoleon," said Paoli to me,
"you do not belong to this century; you talk like one of
Plutarch's characters. Courage, you will take flight yet!"]
1104 (return)
[ De Ségur, "Histoire et Mémoires," I., 150. (Narrative by
Pontécoulant, member of the committee in the war, June,
1795.) "Boissy d'Anglas told him that he had seen the
evening before a little Italian, pale, slender, and puny, but
singularly audacious in his views and in the vigor of his
expressions.—The next day, Bonaparte calls on
Pontécou1ant, Attitude rigid through a morbid pride, poor
exterior, long visage, hollow and bronzed.... He is just from
the army and talks like one who knows what he is talking
about."]
1105 (return)
[ Coston, "Biographie des premières années de Napoléon
Buonaparte," 2 vols. (1840), passim.—Yung, "Bonaparte et
son Temps," I., 300, 302. (Pièces généalogiques.)—King
Joseph, "Mémoires," I., 109, 111. (On the various branches
and distinguished men of the Bonaparte family.)—Miot de
Melito, "Mémoires," II., 30. (Documents on the Bonaparte
family, collected on the spot by the author in 1801.)]
1106 (return)
[ "Mémorial," May 6, 1816.—Miot de Melito, II., 30. (On
the Bonapartes of San Miniato): "The last offshoot of this
branch was a canon then still living in this same town of San
Miniato, and visited by Bonaparte in the year IV, when he
came to Florence."]
1107 (return)
[ "Correspondance de l'Empereur Napoléon I." (Letter of
Bonaparte, Sept.29, 1797, in relation to Italy): "A people at
bottom inimical to the French through the prejudices,
character, and customs of centuries."]
1108 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, I., 126, (1796): "Florence, for two
centuries and a half, had lost that antique energy which, in
the stormy times of the Republic, distinguished this city.
Indolence was the dominant spirit of all classes.. . Almost
everywhere I saw only men lulled to rest by the charms of
the most exquisite climate, occupied solely with the details
of a monotonous existence, and tranquilly vegetating under
its beneficent sky."—(On Milan, in 1796, cf. Stendhal,
introduction to the "Chartreuse de Parme.")]
1109 (return)
[ "Miot de Melito," I., 131: "Having just left one of the most

civilized cities in Italy, it was not without some emotion that
I found myself suddenly transported to a country (Corsica)
which, in its savage aspect, its rugged mountains, and its
inhabitants uniformly dressed in coarse brown cloth,
contrasted so strongly with the rich and smiling landscape of
Tuscany, and with the comfort, I should almost say elegance,
of costume worn by the happy cultivators of that fertile
soil."]
1110 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, II., 30: "Of a not very important family of
Sartène."—II., 143. (On the canton of Sartène and the
Vendettas of 1796).—Coston, I., 4: "The family of Madame
Laetitia, sprung from the counts of Cotalto, came originally
from Italy."]
1111 (return)
[ His father, Charles Bonaparte, weak and even frivolous,
"too fond of pleasure to care about his children," and to see
to his affairs, tolerably learned and an indifferent head of a
family, died at the age of thirty-nine of a cancer in the
stomach, which seems to be the only bequest he made to his
son Napoleon.—His mother, on the contrary, serious,
authoritative, the true head of a family, was, said Napoleon,
"hard in her affections she punished and rewarded without
distinction, good or bad; she made us all feel it."—On
becoming head of the household, "she was too
parsimonious-even ridiculously so. This was due to excess
of foresight on her part; she had known want, and her
terrible sufferings were never out of her mind.... Paoli had
tried persuasion with her before resorting to force... .
Madame replied heroically, as a Cornelia would have
done.... From 12 to 15,000 peasants poured down from the
mountains of Ajaccio; our house was pillaged and burnt, our
vines destroyed, and our flocks. ... In other respects, this
woman, from whom it would have been so difficult to
extract five francs, would have given up everything to
secure my return from Elba, and after Waterloo she offered
me all she possessed to restore my affairs." (" Mémorial,"
May 29, 1816, and "Mémoires d'Antonomarchi," Nov. 18,
1819.—On the ideas and ways of Bonaparte's mother, read
her "Conversation" in "Journal et Mémoires," vol. IV., by
Stanislas Girardin.) Duchesse d'Abrantès," Mémoires," II.,
318, 369. "Avaricious out of all reason except on a few
grave occasions.... No knowledge whatever of the usages of
society.... very ignorant, not alone of our literature, but of
her own."—Stendhal, "Vie de Napoleon": "The character of
her son is to be explained by the perfectly Italian character
of Madame Laetitia."]
1112 (return)
[ The French conquest is effected by armed force between

July 30, 1768, and May 22, 1769. The Bonaparte family
submitted May 23, 1769, and Napoleon was born on the
following 15th of August.]
1113 (return)
[ Antonomarchi, "Mémoires," October 4, 1819. "Mémorial,"
May 29, 1816.]
1114 (return)
[ "Miot de Melito," II., 33: "The day I arrived at Bocognano
two men lost their lives through private vengeance. About
eight years before this one of the inhabitants of the canton
had killed a neighbor, the father of two children.... On
reaching the age of sixteen or seventeen years these children
left the country in order to dog the steps of the murderer,
who kept on the watch, not daring to go far from his
village.... Finding him playing cards under a tree, they fired
at and killed him, and besides this accidentally shot another
man who was asleep a few paces off. The relatives on both
sides pronounced the act justifiable and according to rule."
Ibid., I., 143: "On reaching Bastia from Ajaccio the two
principal families of the place, the Peraldi and the Visuldi,
fired at each other, in disputing over the honor of
entertaining me."]
1115 (return)
[ Bourrienne, "Mémoires," I., 18, 19.]
1116 (return)
[ De Ségur, "Histoire et Mémoires," I,, 74.]
1117 (return)
[ Yung, I., 195. (Letter of Bonaparte to Paoli, June 12, 1789);
I., 250 (Letter of Bonaparte to Buttafuoco, January 23
1790).]
1118 (return)
[ Yung, I., 107 (Letter of Napoleon to his father, Sept. 12,
1784); I., 163 (Letter of Napoleon to Abbé Raynal, July,
1786); I., 197 (Letter of Napoleon to Paoli, June 12, 1789).
The three letters on the history of Corsica are dedicated to
Abbé Raynal in a letter of June 24, 1790, and may be found
in Yung, I., 434.]
1119 (return)
[ Read especially his essay "On the Truths and Sentiments
most important to inculcate on Men for their Welfare" (a
subject proposed by the Academy of Lyons in 1790). "Some
bold men driven by genius.. .. Perfection grows out of
reason as fruit out of a tree.... Reason's eyes guard man from
the precipice of the passions... The spectacle of the strength
of virtue was what the Lacedaemonians principally felt....
Must men then be lucky in the means by which they are led
on to happiness?.... My rights (to property) are renewed
along with my transpiration, circulate in my blood, are

written on my nerves, on my heart.... Proclaim to the rich—
your wealth is your misfortune, withdrawn within the
latitude of your senses.... Let the enemies of nature at thy
voice keep silence and swallow their rabid serpents'
tongues.... The wretched shun the society of men, the
tapestry of gayety turns to mourning.... Such, gentlemen, are
the Sentiments which, in animal relations, mankind should
have taught it for its welfare."]
1120 (return)
[ Yung, I., 252 (Letter to Buttafuoco). "Dripping with the
blood of his brethren, sullied by every species of crime, he
presents himself with confidence under his vest of a general,
the sole reward of his criminalities."—I., 192 (Letter to the
Corsican Intendant, April 2, 1879). "Cultivation is what
ruins us"—See various manuscript letters, copied by Yung,
for innumerable and gross mistakes in French.—Miot de
Melito, I., 84 (July, 1796). "He spoke curtly and, at this time,
very incorrectly."—Madame de Rémusat, I., 104. "Whatever
language he spoke it never seemed familiar to him; he
appeared to force himself in expressing his ideas."—Notes
par le Comte Chaptal (unpublished), councillor of state and
afterwards minister of the interior under the Consulate: "At
this time, Bonaparte did not blush at the slight knowledge of
administrative details which he possessed; he asked a good
many questions and demanded definitions and the meaning
of the commonest words in use. As it very often happened
with him not to clearly comprehend words which he heard
for the first time, he always repeated these afterwards as he
understood them; for example, he constantly used section for
session, armistice for amnesty, fulminating point for
culminating point, rentes voyagères for 'rentes viagères,'
etc."]
1121 (return)
[ De Ségur, I., 174]
1122 (return)
[ Cf. the "Mémoires" of Marshal Marmont, I., 15, for the
ordinary sentiments of the young nobility. "In 1792 I had a
sentiment for the person of the king, difficult to define, of
which I recovered the trace, and to some extent the power,
twenty-two years later; a sentiment of devotion almost
religious in character, an innate respect as if due to a being
of a superior order. The word King then possessed a magic,
a force, which nothing had changed in pure and honest
breasts.... This religion of royalty still existed in the mass of
the nation,, and especially amongst the well-born, who,
sufficiently remote from power, were rather struck with its
brilliancy than with its imperfections.... This love became a
sort of worship."]

1123 (return)
[ Bourrienne, "Mémoires," I. 27.—Ségur, I. 445. In 1795, at
Paris, Bonaparte, being out of military employment, enters
upon several commercial speculations, amongst which is a
bookstore, which does not succeed. (Stated by Sebastiani
and many others.)]
1124 (return)
[ "Mémorial," Aug. 3, 1816.]
1125 (return)
[ Bourrienne, I., 171. (Original text of the "Souper de
Beaucaire.")]
1126 (return)
[ Yung, II., 430, 431. (Words of Charlotte Robespierre.)
Bonaparte as a souvenir of his acquaintance with her,
granted her a pension, under the consulate, of 3600 francs.—
Ibid. (Letter of Tilly, chargé d'affaires at Genoa, to Buchot,
commissioner of foreign affairs.) Cf. in the "Mémorial,"
Napoleon's favorable judgment of Robespierre.]
1127 (return)
[ Yung, II., 455. (Letter from Bonaparte to Tilly, Aug. 7,
1794.) Ibid., III., 120. (Memoirs of Lucien.) "Barras takes
care of Josephine's dowry, which is the command of the
army in Italy." Ibid., II., 477. (Grading of general officers,
notes by Schérer on Bonaparte.) "He knows all about
artillery, but is rather too ambitious, and too intriguing for
promotion."]
1128 (return)
[ De Ségur, I., 162.—La Fayette, "Mémoires," II., 215.
"Mémorial" (note dictated by Napoleon). He states the
reasons for and against, and adds, speaking of himself:
"These sentiments, twenty-five years of age, confidence in
his strength, his destiny, determined him." Bourrienne, I.,
51: "It is certain that he has always bemoaned that day; he
has often said to me that he would give years of his life to
efface that page of his history."]
1129 (return)
[ "Mémorial," I., Sept 6, 1815. "It is only after Lodi that the
idea came to me that I might, after all, become a decisive
actor on our political stage. Then the first spark of lofty
ambition gleamed out." On his aim and conduct in the Italian
campaign of Sybel, "Histoire de l'Europe pendant la
Révolution Française" (Dosquet translation), vol. IV., books
II. and III., especially pp.182, 199, 334, 335, 406, 420, 475,
489.]
1130 (return)
[ Yung, III., 213. (Letter of M. de Sucy, August 4, 1797.)]
1131 (return)
[ Ibid., III., 214. (Report of d'Entraigues to M. de

Mowikinoff, Sept., 1797.) "If there was any king in France
which was not himself, he would like to have been his
creator, with his rights at the end of his sword, this sword
never to be parted with, so that he might plunge it in the
king's bosom if he ever ceased to be submissive to him."—
Miot de Melito, I., 154. (Bonaparte to Montebello, before
Miot and Melzi, June, 1797.) Ibid, I., 184. (Bonaparte to
Miot, Nov. 18, 1797, at Turin.)]
1132 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, "L'Église Romaine et la Premier Empire,"
I., 405. (Words of M. Cacault, signer of the Treaty of
Tolentino, and French Secretary of Legation at Rome, at the
commencement of negotiations for the Concordat.) M.
Cacaut says that he used this expression, "After the scenes of
Tolentino and of Leghorn, and the fright of Manfredini, and
Matéi threatened, and so many other vivacities."]
1133 (return)
[ Madame de Staël, "Considérations sur la Révolution
Française," 3rd part, ch. XXVI., and 4th part, ch. XVIII.]
1134 (return)
[ Portrait of Bonaparte in the "Cabinet des Etampes," "drawn
by Guérin, engraved by Fiesinger, deposited in the National
Library, Vendémiaire 29, year VII."]
1135 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, "Mémoires," I., 104.—Miot de
Melito, I., 84.]
1136 (return)
[ Madame de Staël, "Considerations," etc., 3rd part, ch.
XXV.—Madame de Rémusat, II., 77.]
1137 (return)
[ Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Napoléon," narration of Admiral
Decrès.—Same narration in the "Mémorial."]
1138 (return)
[ De Ségur, I., 193.]
1139 (return)
[ Roederer, "Oeuvres complétes," II., 560. (Conversations
with General Lasalle in 1809, and Lasalle's judgment on the
débuts of Napoleon).]
1140 (return)
[ Another instance of this commanding influence is found in
the case of General Vandamme, an old revolutionary soldier
still more brutal and energetic than Augereau. In 1815,
Vandamme said to Marshal d'Ornano, one day, on ascending
the staircase of the Tuileries together: "My dear fellow, that
devil of a man (speaking of the Emperor) fascinates me in a
way I cannot account for. I, who don't fear either God or the
devil, when I approach him I tremble like a child. He would

make me dash through the eye of a needle into the fire!"
("Le Général Vandamme," by du Casse, II., 385).]
1141 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 356. (Napoleon himself says, February 11,
1809): "I, military! I am so, because I was born so; it is my
habit, my very existence. Wherever I have been I have
always had command. I commanded at twenty-three, at the
siege of Toulon; I commanded at Paris in Vendémiaire; I
won over the soldiers in Italy the moment I presented
myself. I was born for that."]
1142 (return)
[ Observe the various features of the same mental and moral
structure among different members of the family. (Speaking
of his brothers and sisters in the "Memorial" Napoleon
says): "What family as numerous presents such a splendid
group?"—"Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis,
duc), chancelier de France, in VI volumes, Librarie Plon,
Paris 1893. Vol. I. p. 400. (This author, a young magistrate
under Louis XVI., a high functionary under the Empire, an
important political personage under the restoration and the
July monarchy, is probably the best informed and most
judicious of eye-witnesses during the first half of our
century.): "Their vices and virtues surpass ordinary
proportions and have a physiognomy of their own. But what
especially distinguishes them is a stubborn will, and
inflexible resolution.... All possessed the instinct of their
greatness." They readily accepted "the highest positions;
they even got to believing that their elevation was
inevitable.... Nothing in the incredible good fortune of
Joseph astonished him; often in January, 1814, I heard him
say over and over again that if his brother had not meddled
with his affairs after the second entry into Madrid, he would
still be on the throne of Spain. As to determined obstinacy
we have only to refer to the resignation of Louis, the
retirement of Lucien, and the resistances of Fesch; they
alone could stem the will of Napoleon and sometimes break
a lance with him.—Passion, sensuality, the habit of
considering themselves outside of rules, and self-confidence
combined with talent, super abound among the women, as in
the fifteenth century. Elisa, in Tuscany, had a vigorous brain,
was high spirited and a genuine sovereign, notwithstanding
the disorders of her private life, in which even appearances
were not sufficiently maintained." Caroline at Naples,
"without being more scrupulous than her sisters," better
observed the proprieties; none of the others so much
resembled the Emperor; "with her, all tastes succumbed to
ambition"; it was she who advised and prevailed upon her
husband, Murat, to desert Napoleon in 1814. As to Pauline,
the most beautiful woman of her epoch, "no wife, since that
of the Emperor Claude, surpassed her in the use she dared

make of her charms; nothing could stop her, not even a
malady attributed to the strain of this life-style and for which
we have so often seen her borne in a litter."—Jerome, "in
spite of the uncommon boldness of his debaucheries,
maintained his ascendancy over his wife to the last."—On
the "pressing efforts and attempts" of Joseph on Maria
Louise in 1814, Chancelier Pasquier, after Savary's papers
and the evidence of M. de Saint-Aignan, gives extraordinary
details.—"Mes souvenirs sur Napoléon, 346, by the count
Chaptal: "Every member of this numerous family (Jérôme,
Louis, Joseph, the Bonaparte sisters) mounted thrones as if
they had recovered so much property."]
1143 (return)
[ Burkhardt, "Die Renaissance in Italien," passim.—
Stendhal, "Histoire de la peinture en Italie"(introduction),
and" Rome, Naples, et Florence," passim.—"Notes par le
Comte Chaptal": When these notes are published, many
details will be found in them in support of the judgment
expressed in this and the following chapters. The
psychology of Napoleon as here given is largely confirmed
by them.]
1144 (return)
[ Roederer, III, 380 (1802).]
1145 (return)
[ Napoleon uses the French word just which means both fair,
justifiable, pertinent, correct, and in music true.]
1146 (return)
[ "Mémorial."]
1147 (return)
[ De Pradt, "Histoire de l'Ambassade dans la grande-duché
de Varsovie en 1812," preface, p. X, and 5.]
1148 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 544 (February 24, 1809). Cf. Meneval,
"Napoléon et Marie-Louise, souvenirs historiques," I., 210-
213.]
1149 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère," Opinions de Napoléon au conseil
d'état," p.8.—Roederer, III., 380.]
1150 (return)
[ Mollien, "Mémoires," I., 379; II., 230.—Roederer, III.,
434. "He is at the head of all things. He governs,
administrates, negotiates, works eighteen hours a day, with
the clearest and best organized head; he has governed more
in three years than kings in a hundred years."—Lavalette,
"Mémoires," II., 75. (The words of Napoleon's secretary on
Napoleon's labor in Paris, after Leipsic) "He retires at
eleven, but gets up at three o'clock in the morning, and until
the evening there is not a moment he does not devote to

work. It is time this stopped, for he will be used up, and
myself before he is."—Gaudin, Duc de Gaëte, "Mémoires,"
III. (supplement), p.75. Account of an evening in which,
from eight o'clock to three in the morning, Napoleon
examines with Gaudin his general budget, during seven
consecutive hours, without stopping a minute.—Sir Neil
Campbell, "Napoléon at Fontainebleau and at Elbe," p.243.
"Journal de Sir Neil Campbell a' l'ile d'Elbe": I never saw
any man, in any station in life, so personally active and so
persistent in his activity. He seems to take pleasure in
perpetual motion and in seeing those who accompany him
completely tired out, which frequently happened in my case
when I accompanied him.. . Yesterday, after having been on
his legs from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon,
visiting the frigates and transports, even to going down to
the lower compartments among the horses, he rode on
horseback for three hours, and, as he afterwards said to me,
to rest himself."]
1151 (return)
[ The starting-point of the great discoveries of Darwin is the
physical, detailed description he made in his study of
animals and plants, as living; during the whole course of
life, through so many difficulties and subject to a fierce
competition. This study is wholly lacking in the ordinary
zoologist or botanist, whose mind is busy only with
anatomical preparations or collections of plants. In every
science, the difficulty lies in describing in a nutshell, using
significant examples, the real object, just as it exists before
us, and its true history. Claude Bernard one day remarked to
me, "We shall know physiology when we are able to follow
step by step a molecule of carbon or azote in the body of a
dog, give its history, and describe its passage from its
entrance to its exit."]
1152 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, "Mémoires sur le Consulat," 204. (Apropos of
the tribunate): "They consist of a dozen or fifteen
metaphysicians who ought to be flung into the water; they
crawl all over me like vermin."]
1153 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 115: "He is really ignorant, having
read very little and always hastily."—Stendhal, "Mémoires
sur Napoleon": "His education was very defective....He
knew nothing of the great principles discovered within the
past one hundred years," and just those which concern man
or society. "For example, he had not read Montesquieu as
this writer ought to be read, that is to say, in a way to accept
or decidedly reject each of the thirty-one books of the 'Esprit
des lois.' He had not thus read Bayle's Dictionary nor the
Essay on the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. This

ignorance of the Emperor's was not perceptible in
conversation, and first, because he led in conversation, and
next because with Italian finesse no question put by him, or
careless supposition thrown out, ever betrayed that
ignorance."—Bourrienne. I., 19, 21: At Brienne,
"unfortunately for us, the monks to whom the education of
youth was confided knew nothing, and were too poor to pay
good foreign teachers.... It is inconceivable how any capable
man ever graduated from this educational institution."—
Yung, I., 125 (Notes made by him on Bonaparte, when he
left the Military Academy): "Very fond of the abstract
sciences, indifferent to others, well grounded in mathematics
and geography."]
1154 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 544 (March 6, 1809), 26, 563 (Jan. 23, 1811,
and Nov. 12, 1813).]
1155 (return)
[ Mollien, I., 348 (a short time before the rupture of the
peace of Amiens), III., 16: "It was at the end of January,
1809, that he wanted a full report of the financial situation
on the 31st of December, 1808 .... This report was to be
ready in two days."—III., 34: "A complete balance sheet of
the public treasury for the first six months of 1812 was
under Napoleon's eyes at Witebsk, the 11th of August,
eleven days after the close of these first six months. What is
truly wonderful is, that amidst so many different occupations
and preoccupations.... he could preserve such an accurate
run of the proceedings and methods of the administrative
branches about which he wanted to know at any moment.
Nobody had any excuse for not answering him, for each was
questioned in his own terms; it is that singular aptitude of
the head of the State, and the technical precision of his
questions, which alone explains how he could maintain such
a remarkable ensemble in an administrative system of which
the smallest threads centered in himself."]
1156 (return)
[ 200 years after the death of Napoleon Sir Alfred Ayer thus
writes in "LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC": 'Actually,
we shall see that the only test to which a form of scientific
procedure which satisfies the necessary condition of self-
consistency is subject, is the test of its success in practice.
We are entitled to have faith in our procedure just so long as
it does the work it is designed to do—that is, enables us to
predict future experience, and so to control our
environment.' And on the Purpose of Inquiry: 'The
traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as
unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end
them is to establish beyond question what should be the
purpose and the method of philosophical inquiry.' (SR.)]

1157 (return)
[ An expression of Mollien.]
1158 (return)
[ Meneval, I., 210, 213.—Roederer, III., 537, 545 (February
and March, 1889): Words of Napoleon: "At this moment it
was nearly midnight."—Ibid., IV., 55 (November, 1809).
Read the admirable examination of Roederer by Napoleon
on the Kingdom of Naples. His queries form a vast
systematic and concise network, embracing the entire
subject, leaving no physical or moral data, no useful
circumstance not seized upon.—Ségur, II., 231: M. De
Ségur, ordered to inspect every part of the coast-line, had
sent in his report: "'I have seen your reports,' said the First
Consul to me, 'and they are exact. Nevertheless, you forgot
at Osten two cannon out of the four.'—And he pointed out
the place, 'a roadway behind the town.' I went out
overwhelmed with astonishment that among thousands of
cannon distributed among the mounted batteries or light
artillery on the coast, two pieces should not have escaped his
recollection."—"Correspondance," letter to King Joseph,
August 6, 1806: "The admirable condition of my armies is
due to this, that I give attention to them every day for an
hour or two, and, when the monthly reports come in, to the
state of my troops and fleets, all forming about twenty large
volumes. I leave every other occupation to read them over in
detail, to see what difference there is between one month
and another. I take more pleasure in reading those than any
young girl does in a novel."—Cadet de Gassicourt, "Voyage
en Autriche"(1809). On his reviews at Schoenbrunn and his
verification of the contents of a pontoon-wagon, taken as an
example.]
1159 (return)
[ One ancient French league equals app. 4 km. (SR.)]
1160 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 116; IV., 238: "He had not a good memory
for proper names, words, and dates, but it was prodigious for
facts and localities. I remember that, on the way from Paris
to Toulon, he called my attention to ten places suitable for
giving battle.... It was a souvenir of his youthful travels, and
he described to me the lay of the ground, designating the
positions he would have taken even before we were on the
spot." March 17, 1800, puncturing a card with a pin, he
shows Bourrienne the place where he intends to beat Mélas,
at San Juliano. "Four months after this I found myself at San
Juliano with his portfolio and dispatches, and, that very
evening, at Torre-di-Gafolo, a league off, I wrote the bulletin
of the battle under his dictation" (of Marengo).—De Ségur,
II., 30 (Narrative of M. Daru to M. De Ségur Aug. 13, 1805,
at the headquarters of La Manche, Napoleon dictates to M.

Daru the complete plan of the campaign against Austria):
"Order of marches, their duration, places of convergence or
meeting of the columns, attacks in full force, the various
movements and mistakes of the enemy, all, in this rapid
dictation, was foreseen two months beforehand and at a
distance of two hundred leagues.... The battle-field, the
victories, and even the very days on which we were to enter
Munich and Vienna were then announced and written down
as it all turned out.... Daru saw these oracles fulfilled on the
designated days up to our entry into Munich; if there were
any differences of time and not of results between Munich
and Vienna, they were all in our favor."—M. de La Vallette,
"Mémoires," II., p. 35. (He was postmaster-general): "It
often happened to me that I was not as certain as he was of
distances and of many details in my administration on which
he was able to set me straight."—On returning from the
camp at Bologna, Napoleon encounters a squad of soldiers
who had got lost, asks what regiment they belong to,
calculates the day they left, the road they took, what distance
they should have marched. and then tells them, "You will
find your battalion at such a halting place."—At this time,
"the army numbered 200,000 men."]
1161 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 103, 268.]
1162 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, p.25, I (on the Jacobin survivors): "They are
nothing but common artisans, painters, etc., with lively
imaginations, a little better instructed than the people, living
amongst the people and exercising influence over them."—
Madame de Rémusat, I., 271 (on the royalist party): "It is
very easy to deceive that party because its starting-point is
not what it is, but what it would like to have."—I., 337: "The
Bourbons will never see anything except through the Oeil de
Boeuf."—Thibaudeau, p.46: "Insurrections and emigrations
are skin diseases; terrorism is an internal malady." Ibid., 75:
"What now keeps the spirit of the army up is the idea
soldiers have that they occupy the places of former nobles."]
1163 (return)
[ Thibaudeau, pp.419 to 452. (Both texts are given in
separate columns.) And passim, for instance, p.84, the
following portrayal of the decadal system of worship under
the Republic: "It was imagined that citizens could be got
together in churches, to freeze with cold and hear, read, and
study laws, in which there was already but little fun for
those who executed them." Another example of the way in
which his ideas expressed themselves through imagery
(Pelet de la Lozère, p. 242): "I am not satisfied with the
customs regulations on the Alps. They show no life. We
don't hear the rattle of crown pieces pouring into the public

treasury." To appreciate the vividness of Napoleon's
expressions and thought the reader must consult, especially,
the five or six long conversations, noted on the very evening
of the day they occurred by Roederer; the two or three
conversations likewise noted by Miot de Melito; the scenes
narrated by Beugnot; the notes of Pelet de la Lozère and by
Stanislas de Girardin, and nearly the entire volume by
Thibaudeau.]
1164 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, 63, 64. (On the physiological
differences between the English and the French.)—Madame
de Rémusat, I., 273, 392: "You, Frenchmen, are not in
earnest about anything, except, perhaps, equality, and even
here you would gladly give this up if you were sure of being
the foremost.... The hope of advancement in the world
should be cherished by everybody.... Keep your vanity
always alive The severity of the republican government
would have worried you to death. What started the
Revolution? Vanity. What will end it? Vanity, again. Liberty
is merely a pretext."—III., 153 "Liberty is the craving of a
small and privileged class by nature, with faculties superior
to the common run of men; this class, therefore, may be put
under restraint with impunity; equality, on the contrary,
catches the multitude."—Thibaudeau, 99: "What do I care
for the opinions and cackle of the drawing-room? I never
heed it. I pay attention only to what rude peasants say." His
estimates of certain situations are masterpieces of
picturesque concision. "Why did I stop and sign the
preliminaries of Leoben? Because I played vingt-et-un and
was satisfied with twenty." His insight into (dramatic)
character is that of the most sagacious critic. "The 'Mahomet'
of Voltaire is neither a prophet nor an Arab, only an impostor
graduated out of the École Polytechnique."—"Madame de
Genlis tries to define virtue as if she were the discoverer of
it."—(On Madame de Staël): "This woman teaches people to
think who never took to it, or have forgotten how."—(On
Chateaubriand, one of whose relations had just been shot):
"He will write a few pathetic pages and read them aloud in
the faubourg Saint-Germain; pretty women will shed tears,
and that will console him."—(On Abbé Delille): "He is wit
in its dotage."—(On Pasquier and Molé): "I make the most
of one, and made the other."—Madame de Rémusat, II., 389,
391, 394, 399, 402; III., 67.]
1165 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 281, 342: "It pained me to write official
statements under his dictation, of which each was an
imposture." He always answered: "My dear sir, you are a
simpleton—you understand nothing!"—Madame de
Rémusat, II., 205, 209.]

1166 (return)
[ See especially the campaign bulletins for 1807, so insulting
to the king and queen of Prussia, but, owing to that fact, so
well calculated to excite the contemptuous laughter and jeers
of the soldiers.]
1167 (return)
[ In "La Correspondance de Napoleon," published in thirty-
two volumes, the letters are arranged under dates.—In his
'"Correspondance avec Eugène, vice-roi d'Italie," they are
arranged under chapters; also with Joseph, King of Naples
and afterwards King of Spain. It is easy to select other
chapters not less instructive: one on foreign affairs (letters to
M. de Champagny, M de Talleyrand, and M. de Bassano);
another on the finances (letters to M. Gaudin and to M.
Mollien); another on the navy (letters to Admiral Decrès);
another on military administration (letters to General
Clarke); another on the affairs of the Church (letters to M.
Portalis and to M. Bigot de Préameneu); another on the
Police (letters to Fouché), etc.—Finally, by dividing and
distributing his letters according as they relate to this or that
grand enterprise, especially to this or that military campaign,
a third classification could be made.—In this way we can
form a concept of the vastness of his positive knowledge,
also of the scope of his intellect and talents. Cf. especially
the following letters to Prince Eugène, June II, 1806 (on the
supplies and expenses of the Italian army); June 1st and
18th, 1806 (on the occupation of Dalmatia, and on the
military situation, offensive and defensive). To Gen. Dejean,
April 28, 1806 (on the war supplies); June 27, 1806 (on the
fortifications of Peschiera) July 20, 1806 (on the
fortifications of Wesel and of Juliers).—"Mes souvenirs sur
Napoleon", p. 353 by the Count Chaptal: "One day, the
Emperor said to me that he would like to organize a military
school at Fontainebleau; he then explained to me the
principal features of the establishment, and ordered me to
draw up the necessary articles and bring them to him the
next day. I worked all night and they were ready at the
appointed hour. He read them over and pronounced them
correct, but not complete. He bade me take a seat and then
dictated to me for two or three hours a plan which consisted
of five hundred and seventeen articles. Nothing more
perfect, in my opinion, ever issued from a man's brain.—At
another time, the Empress Josephine was to take the waters
at Aix-la-Chapelle, and the Emperor summoned me. 'The
Empress,' said he, 'is to leave to-morrow morning. She is a
good-natured, easy-going woman and must have her route
and behavior marked out for her. Write it down.' He then
dictated instructions to me on twenty-one large sheets of
paper, in which everything she was to say and to do was

designated, even the questions and replies she was to make
to the authorities on the way."]
1168 (return)
[ One French league equals approximately 4 km. 70,000
square leagues then equal 1,120,000 km.2, or 400,000
square miles or 11% of the United States but 5 times the size
of Great Britain. (SR.)]
1169 (return)
[ Cf. in the "Correspondance" the letters dated at
Schoenbrunn near Vienna, during August and September,
1809, and especially: the great number of letters and orders
relating to the English expeditions to Walcheren; the letters
to chief-judge Régnier and to the arch-chancellor
Cambacérès on expropriations for public benefit (Aug. 21,
Sept. 7 and 29); the letters and orders to M. de Champagny
to treat with Austria (Aug. 19, and Sept. 10, 15, 18, 22, and
23); the letters to Admirable Decrès, to despatch naval
expeditions to the colonies (Aug.17 and Sept. 26); the letter
to Mollien on the budget of expenditure (Aug. 8); the letter
to Clarke on the statement of guns in store throughout the
empire (Sept. 14). Other letters, ordering the preparation of
two treatises on military art (Oct. 1), two works on the
history and encroachments of the Holy See (Oct. 3),
prohibiting conferences at Saint-Sulpice (Sept. 15), and
forbidding priests to preach outside the churches (Sept. 24).
—From Schoenbrunn, he watches the details of public
works in France and Italy; for instance, the letters to M. le
Montalivet (Sept.30), to send an auditor post to Parma, to
have a dyke repaired at once, and (Oct. 8) to hasten the
building of several bridges and quays at Lyons.]
1170 (return)
[ He says himself; "I always transpose my theme in many
ways."]
1171 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 117, 120. "1 heard M. de
Talleyrand exclaim one day, some what out of humor, 'This
devil of a man misleads you in all directions. Even his
passions escape you, for he finds some way to counterfeit
them, although they really exist.'"—For example,
immediately prior to the violent confrontation with Lord
Whitworth, which was to put an end to the treaty of Amiens,
he was chatting and amusing himself with the women and
the infant Napoleon, his nephew, in the gayest and most
unconcerned manner: "He is suddenly told that the company
had assembled. His countenance changes like that of an
actor when the scene shifts. He seems to turn pale at will and
his features contract"; he rises, steps up precipitately to the
English ambassador, and fulminates for two hours before
two hundred persons. (Hansard's Parliamentary History, vol.

XXVI, dispatches of Lord Whitworth, pp. 1798, 1302,
1310.)—"He often observes that the politician should
calculate every advantage that could be gained by his
defects." One day, after an explosion he says to Abbé de
Pradt: "You thought me angry! you are mistaken. Anger with
me never mounts higher than here (pointing to his neck)."]
1172 (return)
[ Roederer, III. (The first days of Brumaire, year VIII.)]
1173 (return)
[ Bourrienne, III., 114.]
1174 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 228. (Conversation with Bourrienne in the
park at Passeriano.)]
1175 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 331. (Written down by Bourrienne the same
evening.)]
1176 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 274.—De Ségur, II., 459.
(Napoleon's own words on the eve of the battle of
Austerlitz): "Yes, if I had taken Acre, I would have assumed
the turban, I would have put the army in loose breeches; I
would no longer have exposed it, except at the last
extremity; I would have made it my sacred battalion, my
immortals. It is with Arabs, Greeks, and Armenians that I
would have ended the war against the Turks. Instead of one
battle in Moravia I would have gained a battle of Issus; I
would have made myself emperor of the East, and returned
to Paris by the way of Constantinople."—De Pradt, p.19
(Napoleon's own words at Mayence, September, 1804):
"Since two hundred years there is nothing more to do in
Europe; it is only in the East that things can be carried out
on a grand scale."]
1177 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 407.—Miot de Melito, II., 214 (a
few weeks after his coronation): "There will be no repose in
Europe until it is under one head, under an Emperor, whose
officers would be kings, who would distribute kingdoms to
his lieutenants, who would make one of them King of Italy,
another King of Bavaria, here a landmann of Switzerland,
and here a stadtholder of Holland, etc."]
1178 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoleon I.," vol. XXX., 550, 558.
(Memoirs dictated by Napoleon at Saint Hélène.)—Miot de
Melito, II., 290.—D'Hausonvillc, "l'Église Romaine et le
Premier Empire, passim.— Mémorial." "Paris would
become the capital of the Christian world, and I would have
governed the religious world as well as the political world."]

1179 (return)
[ De Pradt, 23.]
1180 (return)
[ "Mémoires et Mémorial." "It was essential that Paris
should become the unique capital, not to be compared with
other capitals. The masterpieces of science and of art, the
museums, all that had illustrated past centuries, were to be
collected there. Napoleon regretted that he could not
transport St. Peter's to Paris; the meanness of Notre Dame
dissatisfied him."]
1181 (return)
[ Villemain, "Souvenir contemporaines," I., 175. Napoleon's
statement to M. de Narbonne early in March, 1812, and
repeated by him to Villemain an hour afterwards. The
wording is at second hand and merely a very good imitation,
while the ideas are substantially Napoleon's. Cf. his fantasies
about Italy and the Mediterranean, equally exaggerated
("Correspondence," XXX., 548), and an admirable
improvisation on Spain and the colonies at Bayonne.—De
Pradt. "Mémoires sur les revolutions d'Espagne," p.130:
"Therefore Napoleon talked, or rather poetised; he
Ossianized for a long time... like a man full of a sentiment
which oppressed him, in an animated, picturesque style, and
with the impetuosity, imagery, and originality which were
familiar to him,... on the vast throne of Mexico and Peru, on
the greatness of the sovereigns who should possess them.. ..
and on the results which these great foundations would have
on the universe. I had often heard him, but under no
circumstances had I ever heard him develop such a wealth
and compass of imagination. Whether it was the richness of
his subject, or whether his faculties had become excited by
the scene he conjured up, and all the chords of the
instrument vibrated at once, he was sublime."]
1182 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 541 (February 2, 1809): "I love power. But I
love it as an artist.... I love it as a musician loves his violin,
for the tones, chords, and harmonies he can get out of it."]

CHAPTER II. HIS IDEAS, PASSIONS AND
INTELLIGENCE.

I. Intense Passions.
Personality and character during the Italian Renaissance and
during the present time.—Intensity of the passions in
Bonaparte.—His excessive touchiness.—His immediate
violence.—His impatience, rapidity, and need of talking.
—His temperament, tension, and faults.

On taking a near view of the contemporaries of Dante and Michael
Angelo, we find that they differ from us more in character than in
intellect.1201 With us, three hundred years of police and of courts of justice,
of social discipline and peaceful habits, of hereditary civilization, have
diminished the force and violence of the passions natural to Man. In Italy, in
the Renaissance epoch, they were still intact; human emotions at that time
were keener and more profound than at the present day; the appetites were
ardent and more unbridled; man's will was more impetuous and more
tenacious; whatever motive inspired, whether pride, ambition, jealousy,
hatred, love, envy, or sensuality, the inward spring strained with an energy
and relaxed with a violence that has now disappeared. All these energies
reappear in this great survivor of the fifteenth century; in him the play of
the nervous machine is the same as with his Italian ancestors; never was
there, even with the Malatestas and the Borgias, a more sensitive and more
impulsive intellect, one capable of such electric shocks and explosions, in
which the roar and flashes of tempest lasted longer and of which the effects
were more irresistible. In his mind no idea remains speculative and pure;
none is a simple transcript of the real, or a simple picture of the possible;
each is an internal eruption, which suddenly and spontaneously spends itself
in action; each darts forth to its goal and would reach it without stopping
were it not kept back and restrained by force1202 Sometimes, the eruption is
so sudden, that the restraint does not come soon enough. One day, in
Egypt,1203 on entertaining a number of French ladies at dinner, he has one
of them, who was very pretty and whose husband he had just sent off to
France, placed alongside of him; suddenly, as if accidentally, he overturns a
pitcher of water on her, and, under the pretence of enabling her to rearrange
her wet dress, he leads her into another room where he remains with her a
long time, too long, while the other guests seated at the table wait quietly

and exchange glances. Another day, at Paris, toward the epoch of the
Concordat,1204 he says to Senator Volney: "France wants a religion." Volney
replies in a frank, sententious way, "France wants the Bourbons."
Whereupon he gives Volney a kick in the stomach and he falls unconscious;
on being moved to a friend's house, he remains there ill in bed for several
days.—No man is more irritable, so soon in a passion; and all the more
because he purposely gives way to his irritation; for, doing this just at the
right moment, and especially before witnesses, it strikes terror; it enables
him to extort concessions and maintain obedience. His explosions of anger,
half-calculated, half-involuntary, serve him quite as much as they relieve
him, in public as well as in private, with strangers as with intimates, before
constituted bodies, with the Pope, with cardinals, with ambassadors, with
Talleyrand, with Beugnot, with anybody that comes along,1205 whenever he
wishes to set an example or "keep the people around him on the alert." The
public and the army regard him as impassible; but, apart from the battles in
which he wears a mask of bronze, apart from the official ceremonies in
which he assumes a necessarily dignified air, impression and expression
with him are almost always confounded, the inward overflowing in the
outward, the action, like a blow, getting the better of him. At Saint Cloud,
caught by Josephine in the arms of another woman, he runs after the
unlucky interrupter in such a way that "she barely has time to escape";1206
and again, that evening, keeping up his fury so as to put her down
completely, "he treats her in the most outrageous manner, smashing every
piece of furniture that comes in his way." A little before the Empire,
Talleyrand, a great mystifier, tells Berthier that the First Consul wanted to
assume the title of king. Berthier, in eager haste, crosses the drawing-room
full of company, accosts the master of the house and, with a beaming smile,
"congratulates him."1207 At the word king, Bonaparte's eyes flash. Grasping
Berthier by the throat, he pushes him back against the wall, exclaiming,
"You fool! who told you to come here and stir up my bile in this way?
Another time don't come on such errands."—Such is the first impulse, the
instinctive action, to pounce on people and seize them by the throat; we
divine under each sentence, and on every page he writes, out-bursts and
assaults of this description, the physiognomy and intonation of a man who
rushes forward and knocks people down. Accordingly, when dictating in his
cabinet, "he strides up and down the room," and, "if excited," which is often
the case, "his language consists of violent imprecations, and even of oaths,

which are suppressed in what is written."1208 But these are not always
suppressed, for those who have seen the original minutes of his
correspondence on ecclesiastical affairs find dozens of them, the b..., the p...
and the swearwords of the coarsest kind.1209
Never was there such impatient touchiness. "When dressing himself,1210
he throws on the floor or into the fire any part of his attire which does not
suit him.... On gala-days and on grand ceremonial occasions his valets are
obliged to agree together when they shall seize the right moment to put
some thing on him... He tears off or breaks whatever causes him the
slightest discomfort, while the poor valet who has been the means of it
meets with a violent and positive proof of his anger. No thought was ever
more carried away by its own speed. "His handwriting, when he tries to
write, "is a mass of disconnected and undecipherable signs;1211 the words
lack one-half of their letters." On reading it over himself, he cannot tell
what it means. At last, he becomes almost incapable of producing a
handwritten letter, while his signature is a mere scrawl. He accordingly
dictates, but so fast that his secretaries can scarcely keep pace with him: on
their first attempt the perspiration flows freely and they succeed in noting
down only the half of what he says. Bourrienne, de Meneval, and Maret
invent a stenography of their own, for he never repeats any of his phrases;
so much the worse for the pen if it lags behind, and so much the better if a
volley of exclamations or of oaths gives it a chance to catch up.—Never did
speech flow and overflow in such torrents, often without either discretion or
prudence, even when the outburst is neither useful nor creditable the reason
is that both spirit and intellect are charged to excess subject to this inward
pressure the improvisator and polemic, under full headway,1212 take the
place of the man of business and the statesman.
"With him," says a good observer,1213 "talking is a prime necessity, and,
assuredly, among the prerogatives of high rank, he ranks first that of
speaking without interruption."
Even at the Council of State he allows himself to run on, forgetting the
business on hand; he starts off right and left with some digression or
demonstration, some invective or other, for two or three hours at a
stretch,1214 insisting over and over again, bent on convincing or prevailing,
and ending in demanding of the others if he is not right, "and, in this case,
never failing to find that all have yielded to the force of his arguments." On

reflection, he knows the value of an assent thus obtained, and, pointing to
his chair, he observes:
"It must be admitted that it is easy to be brilliant when one is in that
seat!"
Nevertheless he has enjoyed his intellectual exercise and given way to his
passion, which controls him far more than he controls it.
"My nerves are very irritable," he said of himself, "and when in this state
were my pulse not always regular I should risk going crazy."1215
The tension of accumulated impressions is often too great, and it ends in
a physical break-down. Strangely enough in so great a warrior and with
such a statesman, "it is not infrequent, when excited, to see him shed tears."
He who has looked upon thousands of dying men, and who has had
thousands of men slaughtered, "sobs," after Wagram and after Bautzen,1216
at the couch of a dying comrade. "I saw him," says his valet, "weep while
eating his breakfast, after coming from Marshal Lannes's bedside; big tears
rolled down his cheeks and fell on his plate." It is not alone the physical
sensation, the sight of a bleeding, mangled body, which thus moves him
acutely and deeply; for a word, a simple idea, stings and penetrates almost
as far. Before the emotion of Dandolo, who pleads for Venice his country,
which is sold to Austria, he is agitated and his eyes moisten.1217 Speaking
of the capitulation of Baylen, at a full meeting of the Council of State,1218
his voice trembles, and "he gives way to his grief, his eyes even filling with
tears." In 1806, setting out for the army and on taking leave of Josephine,
he has a nervous attack which is so severe as to bring on vomiting.1219 "We
had to make him sit down," says an eye-witness, "and swallow some orange
water; he shed tears, and this lasted a quarter of an hour." The same nervous
and stomachic crisis came on in 1808, on deciding on the divorce; he tosses
about a whole night, and laments like a woman; he melts, and embraces
Josephine; he is weaker than she is: "My poor Josephine, I can never leave
you!" Folding her in his arms, he declares that she shall not quit him; he
abandons himself wholly to the sensation of the moment; she must undress
at once, sleep alongside of him, and he weeps over her; "literally," she says,
"he soaked the bed with his tears."—Evidently, in such an organism,
however powerful the superimposed regulator, there is a risk of the
equilibrium being destroyed. He is aware of this, for he knows himself well;
he is afraid of his own nervous sensibility, the same as of an easily

frightened horse; at critical moments, at Berezina, he refuses to receive the
bad news which might excite this, and, on the informer's insisting on it, he
asks him again,1220 "Why, sir, do you want to disturb me?"—Nevertheless,
in spite of his precautions, he is twice taken unawares, at times when the
peril was alarming and of a new kind; he, so clear headed and so cool under
fire, the boldest of military heroes and the most audacious of political
adventurers, quails twice in a parliamentary storm and again in a popular
crisis. On the 18th of Brumaire, in the Corps Législatif, "he turned pale,
trembled, and seemed to lose his head at the shouts of outlawry.... they had
to drag him out.... they even thought for a moment that he was going to
faint."1221 After the abdication at Fontainebleau, on encountering the rage
and imprecations which greeted him in Provence, he seemed for some days
to be morally shattered; the animal instincts assert their supremacy; he is
afraid and makes no attempt at concealment.1222 After borrowing the
uniform of an Austrian colonel, the helmet of a Prussian quartermaster, and
the cloak of the Russian quartermaster, he still considers that he is not
sufficiently disguised. In the inn at Calade, "he starts and changes color at
the slightest noise"; the commissaries, who repeatedly enter his room, "find
him always in tears." "He wearies them with his anxieties and irresolution";
he says that the French government would like to have him assassinated on
the road, refuses to eat for fear of poison, and thinks that he might escape
by jumping out of the window. And yet he gives vent to his feelings and lets
his tongue run on about himself without stopping, concerning his past, his
character, unreservedly, indelicately, trivially; like a cynic and one who is
half-crazy; his ideas run loose and crowd each other like the anarchical
gatherings of a tumultuous mob; he does not recover his mastery of them
until he reaches Fréjus, the end of his journey, where he feels himself safe
and protected from any highway assault; then only do they return within
ordinary limits and fall back in regular line under the control of the
sovereign intellect which, after sinking for a time, revives and resumes its
ascendancy.—There is nothing in him so extraordinary as this almost
perpetual domination of the lucid, calculating reason; his willpower is still
more formidable than his intelligence; before it can obtain the mastery of
others it must be master at home. To measure its power, it does not suffice
to note its fascinations; to enumerate the millions of souls it captivates, to
estimate the vastness of the obstacles it overcomes: we must again, and
especially, represent to ourselves the energy and depth of the passions it

keeps in check and urges on like a team of prancing, rearing horses—it is
the driver who, bracing his arms, constantly restrains the almost
ungovernable steeds, who controls their excitement, who regulates their
bounds, who takes advantage even of their viciousness to guide his noisy
vehicle over precipices as it rushes on with thundering speed. If the pure
ideas of the reasoning brain thus maintain their daily supremacy it is due to
the vital flow which nourishes them; their roots are deep in his heart and
temperament, and those roots which give them their vigorous sap constitute
a primordial instinct more powerful than intellect, more powerful even than
his will, the instinct which leads him to center everything on himself, in
other words egoism.1223

II. Will and Egoism.
Bonaparte's dominant passion.—His lucid, calculating mind.
—Source and power of the Will.—Early evidences of an
active, absorbing egoism.—His education derived from the
lessons of things.—In Corsica.—In France during the
Revolution.—In Italy.—In Egypt.—His idea of Society and
of Right.—Maturing after the 18th of Brumaire.—His idea of
Man.—It conforms to his character

It is egoism, not a passive, but an active and intrusive egoism,
proportional to the energy and extension of his faculties developed by his
education and circumstances, exaggerated by his success and his
omnipotence to such a degree that a monstrous colossal I has been erected
in society. It expands unceasingly the circle of a tenacious and rapacious
grasp, which regards all resistance as offensive, which all independence
annoys, and which, on the boundless domain it assigns to itself, is intolerant
of anybody that does not become either an appendix or a tool.—The germ
of this absorbing personality is already apparent in the youth and even in
the infant.
"Character: dominating, imperious, and stubborn,"
says the record at Brienne.1224 And the notes of the Military Academy
add;1225
"Extremely inclined to egoism,"—"proud, ambitious, aspiring in all
directions, fond of solitude,"
undoubtedly because he is not master in a group of equals and is ill at
ease when he cannot rule.
"I lived apart from my comrades," he says at a later date.1226—"I had
selected a little corner in the playgrounds, where I used to go and sit down
and indulge my fancies. When my comrades were disposed to drive me out
of this corner I defended it with all my might. My instinct already told me
that my will should prevail against other wills, and that whatever pleased
me ought to belong to me."
Referring to his early years under the paternal roof at Corsica, he depicts
himself as a little mischievous savage, rebelling against every sort of
restraint, and without any conscience.1227 "I respected nothing and feared

nobody; I beat one and scratched another; I made everybody afraid of me. I
beat my brother Joseph; I bit him and complained of him almost before he
knew what he was about." A clever trick, and one which he was not slow to
repeat. His talent for improvising useful falsehoods is innate; later on, at
maturity, he is proud of this; he makes it the index and measure of "political
superiority," and "delights in calling to mind one of his uncles who, in his
infancy, prognosticated to him that he would govern the world because he
was fond of lying."1228
Remark this observation of the uncles—it sums up the experiences of a
man of his time and of his country; it is what social life in Corsica
inculcated; morals and manners there adapted themselves to each other
through an unfailing connection. The moral law, indeed, is such because
similar customs prevail in all countries and at all times where the police is
powerless, where justice cannot be obtained, where public interests are in
the hands of whoever can lay hold of them, where private warfare is pitiless
and not repressed, where every man goes armed, where every sort of
weapon is fair, and where dissimulation, fraud, and trickery, as well as gun
or poniard, are allowed, which was the case in Corsica in the eighteenth
century, as in Italy in the fifteenth century.—Hence the early impressions of
Bonaparte similar to those of the Borgias and of Macchiavelli; hence, in his
case, that first stratum of half-thought which, later on, serves as the basis of
complete thought; hence, the whole foundation of his future mental edifice
and of the conceptions he subsequently entertains of human society.
Afterwards, on leaving the French schools and every time he returns to
them and spends any time in them, the same impressions, often renewed,
intensify in his mind the same final conclusion. In this country, report the
French commissioners,1229 "the people have no idea of principle in the
abstract," nor of social interest or justice. "Justice does not exist; one
hundred and thirty assassinations have occurred in ten years.... The
institution of juries has deprived the country of all the means for punishing
crime; never do the strongest proofs, the clearest evidence, lead a jury
composed of men of the same party, or of the same family as the accused, to
convict him; and, if the accused is of the opposite party, the juries likewise
acquit him, so as not to incur the risk of revenge, slow perhaps but always
sure."—"Public spirit is unknown." There is no social body, except any
number of small parties hostile to each other.... One is not a Corsican
without belonging to some family, and consequently attached to some party;

he who would serve none, would be detested by all.... All the leaders have
the same end in view, that of getting money no matter by what means, and
their first care is to surround themselves with creatures entirely devoted to
them and to whom they give all the offices.... The elections are held under
arms, and all with violence.... The victorious party uses its authority to
avenge itself on their opponents, and multiplies vexations and outrages... .
The leaders form aristocratic leagues with each other.... and mutually
tolerate abuses. They impose no assessment or collection (of taxes) to curry
favor with electors through party spirit and relationships.... Customs-duties
serve simply to compensate friends and relatives.... Salaries never reach
those for whom they are intended. The rural districts are uninhabitable for
lack of security. The peasants carry guns even when at the plow. One cannot
take a step without an escort; a detachment of five or six men is often sent
to carry a letter from one post-office to another."
Interpret this general statement by the thousands of facts of which it is
the summary; imagine these little daily occurrences narrated with all their
material accompaniments, and with sympathetic or angry comments by
interested neighbors, and we have the moral lessons taught to young
Bonaparte.1230 At table, the child has listened to the conversation of his
elders, and at a word uttered, for instance, by his uncle, or at a
physiognomic expression, a sign of approbation, a shrug of the shoulders,
he has divined that the ordinary march of society is not that of peace but of
war; he sees by what ruses one maintains one's-self, by what acts of
violence one makes ones way, by what sort of help one mounts upward.
Left to himself the rest of the day, to the nurse Ilaria, or to Saveria the
housekeeper, or to the common people amongst whom he strays at will, he
listens to the conversation of sailors or of shepherds assembled on the
public square, and their simple exclamations, their frank admiration of well-
planned ambuscades and lucky surprises, impress more profoundly on him,
often repeated with so much energy, the lessons which he has already
learned at home. These are the lessons taught by things. At this tender age
they sink deep, especially when the disposition is favorable, and in this case
the heart sanctions them beforehand, because education finds its
confederate in instinct. Accordingly, at the outbreak of the Revolution, on
revisiting Corsica, he takes life at once as he finds it there, a combat with
any sort of weapon, and, on this small arena, he acts unscrupulously, going
farther than anybody.1231 If he respects justice and law, it is only in words,

and even here ironically; in his eyes, law is a term of the code, justice a
book term, while might makes right.
A second blow of the coining-press gives another impression of the same
stamp on this character already so decided, while French anarchy forces
maxims into the mind of the young man, already traced in the child's mind
by Corsican anarchy; the lessons of things provided by a society going to
pieces are the same as those of a society which is not yet formed.—His
sharp eyes, at a very early period, see through the flourish of theory and the
parade of phrases; they detect the real foundation of the Revolution,
namely, the sovereignty of unbridled passions and the conquest of the
majority by the minority; conquering or conquered, a choice must be made
between these two extreme conditions; there is no middle course. After the
9th of Thermidor, the last veils are torn away, and the instincts of license
and domination, the ambitions of individuals, fully display themselves.
There is no concern for public interests or for the rights of the people; it is
clear that the rulers form a band, that France is their prey, and that they
intend to hold on to it for and against everybody, by every possible means,
including bayonets. Under this civil régime, a clean sweep of the broom at
the center makes it necessary to be on the side of numbers.—In the armies,
especially in the army of Italy, republican faith and patriotic abnegation,
since the territory became free, have given way to natural appetites and
military passions.1232 Barefoot, in rags, with four ounces of bread a day,
paid in assignats which are not accepted in the markets, both officers and
men desire above all things to be relieved of their misery; "the poor fellows,
after three years of longing on the summits of the Alps, reach the promised
land, and want to enjoy it."1233 Another spur consists in the pride which is
stimulated by the imagination and by success; add to this the necessity for
finding an outlet for their energy, the steam and high pressure of youth;
nearly all are very young men, who regard life, in Gallic or French fashion,
as a party of pleasure and as a duel. But to feel brave and to prove that one
is so, to face bullets for amusement and defiantly, to abandon a successful
adventure for a battle and a battle for a ball, to enjoy ones-self and take
risks to excess, without dissimulating, and with no other object than the
sensation of the moment,1234 to revel in excitement through emulation and
danger, is no longer self-devotion, but giving one's-self up to one's fancies;
and, for all who are not harebrained, to give one's-self up to one's fancies
means to make one's way, obtain promotion, pillage so as to become rich,

like Massena, and conquer so as to become powerful, like Bonaparte.—All
this is understood between the general and his army from the very first,1235
and, after one year's experience, the understanding is perfect. One moral is
derived from their common acts, vague in the army, precise in the general;
what the army only half sees, he sees clearly; if he urges his comrades on, it
is because they follow their own inclination. He simply has a start on them,
and is quicker to make up his mind that the world is a grand banquet, free to
the first-comer, but at which, to be well served, one must have long arms,
be the first to get helped, and let the rest take what is left.
So natural does this seem to him, he says so openly and to men who are
not his intimates; to Miot, a diplomat, and to Melzi a foreigner:
"Do you suppose, says he to them,1236 after the preliminaries of Leoben,
"that to make great men out of Directory lawyers, the Carnots' and the
Barras, I triumph in Italy? Do you suppose also that it is for the
establishment of a republic? What an idea! A republic of thirty million men!
With our customs, our vices, how is that possible? It is a delusion which the
French are infatuated with and which will vanish along with so many
others. What they want is glory, the gratification of vanity—they know
nothing about liberty. Look at the army! Our successes just obtained, our
triumphs have already brought out the true character of the French soldier. I
am all for him. Let the Directory deprive me of the command and it will see
if it is master. The nation needs a chief, one who is famous though his
exploits, and not theories of government, phrases and speeches by
ideologists, which Frenchmen do not comprehend.... As to your country,
Monsieur de Melzi, it has still fewer elements of republicanism than France,
and much less ceremony is essential with it than with any other... In other
respects, I have no idea of coming to terms so promptly with Austria. It is
not for my interest to make peace. You see what I am, what I can do in Italy.
If peace is brought about, if I am no longer at the head of this army which
has become attached to me, I must give up this power, this high position I
have reached, and go and pay court to lawyers in the Luxembourg. I should
not like to quit Italy for France except to play a part there similar to that
which I play here, and the time for that has not yet come—the pear is not
ripe."
To wait until the pear is ripe, but not to allow anybody else to gather it, is
the true motive of his political fealty and of his Jacobin proclamations: "A

party in favor of the Bourbons is raising its head; I have no desire to help it
along. One of these days I shall weaken the republican party, but I shall do
it for my own advantage and not for that of the old dynasty. Meanwhile, it is
necessary to march with the Republicans," along with the worst, and' the
scoundrels about to purge the Five Hundred, the Ancients, and the Directory
itself, and then re-establish in France the Reign of Terror.—In effect, he
contributes to the 18th of Fructidor, and, the blow struck, he explains very
clearly why he took part in it:
"Do not believe1237 I did it in conformity with the ideas entertained by
those with whom I acted. I did—not want a return of the Bourbons, and
especially if brought back by Moreau's army and by Pichegru... Finally, I
will not take the part of Monk, I will not play it, and I will not have others
play it.... As for myself, my dear Miot, I declare to you that I can no longer
obey; I have tasted command and I cannot give it up. My mind is made up.
If I cannot be master I will leave France."
There is no middle course for him between the two alter natives. On
returning to Paris he thinks of "overthrowing the Directory,1238 dissolving
the councils and of making himself dictator"; but, having satisfied himself
that there was but little chance of succeeding, "he postpones his design" and
falls back on the second course. "This is the only motive of his expedition
into Egypt."1239—That, in the actual condition of France and of Europe, the
expedition is opposed to public interests, that France deprives itself of its
best army and offers its best fleet to almost certain destruction, is of little
consequence provided, in this vast and gratuitous adventure, Bonaparte
finds the employment he wants, a large field of action and famous victories
which, like the blasts of a trumpet, will swell beyond the seas and renew his
prestige: in his eyes, the fleet, the army, France, and humanity exist only for
him and are created only for his service.—If, in confirmation of this
persuasion, another lesson in things is still necessary, it will be furnished by
Egypt. Here, absolute sovereign, free of any restraint, contending with an
inferior order of humanity, he acts the sultan and accustoms himself to
playing the part.1240 His last scruples towards the human species disappear;
"I became disgusted with Rousseau"; he is to say, later on, "After seeing the
Orient: the savage man is a dog,"1241 and, in the civilized man, the savage is
just beneath the skin; if the intellect has become somewhat polished, there
is no change in his instincts. A master is as necessary to one as to the other
—a magician who subjugates his imagination, disciplines him, keeps him

from biting without occasion, ties him up, cares for him, and takes him out
hunting. He is born to obey, does not deserve any better lot, and has no
other right.
Become consul and afterward emperor, he applies the theory on a grand
scale, and, in his hands, experience daily furnishes fresh verifications of the
theory. At his first nod the French prostrate themselves obediently, and there
remain, as in a natural position; the lower class, the peasants and the
soldiers, with animal fidelity, and the upper class, the dignitaries and the
functionaries, with Byzantine servility.—The republicans, on their side,
make no resistance; on the contrary, among these he has found his best
governing instruments—senators, deputies, state councilors, judges, and
administrators of every grade.1242 He has at once detected behind their
sermonizing on liberty and equality, their despotic instincts, their craving
for command, for leadership, even as subordinates; and, in addition to this,
with most of them, the appetite for money or for sensual pleasures. The
difference between the delegate of the Committee of Public Safety and the
minister, prefect, or subprefect under the Empire is small; it is the same
person in two costumes: at first in the carmagnole, and later in the
embroidered coat. If a rude, poor puritan, like Cambon or Baudot, refuses to
don the official uniform, if two or three Jacobin generals, like Lecourbe and
Delmas, grumble at the coronation parade, Napoleon, who knows their
mental grasp, regards them as ignoramuses, limited to and rigid inside a
fixed idea.—As to the cultivated and intelligent liberals of 1789, he
consigns them with a word to the place where they belong; they are
"ideologists"; in other words, their pretended knowledge is mere drawing-
room prejudice and the imagination of the study. "Lafayette is a political
ninny," the eternal "dupe of men and of things."1243 With Lafayette and
some others, one embarrassing detail remains namely:
* impartiality and generosity,
* constant care for the common good,
* respect for others,
* the authority of conscience,
* loyalty,
* and good faith.
In short, noble and pure motives.

Napoleon does not accept the denial thus given to his theory; when he
talks with people, he questions their moral nobleness. "General Dumas,"1244
said he, abruptly, to Mathieu Dumas, "you were one of the imbeciles who
believed in liberty?" "Yes, sire, and I was and am still one of that class."
"And you, like the rest, took part in the Revolution through ambition?" "No,
sire, I should have calculated badly, for I am now precisely where I stood in
1790."
"You were not sufficiently aware of the motives which prompted you;
you cannot be different from other people; it is all personal interest. Now,
take Massena. He has glory and honors enough; but he is not content. He
wants to be a prince, like Murat and like Bernadotte. He would risk being
shot to-morrow to be a prince. That is the incentive of Frenchmen."—
His system is based on this. The most competent witnesses, and those
who were most familiar with him certify to his fixed idea on this point.
"His opinions on men," writes M. de Metternich,1245 "centered on one
idea, which, unfortunately for him, had acquired in his mind the force of an
axiom; he was persuaded that no man who was induced to appear on the
public stage, or who was merely engaged in the active pursuits of life,
governed himself, or was governed, otherwise than by his interest."
According to him, Man is held through his egoistic passions, fear,
cupidity, sensuality, self-esteem, and emulation; these are the mainsprings
when he is not under excitement, when he reasons. Moreover, it is not
difficult to turn the brain of man; for he is imaginative, credulous, and
subject to being carried away; stimulate his pride or vanity, provide him
with an extreme and false opinion of himself and of his fellow-men, and
you can start him off head downward wherever you please.1246—None of
these motives is entitled to much respect, and beings thus fashioned form
the natural material for an absolute government, the mass of clay awaiting
the potter's hand to shape it. If parts of this mass are obdurate, the potter has
only to crush and pound them and mix them thoroughly.
Such is the final conception on which Napoleon has anchored himself,
and into which he sinks deeper and deeper, no matter how directly and
violently he may be contradicted by palpable facts. Nothing will dislodge
him; neither the stubborn energy of the English, nor the inflexible
gentleness of the Pope, nor the declared insurrection of the Spaniards, nor
the mute insurrection of the Germans, nor the resistance of Catholic

consciences, nor the gradual disaffection of the French; the reason is, that
his conception is imposed on him by his character;1247 he sees man as he
needs to see him.

III. Napoleon's Dominant Passion: Power.
His mastery of the will of others.—Degree of submission
required by him.—His mode of appreciating others and of
profiting by them.—Tone of command and of conversation.

We at last confront his dominant passion, the inward abyss into which
instinct, education, reflection, and theory have plunged him, and which is to
engulf the proud edifice of his fortune—I mean, his ambition. It is the prime
motor of his soul and the permanent substance of his will, so profound that
he no longer distinguishes between it and himself, and of which he is
sometimes unconscious.
"I," said he to Roederer,1248 "I have no ambition," and then, recollecting
himself, he adds, with his ordinary lucidity, "or, if I have any, it is so natural
to me, so innate, so intimately associated with my existence, that it is like
the blood which flows in my veins and the atmosphere I breathe."—
Still more profoundly, he likens it to that unconscious, savage, and
irresistible emotion which vibrates the soul from one end to the other, to
this universal thrill moving all living beings, animal or moral, to those keen
and terrible tremors which we call the passion of love.
"I have but one passion,1249 one mistress, and that is France. I sleep with
her. She has never been false to me. She lavishes her blood and treasures on
me. If I need 500,000 men, she gives them to me."
Let no one come between him and her. Let Joseph, in relation to the
coronation, abstain from claiming his place, even secondary and
prospective, in the new empire; let him not put forth his fraternal rights.1250
"It is to wound me in the most tender spot." This he does, and, "Nothing can
efface that from my souvenirs. It is as if he had told an impassioned lover
that he had slept with his mistress, or merely that he hoped to succeed with
her. My mistress is power. I have worked too hard to obtain her, to let her
be ravished from me, or even suffer anybody to covet her." This ambition,
as avid as it is jealous, which becomes exasperated at the very idea of a
rival, feels hampered by the mere idea of setting a limit to it; however vast
the acquired power, he would like to have it still more vast; on quitting the

most copious banquet, he still remains insatiate. On the day after the
coronation he said to Decrés:1251
"I come too late, there is no longer anything great to accomplish. I admit
that my career is brilliant and that I have made my way successfully. But
what a difference alongside of antiquity! Take Alexander! After having
conquered Asia, and proclaimed himself to the people as the son of Jupiter,
with the exception of Olympias, who knew what all this meant, and
Aristotle, and a few Athenian pedants, the entire Orient believed him. Very
well, should I now declare that I was the son of God Almighty, and
proclaim that I am going to worship him under this title, every market
woman would hoot at me as I walked along the streets. People nowadays
know too much. Nothing is left to do."
And yet, even on this secluded, elevated domain, and which twenty
centuries of civilization keeps inaccessible, he still encroaches, and to the
utmost, in a roundabout way, by laying his hand on the Church, and next on
the Pope; here, as elsewhere, he takes all he can get. Nothing in his eyes, is
more natural; he has a right to it, because he is the only capable one.
"My Italian people1252 must know me well enough not to forget that there
is more in my little finger than in all their brains put together."
Alongside of him, they are children, "minors," the French also, and
likewise the rest of mankind. A diplomat, who often saw him and studied
him under all as aspects, sums up his character in one conclusive phrase:
"He considered himself an isolated being in this world, made to govern
and direct all minds as he pleased."1253
Hence, whoever has anything to do with him, must abandon his
independence and become his tool of government.
"That terrible man," often exclaimed Decrés1254 "has subjugated us all!
He holds all our imaginations in his hands, now of steel and now of velvet,
but whether one or the other during the day nobody knows, and there is no
way to escape from them whatever they seize on they never let go!"
Independence of any kind, even eventual and merely possible, puts him
in a bad mood; intellectual or moral superiority is of this order, and he
gradually gets rid of it;1255 toward the end he no longer tolerates alongside
of him any but subject or captive spirits. His principal servants are
machines or fanatics, a devout worshipper, like Maret, a gendarme, like

Savary,1256 ready to do his bidding. From the outset, he has reduced his
ministers to the condition of clerks; for he is administrator as well as ruler,
and in each department he watches details as closely as the entire mass.
Accordingly, he requires simply for head of departments active pen pushers,
mute executors, docile and special hands, no need for honest and
independent advisers.
"I should not know what to do with them," he said, "if they were not to a
certain extent mediocre in mind and character."
As to his generals, he admits himself that "he likes to award fame only to
those who cannot stand it." In any event, "he must be sole master in making
or unmaking reputations," according to his personal requirements. Too
brilliant a soldier would become too important; a subordinate should never
be tempted to be less submissive. To this end he studies what he will omit in
his bulletins, what alterations and what changes shall be made in them.
"It is convenient to keep silent about certain victories, or to convert the
defeat of this or that marshal into a success. Sometimes a general learns by
a bulletin of an action that he was never in and of a speech that he never
made."
If he complains, he is notified to keep still, or by way of recompense he
is allowed to pillage, levy contributions, and enrich himself. On becoming
duke or hereditary prince, with half a million or a million of revenue from
his estate, he is not less held in subjection, for the creator has taken
precautions against his own creations.
"There are men,"1257 he said, "who I have made independent, but I know
well where to find them and keep them from being ungrateful."
In effect, if he has endowed them magnificently it is with domains
assigned to them in conquered countries, which insures their fortune being
his fortune. Besides, in order that they may not enjoy any pecuniary
stability, he expressly encourages them and all his grand dignitaries to make
extravagant outlays; thus, through their financial embarrassments be holds
them in a leash. "We have seen most of his marshals, constantly pressed by
their creditors, come to him for assistance, which he has given as he
fancied, or as he found it for his interest to attach some one to him."1258
Thus, beyond the universal ascendancy which his power and genius have
conferred on him, he craves a personal, supplementary, and irresistible hold
on everybody. Consequently,1259 "he carefully cultivates all the bad

passions.... he is glad to find the bad side in a man, so as to get him in his
power"; the thirst for money in Savary, the Jacobin defects of Fouché, the
vanity and sensuality of Cambacérès, the careless cynicism and "the easy
immorality" of Talleyrand, the "dry bluntness" of Duroc, the courtier-like
insipidity of Maret, "the silliness" of Berthier; he brings this out, diverts
himself with it, and profits by it. "Where he sees no vice, he encourages
weaknesses, and, in default of anything better, he provokes fear, so that he
may be ever and continually the strongest.. ..He dreads ties of affection, and
strives to alienate people from each other.... He sells his favors only by
arousing anxiety; he thinks that the best way to attach individuals to him is
to compromise them, and often, even, to ruin them in public opinion."—"If
Caulaincourt is compromised," said he, after the murder of the Duc
d'Enghien, "it is no great matter, he will serve me all the better."
Once that the creature is in his clutches, let him not imagine that he can
escape or withhold anything of his own accord; all that he has belongs to
him. Zeal and success in the performance of duty, punctual obedience
within limits previously designated, is not enough; behind the functionary
he claims the man. "All that may well be," he replies, to whatever may be
said in praise of him,1260 "but he does not belong to me as I would like." It
is devotion which he exacts, and, by devotion, he means the irrevocable and
complete surrender "of the entire person, in all his sentiments and
opinions." According to him, writes a witness, "one must abandon every old
habit, even the most trifling, and be governed by one thought alone, that of
his will and interests."1261 For greater security, his servitors ought to
extinguish in themselves the critical sense. "What he fears the most is that,
close to him or far off, the faculty of judging should be applied or even
preserved."
"His idea is a marble groove," out of which no mind should diverge.1262
Especially as no two minds could think of diverging at the same time, and
on the same side, their concurrence, even when passive, their common
understanding, even if kept to themselves, their whispers, almost inaudible,
constitute a league, a faction, and, if they are functionaries, "a conspiracy."
On his return from Spain he declares, with a terrible explosion of wrath and
threats,1263 "that the ministers and high dignitaries whom he has created
must stop expressing their opinions and thoughts freely, that they cannot be
otherwise than his organs, that treason has already begun when they begin
to doubt, and that it is under full headway when, from doubt, they proceed

to dissent." If, against his constant encroachments, they strive to preserve a
last refuge, if they refuse to abandon their conscience to him, their faith as
Catholics or their honor as honest men, he is surprised and gets irritated. In
reply to the Bishop of Ghent, who, in the most respectful manner, excuses
himself for not taking a second oath that is against his conscience, he rudely
turns his back, and says, "Very well, sir, your conscience is a
blockhead!"1264 Portalis, director of the publishing office,1265 having
received a papal brief from his cousin, the Abbé d'Astros, respected a
confidential communication; he simply recommended his cousin to keep
this document secret, and declared that, if it were made public, he would
prohibit its circulation; by way of extra precaution he notified the prefect of
police. But he did not specially denounce his cousin, have the man arrested
and the document seized. On the strength of this, the Emperor, in full
council of state, apostrophizes him to his face, and, "with one of those looks
which go straight through one,"1266 declares that he has committed "the
vilest of perfidies"; he bestows on him for half an hour a hailstorm of
reproaches and insults, and then orders him out of the room as if a lackey
who had been guilty of a theft. Whether he keeps within his function or not,
the functionary must be content to do whatever is demanded of him, and
readily anticipate every commission. If his scruples arrest him, if he alleges
personal obligations, if he had rather not fail in delicacy, or even in
common loyalty, he incurs the risk of offending or losing the favor of the
master, which is the case with M. de Rémusat,1267 who is unwilling to
become his spy, reporter, and denunciator for the Faubourg Saint-Germain,
who does not offer, at Vienna, to pump out of Madame d'André the address
of her husband so that M. d'André may be taken and immediately shot.
Savary, who was the negotiator for his being given up, kept constantly
telling M. de Rémusat, "You are going against your interest—I must say
that I do not comprehend you!" And yet Savary, himself minister of the
police, executor of most important services, head manager of the murder of
the Duc d'Enghien and of the ambuscade at Bayonne, counterfeiter of
Austrian bank-notes for the campaign of 1809 and of Russian banknotes for
that of 1812,1268 Savary ends in getting weary; he is charged with too many
dirty jobs; however hardened his conscience it has a tender spot; he
discovers at last that he has scruples. It is with great repugnance that, in
February, 1814, he executes the order to have a small infernal machine
prepared, moving by clock-work, so as to blow up the Bourbons on their

return into France.1269 "Ah," said he, giving himself a blow on the forehead,
"it must be admitted that the Emperor is sometimes hard to serve!"
If he exacts so much from the human creature, it is because, in playing
the game he has to play, he must absorb everything; in the situation in
which he has placed himself, caution is unnecessary. "Is a statesman," said
he, "made to have feeling? Is he not wholly an eccentric personage, always
alone by himself, he on one side and the world on the other?"1270
In this duel without truce or mercy, people interest him only whilst they
are useful to him; their value depends on what he can make out of them; his
sole business is to squeeze them, to extract to the last drop whatever is
available in them.
"I find very little satisfaction in useless sentiments," said he again,1271
"and Berthier is so mediocre that I do not know why I waste my time on
him. And yet when I am not set against him, I am not sure that I do not like
him."
He goes no further. According to him, this indifference is necessary in a
statesman. The glass he looks through is that of his own policy;1272 he must
take care that it does not magnify or diminish objects.—Therefore, outside
of explosions of nervous sensibility, "he has no consideration for men other
than that of a foreman for his workmen,"1273 or, more precisely, for his
tools; once the tool is worn out, little does he care whether it rusts away in a
corner or is cast aside on a heap of scrap-iron. "Portalis, Minister of
Justice,1274 enters his room one day with a downcast look and his eyes
filled with tears. 'What's the matter with you, Portalis?' inquired Napoleon,
'are you ill? 'No, sire, but very wretched. The poor Archbishop of Tours, my
old schoolmate...' 'Eh, well, what has happened to him?' 'Alas, sire, he has
just died.' 'What do I care? he was no longer good for anything.'" Owning
and making the most of men and of things, of bodies and of souls, using and
abusing them at discretion, even to exhaustion, without being responsible to
any one, he reaches that point after a few years where he can say as glibly
and more despotically than Louis XIV. himself,
"My armies, my fleets, my cardinals, my councils, my senate, my
populations, my empire."1275
Addressing army corps about to rush into battle:
"Soldiers, I need your lives, and you owe them to me."

He says to General Dorsenne and to the grenadiers of the guard:1276
"I hear that you complain that you want to return to Paris, to your
mistresses. Undeceive yourselves. I shall keep you under arms until you are
eighty. You were born to the bivouac, and you shall die there."
How he treats his brothers and relations who have become kings; how he
reins them in; how he applies the spur and the whip and makes them trot
and jump fences and ditches, may be found in his correspondence; every
stray impulse to take the lead, even when justified by an unforeseen
urgency and with the most evident good intention, is suppressed as a
deviation, is arrested with a brusque roughness which strains the loins and
weakens the knees of the delinquent. The amiable Prince Eugene, so
obedient and so loyal,1277 is thus warned:
"If you want orders or advice from His Majesty in the alteration of the
ceiling of your room you should wait till you get them; were Milan burning
and you asked orders for putting out the fire, you should let Milan burn
until you got them... His Majesty is displeased, and very much displeased,
with you; you must never attempt to do his work. Never does he like this,
and he will never forgive it."
This enables us to judge of his tone with subalterns. The French
battalions are refused admission into certain places in Holland:1278
"Announce to the King of Holland, that if his ministers have acted on
their own responsibility, I will have them arrested and all their heads cut
off."
He says to M. de Ségur, member of the Academy commission which had
just approved M. de Chateaubriand's discourse:1279
"You, and M. de Fontaines, as state councillor and grand master, I ought
to put in Vincennes.... Tell the second class of the Institute that I will have
no political subjects treated at its meetings.....If it disobeys, I will break it
up like a bad club.
Even when not angry or scolding,1280 when the claws are drawn in, one
feels the clutch. He says to Beugnot, whom he has just berated,
scandalously and unjustly,—conscious of having done him injustice and
with a view to produce an effect on the bystanders,—
"Well, you great imbecile, you have got back your brains?"

On this, Beugnot, tall as a drum-major, bows very low, while the smaller
man, raising his hand, seizes him by the ear, "a heady mark of favor," says
Beugnot, a sign of familiarity and of returning good humor. And better yet,
the master deigns to lecture Beugnot on his personal tastes, on his regrets,
on his wish to return to France: What would he like? To be his minister in
Paris? "Judging by what he saw of me the other day I should not be there
very long; I might die of worry before the end of the month." He has
already killed Portalis, Cretet, and almost Treilhard, even though he had led
a hard life: he could no longer urinate, nor the others either. The same thing
would have happened to Beignot, if not worse....
"Stay here.... after which you will be old, or rather we all shall be old,
and I will send you to the Senate to drivel at your ease."
Evidently,1281 the nearer one is to his person the more disagreeable life
becomes.1282 "Admirably served, promptly obeyed to the minute, he still
delights in keeping everybody around him in terror concerning the details of
all that goes on in his palace." Has any difficult task been accomplished?
He expresses no thanks, never or scarcely ever praises, and, which happens
but once, in the case of M. de Champagny, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who
is praised for having finished the treaty of Vienna in one night, and with
unexpected advantages;1283 this time, the Emperor has thought aloud, is
taken by surprise; "ordinarily, he manifests approbation only by his
silence."—When M. de Rémusat, prefect of the palace, has arranged "one
of those magnificent fêtes in which all the arts minister to his enjoyment,"
economically, correctly, with splendor and success, his wife never asks her
husband1284 if the Emperor is satisfied, but whether he has scolded more or
less.
"His leading general principle, which he applies in every way, in great
things as well as in small ones, is that a man's zeal depends upon his
anxiety."
How insupportable the constraint he exercises, with what crushing
weight his absolutism bears down on the most tried devotion and on the
most pliable characters, with what excess he tramples on and wounds the
best dispositions, up to what point he represses and stifles the respiration of
the human being, he knows as well as anybody. He was heard to say,
"The lucky man is he who hides away from me in the depths of some
province."

And, another day, having asked M. de Ségur what people would say of
him after his death, the latter enlarged on the regrets which would be
universally expressed. "Not at all," replied the Emperor; and then, drawing
in his breath in a significant manner indicative of universal relief, he
replied,
"They'll say, 'Whew!'"1285

IV. His Bad Manners.
His bearings in Society.—His deportment toward Women.—His
disdain of Politeness.

There are very few monarchs, even absolute, who persistently, and from
morning to night, maintain a despotic attitude. Generally, and especially in
France, the sovereign makes two divisions of his time, one for business and
the other for social duties, and, in the latter case, while always head of the
State, he is also head of his house: for he welcomes visitors, entertains his
guests, and, that his guests may not be robots, he tries to put them at their
ease.—That was the case with Louis XIV.1286—polite to everybody, always
affable with men, and sometimes gracious, always courteous with women,
and some times gallant, carefully avoiding brusqueness, ostentation, and
sarcasms, never allowing himself to use an offensive word, never making
people feel their inferiority and dependence, but, on the contrary,
encouraging them to express opinions, and even to converse, tolerating in
conversation a semblance of equality, smiling at a repartee, playfully telling
a story—such was his drawing-room constitution. The drawing-room as
well as every human society needs one, and a liberal one; otherwise life
dies out. Accordingly, the observance of this constitution in by-gone society
is known by the phrase savoir-vivre, and, more rigidly than anybody else,
Louis XIV. submitted himself to this code of proprieties. Traditionally, and
through education, he had consideration for others, at least for the people
around him; his courtiers becoming his guests without ceasing to be his
subjects.
There is nothing of this sort with Napoleon. He preserves nothing of the
etiquette he borrows from the old court but its rigid discipline and its
pompous parade. "The ceremonial system," says an eyewitness, "was
carried out as if it had been regulated by the tap of a drum; everything was
done, in a certain sense, 'double-quick.'1287... This air of precipitation, this
constant anxiety which it inspires," puts an end to all comfort, all ease, all
entertainment, all agreeable intercourse; there is no common bond but that
of command and obedience. "The few individuals he singles out, Savary,
Duroc, Maret, keep silent and simply transmit orders.... We did not appear

to them, in doing what we were ordered to do, and we did not appear to
ourselves, other than veritable machines, all resembling, or but little short
of it, the elegant gilded arm-chairs with which the palaces of Saint-Cloud
and the Tuileries had just been embellished."
For a machine to work well it is important that the machinist should
overhaul it frequently, which this one never fails to do, especially after a
long absence. Whilst he is on his way from Tilsit, "everybody anxiously
examines his conscience to ascertain what he has done that this rigid master
will find fault with on his return. Whether spouse, family, or grand
dignitary, each is more or less disturbed; while the Empress, who knows
him better than any one, naively says, 'As the Emperor is so happy it is
certain that he will do a deal of scolding!'"1288 Actually, he has scarcely
arrived when he gives a rude and vigorous wrench of the bolt; and then,
"satisfied at having excited terror all around, he appears to have forgotten
what has passed and resumes the usual tenor of his life." "Through
calculation as well as from taste,1289 he never ceases to be a monarch";
hence, "a mute, frigid court.... more dismal than dignified; every face wears
an expression of uneasiness... a silence both dull and constrained." At
Fontainebleau, "amidst splendors and pleasures," there is no real enjoyment
nor anything agreeable, not even for himself. "I pity you," said M. de
Talleyrand to M. de Rémusat, "you have to amuse the unamusable." At the
theatre he is abstracted or yawns. Applause is prohibited; the court, sitting
out "the file of eternal tragedies, is mortally bored.... the young ladies fall
asleep, people leave the theatre, gloomy and discontented."—There is the
same constraint in the drawing-room. "He did not know how to appear at
ease, and I believe that he never wanted anybody else to be so, afraid of the
slightest approach to familiarity, and inspiring each with a fear of saying
something offensive to his neighbor before witnesses.... During the
quadrille, he moves around amongst the rows of ladies, addressing them
with some trifling or disagreeable remark," and never does he accost them
otherwise than "awkwardly and ill at his ease." At bottom, he distrusts them
and is ill-disposed toward them.1290 It is because "the power they have
acquired in society seems to him an intolerable usurpation.—"Never did he
utter to a woman a graceful or even a well-turned compliment, although the
effort to find one was often apparent on his face and in the tone of his
voice.... He talks to them only of their toilet, of which he declares himself a
severe and minute judge, and on which he indulges in not very delicate

jests; or again, on the number of their children, demanding of them in rude
language whether they nurse them themselves; or again, lecturing them on
their social relations."1291 Hence, "there is not one who does not rejoice
when he moves off."1292 He would often amuse himself by putting them out
of countenance, scandalizing and bantering them to their faces, driving
them into a corner the same as a colonel worries his canteen women. "Yes,
ladies, you furnish the good people of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with
something to talk about. It is said, Madame A..., that you are intimate with
Monsieur B..., and you Madame C...., with Monsieur D." On any intrigue
chancing to appear in the police reports, "he loses no time in informing the
husband of what is going on."—He is no less indiscreet in relation to his
own affairs;1293 when it is over he divulges the fact and gives the name;
furthermore, he informs Josephine in detail and will not listen to any
reproach: "I have a right to answer all your objections with an eternal I!"
This term, indeed, answers to everything, and he explains it by adding: "I
stand apart from other men. I accept nobody's conditions," nor any species
of obligation, no code whatever, not even the common code of outward
civility, which, diminishing or dissimulating primitive brutality, allows men
to associate together without clashing. He does not comprehend it, and he
repudiates it. "I have little liking,"1294 he says, "for that vague, leveling
word propriety (convenances), which you people fling out every chance you
get. It is an invention of fools who want to pass for clever men; a kind of
social muzzle which annoys the strong and is useful only to the mediocre...
Ah, good taste! Another classic expression which I do not accept." "It is
your personal enemy"; says Talleyrand to him, one day, "if you could have
shot it away with bullets, it would have disappeared long ago!"—It is
because good taste is the highest attainment of civilization, the innermost
vestment which drapes human nudity, which best fits the person, the last
garment retained after the others have been cast off, and which delicate
tissue continues to hamper Napoleon; he throws it off instinctively, because
it interferes with his natural behavior, with the uncurbed, dominating,
savage ways of the vanquisher who knocks down his adversary and treats
him as he pleases.

V. His Policy.
His tone and bearing towards Sovereigns.—His Policy.—His
means and ends.—After Sovereigns he sets populations
against him.—Final opinion of Europe.

Such behavior render social intercourse impossible, especially among the
independent and armed personages known as nations or States. This is why
they are outlawed in politics and in diplomacy and every head of a State or
representative of a country, carefully and on principle, abstains from them,
at least with those on his own level. He is bound to treat these as his equals,
humor them, and, accordingly, not to give way to the irritation of the
moment or to personal feeling; in short, to exercise self-control and
measure his words. To this is due the tone of manifestos, protocols,
dispatches, and other public documents the formal language of legations, so
cold, dry, and elaborated, those expressions purposely attenuated and
smoothed down, those long phrases apparently spun out mechanically and
always after the same pattern, a sort of soft wadding or international buffer
interposed between contestants to lessen the shocks of collision. The
reciprocal irritations between States are already too great; there are ever too
many unavoidable and regrettable encounters, too many causes of conflict,
the consequences of which are too serious; it is unnecessary to add to the
wounds of interest the wounds of imagination and of pride; and above all, it
is unnecessary to amplify these without reason, at the risk of increasing the
obstacles of to-day and the resentments of to-morrow.—With Napoleon it is
just the opposite: his attitude, even at peaceful interviews, remains
aggressive and militant; purposely or in-voluntarily, he raises his hand and
the blow is felt to be coming, while, in the meantime, he insults. In his
correspondence with sovereigns, in his official proclamations, in his
deliberations with ambassadors, and even at public audiences,1295 he
provokes, threatens, and defies.1296 He treats his adversary with a lofty air,
insults him often to his face, and charges him with the most disgraceful
imputations.1297 He divulges the secrets of his private life, of his closet, and
of his bed; he defames or calumniates his ministers, his court, and his
wife;1298 he purposely stabs him in the most sensitive part. He tells one that

he is a dupe, a betrayed husband; another that he is an abettor of
assassination; he assumes the air of a judge condemning a criminal, or the
tone of a superior reprimanding an inferior, or, at best, that of a teacher
taking a scholar to task. With a smile of pity, he points out mistakes, weak
points, and incapacity, and shows him beforehand that he must be defeated.
On receiving the envoy of the Emperor Alexander at Wilna,1299 be says to
him:
"Russia does not want this war; none of the European powers are in favor
of it; England herself does not want it, for she foresees the harm it will do to
Russia, and even, perhaps, the greatest... I know as well as yourself, and
perhaps even better, how many troops you have. Your infantry in all
amounts to 120,000 men and your cavalry to about 60,000 or 70,000; I have
three times as many.... The Emperor Alexander is badly advised. How can
he tolerate such vile people around him—an Armfeld, an intriguing,
depraved, rascally fellow, a ruined debauchee, who is known only by his
crimes and who is the enemy of Russia; a Stein, driven from his country
like an outcast, a miscreant with a price on his head; a Bennigsen, who, it is
said, has some military talent, of which I know nothing, but whose hands
are steeped in blood?12100.... Let him surround himself with the Russians
and I will say nothing.... Have you no Russian gentlemen among you who
are certainly more attached to him than these mercenaries? Does he imagine
that they are fond of him personally? Let him put Armfeld in command in
Finland and I have nothing to say; but to have him about his person, for
shame!.... What a superb perspective opened out to the Emperor Alexander
at Tilsit, and especially at Erfurt!.... He has spoilt the finest reign Russia
ever saw.... How can he admit to his society such men as a Stein, an
Armfeld, a Vinzingerode? Say to the Emperor Alexander, that as he gathers
around him my personal enemies it means a desire to insult me personally,
and, consequently, that I must do the same to him. I will drive all his Baden,
Wurtemburg, and Weimar relations out of Germany. Let him provide a
refuge for them in Russia!"
Note what he means by—personal insult12101, how he intends to avenge
himself by reprisals of the worst kind, to what excess he carries his
interference, how he enters the cabinets of foreign sovereigns, forcibly
entering and breaking, to drive out their councilors and control their
meetings: like the Roman senate with an Antiochus or a Prusias, like an
English Resident with the King of Oude or of Lahore. With others as at

home, he cannot help but act as a master. The aspiration for universal
dominion is in his very nature; it may be modified, kept in check, but never
can it be completely stifled."12102
It declares itself on the organization of the Consulate. It explains why the
peace of Amiens could not last; apart from the diplomatic discussions and
behind his alleged grievances, his character, his exactions, his avowed
plans, and the use he intends making of his forces form the real and true
causes of the rupture. In comprehensible sometimes even in explicit terms,
he tells the English: Expel the Bourbons from your island and close the
mouths of your journalists. If this is against your constitution so much the
worse for it, or so much the worse for you. "There are general principles of
international law to which the (special) laws of states must give way."12103
Change your fundamental laws. Suppress the freedom of the press and the
right of asylum on your soil, the same as I have done. "I have a very poor
opinion of a government which is not strong enough to interdict things
objectionable to foreign governments."12104 As to mine, my interference
with my neighbors, my late acquisitions of territory, that does not concern
you: "I suppose that you want to talk about Piedmont and Switzerland?
These are trifles"12105 "Europe recognizes that Holland, Italy, and
Switzerland are at the disposition of France.12106 On the other hand, Spain
submits to me and through her I hold Portugal. Thus, from Amsterdam to
Bordeaux, from Lisbon to Cadiz and Genoa, from Leghorn to Naples and to
Tarentum, I can close every port to you; no treaty of commerce between us.
Any treaty that I might grant to you would be trifling: for each million of
merchandise that you would send into France a million of French
merchandise would be exported;12107 in other words, you would be subject
to an open or concealed continental blockade, which would cause you as
much distress in peace as if you were at war." My eyes are nevertheless
fixed on Egypt; "six thousand Frenchmen would now suffice to re-conquer
it";12108 forcibly, or otherwise, I shall return there; opportunities will not be
lacking, and I shall be on the watch for them; "sooner or later she will
belong to France, either through the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, or
through some arrangement with the Porte."12109 Evacuate Malta so that the
Mediterranean may become a French lake; I must rule on sea as on land,
and dispose of the Orient as of the Occident. In sum, "with my France,
England must naturally end in becoming simply an appendix: nature has
made her one of our islands, the same as Oleron or Corsica."12110 Naturally,

with such a perspective before them, the English keep Malta and
recommence the war. He has anticipated such an occurrence, and his
resolution is taken; at a glance, he perceives and measures the path this will
open to him; with his usual clear-sightedness he has comprehended, and he
announces that the English resistance "forces him to conquer Europe...."
12111—"The First Consul is only thirty-three and has thus far destroyed only
the second-class governments. Who knows how much time he will require
to again change the face of Europe and resurrect the Western Roman
Empire?"
To subjugate the Continent in order to form a coalition against England,
such, henceforth, are his means, which are as violent as the end in view,
while the means, like the end, are given by his character. Too imperious and
too impatient to wait or to manage others, he is incapable of yielding to
their will except through constraint, and his collaborators are to him nothing
more than subjects under the name of allies.—Later, at St. Helena, with his
indestructible imaginative energy and power of illusion, he plays on the
public with his humanitarian illusions.12112 But, as he himself avows, the
accomplishment of his retrospective dream required beforehand the entire
submission of all Europe; a liberal sovereign and pacificator, "a crowned
Washington, yes," he used to say, "but I could not reasonably attain this
point, except through a universal dictatorship, which I aimed at."12113 In
vain does common sense demonstrate to him that such an enterprise
inevitably rallies the Continent to the side of England, and that his means
divert him from the end. In vain is it repeatedly represented to him that he
needs one sure great ally on the Continent;12114 that to obtain this he must
conciliate Austria; that he must not drive her to despair, but rather win her
over and compensate her on the side of the Orient; place her in permanent
conflict with Russia, and attach her to the new French Empire by a
community of vital interests. In vain does he, after Tilsit, make a bargain of
this kind with Russia. This bargain cannot hold, because in this arrangement
Napoleon, as usual with him, always encroaching, threatening, and
attacking, wants to reduce Alexander to the role of a subordinate and a
dupe.12115 No clear-sighted witness can doubt this. In 1809, a diplomat
writes: "The French system, which is now triumphant, is directed against
the whole body of great states,"12116 not alone against England, Prussia, and
Austria, but against Russia, against every power capable of maintaining its

independence; for, if she remains independent, she may become hostile, and
as a precautionary step Napoleon crushes in her a probable enemy.
All the more so because this course once entered upon he cannot stop; at
the same time his character and the situation in which he has placed himself
impels him on while his past hurries him along to his future.12117 At the
moment of the rupture of the treaty of Amiens he is already so strong and so
aggressive that his neighbors are obliged, for their own security, to form an
alliance with England; this leads him to break down all the old monarchies
that are still intact, to conquer Naples, to mutilate Austria the first time, to
dismember and cut up Prussia, to mutilate Austria the second time, to
manufacture kingdoms for his brothers at Naples, in Holland and in
Westphalia.—At this same date, all the ports of his empire are closed
against the English, which leads him to close against them all the ports of
the Continent, to organize against them the continental blockade, to
proclaim against them an European crusade, to prevent the neutrality of
sovereigns like the Pope, of lukewarm subalterns like his brother Louis, of
doubtful collaborators or inadequate, like the Braganzas of Portugal and the
Bourbons of Spain, and therefore to get hold of Portugal, Spain, the
Pontifical States, and Holland, and next of the Hanseatic towns and the
duchy of Oldenburg, to extending along the entire coast, from the mouths of
the Cattaro and Trieste to Hamburg and Dantzic, his cordon of military
chiefs, prefects, and custom-houses, a sort of net of which he draws the
meshes tighter and tighter every day, even stifling not alone his home
consumer, but the producer and the merchant.12118—And all this sometimes
by a simple decree, with no other alleged motive than his interest, his
convenience, or his pleasure,12119 brusquely and arbitrarily, in violation of
international law, humanity, and hospitality. It would take volumes to
describe his abuses of power, the tissue of brutalities and knaveries,12120 the
oppression of the ally and despoiling of the vanquished, the military
brigandage exercised over populations in time of war, and by the systematic
exactions practiced on them in times of peace.12121
Accordingly, after 1808, these populations rise against him. He has so
deeply injured them in their interests, and hurt their feelings to such an
extent,12122 he has so trodden them down, ransomed, and forced them into
his service. He has destroyed, apart from French lives, so many Spanish,
Italian, Austrian, Prussian, Swiss, Bavarian, Saxon, and Dutch lives, he has
slain so many men as enemies, he has enlisted such numbers at home, and

slain so many under his own banners as auxiliaries, that nations are still
more hostile to him than sovereigns. Unquestionably, nobody can live
together with such a character; his genius is too vast, too baneful, and all
the more because it is so vast. War will last as long as he reigns; it is in vain
to reduce him, to confine him at home, to drive him back within the ancient
frontiers of France; no barrier will restrain him; no treaty will bind him;
peace with him will never be other than a truce; he will use it simply to
recover himself, and, as soon as he has done this, he will begin again;12123
he is in his very essence anti-social. The mind of Europe in this respect is
made up definitely and unshakably. One petty detail alone shows how
unanimous and profound this conviction was. On the 7th of March the news
reached Vienna that he had escaped from the island of Elba, without its
being yet known where he would land. M. de Metternich12124 brings the
news to the Emperor of Austria before eight o'clock in the morning, who
says to him, "Lose no time in finding the King of Prussia and the Emperor
of Russia, and tell them that I am ready to order my army to march at once
for France." At a quarter past eight M. de Metternich is with the Czar, and at
half-past eight, with the King of Prussia; both of them reply instantly in the
same manner. "At nine o'clock," says M. de Metternich, "I was back. At ten
o'clock aids flew in every direction countermanding army orders.... Thus
was war declared in less than an hour."

VI. Fundamental Defaults of his System.
Inward principle of his outward deportment.—He subordinates
the State to him instead of subordinating himself to the
State.—Effect of this.—His work merely a life-interest.
—It is ephemeral.—Injurious.—The number of lives it cost.
—The mutilation of France.—Vice of construction in his
European edifice.—Analogous vice in his French edifice.

Other heads of states have similarly passed their lives in doing violence
to mankind; but it was for something that was likely to last, and for a
national interest. What they deemed the public good was not a phantom of
the brain, a chimerical poem due to a caprice of the imagination, to personal
passions, to their own peculiar ambition and pride. Outside of themselves
and the coinage of their brain a real and substantial object of prime
importance existed, namely, the State, the great body of society, the vast
organism which lasts indefinitely through the long series of interlinked and
responsible generations. If they drew blood from the passing generation it
was for the benefit of coming generations, to preserve them from civil war
or from foreign domination.12125 They have acted generally like able
surgeons, if not through virtue, at least through dynastic sentiment and
family traditions; having practiced from father to son, they had acquired the
professional conscience; their first and only aim was the safety and health
of their patient. It is for this reason that they have not recklessly undertaken
extravagant, bloody, and over-risky operations; rarely have they given way
to temptation through a desire to display their skill, through the need of
dazzling and astonishing the world, through the novelty, keenness, and
success of their saws and scalpels. They felt that a longer and superior
existence to their own was imposed upon them; they looked beyond them-
selves as far as their sight would reach, and so took measures that the State
after them might do without them, live on intact, remain independent,
vigorous, and respected athwart the vicissitudes of European conflict and
the uncertain problems of coming history. Such, under the ancient régime,
was what were called reasons of state; these had prevailed in the councils of
princes for eight hundred years; along with unavoidable failures and after
temporary deviations, these had become for the time being and remained
the preponderating motive. Undoubtedly they excused or authorized many

breaches of faith, many outrages, and, to come to the word, many crimes;
but, in the political order of things, especially in the management of
external affairs, they furnished a governing and a salutary principle. Under
its constant influence thirty monarchs had labored, and it is thus that,
province after province, they had solidly and enduringly built up France, by
ways and means beyond the reach of individuals but available to the heads
of States.
Now, this principle is lacking with their improvised successor. On the
throne as in the camp, whether general, consul, or emperor, he remains the
military adventurer, and cares only for his own advancement. Owing to the
great defect in the education of both conscience and sentiments, instead of
subordinating himself to the State, he subordinates the State to him; he does
not look beyond his own brief physical existence to the nation which is to
survive him. Consequently, he sacrifices the future to the present, and his
work is not to be enduring. After him the deluge! Little does he care who
utters this terrible phrase; and worse still, he earnestly wishes, from the
bottom of his heart that everybody should utter it.
"My brother," said Joseph, in 1803,12126 "desires that the necessity of his
existence should be so strongly felt, and the benefit of this considered so
great, that nobody could look beyond it without shuddering. He knows, and
he feels it, that he reigns through this idea rather than through force or
gratitude. If to-morrow, or on any day, it could be said, 'Here is a tranquil,
established order of things, here is a known successor; Bonaparte might die
without fear of change or disturbance,' my brother would no longer think
himself secure.... Such is the principle which governs him."
In vain do years glide by, never does he think of putting France in a way
to subsist without him; on the contrary, he jeopardizes lasting acquisitions
by exaggerated annexations, and it is evident from the very first day that the
Empire will end with the Emperor. In 1805, the five per cents being at
eighty francs, his Minister of the Finances, Gaudin, observes to him that
this is a reasonable rate.12127 "No complaint can now be made, since these
funds are an annuity on Your Majesty's life."—"What do you mean by
that?"—"I mean that the Empire has become so great as to be ungovernable
without you."—"If my successor is a fool so much the worse for
him!"—"Yes, but so much the worse for France!" Two years later, M. de
Metternich, by way of a political summing up, expresses his general

opinion: "It is remarkable that Napoleon, constantly disturbing and
modifying the relations of all Europe, has not yet taken a single step toward
ensuring the maintenance of his successors."12128 In 1809, adds the same
diplomat:12129 "His death will be the signal for a new and frightful
upheaval; so many divided elements all tend to combine. Deposed
sovereigns will be recalled by former subjects; new princes will have new
crowns to defend. A veritable civil war will rage for half a century over the
vast empire of the continent the day when the arms of iron which held the
reins are turned into dust." In 1811, "everybody is convinced12130 that on
the disappearance of Napoleon, the master in whose hands all power is
concentrated, the first inevitable consequence will be a revolution." At
home, in France, at this same date, his own servitors begin to comprehend
that his empire is not merely a life-interest and will not last after he is gone,
but that the Empire is ephemeral and will not last during his life; for he is
constantly raising his edifice higher and higher, while all that his building
gains in elevation it loses in stability. "The Emperor is crazy," said Decrees
to Marmont,12131"completely crazy. He will ruin us all, numerous as we are,
and all will end in some frightful catastrophe." In effect, he is pushing
France on to the abyss, forcibly and by deceiving her, through a breach of
trust which willfully, and by his fault, grows worse and worse just as his
own interests, as he comprehends these, diverge from those of the public
from year to year.
At the treaty of Luneville and before the rupture of the peace of
Amiens,12132 this variance was already considerable. It becomes manifest at
the treaty of Presbourg and still more evident at the treaty of Tilsit. It is
glaring in 1808, after the deposition of the Spanish Bourbons; it becomes
scandalous and monstrous in 1812, when the war with Russia took place.
Napoleon himself admits that this war is against the interests of France and
yet he undertakes it.12133 Later, at St. Helena, he falls into a melting mood
over "the French people whom he loved so dearly."12134 The truth is, he
loves it as a rider loves his horse; as he makes it rear and prance and show
off its paces, when he flatters and caresses it; it is not for the advantage of
the animal but for his own purposes, on account of its usefulness to him; to
be spurred on until exhausted, to jump ditches growing wider and wider,
and leap fences growing higher and higher; one ditch more, and still another
fence, the last obstacle which seems to be the last, succeeded by others,
while, in any event, the horse remains forcibly and for ever, what it already

is, namely, a beast of burden and broken down.—For, on this Russian
expedition, instead of frightful disasters, let us imagine a brilliant success, a
victory at Smolensk equal to that of Friedland, a treaty of Moscow more
advantageous than that of Tilsit, and the Czar brought to heel. As a result
the Czar is probably strangled or dethroned, a patriotic insurrection will
take place in Russia as in Spain, two lasting wars, at the two extremities of
the Continent, against religious fanaticism, more irreconcilable than
positive interests, and against a scattered barbarism more indomitable than a
concentrated civilization. At best, a European empire secretly mined by
European resistance; an exterior France forcibly superposed on the enslaved
Continent;12135 French residents and commanders at St. Petersburg and
Riga as at Dantzic, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Barcelona, and Trieste.
Every able-bodied Frenchman that can be employed from Cadiz to Moscow
in maintaining and administering the conquest. All the able-bodied youth
annually seized by the conscription, and, if they have escaped this, seized
again by decrees.12136 The entire male population thus devoted to works of
constraint, nothing else in prospect for either the cultivated or the
uncultivated, no military or civil career other than a prolonged guard duty,
threatened and threatening, as soldier, customs-inspector, or gendarme, as
prefect, sub-prefect, or commissioner of police, that is to say, as subaltern
henchman and bully restraining subjects and raising contributions,
confiscating and burning merchandise, seizing grumblers, and making the
refractory toe the mark.12137 In 1810, one hundred and sixty thousand of the
refractory were already condemned by name, and, moreover, penalties were
imposed on their families to the amount of one hundred and seventy
millions of francs In 1811 and 1812 the roving columns which tracked
fugitives gathered sixty thousand of them, and drove them along the coast
from the Adour to the Niemen; on reaching the frontier, they were en-rolled
in the grand army; but they desert the very first month, they and their
chained companions, at the rate of four or five thousand a day.12138 Should
England be conquered, garrisons would have to be maintained there, and of
soldiers equally zealous. Such is the dark future which this system opens to
the French, even with the best of good luck. It turns out that the luck is bad,
and at the end of 1812 the grand army is freezing in the snow; Napoleon's
horse has let him tumble. Fortunately, the animal has simply foundered;
"His Majesty's health was never better";12139 nothing has happened to the
rider; he gets up on his legs, and what concerns him at this moment is not

the sufferings of his broken-down steed, but his own mishap; his reputation
as a horseman is compromised; the effect on the public, the hooting of the
audience, is what troubles him, the comedy of a perilous leap, announced
with such a flourish of trumpets and ending in such a disgraceful fall. On
reaching Warsaw12140 he says to himself, ten times over:
"There is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous."
The following year, at Dresden, he exposes still more foolishly, openly,
and nakedly his master passion, the motives which determine him, the
immensity and ferocity of his pitiless pride.
"What do they want of me?" said he to M. de Metternich.12141 "Do they
want me to dishonor myself? Never! I can die, but never will I yield an inch
of territory! Your sovereigns, born to the throne, may be beaten twenty
times over and yet return to their capitals: I cannot do this, because I am a
parvenu soldier. My domination will not survive the day when I shall have
ceased to be strong, and, consequently, feared."
In effect, his despotism in France is founded on his European
omnipotence; if he does not remain master of the Continent," he must settle
with the corps législatif.12142 Rather than descend to an inferior position,
rather than be a constitutional monarch, controlled by parliamentary
chambers, he plays double or quits, and will risk losing everything.
"I have seen your soldiers," says Metternich to him, "they are children.
When this army of boys is gone, what will you do then?"
At these words, which touch his heart, he grows pale, his features
contract, and his rage overcomes him; like a wounded man who has made a
false step and exposes himself, he says violently to Metternich:
"You are not a soldier You do not know the impulses of a soldier's breast!
I have grown up on the battle-field, and a man like me does not give a damn
for the lives of a million men!"12143
His imperial pipe-dreams has devoured many more. Between 1804 and
1815 he has had slaughtered 1,700,000 Frenchmen, born within the
boundaries of ancient France,12144 to which must be added, probably,
2,000,000 men born outside of these limits, and slain for him, under the title
of allies, or slain by him under the title of enemies. All that the poor,
enthusiastic, and credulous Gauls have gained by entrusting their public
welfare to him is two invasions; all that he bequeaths to them as a reward

for their devotion, after this prodigious waste of their blood and the blood
of others, is a France shorn of fifteen departments acquired by the republic,
deprived of Savoy, of the left bank of the Rhine and of Belgium, despoiled
of the northeast angle by which it completed its boundaries, fortified its
most vulnerable point, and, using the words of Vauban, "made its field
square," separated from 4,000,000 new Frenchmen which it had assimilated
after twenty years of life in common, and, worse still, thrown back within
the frontiers of 1789, alone, diminished in the midst of its aggrandized
neighbors, suspected by all Europe, and lastingly surrounded by a
threatening circle of distrust and rancor.
Such is the political work of Napoleon, the work of egoism served by
genius. In his European structure as in his French structure this sovereign
egoism has introduced a vice of construction. This fundamental vice is
manifest at the outset in the European edifice, and, at the expiration of
fifteen years, it brings about a sudden downfall: in the French edifice it is
equally serious but not so apparent; only at the end of half a century, or
even a whole century, is it to be made clearly visible; but its gradual and
slow effects will be equally pernicious and they are no less sure.

1201 (return)
[ See my "Philosophy of Art" for texts and facts, Part II., ch.
VI.—Other analogies, which are too long for development
here, may be found, especially in all that concerns the
imagination and love. "He was disposed to accept the
marvelous, presentiments, and even certain mysterious
communications between beings.... I have seen him excited
by the rustling of the wind, speak enthusiastically of the roar
of the sea, and sometimes inclined to believe in nocturnal
apparitions; in short, leaning to certain superstitions."
(Madame de Rémusat, I., 102, and III., 164.)—Meneval
(III., 114) notes his "crossing himself involuntarily on the
occurrence of some great danger, on the discovery of some
important fact." During the consulate, in the evening, in a
circle of ladies, he sometimes improvised and declaimed
tragic "tales," Italian fashion, quite worthy of the story-
tellers of the XVth and XVIth centuries. (Bourrienne, VI.,
387, gives one of his improvisations. Cf. Madame de
Rémusat, I., 102.)—As to love, his letters to Josephine
during the Italian campaign form one of the best examples
of Italian passion and "in most piquant contrast with the
temperate and graceful elegance of his predecessor M. de
Beauharnais." (Madame de Rémusat, I., 143).—His other
amours, simply physical, are too difficult to deal with; I have

gathered some details orally on this subject which are almost
from first hands and perfectly authentic. It is sufficient to
cite one text already published: "According to Josephine, he
had no moral principle whatever; did he not seduce his
sisters one after the other? "—"I am not a man like other
men, he said of himself, "and moral laws and those of
propriety do not apply to me." (Madame de Rémusat, I.,
204, 206.)—Note again (II., 350) his proposals to Corvisart.
—Such are everywhere the sentiments, customs, and
morality of the great Italian personages of about the year
1500.]
1202 (return)
[ De Pradt, "Histoire de l'ambassade dans le grand-duché de
Varsovie," p.96. "with the Emperor, desire springs out of his
imagination; his idea becomes passion the moment it comes
into his head."]
1203 (return)
[ Bourrienne, II., 298.—De Ségur, I., 426.]
1204 (return)
[ Bodin, "Recherches sur l'Anjou," II., 325.—"Souvenirs
d'un nonagénaire," by Besnard.—Sainte-Beuve, "Causeries
du Lundi," article on Volney.—Miot de Melito, I., 297. He
wanted to adopt Louis's son, and make him King of Italy.
Louis refused, alleging that this marked favor would give
new life to the reports spread about at one time in relation to
this child." Thereupon, Napoleon, exasperated, "seized
Prince Louis by the waist and pushed him violently out of
the room."—" Mémorial," Oct.10, 1816. Napoleon relates
that at the last conference of Campo-Fermio, to put an end to
the resistance of the Austrian plenipotentiary, he suddenly
arose, seized a set of porcelain on a stand near him and
dashed it to the floor, exclaiming, "Thus will I shatter your
monarchy before a month is over!" (Bourrienne questions
this story.)]
1205 (return)
[ Varnhagen von Ense, "Ausgewahlte Schriften," III., 77
(Public reception of July 22, 1810). Napoleon first speaks to
the Austrian Ambassador and next to the Russian
Ambassador with a constrained air, forcing himself to be
polite, in which he cannot persist. "Treating with I do not
know what unknown personage, he interrogated him,
reprimanded him, threatened him, and kept him for a
sufficiently long time in a state of painful dismay. Those
who stood near by and who could not help feeling a
dismayed, stated later that there had been nothing to provoke
such fury, that the Emperor had only sought an opportunity
to vent his ill-humor; that he did it purposely on some poor
devil so as to inspire fear in others and to put down in
advance any tendency to opposition. Cf. Beugnot,

"Mémoires," I., 380, 386, 387.—This mixture of anger and
calculation likewise explains his conduct at Sainte Helena
with Sir Hudson Lowe, his unbridled diatribes and insults
bestowed on the governor like so many slaps in the face. (W.
Forsyth, "History of the Captivity of Napoleon at Saint
Helena, from the letters and journals of Sir Hudson Lowe,"
III., 306.)]
1206 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, II., 46.]
1207 (return)
[ "Les Cahiers de Coignat." 191. "At Posen, already, I saw
him mount his horse in such a fury as to land on the other
side and then give his groom a cut of the whip."]
1208 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 222.]
1209 (return)
[ Especially the letters addressed to Cardinal Consalvi and to
the Préfet of Montenotte (I am indebted to M.
d'Haussonville for this information).—Besides, he is lavish
of the same expressions in conversation. On a tour through
Normandy, he sends for the bishop of Séez and thus publicly
addresses him: "Instead of merging the parties, you
distinguish between constitutionalists and non-
constitutionalists. Miserable fool! You are a poor subject,—
hand in your resignation at once!"—To the grand-vicars he
says, "Which of you governs your bishop—who is at best a
fool?"—As M. Legallois is pointed out to him, who had of
late been absent. "Fuck, where were you then?" "With my
family." "With a bishop who is merely a damned fool, why
are you so often away, etc.?" (D'Haussonville,VI., 176, and
Roederer, vol. III.)]
1210 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat—I., 101; II., 338.]
1211 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 224.—M. de Meneval, I., 112, 347; III., 120: "On
account of the extraordinary event of his marriage, he sent a
handwritten letter to his future father-in-law (the Emperor of
Austria). It was a grand affair for him. Finally, after a great
effort, he succeeded in penning a letter that was readable."—
Meneval, nevertheless, was obliged "to correct the defective
letters without letting the corrections be too plainly seen."]
1212 (return)
[ For example, at Bayonne and at Warsaw (De Pradt); the
outrageous and never-to-be forgotten scene which, on his
return from Spain, occurred with Talleyrand—("Souvenirs",
by PASQUIER Etienne-Dennis, duc, Chancelier de France.
Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. I., 357);—The gratuitous insult of
M. de Metternich, in 1813, the last word of their interview

("Souvenirs du feu duc de Broglie," I., 230).—Cf. his not
less gratuitous and hazardous confidential communications
to Miot de Melito, in 1797, and his five conversations with
Sir Hudson Lowe, immediately recorded by a witness,
Major Gorrequer. (W. Forsyth, I.,147, 161, 200.)]
1213 (return)
[ De Pradt, preface X]
1214 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozére, p. 7.—Mollien, "Mémoires," II., 222.
—"Souvenirs du feu duc de Broglie," I., 66, 69.]
1215 (return)
[ "Madame de Rémusat," I., 121: I have it from Corvisart
that the pulsations of his arteries are fewer than is usual with
men. He never experienced what is commonly called
giddiness." With him, the nervous apparatus is perfect in all
its functions, incomparable for receiving, recording,
registering, combining, and reflecting, but other organs
suffer a reaction and are very sensitive." (De Ségur, VI., 15
and 16, note of Drs. Yvan and Mestivier, his physicians.) "To
preserve the equilibrium it was necessary with him that the
skin should always fulfill its functions; as soon as the tissues
were affected by any moral or atmospheric cause....
irritation, cough, ischuria." Hence his need of frequent
prolonged and very hot baths. "The spasm was generally
shared by the stomach and the bladder. If in the stomach, he
had a nervous cough which exhausted his moral and
physical energies." Such was the case between the eve of the
battle of Moscow and the morning after his entry into
Moscow: "a constant dry cough, difficult and intermittent
breathing; the pulse sluggish, weak, and irregular; the urine
thick and sedimentary, drop by drop and painful; the lower
part of the legs and the feet extremely oedematous." Already,
in 1806, at Warsaw, "after violent convulsions in the
stomach," he declared to the Count de Loban, "that he bore
within him the germs of a premature death, and that he
would die of the same disease as his father's." (De Ségur,
VI., 82.) After the victory of Dresden, having eaten a ragout
containing garlic, he is seized with such violent gripings as
to make him think he was poisoned, and he makes a
retrograde movement, which causes the loss of Vandamme's
division, and, consequently, the ruin of 1813. "Souvenirs",
by Pasquier, Etienne-Dennis, duc, chancelier de France.
Librarie Plon, Paris 1893, (narrative of Daru, an eye-
witness.)—This susceptibility of the nerves and stomach is
hereditary with him and shows itself in early youth. "One
day, at Brienne, obliged to drop on his knees, as a
punishment, on the sill of the refectory, he is seized with
sudden vomiting and a violent nervous attack." De Segur, I.,
71.—It is well known that he died of a cancer in the

stomach, like his father Charles Bonaparte. His grandfather
Joseph Bonaparte, his uncle Fesch, his brother Lucien, and
his sister Caroline died of the same, or of an analogous
disease.]
1216 (return)
[ Meneval, I., 269. Constant, "Mémoires," V., 62. De Ségur,
VI., 114, 117.]
1217 (return)
[ Marshal Marmont, "Mémoires," I., 306. Bourrienne, II.,
119: "When off the political field he was sensitive, kind,
open to pity."]
1218 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozére, p.7. De Champagny, "Souvenirs,"
p.103. At first, the emotion was much stronger. "He had the
fatal news for nearly three hours; he had given vent to his
despair alone by himself. He summoned me.... plaintive
cries involuntarily escaped him."]
1219 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 121, 342; II., 50; III., 61, 294,
312.]
1220 (return)
[ De Ségur, V., 348.]
1221 (return)
[ Yung, II., 329, 331. (Narrated by Lucien, and report to
Louis XVIII.)]
1222 (return)
[ "Nouvelle relation de l'Itinéraire de Napoléon, de
Fontainebleau à l'Ile de l'Elbe," by Count Waldberg-
Truchsees, Prussian commissioner (1885), pp.22, 24, 25, 26,
30, 32, 34, 37.—The violent scenes, probably, of the
abdication and the attempt at Fontainebleau to poison
himself had already disturbed his balance. On reaching Elba,
he says to the Austrian commissioner, Koller, "As to you,
my dear general, I have let you see my bare rump."—Cf. in
"Madame de Rémusat," I., 108, one of his confessions to
Talleyrand: he crudely points out in himself the distance
between natural instinct and studied courage.—Here and
elsewhere, we obtain a glimpse of the actor and even of the
Italian buffoon; M. de Pradt called him "Jupiter Scapin."
Read his reflections before M. de Pradt, on his return from
Russia, in which he appears in the light of a comedian who,
having played badly and failed in his part, retires behind the
scenes, runs down the piece, and criticize the imperfections
of the audience. (De Pradt, p.219.)]
1223 (return)
[ The reader may find his comprehension of the author's
meaning strengthened by the following translation of a
passage from his essay on Jouffroy (Philosophes classiques

du XIXth Siécle," 3rd ed.): "What is a man, master of
himself? He is one who, dying with thirst, refrains from
swallowing a cooling draft, merely moistening his lips: who
insulted in public, remains calm in calculating his most
appropriate revenge; who in battle, his nerves excited by a
charge, plans a difficult maneuver, thinks it out, and writes it
down with a lead-pencil while balls are whistling around
him, and sends it to his colonels. In other words, it is a man
in whom the deliberate and abstract idea of the greatest good
is stronger than all other ideas and sensations. The
conception of the greatest good once attained, every dislike,
every species of indolence, every fear, every seduction,
every agitation, are found weak. The tendency which arise
from the idea of the greatest good constantly dominates all
others and determines all actions." TR.]
1224 (return)
[ Bourrienne, I. 21.]
1225 (return)
[ Yung, 1., 125.]
1226 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 267.—Yung, II., 109. On his
return to Corsica he takes upon himself the government of
the whole family. "Nobody could discuss with him, says his
brother Lucien; he took offence at the slightest observation
and got in a passion at the slightest resistance. Joseph (the
eldest) dared not even reply to his brother."]
1227 (return)
[ Mémorial, August 27-31, 1815.]
1228 (return)
[ "Madame de Rémusat," I., 105.—Never was there an abler
and more persevering sophist, more persuasive, more
eloquent, in order to make it appear that he was right. Hence
his dictations at St. Helena; his proclamations, messages,
and diplomatic correspondence; his ascendancy in talking as
great as through his arms, over his subject and over his
adversaries; also his posthumous ascendancy over posterity.
He is as great a lawyer as he is a captain and administrator.
The peculiarity of this disposition is never submitting to
truth, but always to speak or write with reference to an
audience, to plead a cause. Through this talent one creates
phantoms which dupe the audience; on the other hand, as the
author himself forms part of the audience, he ends in not
along leading others into error but likewise himself, which is
the case with Napoleon.]
1229 (return)
[ Yung, II., 111. (Report by Volney, Corsican commissioner,
1791.—II., 287.) (Mémorial, giving a true account of the
political and military state of Corsica in December, 1790.)—
II., 270. (Dispatch of the representative Lacombe Saint-

Michel, Sept. 10, 1793.)—Miot de Melito I.,131, and
following pages. (He is peace commissioner in Corsica in
1797 and 1801.)]
1230 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, II., 2. "The partisans of the First consul's
family... regarded me simply as the instrument of their
passions, of use only to rid them of their enemies, so as to
center all favors on their protégés."]
1231 (return)
[ Yung., I., 220. (Manifest of October—31, 1789.)—I., 265.
(Loan on the seminary funds obtained by force, June 23,
1790.)—I., 267, 269. (Arrest of M. de la Jaille and other
officers; plan for taking the citadel of Ajaccio.)—II., 115.
(letter to Paoli, February 17, 1792.) "Laws are like the
statues of certain divinities—veiled on certain occasions."—
II., 125. (Election of Bonaparte as lieutenant-colonel of a
battalion of volunteers, April 1, 1792.) The evening before
he had Murati, one of the three departmental commissioners,
carried off by an armed band from the house of the Peraldi,
his adversaries, where he lodged. Murati, seized unawares,
is brought back by force and locked up in Bonaparte's house,
who gravely says to him "I wanted you to be free, entirely at
liberty; you were not so with the Peraldi."—His Corsican
biographer (Nasica, "Mémoires sur la jeunesse et l'enfance
de Napoléon,") considers this a very praiseworthy action]
1232 (return)
[ Cf. on this point, the Memoirs of Marshal Marmont, I.,
180, 196; the Memoirs of Stendhal, on Napoleon; the Report
of d'Antraigues (Yung, III., 170, 171); the "Mercure
Britannique" of Mallet-Dupan, and the first chapter of "La
Chartreuse de Parme," by Stendhal.]
1233 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoléon," I. (Letter of Napoleon to
the Directory, April 26, 1796.)—Proclamation of the same
date: "You have made forced marches barefoot, bivouacked
without brandy, and often without bread."]
1234 (return)
[ Stendhal, "Vie de Napoléon," p. 151. "The commonest
officers were crazy with delight at having white linen and
fine new boots. All were fond of music; many walked a
league in the rain to secure a seat in the La Scala Theatre....
In the sad plight in which the army found itself before
Castiglione and Arcole, everybody, except the knowing
officers, was disposed to attempt the impossible so as not to
quit Italy."—"Marmont," I., 296: "We were all of us very
young,... all aglow with strength and health, and enthusiastic
for glory.... This variety of our occupations and pleasures,
this excessive employment of body and mind gave value to
existence, and made time pass with extraordinary rapidity."]

1235 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoléon," I. Proclamation of March
27, 1796: "Soldiers, you are naked and poorly fed. The
government is vastly indebted to you; it has nothing to give
you.... I am going to lead you to the most fertile plains in the
world; rich provinces, large cities will be in your power; you
will then obtain honor, glory, and wealth."—Proclamation of
April 26, 1796:—"Friends, I guarantee that conquest to
you!"—Cf. in Marmont's memoirs the way in which
Bonaparte plays the part of tempter in offering Marmont,
who refuses, an opportunity to rob a treasury chest.]
1236 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, I., 154. (June, 1797, in the gardens of
Montebello.) "Such are substantially the most remarkable
expressions in this long discourse which I have recorded and
preserved."]
1237 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, I. 184. (Conversation with Bonaparte,
November 18, 1797, at Turin.) "I remained an hour with the
general tête-à-tête. I shall relate the conversation exactly as
it occurred, according to my notes, made at the time."]
1238 (return)
[ Mathieu Dumas, "Mémoires," III., 156. "It is certain that
he thought of it from this moment and seriously studied the
obstacles, means, and chances of success." (Mathieu Dumas
cites the testimony of Desaix, who was engaged in the
enterprise): "It seems that all was ready, when Bonaparte
judged that things were not yet ripe, nor the means
sufficient."—Hence his departure. "He wanted to get out of
the way of the rule and caprices of these contemptible
dictators, while the latter wanted to get rid of him because
his military fame and influence in the army were obnoxious
to them."]
1239 (return)
[ Larevellière-Lepaux (one of the five directors on duty),
"Mémoires," II., 340. "All that is truly grand in this
enterprise, as well as all that is bold and extravagant, either
in its conception or execution, belongs wholly to Bonaparte.
The idea of it never occurred to the Directory nor to any of
its members.... His ambition and his pride could not endure
the alternative of no longer being prominent or of accepting
a post which, however eminent, would have always
subjected him to the orders of the Directory."]
1240 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 142. "Josephine laid great stress
on the Egyptian expedition as the cause of his change of
temper and of the daily despotism which made her suffer so
much."—"Mes souvenirs sur Napoleon," 325 by the count
Chaptal. (Bonaparte's own words to the poet Lemercier who

might have accompanied him to the Middle East and there
would have learned many things about human nature): "You
would have seen a country where the sovereign takes no
account of the lives of his subjects, and where the subject
himself takes no account of his own life. You would have
got rid of your philanthropic 'notions."]
1241 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 461 (Jan. 12, 1803)]
1242 (return)
[ Cf. "The Revolution," Vol. p. 773. (Note I., on the
situation, in 1806, of the Conventionalists who had survived
the revolution.) For instance, Fouché is minister; Jeanbon-
Saint-André, prefect; Drouet (de Varennes), sub-prefect;
Chépy (of Grenoble), commissary-general of the police at
Brest; 131 regicides are functionaries, among whom we find
twenty one prefects and forty-two magistrates.—
Occasionally, a chance document that has been preserved
allows one to catch "the man in the act." ("Bulletins
hebdomadaires de la censure, 1810 and 1814," published by
M. Thurot, in the Revue Critique, 1871): "Seizure of 240
copies of an indecent work printed for account of M. Palloy,
the author. This Palloy enjoyed some celebrity during the
Revolution, being one of the famous patriots of the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The constituent Assembly had
conceded to him the ownership of the site of the Bastille, of
which he distributed its stones among all the communes. He
is a bon vivant, who took it into his head to write out in a
very bad style the filthy story of his amours with a prostitute
of the Palais-Royal. He was quite willing that the book
should be seized on condition that he might retain a few
copies of his jovial production. He professes high admiration
for, and strong attachment to His Majesty's person, and
expresses his sentiments piquantly, in the style of 1789."]
1243 (return)
[ "Mémorial," June 12, 1816.]
1244 (return)
[ Mathieu Dumas, III., 363 (July 4, 1809, a few days before
Wagram).—Madame de Rémusat," I., 105: "I have never
heard him express any admiration or comprehension of a
noble action."—I., 179: On Augustus's clemency and his
saying, "Let us be friends, Cinna," the following is his
interpretation of it: "I understand this action simply as the
feint of a tyrant, and approve as calculation what I find
puerile as sentiment."—"Notes par le Comte Chaptal": "He
believed neither in virtue nor in probity, often calling these
two words nothing but abstractions; this is what rendered
him so distrustful and so immoral.... He never experienced a
generous sentiment; this is why he was so cold in company,

and why he never had a friend. He regarded men as so much
counterfeit coin or as mere instruments."]
1245 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, "Mémoires," I., 241.—"Madame de
Rémusat," I., 93: "That man has been so harmful (si
assommateur de toute vertu...) to all virtue."—Madame de
Staël, "Considerations sur la Revolution Française," 4th part,
ch. 18. (Napoleon's conduct with M. de Melzi, to destroy
him in public opinion in Milan, in 1805.)]
1246 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 106; II., 247, 336: "His means for
governing man were all derived from those which tend to
debase him. ... He tolerated virtue only when he could cover
it with ridicule."]
1247 (return)
[ Nearly all his false calculations are due to this defect,
combined with an excess of constructive imagination.—Cf.
De Pradt, p.94: "The Emperor is all system, all illusion, as
one cannot fail to be when one is all imagination. Whoever
has watched his course has noticed his creating for himself
an imaginary Spain, an imaginary Catholicism, an imaginary
England, an imaginary financial state, an imaginary
noblesse, and still more an imaginary France, and, in late
times, an imaginary congress."]
1248 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 495. (March 8, 1804.)]
1249 (return)
[ Ibid., III., 537 (February 11, 1809.)]
1250 (return)
[ Roederer, III., 514. (November 4, 1804.)]
1251 (return)
[ Marmont, II., 242.]
1252 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoléon," I. (Letter to Prince
Eugéne, April 14, 1806.)]
1253 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, I., 284.]
1254 (return)
[ Mollien, III., 427.]
1255 (return)
[ "Notes par le Comte Chaptal": During the Consulate, "his
opinion not being yet formed on many points, he allowed
discussion and it was then possible to enlighten him and
enforce an opinion once expressed in his presence. But, from
the moment that he possessed ideas of his own, either true or
false, on administrative subjects, he consulted no one;... he
treated everybody who differed from him in opinion

contemptuously, tried to make them appear ridiculous, and
often exclaimed, giving his forehead a slap, that here was an
instrument far more useful than the counsels of men who
were commonly supposed to be instructed and experienced...
For four years, he sought to gather around him the able men
of both parties. After this, the choice of his agents began to
be indifferent to him. Regarding himself as strong enough to
rule and carry on the administration himself, the talents and
character of those who stood in his way were discarded.
What he wanted was valets and not councillors... The
ministers were simply head-clerks of the bureaus. The
Council of State served only to give form to the decrees
emanating from him; he ruled even in petty details.
Everybody around him was timid and passive; his will was
regarded as that of an oracle and executed without
reflection.... Self-isolated from other men, having
concentrated in his own hands all powers and all action,
thoroughly convinced that another's light and experience
could be of no use to him, he thought that arms and hands
were all that he required."]
1256 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier
de France. In VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Vol I.
chap. IX. and X. pp. 225-268. (Admirable portraiture of his
principal agents, Cambacérès, Talleyrand, Maret, Cretet,
Real, etc.) Lacuée, director of the conscription, is a perfect
type of the imperial functionary. Having received the broad
ribbon of the Legion d'Honneur, he exclaimed, at the height
of his enthusiasm: "what will not France become under such
a man? To what degree of happiness and glory will it not
ascend, always provided the conscription furnishes him with
200,000 men a year! And, indeed, that will not be difficult,
considering the extent of the empire."—And likewise with
Merlin de Douai: "I never knew a man less endowed with
the sentiment of the just and the unjust; everything seems to
him right and good, as the consequences of a legal text. He
was even endowed with a kind of satanic smile which
involuntarily rose to his lips... every time the opportunity
occurred, when, in applying his odious science, he reached
the conclusion that severity is necessary or some
condemnation." The same with Defermon, in fiscal matters]
1257 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, II., 278; II., 175.]
1258 (return)
[ Ibid., III., 275, II., 45. (Apropos of Savary, his most
intimate agent.): "He is a man who must be constantly
corrupted."]
1259 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 109; II., 247; III., 366.]

1260 (return)
[ "Madame de Rémusat," II., 142, 167, 245. (Napoleon's
own words.) "If I ordered Savary to rid himself of his wife
and children, I am sure he would not hesitate."—Marmont,
II., 194: "We were at Vienna in 1809. Davoust said, speaking
of his own and Maret's devotion: "If the Emperor should say
to us both, 'My political interests require the destruction of
Paris without any one escaping,' Maret would keep the
secret, I am sure; but nevertheless he could not help letting it
be known by getting his own family out. I, rather than reveal
it I would leave my wife and children there." (These are
bravado expressions, wordy exaggerations, but significant.)]
1261 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, II., 379.]
1262 (return)
[ "Souvenirs du feu duc de Broglie," I., 230. (Words of
Maret, at Dresden, in 1813; he probably repeats one of
Napoleon's figures.)]
1263 (return)
[ Mollien, II., 9.]
1264 (return)
[ D'Haussonville, "L'Église Romaine et le premier
Empire,"VI., 190, and passim.]
1265 (return)
[ Ibid., III., 460-473.—Cf. on the same scene, "Souvenirs",
by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), Chancelier de France.
(He was both witness and actor.)]
1266 (return)
[ An expression of Cambacérès. M. de Lavalette, II., 154.]
1267 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, III. 184]
1268 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893.-, I.,
521. Details of the manufacture of counterfeit money, by
order of Savary, in an isolated building on the plain of
Montrouge.—Metternich, II., 358. (Words of Napoleon to
M. de Metternich): "I had 300 millions of banknotes of the
Bank of Vienna all ready and was going to flood you with
them." Ibid., Correspondence of M. de Metternich with M.
de Champagny on this subject (June, 1810).]
1269 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893.—Vol.
II. p. 196.]
1270 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, II., 335.]
1271 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 231.]

1272 (return)
[ Ibid., 335.]
1273 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, I., 284. "One of those to whom he
seemed the most attached was Duroc. 'He loves me the same
as a dog loves his master,' is the phrase he made use of in
speaking of him to me. He compared Berthier's sentiment
for his person to that of a child's nurse. Far from being
opposed to his theory of the motives influencing men these
sentiments were its natural consequence whenever he came
across sentiments to which he could not apply the theory of
calculation based on cold interest, he sought the cause of it
in a kind of instinct."]
1274 (return)
[ Beugnot, "Mémoires," II., 59.]
1275 (return)
[ "Mémorial." "If I had returned victorious from Moscow, I
would have brought the Pope not to regret temporal power: I
would have converted him into an idol... I would have
directed the religious world as well as the political world...
My councils would have represented Christianity, and the
Pope would have only been president of them."]
1276 (return)
[ De Ségur, III., 312. (In Spain, 1809.)]
1277 (return)
[ "Mémoires du Prince Eugène." (Letters of Napoleon,
August, 1806.)]
1278 (return)
[ Letter of Napoleon to Fouché, March 3, 1810. (Left out in
the "Correspondance de Napoléon I.," and published by M.
Thiers in "Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire," XII., p.
115.)]
1279 (return)
[ De Ségur, III., 459.]
1280 (return)
[ Words of Napoleon to Marmont, who, after three months in
the hospital, returns to him in Spain with a broken arm and
his hand in a black sling: "You hold on to that rag then?"
Sainte-Beuve, who loves the truth as it really is, quotes the
words as they came, which Marmont dared not reproduce.
(Causeries du Lundi, VI., 16.)—"Souvenirs", by Pasquier,
Librarie Plon, Paris 1893: "M. de Champagny having been
dismissed and replaced, a courageous friend defended him
and insisted on his merit: "You are right," said the Emperor,
"he had some when I took him; but by cramming him too
full, I have made him stupid."]
1281 (return)
[ Beugnot, I., 456, 464]

1282 (return)
[ Mme. de Rémusat, II., 272.]
1283 (return)
[ M. de Champagny, "Souvenirs," 117.]
1284 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 125.]
1285 (return)
[ De Ségur, III., 456.]
1286 (return)
[ "The Ancient Regime," p. 125.—"æuvres de Louis XIV.,"
191: "If there is any peculiar characteristic of this monarchy,
it is the free and easy access of the subjects to the king; it an
egalité de justice between both, and which, so to say,
maintains both in a genial and honest companionship, in
spite of the almost infinite distance in birth, rank, and power.
This agreeable society, which enables persons of the Court
to associate familiarly with us, impresses them and charms
them more than one can tell."]
1287 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, II., 32, 39.]
1288 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, III., 169.]
1289 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 32, 223, 240, 259; III., 169.]
1290 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 112, II., 77.]
1291 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, I., 286.—"It would be difficult to
imagine any greater awkwardness than that of Napoleon in a
drawing-room.—Varnhagen von Ense, "Ausgewählte
Schriften," III., 177. (Audience of July 10, 1810): "I never
heard a harsher voice, one so inflexible. When he smiled, it
was only with the mouth and a portion of the cheeks; the
brow and eyes remained immovably sombre,... This
compound of a smile with seriousness had in it something
terrible and frightful."—On one occasion, at St. Cloud,
Varnhagen heard him exclaim over and over again, twenty
times, before a group of ladies, "How hot!"]
1292 (return)
[ Mme. de Rémusat, II., 77, 169.—Thibaudeau, "Mémoires
sur le Consulat," p. 18: "He sometimes pays them left-
handed compliments on their toilet or adventures, which was
his way of censuring morals."—"Mes souvenirs sur
Napoléon," 322 by le Comte Chaptal: "At a fête, in the Hôtel
de Ville, he exclaimed to Madame——, who had just given
her name to him: 'Good God, they told me you were pretty!'
To some old persons: 'You haven't long to live! To another

lady: 'It is a fine time for you, now your husband is on his
campaigns!' In general, the tone of Bonaparte was that of an
ill-bred lieutenant. He often invited a dozen or fifteen
persons to dinner and rose from the table before the soup
was finished... The court was a regular galley where each
rowed according to command."]
1293 (return)
[ Madame de Rémusat, I., 114, 122, 206; II., 110, 112.]
1294 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 277.]
1295 (return)
[ "Hansard's Parliamentary History," vol. XXXVI.,.310.
Lord Whitworth's dispatch to Lord Hawkesbury, March 14,
1803, and account of the scene with Napoleon. "All this took
place loud enough for the two hundred persons present to
hear it."—Lord Whitworth (dispatch of March 17)
complains of this to Talleyrand and informs him that he shall
discontinue his visits to the Tuileries unless he is assured
that similar scenes shall not occur again.—Lord
Hawkesbury approves of this (dispatch of March 27), and
declares that the proceeding is improper and offensive to the
King of England.—Similar scenes, the same conceit and
intemperate language, with M. de Metternich, at Paris, in
1809, also at Dresden, in 1813: again with Prince Korsakof,
at Paris, in 1812; with M. de Balachof, at Wilna, in 1812,
and with Prince Cardito, at Milan, in 1805.]
1296 (return)
[ Before the rupture of the peace of Amiens ("Moniteur,"
Aug. 8, 1802): The French government is now more firmly
established than the English government."—("Moniteur"
Sept.10, 1802): "What a difference between a people which
conquers for love of glory and a people of traders who
happen to become conquerors!"—("Moniteur," Feb. 20,
1803): "The government declares with a just pride that
England cannot now contend against France."—Campaign
of 1805, 9th bulletin, words of Napoleon in the presence of
Mack's staff: "I recommend my brother the Emperor of
Germany to make peace as quick as he can! Now is the time
to remember that all empires come to an end; the idea that
an end might come to the house of Lorraine ought to alarm
him."—Letter to the Queen of Naples, January 2, 1805: "Let
your Majesty listen to what I predict. On the first war
breaking out, of which she might be the cause, she and her
children will have ceased to reign; her children would go
wandering about among the different countries of Europe
begging help from their relations."]
1297 (return)
[ 37th bulletin, announcing the march of an army on Naples
"to punish the Queen's treachery and cast from the throne

that criminal woman, who, with such shamelessness, has
violated all that men hold sacred."—Proclamation of May
13, 1809: "Vienna, which the princes of the house of
Lorraine have abandoned, not as honorable soldiers yielding
to circumstances and the chances of war, but as perjurers
pursued by remorse.... In flying from Vienna their adieus to
its inhabitants consisted of murder and fire. Like Medea,
they have sacrificed their children with their own hands."—
13th bulletin: "The rage of the house of Lorraine against the
city of Vienna,"]
1298 (return)
[ Letter to the King of Spain, Sept. 18, 1803, and a note to
the Spanish minister of foreign affairs, on the Prince de la
Paix: "This favorite, who has succeeded by the most
criminal ways to a degree unheard of in the annals of
history.... Let Your Majesty put away a man who,
maintaining in his rank the low passions of his character, has
lived wholly on his vices."—After the battle of Jéna, 9th,
17th, 18th, and 19th bulletins, comparison of the Queen of
Prussia with Lady Hamilton, open and repeated insinuations,
imputing to her an intrigue with the Emperor Alexander.
"Everybody admits that the Queen of Prussia is the author of
the evils the Prussian nation suffers. This is heard
everywhere. How changed she is since that fatal interview
with the Emperor Alexander!... The portrait of the Emperor
Alexander, presented to her by the Prince, was found in the
apartment of the Queen at Potsdam."]
1299 (return)
[ "La Guerre patriotique" (1812-1815), according to the
letters of contemporaries, by Doubravine (in Russian). The
Report of the Russian envoy, M. de Balachof, is in French,]
12100 (return)
[ An allusion to the murder of Paul I.]
12101 (return)
[ Stanislas de Girardin, "Mémoires," III., 249. (Reception of
Nivôse 12, year X.) The First consul addresses the Senate:
"Citizens, I warn you that I regard the nomination of Daunou
to the senate as a personal insult, and you know that I have
never put up with one."—"Correspondance de Napoleon I."
(Letter of Sept.23, 1809, to M. de Champagny): "The
Emperor Francis insulted me in writing to me that I cede
nothing to him, when, out of consideration for him, I have
reduced my demands nearly one-half." (Instead of 2,750,000
Austrian subjects he demanded only 1,600,000.)—Roederer,
III., 377 (Jan.24, 1801): "The French people must put up
with my defects if they find I am of service to them; it is my
fault that I cannot endure insults."]
12102 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, II., 378. (Letter to the Emperor of

Austria, July 28, 1810.)]
12103 (return)
[ Note presented by the French ambassador, Otto, Aug. 17,
1802.]
12104 (return)
[ Stanislas Girardin, III., 296. (Words of the First consul,
Floreal 24, year XI.): "I had proposed to the British minister,
for several months, to make an arrangement by which a law
should be passed in France and in England prohibiting
newspapers and the members of the government from
expressing either good or ill of foreign governments. He
never would consent to it."—St. Girardin: "He could not."—
Bonaparte: "Why?"—St. Girardin: "Because an agreement
of that sort would have been opposed to the fundamental law
of the country." Bonaparte: "I have a poor opinion," etc.]
12105 (return)
[ Hansard, vol. XXXVI., p.1298. (Dispatch of Lord
Whitworth, Feb.21, 1803, conversation with the First consul
at the Tuileries.)—Seeley, 'A Short History of Napoleon the
First." "Trifles is a softened expression, Lord Whitworth
adds in a parenthesis which has never been printed; "the
expression he made use of is too insignificant and too low to
have a place in a dispatch or anywhere else, save in the
mouth of a hack-driver."]
12106 (return)
[ Lanfrey, "Histoire de Napoléon," II., 482. (Words of the
First consul to the Swiss delegates, conference of January
29, 1803.)]
12107 (return)
[ Sir Neil Campbell, "Napoleon at Fontainebleau and Elba,"
p.201. (The words of Napoleon to Sir Neil Campbell and to
the other commissioners.)—The Mémorial de Sainte Helene
mentions the same plan in almost identical terms.—Pelet de
la Lozère, "Opinions de Napoléon au conseil d'état," p.238
(session of March 4, 1806): "Within forty-eight hours after
peace with England, I shall interdict foreign commodities
and promulgate a navigation act forbidding any other than
French vessels entering our ports, built of French timber, and
with the crews two-thirds French. Even coal and English
'milords' shall land only under the French flag."—Ibid., 32.]
12108 (return)
[ Moniteur, January 30, 1803 (Sebastiani).]
12109 (return)
[ Hansard, vol. XXXVI., p.1298. (Lord Whitworth's
dispatch, Feb.21, 1803, the First Consul's words to Lord
Whitworth.)]
12110 (return)
[ "Memorial." (Napoleon's own words, March 24, 1806.)]

12111 (return)
[ Lanfrey, II., 476. (Note to Otto, October 23, 1802.)—
Thiers,VI., 249.]
12112 (return)
[ Letter to Clarke, Minister of War, Jan. 18, 1814. "If, at
Leipsic, I had had 30,000 cannon balls to fire off on the
evening of the 18th, I should to-day be master of the
world."]
12113 (return)
[ "Memorial," Nov. 30, 1815.]
12114 (return)
[ Lanfrey, III.,—399. Letters of Talleyrand, October 11 and
27, 1805, and memorandum addressed to Napoleon.]
12115 (return)
[ At the council held in relation to the future marriage of
Napoleon, Cambacérès vainly supported an alliance with the
Russians. The following week, he says to M. Pasquier:
"When one has only one good reason to give and it cannot
possibly be given, it is natural that one should be beaten...,
You will see that it is so good that one phrase suffices to
make its force fully understood. I am deeply convinced that
in two years we shall have a war with that of two powers
whose daughter the Emperor does not marry. Now a war
with Austria does not cause me any uneasiness, and I
tremble at a war with Russia. The consequences are
incalculable." "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis,
duc), Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Vol I., p 293, p 378.).]
12116 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, II., 305. (Letter to the Emperor of
Austria, Aug.10, 1809.)—Ibid. 403.. (Letter of Jan.11,
1811.) "My appreciation of Napoleon's plans and projects, at
bottom, has never varied. The monstrous purpose of the
complete subjection of the continent under one head was,
and is still, his object."]
12117 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoleon I." (Letter to the King of
Wurtemberg, April 2, 1814): "The war will take place in
spite of him (the Emperor Alexander), in spite of me, in spite
of the interests of France and those of Russia. Having
already seen this so often, it is my past experience which
enables me to unveil the future,"]
12118 (return)
[ Mollien, III., 135, 190.—In 1810 "prices have increased
400% on sugar, and 100 % on cotton and dye
stuffs."—"More than 20,000 custom-house officers were
employed on the frontier against more than 100,000
smugglers, in constant activity and favored by the
population."—"Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis,

duc), Librarie Plon, Paris 1893.-, I., 387.—There were
licenses for importing colonial products, but on condition of
exporting a proportionate quantity of French manufactures;
now, England refused to receive them. Consequently, "not
being allowed to bring these articles back to France, they
were thrown overboard."—"They began at first by devoting
the refuse of manufactures to this trade, and then ended by
manufacturing articles without other destination; for
example, at Lyons, taffetas and satins."]
12119 (return)
[ Proclamation of Dec.27, 1805: "The Naples dynasty has
ceased to reign. Its existence is incompatible with the repose
of Europe and the honor of my crown."—Message to the
Senate, Dec. 10, 1810: "Fresh guarantees having become
necessary, the annexation to the Empire of the mouths of the
Escaut, the Meuse, the Rhine, the Ems, the Weser, and the
Elbe, seemed to me to be the first and most important.... The
annexation of the Valais is an anticipated result of the vast
works I have undertaken for the past ten years in that section
of the Alps."]
12120 (return)
[ We are familiar with the Spanish affair. His treatment of
Portugal is anterior and of same order.-" Correspondance."
(Letter to Junot, Oct.31, 1807):—'I have already informed
you, that in authorizing you to enter as an auxiliary, it was to
enable you to possess yourself of the (Portuguese) fleet, but
my mind was made up to take Portugal."—(Letter to Junot,
Dec. 23, 1807): "Disarm the country. Send all the
Portuguese troops to France.... I want them out of the
country. Have all princes, ministers, and other men who
serve as rallying points, sent to France."—(Decree of Dec.
23, 1807): "An extra contribution of 100 million francs shall
be imposed on the kingdom of Portugal, to redeem all
property, of whatever denomination, belonging to private
parties... All property belonging to the Queen of Portugal, to
the prince-regent, and to princes in appanage;.... all the
possessions of the nobles who have followed the king, on his
abandoning the country, and who had not returned to the
kingdom before February 1, shall be put under
sequestration."—Cf. M. d'Haussonville, "L'Église Romaine
et le premier Empire," 5 vols. (especially the last volume).
No other work enables one to see into Napoleon's object and
proceedings better nor more closely.]
12121 (return)
[ "Souvenirs du feu duc de Broglie," p.143. (As a specimen
of steps taken in time of war, see the register of Marshal
Bessières' orders, commandant at Valladolid from April 11 to
July 15, 1811.)—"Correspondance du Roi Jérome," letter of
Jerome to Napoleon, Dec. 5, 1811. (Showing the situation of

a vanquished people in times of peace): "If war should break
out, all countries between the Rhine and the Oder will
become the center of a vast and active insurrection. The
mighty cause of this dangerous movement is not merely
hatred of the French, and impatience of a foreign yoke, but
rather in the misfortunes of the day, in the total ruin of all
classes, in over-taxation, consisting of war levies, the
maintenance of troops, soldiers traversing the country, and
every sort of constantly renewed vexation.... At Hanover,
Magdebourg, and in the principal towns of my kingdom,
owners of property are abandoning their dwellings and
vainly trying to dispose of them at the lowest prices....
Misery everywhere presses on families; capital is exhausted;
the noble, the peasant, the bourgeois, are crushed with debt
and want.... The despair of populations no longer having
anything to lose, because all has been taken away, is to be
feared."—De Pradt, p.73. (Specimen of military proceedings
in allied countries.) At Wolburch, in the Bishop of Cujavie's
chateau, "I found his secretary, canon of Cujavie, decorated
with the ribbon and cross of his order, who showed me his
jaw, broken by the vigorous blows administered to him the
previous evening by General Count Vandamme, because he
had refused to serve Tokay wine, imperiously demanded by
the general; he was told that the King of Westphalia had
lodged in the castle the day before, and had carted away all
this wine."]
12122 (return)
[ Fievée, "Correspondance et relations avec Bonaparte, de
1802 à 1813," III., 82. (Dec. 1811), (On the populations
annexed or conquered): "There is no hesitation in depriving
them of their patrimony, their language, their legislatures, in
disturbing all their habits, and that without any warrant but
throwing a bulletin des lois at their heads (inapplicable)....
How could they be expected to recognize this, or even
become resigned to it?... Is it possible not to feel that one no
longer has a country, that one is under constraint, wounded
in feeling and humiliated?... Prussia, and a large part of
Germany, has been so impoverished that there is more to
gain by taking a pitchfork to kill a man than to stir up a pile
of manure."]
12123 (return)
[ "Correspondance," letter to King Joseph, Feb. 18, 1814. "If
I had signed the treaty reducing France to its ancient limits, I
should have gone to war two years after"—Marmont, V., 133
(1813): "Napoleon, in the last years of his reign, always
preferred to lose all rather than to yield anything."]
12124 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, II., 205.]

12125 (return)
[ Words of Richelieu on his death-bed: "Behold my judge,"
said he, pointing to the Host, "the judge who will soon
pronounce his verdict. I pray that he will condemn me, if,
during my ministry, I have proposed to myself aught else
than the good of religion and of the State."]
12126 (return)
[ Miot de Melito, "Mémoires,"II., 48, 152.]
12127 (return)
[ "Souvenirs," by Gaudin, duc de Gaëte (3rd vol. of the
"Mémoires," p.67).]
12128 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, II., 120. (Letter to Stadion, July 26,
1807.)]
12129 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 291. (Letter of April 11, 1809.)]
12130 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 400. (Letter of Jan.17, 1811.) In lucid moments,
Napoleon takes the same view. Cf. Pelet de la Lozère,
"Opinions de Napoleon au conseil d'etat," p. 15: "That will
last as long as I do. After me, however, my son will deem
himself fortunate if he has 40,000 francs a year."—(De
Ségur, "Histoire et Mémoires," III., 155.): "How often at this
time (1811) was he heard to foretell that the weight of his
empire would crush his heir!" "Poor child," said he,
regarding the King of Rome, "what an entanglement I shall
leave to you!" From the beginning he frequently passed
judgment on himself and foresaw the effect of his action in
history." On reaching the isle of Poplars, the First Consul
stopped at Rousseau's grave, and said: 'It would have, been
better for the repose of France, if that man had never
existed.' 'And why, citizen Consul?' 'He is the man who
made the French revolution.' 'It seems to me that you need
not complain of the French revolution!' 'well, the future must
decide whether it would not have been better for the repose
of the whole world if neither myself nor Rousseau had ever
lived.' He then resumed his promenade in a revery."—
Stanislas Girardin; "Journal et Mémoires," III., Visit of the
French Consul to Ermenonville.]
12131 (return)
[ Marmont, "Mémoires," III., 337. (On returning from
Wagram.)]
12132 (return)
[ On this initial discord, cf. Armand Lefèvre, "Histoire des
Cabinets de l'Europe," vol.VI.]
12133 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoléon I." (Letter to the King of
Wurtemberg, April 2, 1811.)]

12134 (return)
[ Testament of April 25, 1821 "It is my desire that my
remains rest on the banks of the Seine, amidst that French
people I have so dearly loved."]
12135 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoleon I.", XXII., 119. (Note by
Napoleon, April, 1811.) "There will always be at Hamburg,
Bremen, and Lubeck from 8000 to 10,000 Frenchmen, either
as employees or as gendarmes, in the custom-houses and
warehouses."]
12136 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc),
Librarie Plon, Paris 1893.-, II., 88, and following pages:
"During the year 1813, from Jan. 1 to Oct. 7, 840,000 men
had already been drafted from imperial France and they had
to be furnished."—Other decrees in December, placing at the
disposition of the government 300,000 conscripts for the
years 1806 to 1814 inclusive.—Another decree in November
organizing 140,000 men of the national guard in cohorts,
intended for the defense of strongholds.—In all, 1,300,000
men summoned in one year. "Never has any nation been thus
asked to let itself be voluntarily led in a mass to the
slaughterhouse.—Ibid., II., 59. Senatus-consulte, and order
of council for raising 10,000 young men, exempt or
redeemed from conscription, as the prefects might choose,
arbitrarily, from amongst the highest classes in society. The
purpose was plainly "to secure hostages in every family of
doubtful loyalty. No measure created for Napoleon more
irreconcilable enemies."—Cf. De Ségur, II., 34. (He was
charged with organizing and commanding a division of
young men.) Many were sons of Vendéans or of
Conventionalists, some torn from their wives the day after
their marriage, or from the bedside of a wife in her
confinement, of a dying father, or of a sick son; "some
looked so feeble that they seemed dying." One half perished
in the campaign of 1814.—"Correspondance," letter to
Clarke, Minister of War, Oct.23, 1813 (in relation to the new
levies): "I rely on 100,000 refractory conscripts."]
12137 (return)
[ "Archives nationales," A F.,VI., 1297. (Documents 206 to
210.) (Report to the Emperor by Count Dumas, April 10,
1810.) Besides the 170 millions of penalties 1,675,457
francs of penalty were inflicted on 2335 individuals,
"abettors or accomplices."—Ibid., A F.,VI., 1051. (Report of
Gen. Lacoste on the department of Haute-Loire, Oct. 13,
1808.) "He always calculated in this department on the
desertion of one-half of the conscripts. In most of the
cantons the gendarmes traffic with the conscription
shamefully; certain conscripts pension them to show them

favors."—Ibid., A F.,VI., 1052. (Report by Pelet, Jan. 12,
1812.) "The operation of the conscription has improved (in
the Herault); the contingents of 1811 have been furnished.
There remained 1800 refractory, or deserters of the previous
classes; 1600 have been arrested or made to surrender by the
flying column; 200 have still to be pursued." Faber,
—"Notice (1807) sur l'intérieur de la France," p. 141:
"Desertion, especially on the frontiers, is occasionally
frightful; 80 deserters out of 160 have sometimes been
arrested."—Ibid., p.149: It has been stated in the public
journals that in 1801 the court in session at Lille had
condemned 135 refractory out of the annual conscription,
and that which holds its sittings at Ghent had condemned 70.
Now, 200 conscripts form the maximum of what an
arrondissement in a department could furnish."—Ibid, p.145.
"France resembles a vast house of detention where
everybody is suspicious of his neighbor, where each avoids
the other... One often sees a young man with a gendarme at
his heels oftentimes, on looking closely, this young man's
hands are found tied, or he is handcuffed."—Mathieu
Dumas, III., 507 (After the battle of Dresden, in the Dresden
hospitals): "I observed, with sorrow, that many of these men
were slightly wounded: most of them, young conscripts just
arrived in the army, had not been wounded by the enemy's
fire, but they had mutilated each other's feet and hands.
Antecedents of this kind, of equally bad augury, had already
been remarked in the campaign of 1809."]
12138 (return)
[ De Ségur, III., 474.—Thiers, XIV., 159. (One month after
crossing the Niemen one hundred and fifty thousand men
had dropped out of the ranks.)]
12139 (return)
[ Bulletin 29 (December 3, 1812).]
12140 (return)
[ "De Pradt, Histoire de l'Ambassade de Varsovie," p.219.]
12141 (return)
[ M. de Metternich, I., 147.—Fain, "Manuscript," of 1813,
II., 26. (Napoleon's address to his generals.) "What we want
is a complete triumph. To abandon this or that province is
not the question; our political superiority and our existence
depend on it. "—II., 41, 42. (Words of Napoleon to
Metternich.) "And it is my father-in-law who favors such a
project! And he sends you! In what attitude does he wish to
place me before the French people? He is strangely deluded
if he thinks that a mutilated throne can offer an asylum to his
daughter and grandson.... Ah, Metternich, how much has
England given you to make you play this part against me?"
(This last phrase, omitted in Metternich's narrative, is a
characteristic trait; Napoleon at this decisive moment,

remains insulting and aggressive, gratuitously and even to
his own destruction.)]
12142 (return)
[ "Souvenirs du feu duc de Broglie," I., 235.]
12143 (return)
[ Ibid., I., 230. Some days before Napoleon had said to M.
de Narbonne, who told me that very evening: "After all,
what has this (the Russian campaign) cost me? 300,000 men,
among whom, again, were a good many
Germans."—"Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis,
duc, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. II. 110. (Apropos of the
Frankfurt basis, and accepted by Napoleon when too late.)
"What characterizes this mistake is that it was committed
much more against the interests of France than against his
own.... He sacrificed her to the perplexities of his personal
situation, to the mauvaise honte of his own ambition, to the
difficulty he finds in standing alone to a certain extent before
a nation which had done everything for him and which could
justly reproach him with having sacrificed so much treasure
and spilled so much blood on enterprises proved to have
been foolish and impracticable."]
12144 (return)
[ Leonce de Lavergne, "Economie rurale de la France," P.40.
(According to the former director of the conscription under
the Empire.)]

BOOK SECOND. FORMATION AND
CHARACTER OF THE NEW STATE.

CHAPTER I. THE INSTITUTION OF
GOVERNMENT

I. The Institution of Government.
Conditions on which the public power can act.—Two points
forgotten by the authors of the preceding constitutions.—
Difficulty of the undertaking and poor quality of the
available materials.

Every human society requires government, that is to say an authority. No
other machinery is more useful. But a machinery is useful only if it is
adapted to its purpose; if not it will not work, or may even work contrary to
its purpose. Hence, during its construction, one must first of all consider the
magnitude of the work it has to do as well as the quality of the materials
one has at one's disposal. It is very important to know beforehand whether it
will lift 100 or of 100,000 kilograms, whether the pieces fitted together will
be of iron or of steel, of sound or of unsound timber.—But the legislators
had not taken that into consideration during the last ten years. They had set
themselves up as theoreticians, and likewise as optimists, without looking at
the things, or else imagining the them as they wished to have them. In the
national assemblies, as well as with the public, the task was deemed easy
and simple, whereas it was extraordinary and immense; for the matter in
hand consisted in effecting a social revolution and in carrying on an
European war. The materials were supposed to be excellent, as manageable
as they were substantial, while, in fact, they were very poor, being both
refractory and brittle, for these human materials consisted of the Frenchmen
of 1789 and of the following years; that is to say, of exceedingly sensitive
men doing each other all possible harm, inexperienced in political business,
Utopians, impatient, intractable, and overexcited. Calculations had been
made on these prodigiously false data; consequently, although the
calculations were very exact, the results obtained were found absurd.
Relying on these data, the machine had been planned, and all its parts been
adjusted, assembled, and balanced. That is why the machine, irreproachable
in theory, remained unsuccessful in practice: the better it appeared on paper
the quicker it broke down when set up on the ground.

II. Default of previous government.
The consequences of the years 1789 to 1799.—Insubordination
of the local powers, conflict of the central powers,
suppression of liberal institutions, and the establishment
of an unstable despotism.—Evil-doing of the government thus
formed.

A capital defect at once declared itself in the two principal compositions,
in the working gear of the superposed powers and in the balance of the
motor powers.—In the first place, the hold given to the central government
on its local subordinates was evidently too feeble; with no right to appoint
these, it could not select them as it pleased, according to the requirements of
the service. Department, district, canton, and commune administrators, civil
and criminal judges, assessors, appraisers, and collectors of taxes, officers
of the national-guard and even of the gendarmerie, police-commissioners,
and other agents who had to enforce laws on the spot, were nearly all
recruited elsewhere: either in popular assemblies or provided ready-made
by elected bodies.2101 They were for it merely borrowed instruments; thus
originating, they escaped its control; it could not make them work as it
wanted them to work. On most occasions they would shirk their duties; at
other times, on receiving orders, they would stand inert; or, again, they
would act outside of or beyond their special function, either going too far or
acting in a contrary sense; never did they act with moderation and precision,
with coherence and consequence. For this reason any desire of the
government to do its job proved unsuccessful. Its legal subordinates—
incapable, timid, lukewarm, unmanageable, or even hostile—obeyed badly,
did not obey at all, or willfully disobeyed. The blade of the executive
instrument, loose in the handle, glanced or broke off when the thrust had to
be made.
In the second place, never could the two or three motor forces thrusting
the handle act in harmony, owing to the clashing of so many of them; one
always ended in breaking down the other. The Constituent Assembly had set
aside the King, the Legislative Assembly had deposed him, the Convention
had decapitated him. Afterward each fraction of the sovereign body in the
Convention had proscribed the other; the Montagnards had guillotined the

Girondists, and the Thermidorians had guillotined the Montagnards. Later,
under the Constitution of the year III, the Fructidorians had banished the
Constitutionalists, the Directory had purged the Councils, and the Councils
had purged the Directory.—Not only did the democratic and parliamentary
institution fail in its work and break down on trial, but, again, through its
own action, it became transformed into its opposite. In a year or two a coup
d'état in Paris took place; a faction seized the central power and converted it
into an absolute power in the hands of five or six ringleaders. The new
government at once re-forged the executive instrument for its own
advantage and refastened the blade firmly on the handle; in the provinces it
dismissed those elected by the people and deprived the governed of the
right to choose their own rulers; henceforth, through its proconsuls on
mission, or through its resident commissioners, it alone appointed,
superintended, and regulated on the spot all local authorities.2102
Thus the liberal constitution, at its close, gave birth to a centralized
despotism, and this was the worst of its species, at once formless and
monstrous; for it was born out of a civil crime, while the government which
used it had no support but a band of bigoted fanatics or political
adventurers; without any legal authority over the nation, or any moral hold
on the army, detested, threatened, discordant, exposed to the resistance of
its own upholders, to the treachery of its own members, and living only
from day to day, it could maintain itself only through a brutal absolutism
and permanent terror, while the public power of which the first care is the
protection of property, consciences, and lives, became in its hands the worst
of persecutors, robbers, and murderers.

III. In 1799, the undertaking more difficult and
the materials worse.
Twice in succession had the experiment been tried, the monarchical
constitution of 1791, and the republican constitution of 1795; twice in
succession had the same events followed the same course to attain the same
end; twice in succession had the theoretical, cunningly-devised machine for
universal protection changed into an efficient and brutal machine for
universal oppression. It is evident that if the same machine were started the
third time under analogous conditions, one might expect to see it work in
the same manner; that is to say, contrary to its purpose.
Now, in 1799, the conditions were analogous, and even worse, for the
work which the machine had to do was not less, while the human materials
available for its construction were not so good.—Externally, the country
was constantly at war with Europe; peace could not be secured except by
great military effort, and peace was as difficult to preserve as to win. The
European equilibrium had been too greatly disturbed; neighboring or rival
States had suffered too much; the rancor and distrust provoked by the
invading revolutionary republic were too active; these would have lasted a
long time against pacified France even after she had concluded reasonable
treaties. Even should she abandon a policy of propaganda and interference,
return brilliant acquisitions, cease the domination of protectorates, and
abandon the disguised annexation of Italy, Holland, and Switzerland, the
nation was still bound to keep watch under arms. A government able to
concentrate all its forces—that is to say, placed above and beyond all
dispute and promptly obeyed-was indispensable, if only to remain intact
and complete, to keep Belgium and the frontier of the Rhine.—Likewise
internally, and for no other purpose than to restore civil order; for here, too,
the outrages of the Revolution had been too great. There had been too much
spoliation, too many imprisonments, exiles, and murders, too many
violations of every kind, too many invasions of the rights of property and of
persons, public and private. It was so much more difficult
* To insure respect for persons and all private and public possessions;

* to restrain at once both Royalists and Jacobins;
* to restore 140,000 émigrés to their country and yet satisfy 1,200,000
possessors of national property;
* to give back to 25,000,000 of orthodox Catholics the right, faculty, and
means for worshipping, and yet not allow the schismatic clergy to be
maltreated;
* to bring face to face in the same commune the dispossessed seigneur
and the peasant holders of his domain;
* to compel the delegates of the Committee of Public Safety and their
victims, the shooters and the shot of Vendémiaire, the Fructidorians and the
Fructidorized, the Whites and the Blues of La Vendée and Brittany, to live
in peace side by side,
because the future laborers in this immense work, from the village mayor
to the state-senator and state-councilor, had borne a part in the Revolution,
either in effecting it or under subjection to it—Monarchists, Feuillantists,
Girondists, Montagnards, Thermidorians, moderate Jacobins or desperate
Jacobins, all oppressed in turn and disappointed in their calculations. Their
passions, under this régime, had become embittered; each brought personal
bias and resentment into the performance of his duties; to prevent him from
being unjust and mischievous demanded a tightened curb.2103 All sense of
conviction, under this régime, had died out; no body would serve gratis as
in 1789;2104 nobody would work without pay; disinterestedness had lost all
charm; ostentatious zeal seemed hypocrisy; genuine zeal seemed self-
dupery; each looked out for himself and not for the community; public
spirit had yielded to indifference, to egotism, and to the need of security, of
enjoyment, and of self-advancement. Human materials, deteriorated by the
Revolution, were less than ever suited to providing citizens—they simply
furnished functionaries. With such wheels combined together according to
formula current between 1791 and 1795, the requisite work could not
possibly be done. As a consequence, definitely and for a long time, any use
of the two great liberal mechanisms were doomed. So long as the wheels
remained of such poor quality and the task so hard, both the election of
local powers and the division of the central power had to be abandoned.

IV. Motives for suppressing the election of local
powers.
Motives for suppressing the election of local powers.—The
Electors.—Their egoism and partiality.—The Elected.—Their
inertia, corruption, and disobedience.

All were agreed on the first point. If any still doubted, they had only to
open their eyes, fix them on the local authorities, watch them as soon as
born, and follow them throughout the exercise of their functions.—
Naturally, in filling each office, the electors had chosen a man of their own
species and caliber; their fixed and dominant disposition was accordingly
well known; they were indifferent to public matters and therefore their
candidate was as indifferent as themselves. Had they shown too great a
concern for the nation this would have prevented their election; the State to
them was a troublesome moralist and remote creditor. Their candidate must
choose between them and this intruder, side with them against it, and not
act as a pedagogue in its name or as bailiff on its behalf. When power is
born on the spot and conferred to-day by constituents who are to submit to
it to-morrow as subordinates, they do not put the whip in the hands of one
who will flog them; they demand sentiments of him in conformity with
their inclinations; in any event they will not tolerate in him the opposite
ones. From the beginning, this resemblance between them and him is great,
and it goes on increasing from day to day because the creature is always in
the hands of his creators; subject to their daily pressure, he at last becomes
as they are; after a certain period they have shaped him in their image.—
Thus the candidate-elect, from the start or very soon after, became a
confederate with his electors. At one time, and this occurred frequently,
especially in the towns, he had been elected by a violent sectarian minority;
he then subordinated general interests to the interests of a clique. At
another, and especially in the rural districts, he had been elected by an
ignorant and brutal majority, when he accordingly subordinated general
interests to those of a village.—If he chanced to be conscientious and
somewhat intelligent and was anxious to do his duty, he could not; he felt
himself weak and was felt to be weak;2105 both authority and the means for

exercising it were wanting in him. He had not the force which a power
above communicates to its delegates below; nobody saw behind him the
government and the army; his only resource was a national-guard, which
either shirked or refused to do its duty, and which often did not exist at all.
—On the contrary, he could prevaricate, pillage, and persecute for his own
advantage and that of his clique with impunity; for there was no restraint on
him from above; the Paris Jacobins would not be disposed to alienate the
Jacobins of the province; they were partisans and allies, and the government
had few others; it was bound to retain them, to let them intrigue and
embezzle at will.
Suppose an extensive domain of which the steward is appointed, not by
the absent owner, but by his tenants, debtors, farmers, and dependents: the
reader may imagine whether rents will be paid and debts collected, whether
road-taxes will be worked out, what care will be taken of the property, what
its annual income will be to the owner, how abuses of commission and
omission will be multiplied indefinitely, how great the disorder will be, the
neglect, the waste, the fraud, the injustice, and the license.—The same in
France,2106 and for the same reason:
* every public service disorganized, destroyed, or perverted;
* no justice, no police;
* authorities abstaining from prosecution, magistrates not daring to
condemn, a gendarmerie which receives no orders or which stands still;
* rural marauding become a habit;
* roving bands of brigands in forty-five departments;
* mail wagons and coaches stopped and pillaged even up to the environs
of Paris;
* highways broken up and rendered impassable;
* open smuggling, customs yielding nothing, national forests devastated,
the public treasury empty,2107 its revenues intercepted and expended before
being deposited, taxes decreed and not collected;
* everywhere arbitrary assessments of real and personal estate, no less
wicked exemptions than overcharges;
* in many places no list prepared for tax assessments,

* communes which here and there, under pretext of defending the
republic against neighboring consumers, exempt themselves from both tax
and conscription;
* conscripts to whom their mayor gives false certificates of infirmity and
marriage, who do not turn out when ordered out, who desert by hundreds on
the way to headquarters, who form mobs and use guns in defending
themselves against the troops,—such were the fruits of the system.
The government could not constrain rural majorities with the officials
chosen by the selfish and inept rural majorities. Neither could it repress the
urban minorities with agents elected by the same partial and corrupt urban
minorities. Hands are necessary, and hands as firm as tenacious, to seize
conscripts by the collar, to rummage the pockets of taxpayers, and the State
did not have such hands. They were required right away, if only to prepare
and provide for urgent needs. If the western departments had to be subdued
and tranquilized, relief furnished to Massena besieged in Genoa, Mélas
prevented from invading Provence, Moreau's army transported over the
Rhine, the first thing was to restore to the central government the
appointment of local authorities.

V. Reasons for centralization.
Reasons for placing the executive central power in one
hand.—Sieyès' chimerical combinations.—Bonaparte's
objections.

On this second point, the evidence was scarcely less.—And clearly, the
moment the local powers owed their appointment to the central powers, it is
plain that the central executive power, on which they depend, should be
unique. For, this great team of functionaries, driven from aloft, could not
have aloft several distinct drivers; being several and distinct, the drivers
would each pull his own way, while the horses, pulling in opposite
directions, would do nothing but prance. In this respect the combinations of
Sieyès do not bear examination. A mere theorist and charged with preparing
the plan of a new constitution, he had reasoned as if the drivers on the box
were not men, but robots: perched above all, a grand-elector, a show
sovereign, with two places to dispose of and always passive, except to
appoint or revoke two active sovereigns, the two governing consuls. One, a
peace-consul, appointing all civil officers, and the other a war-consul,
making all military and diplomatic appointments; each with his own
ministers, his own council of state, his own court of judicature. All these
functionaries, ministers, consuls, and the grand-elector himself, were
revocable at the will of a senate which from day to day could absorb them,
that is to say, make them senators with a salary of 30,000 francs and an
embroidered dress-coat.2108 Sieyès evidently had not taken into account
either the work to be done or the men who would have to do it, while
Bonaparte, who was doing the work at this very time, who understood men
and who understood himself, at once put his finger on the weak spot of this
complex mechanism, so badly adjusted and so frail. Two consuls,2109 "one
controlling the ministers of justice, of the interior, of the police, of the
treasury, and the other the ministers of war, of the navy, and of foreign
affairs." The conflict between them is certain; look at them facing each
other, subject to contrary influences and suggestions: around the former
"only judges, administrators, financiers, and men in long robes," and round
the latter "only epaulets and men of the sword." Certainly "one will need

money and recruits for his army which the other will not grant."—And it is
not your grand-elector who will make them agree. "If he conforms strictly
to the functions which you assign to him he will be the mere ghost, the
fleshless phantom of a roi fainéant. Do you know any man vile enough to
take part in such contrivances? How can you imagine any man of talent or
at all honorable contentedly playing the part of a hog fattening himself on a
few millions?"—And all the more because if he wants to abandon his part
the door stands open. "Were I the grand-elector I would say to the war-
consul and to the peace-consul on appointing them, If you put in a minister
or sign a bill I don't like I'll put you out." Thus does the grand-elector
become an active, absolute monarch.
"But," you may say, "the senate in its turn will absorb the grand-
elector."—"The remedy is worse than the disease; nobody, according to this
plan, has any guarantees," and each, therefore, will try to secure them to
himself, the grand-elector against the senate, the consuls against the grand-
elector, and the senate against the grand-elector and consuls combined, each
uneasy, alarmed, threatened, threatening, and usurping to protect himself;
these are the wheels which work the wrong way, in a machine constantly
getting out of order, stopping, and finally breaking down entirely.
Thereupon, and as Bonaparte, moreover, was already master, all the
executive powers were reduced to one, and this power was vested in
him.2110 In reality, "to humor republican opinion"2111 they gave him two
associates with the same title as his own; but they were appointed only for
show, simply as consulting, inferior, and docile registrars, with no rights
save that of signing their names after his and putting their signatures to the
procès verbal declaring his orders; he alone commanded, "he alone had the
say, he alone appointed to all offices," so that they were already subjects as
he alone was already the sovereign.

VI. Irreconcilable divisions.
Difficulty of organizing a legislative power.—Fraudulent
and violent elections for ten years.—Spirit and diffusion
of hatred against the men and dogmas of the Revolution.
—Probable composition of a freely elected Assembly.—Its two
irreconcilable divisions.—Sentiments of the army.
—Proximity and probable meaning of a new coup d'État.

It remained to frame a legislative power as a counterpoise to this
executive power, so concentrated and so strong.—In organized and
tolerably sound communities this point is reached through an elective
parliament which represents the public will; it represents this because it is a
copy, a faithful reduction of that will on a small scale; it is so organized as
to present a loyal and proportionate expression of diverse controlling
opinions. In this case, the electoral selection has worked well; one superior
right, that of election, has been respected, or, in other words, the passions
excited have not proved too strong, which is owing to the most important
interests not having proved too divergent.—Unfortunately, in France, rent
asunder and discordant, all the most important interests were in sharp
antagonism; the passions brought into play, consequently, were furious; no
right was respected, and least of all that of election; hence the electoral test
worked badly, and no elected parliament was or could be a veritable
expression of the public will. Since 1791, the elections, violated and
deserted, had brought intruders only to the legislative benches, under the
name of mandatories. These were endured for lack of better; but nobody
had any confidence in them, and nobody showed them any deference.
People knew how they had been elected and how little their title was worth.
Through inertness, fear, or disgust, the great majority of electors had not
voted, while the voters at the polls fought among themselves, the strongest
or least scrupulous expelling or constraining the rest. During the last three
years of the Directory the electoral assembly was often divided; each
faction elected its own deputy and protested against the election of the
other. The government then chose between the two candidates elected,
arbitrarily and always with barefaced partiality; and again, if but one
candidate was elected, and that one an adversary, his election was
invalidated. In sum, for nine years, the legislative body, imposed on the

nation by a faction, was scarcely more legitimate than the executive power,
another usurper, and which, later on, filled up or purged its ranks. Any
remedy for this defect in the electoral machine was impossible; it was due
to its internal structure, to the very quality of its materials. At this date, even
under an impartial and strong government, the machine could not have
answered its purpose, that of deriving from the nation a body of sober-
minded and respected delegates, providing France with a parliament
capable of playing its own part, or any part whatever, in the conduct of
public business.
For, suppose
* that the new governors show uncommon loyalty, energy, and vigilance,
remarkable political abnegation and administrative omnipresence,
* that the factions are contained without suppression of free speech,
* the central powers neutral yet active,
* no official candidature,
* no pressure from above,
* no constraint from below,
* the police-commissioners respectful and gendarmes protecting the
entrance to every electoral assembly,
* all proceedings regular, no disturbance inside, voting perfectly free, the
electors numerous, five or six millions of Frenchmen gathered at the polls,
and guess what choice they will make.
After Fructidor, there is a renewal of religious persecution and of
excessive civil oppression; the brutality and unworthiness of the rulers have
doubled and diffused hatred against the men and the ideas of the
Revolution.—In Belgium, recently annexed, the regular and secular clergy
had just been proscribed in a mass,2112 and a great rural insurrection had
broken out. The uprising had spread from the Waes country and the ancient
seignory of Malines, around Louvain as far as Tirlemont, and afterward to
Brussels, to Campine, to South Brabant, to Flanders, to Luxembourg, in the
Ardennes, and even to the frontiers of Liège; many villages had to be
burned, and many of their inhabitants killed, and the survivors keep this in
mind. In the twelve western departments,2113 at the beginning of the year
1800, the royalists were masters of nearly the whole country and had
control of forty thousand armed men in regimental order; undoubtedly these

were to be overcome and disarmed, but they were not to be deprived of
their opinions, as of their guns.—In the month of August, 1799,2114 sixteen
thousand insurgents in Haute Garonne and the six neighboring departments,
led by Count de Paulo, had unfurled the royal white flag; one of the
cantons, Cadours, "had risen almost entirely;" a certain town, Muret, sent
all its able-bodied men. They had penetrated even to the outskirts of
Toulouse, and several engagements, including a pitched battle, were
necessary to subdue them. On one occasion, at Montréjean, 2000 were slain
or drowned. The peasants fought with fury, "a fury that bordered on
frenzy;" "some were heard to exclaim with their last breath, 'Vive le Roi!'
and others were cut to pieces rather than shout, 'Vive la République!'"—
From Marseilles to Lyons the revolt lasted five years on both banks of the
Rhône, under the form of brigandage; the royalist bands, increased by
refractory conscripts and favored by the inhabitants whom they spared,
killed or pillaged the agents of the republic and the buyers of national
possessions.2115 There were thus, in more than thirty departments,
intermittent and scattered Vendées. In all the Catholic departments there
was a latent Vendée. Had the elections been free during this state of
exasperation it is probable that one-half of France would have voted for
men of the ancient régime—Catholics, Royalists, or, at least, the
Monarchists of 1790.
Let the reader imagine facing this party, in the same chamber, about an
equal number of representatives elected by the other party; the only ones it
could select, its notables, that is to say, the survivors of preceding
assemblies, probably Constitutionalists of the year IV and the year V,
Conventionalists of the Plain and of the Feuillants of 1792, from Lafayette
and Dumolard to Daunou, Thibaudeau and Grégoire, among them
Girondists and a few Montagnards, Barère,2116 with others, all of them
wedded to the theory the same as their adversaries to traditions. To one who
is familiar with the two groups, behold two inimical doctrines confronting
each other; two irreconcilable systems of opinions and passions, two
contradictory modes of conceiving sovereignty, law, society, the State,
property, religion, the Church, the ancient régime, the Revolution, the
present and the past; it is civil war transferred from the nation to the
parliament. Certainly the Right would like to see the First Consul a Monck,
which would lead to his becoming a Cromwell; for his power depends
entirely on his credit with the army, then the sovereign force; at this date the

army is still republican, at least in feeling if not intelligently, imbued with
Jacobin prejudices, attached to revolutionary interests, and hence blindly
hostile to aristocrats, kings, and priests.2117 At the first threat of a
monarchical and Catholic restoration it will demand of him an eighteenth
Fructidor2118; otherwise, some Jacobin general, Jourdan, Bernadotte, or
Augereau, will make one without him, against him, and they fall back into
the rut from which they wished to escape, into the fatal circle of revolutions
and coups d'état.

VII. Establishment of a new Dictatorship.
The electoral and legislative combinations of Sieyès.
—Bonaparte's use of them.—Paralysis and submission of the
three legislative bodies.—The Senate as the ruler's tool.
—Senatus-consultes and Plebiscites.—Final establishment of
the Dictatorship.—Its dangers and necessity.—Public power
now able to do its work.

Sieyès comprehended this: he detects on the horizon the two specters
which, for ten years, have haunted all the governments of France, legal
anarchy and unstable despotism; he has found a magic formula with which
to exorcise these two phantoms; henceforth "power is to come from above
and confidence from below."2119—Consequently, the new constitutional act
withdraws from the nation the right to elect its deputies; it will simply elect
candidates to the deputation and through three degrees of election, one
above the other; thus, it is to take part in the choice of its candidates only
through "an illusory and metaphysical participation."2120 The right of the
electors of the first degree is wholly reduced to designating one-tenth
among themselves; the right of those of the second degree is also reduced to
designating one-tenth among themselves; the right of those of the third
degree is finally reduced to designating one-tenth of their number, about six
thousand candidates. On this list, the government itself, by right and by way
of increasing the number, inscribes its own high functionaries; evidently, on
such a long list, it will have no difficulty in finding men who, as simple
tools, will be devoted to it. Through another excess of precaution, the
government, on its sole authority, in the absence of any list, alone names the
first legislature. Last of all, it is careful to attach handsome salaries to these
legislative offices, 10,000 f., 15,000 f., and 30,000 f. a year; parties canvass
with it for these places the very first day, the future depositaries of
legislative power being, to begin with, solicitors of the antechamber.—To
render their docility complete, there is a dismemberment of this legislative
power in advance; it is divided among three bodies, born feeble and passive
by institution. Neither of these has any initiative; their deliberations are
confined to laws proposed by the government. Each possesses only a
fragment of function; the "Tribunat" discusses without passing laws, the
"Corps Législatif" decrees without discussion, the conservative" Sénat" is to

maintain this general paralysis. "What do you want?" said Bonaparte to
Lafayette.2121 "Sieyès everywhere put nothing but ghosts, the ghost of a
legislative power, the ghost of a judiciary, the ghost of a government.
Something substantial had to be put in their place. Ma foi, I put it there," in
the executive power.
There it is, completely in his hands; other authorities to him are merely
for show or as instruments.2122 The mutes of the Corps Législatif come
annually to Paris to keep silent for four months; one day he will forget to
convoke them, and nobody will remark their absence.—As to the Tribunat,
which talks too much, he will at first reduce its words to a minimum "by
putting it on the diet of laws;" afterward, through the interposition of the
senate, which designates retiring members, he gets rid of troublesome
babblers; finally, and always through the interposition of the senate, titular
interpreter, guardian, and reformer of the constitution, he ventilates and then
suppresses the Tribunat itself.—The senate is the grand instrument by
which he reigns; he commands it to furnish the senatus-consultes of which
he has need. Through this comedy played by him above, and through
another complementary comedy which he plays below, the plebiscite, he
transforms his ten-year consulate into a consulate for life, and then into an
empire, that is to say, into a permanent, legal, full, and perfect dictatorship.
In this way the nation is handed over to the absolutism of a man who, being
a man, cannot fail to think of his own interest before all others. It remains to
be seen how far and for how long a time this interest, as he comprehends it,
or imagines it, will accord with the interest of the public. All the better for
France should this accord prove complete and permanent; all the worse for
France should it prove partial and temporary. It is a terrible risk, but
inevitable. There is no escape from anarchy except through despotism, with
the chance of encountering in one man, at first a savior and then a destroyer,
with the certainty of henceforth belonging to an unknown will fashioned by
genius and good sense, or by imagination and egoism, in a soul fiery and
disturbed by the temptations of absolute power, by success and universal
adulation, in a despot responsible to no one but himself, in a conqueror
condemned by the impulses of conquest to regard himself and the world
under a light growing falser and falser.
Such are the bitter fruits of social dissolution: the authority of the state
will either perish or become perverted; each uses it for his own purposes,
and nobody is disposed to entrust it to an external arbitrator, and the

usurpers who seize it only remain trustee on condition that they abuse it;
when it works in their hands it is only to work against its office. It must be
accepted when, for want of better or fear of worse, through a final
usurpation, it falls into the only hands able to restore it, organize it, and
apply it at last to the service of the public.

2101 (return)
[ "The Revolution," P.193 and following pages, also p.224
and following pages. The provisions of the constitution of
the year III, somewhat less anarchical, are analogous; those
of the "Mountain" constitution (year II) are so anarchical
that nobody thought of enforcing them.]
2102 (return)
[ "The Revolution," vol. III., pp.446, 450, 476.]
2103 (return)
[ Sauzay, "Histoire de la persecution révolutionnaire dans le
département du Doubs," X., 472 (Speech of Briot to the five-
hundred, Aug.29, 1799): "The country seeks in vain for its
children; it finds the chouans, the Jacobins, the moderates,
and the constitutionalists of '91 and '93, clubbists, the
amnestied, fanatics, scissionists and antiscissionists; in vain
does it call for republicans."]
2104 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., 427, 474.—Rocquain, "L'état de la
France au 18 Brumaire," 360, 362: "Inertia or absence of the
national agents. .. It would be painful to think that a lack of
salary was one of the causes of the difficulty in establishing
municipal administrations. In 1790, 1791, and 1792, we
found our fellow-citizens emulously striving after these
gratuitous offices and even proud of the disinterestedness
which the law prescribed." (Report of the Directory, end of
1795.) After this date public spirit is extinguished, stifled by
the Reign of Terror.—Ibid., 368, 369: "Deplorable
indifference for public offices.... Out of seven town officials
appointed in the commune of Laval, only one accepted, and
that one the least capable. It is the same in the other
communes."—Ibid., 380 (Report of the year VII): "General
decline of public spirit."—Ibid., 287 (Report by Lacuée, on
the 1st military division, Aisne, Eure-et-Loire, Loiret, Oise,
Seine, Seine-et-Marne, (year IX): "Public spirit is dying out
and is even gone."]
2105 (return)
[ Rocquain, Ibid., p.27 (Report of François de Nantes, on the
8th military division,Vaucluse, Bouches-du-Rhône, Var,
Basses-Alpes, and Alpes-Maratimes, year IX): "Witnesses,
in some communes, did not dare furnish testimony, and, in
all, the justices of the peace were afraid of making enemies

and of not being re-elected. It was the same with the town
officials charged with prosecutions and whom their quality
as elected and temporary officials always rendered timid."—
Ibid., 48: "All the customs-directors complained of the
partiality of the courts. I have myself examined several cases
in which the courts of Marseilles and Toulon decided against
the plain text the law and with criminal partiality.—Archives
nationales, series F7, Reports "on the situation, on the spirit
of the public," in many hundreds of towns, cantons, and
departments, from the year III to the year VIII and after.]
2106 (return)
[ Cf. "The Revolution," III., book IX., ch. I.—Rocquain,
passim.—Schmidt, "Tableaux de la Révolution française,"
III., parts 9 and 10.—Archives nationales, F7, 3250 (Letter
of the commissioner of the executive directory, Fructidor 23,
year VII): "Armed mobs on the road between Saint-Omer
and Arras have dared fire on the diligences and rescue from
the gendarmerie the drawn conscripts."—Ibid., F7, 6565.
Only on Seine-inferiure, of which the following are some of
the reports of the gendarmerie for one year.—Messidor, year
VII, seditious mobs of conscripts and others in the cantons
of Motteville and Doudeville. "What shows the perverted
spirit of the communes of Gremonville and of Héronville is
that none of the inhabitants will make any declaration, while
it is impossible that they should not have been in the rebels'
secrets."—Similar mobs in the communes of Guerville,
Millebose,and in the forest of Eu: "It is stated that they have
leaders, and that drilling goes on under their orders.—
Vendémiarie 27, year VIII.) "Twenty-five armed brigands or
drafted men in the cantons of Réauté and Bolbec have put
farmers to ransom."—(Nivôse 12~ year VIII.) In the canton
of Cuny another band of brigands do the same thing.—
(Germinal 14, year VIII.) Twelve brigands stop the diligence
between Neufchatel and Rouen; a few days after, the
diligence between Rouen and Paris is stopped and three of
the escort are killed.—Analogous scenes and mobs in the
other departments.]
2107 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc),
Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. I., 260. Under the Directory," one
day, in order to dispatch a special courier, the receipts of the
Opera had to be taken because they were in coin. Another
day, it was on the point of sending every gold piece in the
musée of medals to be melted down (worth in the crucible
from 5000 to 6000 francs)."]
2108 (return)
[ "Théorie constitutionnelle de Sieyès." (Extract from
unpublished memoirs by Boulay de la Meurthe.) Paris, 1866,
Renouard.]

2109 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoleon 1er," XXX.. 345.
("Mémoires.")—"Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène"]
2110 (return)
[ "Extrait des Mémoires" de Boulay de la Meurthe, p.50.
(Words of Bonaparte to Roederer about Sieyès, who raised
objections and wanted to retire.) "If Sieyès goes into the
country, draw up for me at once the plan of a constitution. I
will summon the primary assemblies in a week and make
them accept it after discharging the (Constituant)
committees."]
2111 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Napoléon ler" XXX., 345, 346.
("Mémoires.") "Circumstances were such as to still make it
necessary to disguise the unique magistracy of the
president."]
2112 (return)
[ The Revolution," III., 458, 417.—"Mercure britannique,"
nos. for November 1798 and January 1799. (Letters from
Belgium.)—"More than 300 millions have been seized by
force in these desolated provinces; there is not a landowner
whose fortune has not been ruined, or sequestrated, or fatally
sapped by forced levies and the flood of taxes which
followed these, by robberies of movable property and the
bankruptcy due to France having discredited claims on the
emperor and on the governments, in short through
confiscation."—The insurrection breaks out, as in Vendée,
on account of the conscription; the war-cry of the insurgents
is, "Better die here than elsewhere."]
2113 (return)
[ De Martel, "Les Historiens fantaisistes," part 2 (on the
Pacification of the West, according to reports of the royalist
leaders and of the republican generals).]
2114 (return)
[ Archives nationales, F7, 3218. (Summary of dispatches
arranged according to dates.-Letters of Adjutant-General
Vicose, Fructidor 3, year VII.—Letters of Lamagdelaine,
commissioner of the executive Directory, Thermidor 26 and
Fructidor 3, year VII.)—"The rascals who led the people
astray had promised them, in the King's name, that they
should not be called on for further taxes, that the conscripts
and requisitionnaires should not leave, and, finally, that they
should have the priests they wanted."—Near Montréjean
"the carnage was frightful, nearly 2000 men slain or
drowned and 1000 prisoners."—(Letter of M. Alquier to the
first consul, Pluviôse 18, year VIII.) "The insurrection of
Thermidor caused the loss of 3000 cultivators.—(Letters of
the department administrators and of the government
commissioners, Nivôse 25 and 27, Pluviôse 13, 15, 25, 27,

and 30, year VIII.)—The insurrection is prolonged through a
vast number of isolated outrages, with sabers or guns,
against republican functionaries and partisans, justices of the
peace, mayors, etc. In the commune of Balbèze, fifty
conscripts, armed deserters with their knapsacks, impose
requisitions,give balls on Sunday, and make patriots give up
their arms. Elsewhere, this or that known patriot is assaulted
in his house by a band of ten or a dozen young folks who
make him pay a ransom, shout "Vive le Roi!" etc.—Cf.
"Histoire de I' insurrection royaliste de l'an VII," by B.
Lavigne, 1887.]
2115 (return)
[ Archives nationales, F7, 3273 (Letter of the commissioner
of the executive Directory, Vaucluse, Fructidor 6, year VII.):
"Eighty armed royalists have carried off, near the forest of
Suze, the cash-box of the collector, Bouchet, in the name of
Louis XVIII. These rascals, it must be noted, did not take
any of the money belonging to the collector himself."—
(Ibid., Thermidor 3, year VII.) "On looking around among
our communes I find all of them under the control of royalist
or town-councillors. That is the spirit of the peasants
generally.... Public spirit it so perverted, so opposed to the
constitutional regime, that a miracle only will bring them
within the pale of freedom."—Ibid., F7, 3199. (Similar
documents on the department of Bouches-du-Rhône.)
Outrages continue here far down into the consulate, in spite
of the vigor and multitude of military executions.—(Letter
of the sub-prefect of Tarascon, Germinal 15, year IX.) "In
the commune of Eyragues, yesterday, at eight o'clock, a
band of masked brigands surrounded the mayor's house,
while some of them entered it and shot this public
functionary without anybody daring to render him any
assistance.... Three-quarters of the inhabitants of Eyragues
are royalists."—In series F7, 7152 and those following may
be found an enumeration of political crimes classified by
department and by the month, especially for Messidor, year
VII.]
2116 (return)
[ Barère, representative of Hautes Pyrénées, had preserved a
good deal of credit in this remote department, especially in
the district of Argeles, with populations which knew nothing
about the "Mountain." In 1805, the electors presented him as
a candidate for the legislative body and the senate; in 1815,
they elected him deputy.]
2117 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc),
chancelier de France. in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris
1893. I., 158. At the time the concordat was under
consideration the aversion to "priest rule" was very great in

the army; there were secret meetings held against it. Many
of the superior officers took part in them, and even some of
the leading generals. Moreau was aware of them although he
did not attend them. In one of these gatherings, things were
carried far enough to resolve upon the assassination of the
first consul. A certain Donnadieu, then of a low rank in the
army, offered to strike the blow. General Oudinot, who was
present, informed Davoust, and Donnadieu, imprisoned in
the Temple, made revelations. Measures were at once taken
to scatter the conspirators, who were all sent away more or
less farther off; some were arrested and others exiled, among
them General Mounier, who had commanded one of
Desaix's brigades at Marengo. General Lecourbe was also
one of the conspirators.]
2118 (return)
[ On the 18th Fructidor Napoléon used grape-shot and
artillery to sweep the royalists off the streets of Paris. (SR.)]
2119 (return)
[ "Extrait des Mémoires de Boulay de la Meurthe," p.10.]
2120 (return)
[ Napoleon's words. ("Correspondance," XXX., 343,
memoirs dictated at Saint Helena.)]
2121 (return)
[ Lafayette, "Mémoires," II., 192.]
2122 (return)
[ Pelet de la Lozère, "Opinions de Napoléon au conseil
d'état," p. 63 "The senate is mistaken if it thinks it possesses
a national and representative chamber. It is merely a
constituted authority emanating from the government like
the others."—Ibid., P.147: "It must not be in the power of a
legislative body to impede government by refusing taxes;
once the taxes are established they should be levied by
simple decrees. The court of cassation regards my decrees as
laws; otherwise, there would be no government." (January 9,
1808.)—Ibid., p. 147:" If I ever had any fear of the senate I
had only to put fifty young state-councillors into it."
(December 1, 1803.)—Ibid., p.150: "If an opposition should
spring up in the legislative corps I would fall back on the
senate to prorogue, change it, or break it up." (March 29,
1806.)—Ibid., p.151: "Sixty legislators go out every year
which one does not know what to do with; those who do not
get places go and grumble in the departments. I should like
to have old land-owners married, in a certain sense, to the
state through their family or profession, attached by some tie
to the commonwealth. Such men would come to Paris
annually, converse with the emperor in his own circle, and
be contented with this little bit of vanity relieving the
monotony of their existence." (Same date.)—Cf.
Thibaudeau, "Mémoires sur le Consulat," ch. XIII., and M.

de Metternich, "Mémoires," I., 120 (Words of Napoleon at
Dresden, in the spring of 1812): "I shall give the senate and
the council of state a new organization. The former will take
the place of the upper chamber, the latter that of the chamber
of deputies. I shall continue to appoint the senators; I shall
have the state councillors elected one-third at a time on
triple lists; the rest I will appoint. Here will the budget be
prepared and the laws elaborated."—We see the corps
législatif, docile as it is, still worrying him, and very justly;
he foresaw the session of 1813.]

CHAPTER II. PUBLIC POWER

I. Principal service rendered by the public power.
Principal service rendered by the public power.—It is an
instrumentality.—A common law for every instrumentality.
—Mechanical instruments.—Physiological instruments.—Social
instruments.—The perfection of an instrument increases with
the convergence of its effects.

What is the service which the public power renders to the public?—The
principal one is the protection of the community against the foreigner, and
of private individuals against each other.—Evidently, to do this, it must in
all cases be provided with indispensable means, namely: diplomats, an
army, a fleet, arsenals, civil and criminal courts, prisons, a police, taxation
and tax-collectors, a hierarchy of agents and local supervisors, who, each in
his place and attending to his special duty, will co-operate in securing the
desired effect.—Evidently, again, to apply all these instruments, the public
power must have, according to the case, this or that form or constitution,
this or that degree of impulse and energy: according to the nature and
gravity of external or internal danger, it is proper that it should be
concentrated or divided, emancipated from control or under control,
authoritative or liberal. No indignation need be cherished beforehand
against its mechanism. Strictly speaking, it is a vast piece appliance in the
human community, such as a machine in a factory or such as organ in the
human body. If this organ is the only on that can carry out the task, let us
accept it and its structure: whoever wants the end wants the means. All we
can ask is that the means shall be adapted to the end; in other terms, that the
myriad of large or small local or central pieces shall be determined,
adjusted, and coordinated in view of the final and total effect to which they
co-operate nearly or remotely.
But, whether simple or compound, every engine which does any work is
subject to one condition; the better it is suited to any distinct purpose the
less it is suited to other purposes; as its perfection increases, so does its
application become limited.—Accordingly, if there are two distinct
instruments applied to two distinct objects, the more perfect they are, each
of its kind, the more do their domains become circumscribed and opposed
to each other; as one of them becomes more capable of doing its own work

it becomes more incapable of doing the work of the other; finally, neither
can take the place of the other, and this is true whatever the instrument may
be, mechanical, physiological, or social.
At the very lowest grade of human industry the savage possesses but one
tool; with his cutting or pointed bit of stone he kills, breaks, splits, bores,
saws, and carves; the instrument suffices, in the main, for all sorts of
services. After this come the lance, the hatchet, the hammer, the punch, the
saw, the knife, each adapted to a distinct purpose and less efficacious
outside of that purpose: one cannot saw well with a knife, and one cuts
badly with a saw. Later, highly-perfected engines appear, and, wholly
special, the sewing-machine and the typewriter: it is impossible to sew with
the typewriter or write with the sewing-machine.—In like manner, when at
the lowest round of the organic ladder the animal is simply a shapeless jelly,
homogeneous and viscous, all parts of it are equally suited to all functions;
the amoebae, indifferently and by all the cells of its body, can walk, seize,
swallow, digest, breathe, and circulate all its fluids, expel its waste, and
propagate its species. A little higher up, in fresh-water polyp, the internal
sac which digests and the outer skin which serves to envelop it can, if
absolutely necessary, change their functions; if you turn the animal inside
out like a glove it continues to live; its skin, become internal, fulfills the
office of a stomach; its stomach, become external, fulfills the office of an
envelope. But, the higher we ascend, the more do the organs, complicated
by the division and subdivision of labor, diverge, each to its own side, and
refuse to take each other's place. The heart, with the mammal, is only good
for impelling the blood, while the lungs only furnish the blood with oxygen;
one cannot possibly do the work of the other; between the two domains the
special structure of the former and the special structure of the latter
interpose an impassable barrier.—In like manner, finally, at the very bottom
of the social scale—lower down than the Andamans and the Fuegians—we
find a primitive stage of humanity in which society consists wholly of a
herd. In this herd there is no distinct association in view of a distinct
purpose; there is not even a family—no permanent tie between male and
female; there is simply a contact of the sexes. Gradually, in this herd of
individuals, all equal and all alike, particular groups define themselves, take
shape, and separate: we see appearing more and more precise relationships,
more and more distinct habitations, more and more hereditary homesteads,
fishing, hunting, and war groups, and small workshops; if the people is a

conquering people, castes establish themselves. At length, we find in this
expanded and solidly-organized social body provinces, communes,
churches, hospitals, schools, corporate bodies and associations of every
species and dimension, temporary or permanent, voluntary or involuntary,
in brief, a multitude of social engines constructed out of human beings who,
on account of personal interest, habit, and constraint, or through inclination,
conscience, and generosity, co-operate according to a public or tacit statute
in effecting in the material or spiritual order of things this or that
determinate undertaking. In France, to-day, there are, besides the State,
eighty-six departments, thirty-six thousand communes, four church bodies,
forty thousand parishes, seven or eight millions of families, millions of
agricultural, industrial, and commercial establishments, hundreds of
institutions of science and art, thousands of educational and charitable
institutions, benevolent and mutual-aid societies, and others for business or
for pleasure by tens and hundreds and thousands, in short, innumerable
associations of every kind, each with a purpose of its own, and, like a tool
or a special organ, carrying out a distinct work.
Now, each of these associations so far as it is a tool or an organ is subject
to the same law; the better it is in one direction, the more mediocre it is in
other directions; its special competency constitutes its general
incompetence. This is why, among developed nations, no specialized
organization can replace another in a satisfactory manner. "An academy of
painting which should also be a bank would, in all probability, exhibit very
bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company which should also
be a kindergarten would, we expect, light the streets poorly and teach the
children badly." 2201 And the reason is that an instrument, whatever it may
be, a mechanical tool, or physiological organ, or human association, is
always a system of pieces whose effects converge to a given end; it matters
little whether the pieces are bits of wood and metal, as in the tool, cells and
fibers, as in the organ, souls and understandings, as in the association; the
essential thing is the convergence of their effects; for the more convergent
these effects, the more efficient is the instrument in the realization of its
end. But, through this convergence, it takes one direction exclusively and
cannot take any other; it cannot operate at once in two different senses; it
cannot possibly turn to the right and at the same time turn to the left. If any
social instrument devised for a special service is made to act additionally
for another, it will perform its own office badly as well the one it usurps. Of

the two works executed by it, the first injures the second and the second
injures the first one. The end, ordinarily, is the sacrifice of one to the other,
and, most frequently, the failure of both.

II. Abusive Government Intervention.
Application of this law to the public power.—General effect
of its intervention.

Let us follow out the effects of this law when it is the public power
which, beyond its principal and peculiar task, undertakes a different task
and puts itself in the place of corporate bodies to do their work; when the
State, not content with protecting the community and individuals against
external or internal oppression, takes upon itself additionally the
government of churches, education, or charity, the direction of art, science,
and of commercial, agricultural, municipal, or domestic affairs.—
Undoubtedly, it can intervene in all corporate bodies other than itself; it has
both the right and the duty to interfere; it is bound to do this through its
very office as defender of persons and property, to repress in these bodies
spoliation and oppression, to compel in them the observance of the
primordial statute, charter, or contract, to maintain in the them rights of
each member fixed by this statute, to decide according to this statute all
conflicts which may arise between administrators and the administrated,
between directors and stockholders, between pastors and parishioners,
between deceased founders and their living successors. In doing this, it
affords them its tribunals, its constables, and its gendarmes, and it affords
these to them only with full consent after having looking into and accepted
the statute. This, too, is one of the obligations of its office: its mandate
hinders it from placing the public power at the service of despoiling and
oppressive enterprises; it is interdicted from authorizing a contract for
prostitution or slavery, and above all, for the best of reasons, a society for
brigandage and insurrections, an armed league, or ready to arm itself,
against the community, or a part of the community, or against itself.—But,
between this legitimate intervention which enables it to maintain rights, and
the abusive interference by which it usurps rights, the limit is visible and it
oversteps this limit when, to its function of justiciary, it adds a second, that
of governing or supporting another corporation. In this case two series of
abuses unfold themselves; on the one side, the State acts contrary to its

primary office, and, on the other, it discharges the duties of its superadded
office badly.2202

III. The State attacks persons and property.
It acts against its function. Its encroachments are attacks
on persons and property.

For, in the first place, to govern another corporate body, for example the
Church, the State at one time appoints its ecclesiastical heads, as under the
old monarchy after the abolition of the Pragmatic Sanction by the
Concordat of 1516; at another, as with the Constituent Assembly in 1791,
without appointing its heads, it invents a new mode of appointment by
imposing on the Church a discipline contrary to its spirit and even to its
dogmas. Sometimes it goes further still and reduces a special body into a
mere administrative branch, transforming its heads into revocable
functionaries whose acts it orders and directs; such under the Empire as
well as under the Restoration, were the mayor and common-councilors in a
commune, and the professors and head-masters of the University. One step
more and the invasion is complete: naturally, either through ambition or
precaution, or through theory or prejudice, on undertaking a new service it
is tempted to reserve to itself or delegate its monopoly. Before 1789 there
existed one of these monopolies to the advantage of the Catholic Church,
through the interdiction of other cults, also another to the advantage of each
corporation of "Arts et Métiers," through the interdiction of free labor; after
1800, there existed one for the benefit of the University through all sorts of
shackles and constraints imposed on the establishment and maintenance of
private schools.—Now, through each of these constraints the State
encroaches on the domain of the individual; the more extended its
encroachments the more does it prey upon and reduce the circle of
spontaneous initiation and of independent action, which constitute the true
life of the individual; if, in conformity with the Jacobin program, it pushes
its interference to the end, it absorbs in itself all other lives;2203 henceforth,
the community consists only of automata maneuvered from above,
infinitely small residues of men, passive, mutilated, and, so to say, dead
souls; the State, instituted to preserve persons, has reduced them to
nonentities.

The effect is the same with property when the State supports other
organizations than its own. For, to maintain these, it has no other funds than
those of the taxpayers; consequently, using its collectors, it takes the money
out of their pockets; all, indiscriminately, willingly or not, pay
supplementary taxes for supplementary services, whether this service
benefits them or is repugnant to them. If I am a Protestant in a Catholic
State, or a Catholic in a Protestant State, I pay for religion which seems
wrong to me and for a Church which seems to me mischievous. If I am a
skeptic, a free-thinker, indifferent or hostile to positive religions in France, I
pay to-day for the support of four cults which I regard as useless or
pernicious. If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an
"Opéra" which I never attend and for a "Sèvres" and "Gobelins" of which I
never see a vase or a piece of tapestry.—In times of tranquility the extortion
is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent. Under the
revolutionary government, bands of collectors armed with pikes made raids
on villages as in conquered countries;2204 the farmer, collared and kept
down by blows from the butt end of a musket, sees his grain taken from his
barn and his cattle from their stable; "all scampered off on the road to the
town;" while around Paris, within a radius of forty leagues, the departments
fasted in order that the capital might be fed. With gentler formalities, under
a regular government, a similar extortion occurs when the State, employing
a respectable collector in uniform, takes from our purse a crown too much
for an office outside of its competency. If, as with the Jacobin State, it
claims all offices, it empties the purse entirely; instituted for the
conservation of property, it confiscates the whole of it.—Thus, with
property, as with persons, when the state proposes to itself another purpose
than the preservation of these, not only does it overstep its mandate but it
acts contrary to its mandate.

IV. Abuse of State powers.
It badly fills the office of the bodies it supplant.—Cases
in which it usurps their powers and refuses to be their
substitute.—Cases in which it violates or profits by their
mechanism.—In all cases it is bad or mediocre substitute.
—Reasons derived from its structure compared with that of
other bodies.

Let us consider the other series of abuses, and the way in which the State
performs the service of the corporate bodies it supplants.
In the first place there is a chance that, sooner or later, it will shirk this
work, for this new service is more or less costly, and, sooner or later, it
seems too costly.—Undoubtedly the State has promised to defray expenses;
sometimes even, like the Constituent and Legislative assemblies, the
revenues for this having been confiscated, it has to furnish an equivalent; it
is bound by contract to make good the local or special sources of revenue
which it has appropriated or dried up, to furnish in exchange a supply of
water from the grand central reservoir, the public treasury.—But if water
becomes low in this reservoir, if the taxes in arrears stop the regular supply,
if a war happens to open a large breach in it, if the prodigality and
incapacity of the rulers, multiply its fissures and leaks, then there is no
money on hand for accessory and secondary services. The State, which has
adopted this service drops it: we have seen under the Convention and the
Directory how, having taken the property of all corporations, provinces, and
communes, of institutions of education, art, and science, of churches,
hospitals, and asylums, it performed their functions; how, after having been
a despoiler and a robber, it became insolvent and bankrupt; how its
usurpation and bankruptcy ruined and then destroyed all other services;
how, through the double effect of its intervention and desertion, it
annihilated in France education, worship, and charity; why the streets in the
towns were no longer lighted nor swept; why, in the provinces, roads went
to decay, and dikes crumbled; why schools and churches stood empty or
were closed; why, in the asylum and in the hospital, foundlings died for lack
of milk, the infirm for lack of clothing and food, and the sick for lack of
broth, medicines, and beds.2205

In the second place, even when the State respects a service or provides
the means for it, there is a chance that it will pervert this simply because it
comes under its direction.—When rulers lay their hands on an institution it
is almost always for the purpose of making something out of it for their
own advantage and to its detriment: they render everything subordinate to
their interests or theories, they put some essential piece or wheel out of
shape or place; they derange its action and put the mechanism out of order;
they make use of it as a fiscal, electoral, or doctrinal engine, as a reigning or
sectarian instrument.—Such, in the eighteenth century, was the
ecclesiastical staff with which we are familiar,2206 court bishops, drawing-
room abbés imposed from above on their diocese or their abbey, non-
residents, charged with functions which they do not fulfill, largely-paid
idlers, parasites of the Church, and, besides all this, worldly, gallant, often
unbelievers, strange leaders of a Christian clergy and which, one would say,
were expressly selected to undermine Catholic faith in the minds of their
flocks, or monastic discipline in their convents.—Such, in 1791,2207 is the
new constitutional clergy, schismatic, excommunicated, interlopers,
imposed on the orthodox majority to say masses which they deem
sacrilegious and to administer sacraments which they refuse to accept.
In the last place, even when the rulers do not subordinate the interests of
the institution to their passions, to their theories, or to their own interests,
even when they avoid mutilating it and changing its nature, even when they
loyally fulfill, as well as they know how, the supererogatory (distributive)
mandate which they have adjudged to themselves, they infallibly fulfill it
badly, at least worse than the special and spontaneous bodies for which they
substitute themselves, for the structure of these bodies and the structure of
the state are different.—Unique of its kind, alone wielding the sword, acting
from above and afar by authority and constraints, the State acts over the
entire territory through uniform laws, through imperative and minute
regulations, by a hierarchy of obedient functionaries, which it maintains
under strict instructions. Hence, it is not adapted to business which, to be
well done, needs springs and processes of another species. Its springs,
wholly exterior, are insufficient, too weak to support and push undertakings
which require an internal motor like private interest, local patriotism, family
affections, scientific curiosity, charitable instincts, and religious faith. Its
wholly mechanical processes, too rigid and too limited, cannot urge on
enterprises which demand of whoever undertakes them delicate and safe

handling, supple manipulation, appreciation of circumstances, ready
adaptation of means to ends, constant contrivance, the initiative, and perfect
independence. On this account the State is a poor head of a family, a poor
commercial or agricultural leader, a bad distributor of labor and of
subsistence, a bad regulator of production, exchanges, and consumption, a
mediocre administrator of the province and the commune, an undiscerning
philanthropist, an incompetent director of the fine arts, of science, of
instruction, and of worship.2208 In all these offices its action is either
dilatory or bungling, according to routine or oppressive, always expensive,
of little effect and feeble in returns, and always beyond or apart from the
real wants it pretends to satisfy. The reason is that it starts from too high a
point therefore extending over too vast a field. Transmitted by hierarchical
procedures, it lags along in formalism, and loses itself in "red-tape." On
attaining its end and object it applies the same program to all territories
alike a program devised beforehand in the Cabinet, all of a piece, without
experimental groping and the necessary corrections;
* a program which, calculated approximately according to the average
and the customary, is not exactly suited to any particular case;
* a program which imposes its fixed uniformity on things instead of
adjusting itself to its diversity and change;
* a sort of model coat, obligatory in pattern and stuff, which the
government dispatches by thousands from the center to the provinces, to be
worn, willingly or not, by figures of all sizes and at all seasons.

V. Final Results of Abusive Government
Intervention
Other consequences.—Suppressed or stunted bodies cease to
grow.—Individuals become socially and politically
incapable.—The hands into which public power then falls.
—Impoverishment and degradation of the social body.

And much worse. Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain
not its own, roughly, at greater cost, and with smaller yield than
spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it
deems its prerogative, or through its unfair competition, it kills and
paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so
many precious organs, which, absorbed, curbed or abandoned, are lost to
the great social body.—And still worse, if this system lasts, and continues to
crush them out, the human community loses the faculty of reproducing
them; entirely extirpated, they do not grow again; even their germ has
perished. Individuals no longer know how to form associations, how to co-
operate under their own impulses, through their own initiative, free of
outside and superior constraint, all together and for a long time in view of a
definite purpose, according to regular forms under freely-chosen chiefs,
frankly accepted and faithfully followed. Mutual confidence, respect for the
law, loyalty, voluntary subordination, foresight, moderation, patience,
perseverance, practical good sense, every disposition of head and heart,
with which no association of any kind is efficacious or even viable, have
died out for lack of exercise. Henceforth spontaneous, pacific, and fruitful
co-operation, as practiced by a free people, is unattainable; men have
arrived at social incapacity and, consequently, at political incapacity.—In
fact they no longer choose their own constitution or their own rulers; they
put with these, willingly or not, according as accident or usurpation
furnishes them: now the public power belongs to the man, the faction, or the
party sufficiently unscrupulous, sufficiently daring, sufficiently violent, to
seize and hold on to it by force, to make the most of it as an egotist or
charlatan, aided by parades and prestige, along with bravura songs and the
usual din of ready-made phrases on the rights of Man and the public

salvation.—This central power itself has in its hands no body who might
give it an impetus and inspiration, it rules only over an impoverished, inert,
or languid social body, solely capable of intermittent spasms or of artificial
rigidity according to order, an organism deprived of its secondary organs,
simplified to excess, of an inferior or degraded kind, a people no longer
anything but an arithmetical sum of separate, unconnected units, in brief,
human dust or mud.—This is what the interference of the State leads to.
There are laws in the social and moral world as in the physiological and
physical world; we may misunderstand them, but we cannot elude them;
they operate now against us, now for us, as we please, but always alike and
without heeding us; it is for us to heed them; for the two conditions they
couple together are inseparable; the moment the first appears the second
inevitably follows.

2201 (return)
[ Macaulay, "Essays: Gladstone on Church and State."—
This principle, of capital importance and of remarkable
fecundity, may be called the principle of specialties. Adam
Smith fist applied it to machines and to workmen. Macaulay
extended it to human associations. Milne-Edwards applied it
to the entire series of animal organs. Herbert Spencer largely
develops it in connection with physiological organs and
human societies in his "Principles of Biology" and
"Principles of Sociology." I have attempted here to show the
three parallel branches of its consequences, and, again, their
common root, a constitutive and primordial property
inherent in every instrumentality.]
2202 (return)
[ Cf. "The Revolution," III., book VI., ch. 2 The
encroachments of the State and their effect on individuals is
there treated. Here, the question is their effects on
corporations. Read, on the same subject, "Gladstone on
Church and State," by Macaulay, and "The Man versus the
State," by Herbert Spencer, two essays in which the close
reasoning and abundance of illustrations are admirable.]
2203 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III, 346. (Laffont II. p 258.)]
2204 (return)
[ Ibid., III. 284 Laff. 213.]
2205 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., 353, 416. (Laffont II. notes pp 262
and 305 to 308.)]
2206 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," 64, 65, 76, 77, 120, 121, 292.

(Laffont I. pp. 52-53, 60-61, 92 to 94, 218 to 219.)]
2207 (return)
[ "The Revolution," I., 177 and following pages. (Laffont I,
pp. 438 to 445.)]
2208 (return)
[ The essays of Herbert Spencer furnish examples for
England under the title of "Over-legislation and
Representative government." Examples for France may be
found in "Liberté du Travail," by Charles Dunoyer (1845).
This work anticipates most of the ideas of Herbert Spencer,
lacking only the physiological "illustrations."]

CHAPTER III. THE NEW GOVERNMENT
ORGANIZATION.

I. Precedents of the new organization.
Precedents of the new organization.—In practical
operation.—Anterior usurpations of the public power.
—Spontaneous bodies under the Ancient Regime and during the
Revolution.—Ruin and discredit of their supports.—The
central power their sole surviving dependence.

Unfortunately, in France at the end of the eighteenth century the bent was
taken and the wrong bent. For three centuries and more the public power
had increasingly violated and discredited spontaneous bodies:
Sometimes it had mutilated them and decapitated them; for example, it
had suppressed provincial governments (états) over three-quarters of the
territory, in all the electoral districts; nothing remained of the old province
but its name and an administrative circumscription.
Sometimes, without mutilating the corporate body it had upset and
deformed it, or dislocated and disjointed it.—So that in the towns, through
changes made in old democratic constitutions, through restrictions put upon
electoral rights and repeated sales of municipal offices,2301 it had handed
over municipal authority to a narrow oligarchy of bourgeois families,
privileged at the expense of the taxpayer, half separated from the main body
of the public, disliked by the lower classes, and no longer supported by the
confidence or deference of the community. And in the parish and in the
rural canton, it had taken away from the noble his office of resident
protector and hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a
mere creditor, and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position
of an absentee creditor.2302—So that in the parish and in the rural canton, it
had taken away from the noble his office of resident protector and
hereditary patron, reducing him to the odious position of a mere creditor,
and, if he were a man of the court, to the yet worse position of an absentee
creditor.2303 Thus, as to the clergy, it had almost separated the head from the
trunk by superposing (through the concordat) a staff of gentleman prelates,
rich, ostentatious, unemployed, and skeptical, upon an army of plain, poor,
laborious, and believing curates.2304

Finally, it had, through a protection as untimely as it was aggressive,
sometimes conferred on the corporation oppressive privileges which
rendered it offensive and mischievous, or else fossilized in an obsolete form
which paralyzed its action or corrupted its service. Such was the case with
the corporations of crafts and industries to which, in consideration of
financial aid, it had conceded monopolies onerous to the consumer and a
clog on industrial enterprises. Such was the case with the Catholic Church
to which, every five years, it granted, in exchange for its voluntary gift (of
money), cruel favors or obnoxious prerogatives, the prolonged persecution
of Protestants, the censorship of intellectual speculation, and the right of
controlling schools and education.2305 Such was the case with the
universities benumbed by routine; with latest provincial "Ètats," constituted
in 1789, as in 1489. Such was the case with noble families subjected by law
to the antique system of substitutions and of primogeniture, that is to say, to
social constraint which, devised long ago for private as well as for public
interest in order to secure the transmission of local patronage and political
power. This system, however, became useless and corrupting, fecund in
pernicious vanities,2306 in detestable calculations, domestic tyrannies,
forced vocations, and private bickering, from the time when the nobles,
become frequenters of the court, had lost political power and renounced
local patronage.
Thus deprived of, or diverted from, their purpose, the corporate bodies
had become unrecognizable under the crust of the abuses which disfigured
them. Nobody, except a Montesquieu, could comprehend why they should
exist; on the approach of the Revolution, they seemed, not organs, but
outgrowths, deformities, and, so to say, superannuated monstrosities. Their
historical and natural roots, their living germs far below the surface, their
social necessity, their fundamental utility, their possible usefulness, were no
longer visible. Only their present inconvenience was felt; people suffered
by their friction and burden; their lack of harmony and incoherence created
dissatisfaction; annoyance due to their degeneracy were attributed to radical
defects; they were judged to be naturally unsound and were condemned, in
principle, because of the deviations and laws which the public power had
imposed on their development.
Suddenly, the public power, which had produced the evil by its
intervention, pretended to remove it by a still greater intervention: in 1789 it
again intruded itself on corporate bodies, not to reform them, not restore

each to its proper channel, not to confine each with proper limits, but to
destroy them outright. Through a radical, universal, and extraordinary
amputation, the like of which is not mentioned in history, with the rashness
of the theorist and the brutality of the butcher, the legislator extirpated them
all, as far as he could, even including the family, while his fury extended
beyond the present into the future. To legal abolition and total confiscation,
he added the systematic hostility of his preventive laws, together with a
fresh obstacle in the shape of his new constructions; during three successive
legislatures2307 he provided against their future regeneration, against the
permanent instincts and necessities which might one day resuscitate stable
families, distinct provinces, and an orthodox church, against artistic,
industrial, financial, charitable, and educational corporations, against every
spontaneous and organized group, and against every collective, local, or
special enterprise. In place of these he installed synthetic bodies or
institutions:
* a Church without believers,
* schools without pupils,
* hospitals without incomes,
* a geometrical hierarchy of improvised powers in the commune, district,
and department,
all badly organized, badly adjusted, out of gear at the start, overwhelmed
with political functions, as incapable of performing their proper duties as
their supplementary duties, and, from the very beginning, either powerless
or mischievous.2308 Changes repeatedly marred by arbitrariness from above
or from below, set aside or perverted now by the mob and again by the
government, inert in the country, oppressive in the towns, we have seen the
state into which they had fallen at the end of the Directory; how, instead of
a refuge for liberty, they had become haunts of tyranny or sinks of egoism;
why, in 1800, they were as much decried as their predecessors in 1788, why
their two successive props, the old one and the most recent, historic custom
and popular election, were now discredited and no longer resorted to.—
After the disastrous experience of the monarchy and the still worse
experience of the republic, another prop had to be sought for; but only one
remained, that of the central power, the only one visible and which seemed
substantial; in default of others they had recourse to this.2309 In any event,
no protestation, even secret and moral, any longer prevented the State from

attaching other corporate bodies to itself, in order to use them for its own
purposes as instruments or appendages.

II. Doctrines of Government.
The theory.—Agreement of speculative ideas with practical
necessities.—Public rights under the Ancient Regime.—The
King's three original rights.—Labors of the jurists in
extending royal prerogatives.—Historical impediments.—The
primitive or ulterior limits of royal power.—The
philosophic and revolutionary principle of popular
sovereignty.—Unlimited extension of State power.
—Application to spontaneous bodies.—Convergence of ancient
and new doctrines.—Corporations considered as creations of
the public power.—Centralization through the universal
intervention of the State.

The theory here agreed with the need, and not alone the recent theory, but
again the ancient theory. Long before 1789, public right had elevated the
prerogative of centralized power into a dogma and exaggerated it beyond
measure.
There are three titles under which this power was conferred.—Feudal
seignior, and suzerain, that is to say, commander-in-chief of the great
resident army whose willing forces had served to reconstruct society in the
ninth century, the King, through the remotest of his origins—that is to say,
through the immemorial confusion of sovereignty with property—was the
owner of France, the same as an individual owns his private domain.2310—
Married, moreover, to the Church since the first Capets, consecrated and
crowned at Rheims, anointed by God like a second David,2311 not only was
he believed to be authorized from on high, like other monarchs, but, from
Louis le Gros, and especially after the time of saint Louis, he appeared as
the delegate from on high, invested with a laic sacerdotalism, clothed with
moral power, minister of eternal justice, redresser of wrongs, protector of
the weak, benefactor of the humble—in short, "His Most Christian
Majesty."—At length, after the thirteenth century, the recent discovery and
diligent study of the ancient codes of Justinian had shown in his person the
successor of the Caesars of Rome and of the Emperors of Constantinople.
According to these codes the people in a body had transferred its rights to
the prince; now, in antique cities, all rights were vested in the community,
and the individual had none;2312 accordingly, through this transfer, all
rights, public or private, passed into the hands of the prince; henceforth he

could exercise them as he pleased, under no restriction and no control. He
was above the law, since he made it; his powers were illimitable and his
decision absolute.2313
On this triple frame the jurists, like State spiders, had, from Philippe le
Bel down, spun their web, and the instinctive concordance of their
hereditary efforts had attached all its threads to the omnipotence of the
King.—Being jurisconsults—that is to say, logicians—they were obliged to
deduce, and their minds naturally recurred to the unique and rigid principle
to which they might attach their arguments.—As advocates and councilors
of the crown they espoused the case of their client and, through professional
zeal, derived or forced precedents and texts to his advantage.—By virtue of
being administrators and judges the grandeur of their master constituted
their grandeur, and personal interest counseled them to expand a prerogative
in which, through delegation, they took part.—Hence, during four centuries,
they had spun the tissue of "regalian rights," the great net in the meshes of
which, since Louis XIV., all lives found themselves caught.2314
Nevertheless, however tightly spun was the web, there were openings in
it, or, at least, very weak spots.—And first, of the consequences flowing
from these three principles in their hands, two of them had hindered the
third from unwinding its skein to the end: owing to the fact that the King
was formerly Count de Paris and Abbot of St. Denis, he could not become a
veritable Augustus, an authentic Diocletian: his two French titles limited his
Roman title. Without regard to the laws, so-called fundamental, which
imposed his heir on him beforehand, also the entire line of his successive
heirs, the tutor, male or female, of his minor heir, and which, if he
derogated from immemorial usage, annulled his will like that of a private
individual, his quality of suzerain and that of Most Christian, were for him a
double impediment. As hereditary general of the feudal army he was bound
to consider and respect the hereditary officers of the same army, his old
peers and companions in arms—that is to say, the nobles. As outside bishop,
he owed to the Church not alone his spiritual orthodoxy, but, again, his
temporal esteem, his active zeal, and the aid furnished him by his secular
arm. Hence, in applied right, the numerous privileges of the nobles and the
Church, so many immunities and even liberties, so many remains of antique
local independence, and even of antique local sovereignty,2315 so many
prerogatives, honorific or serviceable, maintained by the law and by the
tribunals. On this side, the meshes of the monarchical netting had not been

well knit or remained loose; and the same elsewhere, with openings more or
less wide, in the five provincial governments (états), in the Pyrenees
districts, in Alsace, at Strasbourg, but especially in Languedoc and in
Brittany, where the pact of incorporation, through a sort of bilateral
contract, associated together on the same parchment and under the same
seal the franchises of the province and the sovereignty of the King.
Add to these original lacunae the hole made by the Prince himself in his
net already woven: he had with his own hand torn away its meshes, and by
thousands. Extravagant to excess and always needy, he converted
everything into money, even his own rights, and, in the military order, in the
civil order, in commerce and in industry, in the administration, in the
judicature, and in the finances. From one end of the territory to the other, he
had sold innumerable offices, imposts, dignities, honors, monopolies,
exemptions, survivorships, expectancies—in brief, privileges which, once
conferred for a money consideration, became legal property,2316 often
hereditary and transmissible by the individual or the corporation which had
paid for them. In this way the King alienated a portion of his royalty for the
benefit of the buyer. Now, in 1789, he had alienated a great many of these
portions; accordingly, his present authority was everywhere restricted by
the use he had previously made of it.—Sovereignty, thus, in his hands had
suffered from the double effect of its historic origins and its historic
exercise; the public power had not become, or had ceased to be,
omnipotence. On the one hand it had not reached its plenitude, and on the
other hand it had deprived itself of a portion of its own completeness.
The philosophers wished to find a solution for this double weakness,
innate and acquired They had therefore transported sovereignty out of
history into the ideal and abstract world, with an imaginary city of mankind
reduced to the minimum of a human being Here men, infinitely simplified,
all alike, equal, separate from their surroundings and from their past,
veritable puppets, were all lifting their hands in common rectangular motion
to vote unanimously for the contrat social. In this contract "all classes are
reduced to one,2317 the complete surrender of each associate, with all his
rights, to the community, each giving himself up entirely, just as he actually
is, himself and all his forces, of which whatever he possesses forms a part,"
each becoming with respect to himself and every act of his private life a
delegate of the State, a responsible clerk, in short, a functionary, a
functionary of the people, henceforth the unique, the absolute, and the

universal sovereign. A terrible principle, proclaimed and applied for ten
years, below by the mob and above by the government! Popular opinion
had adopted it; accordingly the passage from the sovereignty of the King to
the sovereignty of the people was easy, smooth,2318 and to the novice in
reasoning, the old-fashioned taxable and workable subject, to whom the
principle conferred a portion of the sovereignty, the temptation was too
great.
At once, according to their custom, the jurists put themselves at the
service of the new reign. And no dogma was better suited their to
authoritative instinct; no axiom furnished them so convenient a fulcrum on
which to set up and turn their logical wheel. This wheel, which they had
latterly managed with care and caution under the ancient Régime, had
suddenly in their hands turned with frightful speed and effect in order to
convert the rigid, universal, and applied laws, the intermittent processes, the
theoretical pretensions, and the worst precedents of the monarchy into
practice. This meant
* the use of extraordinary commissions,
* accusations of lésé majesté,
* the suppression of legal formalities,
* the persecution of religious beliefs and of personal opinions,
* the right of condemning publications and of coercing thought,
* the right of instruction and education,
* the rights of pre-emption, of requisition, of confiscation, and of
proscription,
in short, pure and perfect arbitrariness. The result is visible in the deeds
of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambacérès, in those of the
Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention, under the
Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent for combining
despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their professional skill in
fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible arguments with which to
properly strangle the individual, their adversary, to the profit of the State,
their eternal master.
In effect, not only had they almost strangled their adversary, but likewise,
through an aftereffect, their master: France which, after fourteen months of
suffocation, was approaching physical suicide.2319 Such success, too great,

had obliged them to stop; they had abandoned one-half of their destructive
creed, retaining only the other half, the effect of which, less imminent, was
less apparent. If they no longer dared paralyze individual acts in the man,
they persisted in paralyzing in the individual all collective acts.—There
must be no special associations in general society; no corporations within
the State, especially no spontaneous bodies endowed with the initiative,
proprietary and permanent: such is Article II. of the Revolutionary Creed,
and the direct consequence of the previous one which posits axiomatically
the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the State.
Rousseau,2320 inventor of the first, had like-wise enunciated the second; the
constituent assembly had solemnly decreed it and applied it on a grand
scale,2321 and successive assemblies had applied it on a still grander
scale;2322 it was a faith with the Jacobins, and, besides, in conformity with
the spirit of Roman imperial right and with the leading maxim of French
monarchical right. On this point the three known jurisprudential systems
were in accord, while their convergence brought together around the same
table the jurists of the three doctrines in a common task, ex-
parliamentarians and ex-members of the Committee of Public Safety,
former pro-scribers and the proscribed, the purveyors of Sinamari with
Treilhard and Merlin de Douai, returned from Guiana, alongside of Simeon,
Portalis, and Barbé-Marbois. There was nobody in this conclave to maintain
the rights of spontaneous bodies; the theory, on all three sides, no matter
from whom it proceeded, refused to recognize them for what they are
originally and essentially, that is to say, distinct organisms equally natural
with the State, equally indispensable in their way, and, therefore, as
legitimate as itself; it allowed them only a life on trust, derived from above
and from the center. But, since the State created them, it might and ought to
treat them as its creatures, keep them indefinitely under its thumb, use them
for its purposes, act through them as through other agencies, and transform
their chiefs into functionaries of the central power.

III. Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.
The Organizer.—Influence of Napoleon's character and mind
on his internal and French system.—Exigencies of his
external and European rôle.—Suppression of all centers of
combination and concord.—Extension of the public domain and
what it embraces.—Reasons for maintaining the private
domain.—The part of the individual.—His reserved
enclosure.—Outlets for him beyond that.—His talents are
enlisted in the service of public power.—Special aptitude
and temporary vigor, lack of balance, and doubtful future of
the social body thus formed.

A new France, not the chimerical, communistic, equalized, and Spartan
France of Robespierre and Saint-Just, but a possible real, durable, and yet
leveled and uniform France, logically struck out at one blow, all of a piece,
according to one general principle, a France, centralized, administrative,
and, save the petty egoistic play of individuals, managed in one entire body
from top to bottom,—in short, the France which Richelieu and Louis XIV.
had longed for, which Mirabeau after 1790 had foreseen,2323 is now the
work which the theories of the monarchy and of the Revolution had
prepared, and toward which the final concurrence of events, that is to say,
"the alliance of philosophy and the saber," led the sovereign hands of the
First Consul.
Accordingly, considering his well-known character, the promptitude, the
activity, the reach, the universality, and the cast of his intellect, he could not
have proposed to himself a different work nor reduced himself to a lower
standard. His need of governing and of administrating was too great; his
capacity for governing and administrating was too great: his was an
exacting genius.—Moreover, for the outward task that he undertook he
required internally, not only undisputed possession of all executive and
legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all legal authorities, but,
again, the annihilation of all moral authority but his own, that is to say, the
silence of public opinion and the isolation of each individual, and therefore
the abolition, preventive and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic,
pedagogic, charitable, literary, departmental, or communal initiative that
might, now or in the future gather men against him or alongside of him.
Like a good general he secures his rear. At strife with all Europe, he so

arranges it as not to allow in the France he drags along after him refractory
souls or bodies which might form platoons in his rear. Consequently, and
through precaution, he suppresses in advance all eventual rallying points or
centers of combination Henceforth, every wire which can stir up and bring a
company of men together for the same object terminates in his hands; he
holds in his firm grasp all these combined wires, guards them with jealous
care, in order to strain them to the utmost. Let no one attempt to loosen
them, and, above all, let no one entertain a thought of getting hold of them;
they belong to him and to him alone, and compose the public domain,
which is his domain proper.
But, alongside of his proper domain, he recognizes another in which he
himself assigns a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his own; he
does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least
in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable
nor, especially, arbitrary.2324—This is due to his not being an utopian or a
theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious
statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes. He sees things directly,
in themselves; he does not imagine them through book formulae or party
phrases, by a process of verbal reasoning, employing the gratuitous
suppositions of humanitarian optimism or the dogmatic prejudices of
Jacobin nonsense. He sees Man just as he is, not Man in himself, an abstract
citizen, the philosophic puppet of the Contrat Social, but the real individual,
the entire living man, with his profound instincts, his tenacious necessities,
which, whether tolerated or not by legislation, still subsist and operate
infallibly, and which the legislator must take into consideration if he wants
to turn them to account.—This individual, a civilized European and a
modern Frenchman, constituted as he is by several centuries of tolerable
police discipline, of respected rights and hereditary property, must have a
private domain, an enclosed area, large or small, which belongs and is
reserved to him personally, to which the public power interdicts access and
before which it mounts guard to prevent other individuals from intruding on
it. Otherwise his condition seems intolerable to him; he is no longer
disposed to exert himself, to set his wits to work, or to enter upon any
enterprise. Let us be careful not to snap or loosen this powerful and
precious spring of action; let him continue to work, to produce, to
economize, if only that he may be in a condition to pay taxes; let him
continue to marry, to bring forth and raise up sons, if only to serve the

conscription. Let us ease his mind with regard to his enclosure;2325 let him
exercise full proprietorship over it and enjoy it exclusively; let him feel
himself at home in his own house in perpetuity, safe from any intrusion,
protected by the code and by the courts, not alone against his enemies, but
against the administration itself. Let him in this well-defined, circumscribed
abode be free to turn round and range as he pleases, free to browse at will,
and, if he chooses, to consume all his hay himself. It is not essential that his
meadows should be very extensive: most men live with their nose to the
ground; very few look beyond a very narrow circle; men are not much
troubled by being penned up; the egoism and urgent needs of daily life are
already for them ready-made limits: within these natural barriers they ask
for nothing but to be allowed to graze in security. Let us give them this
assurance and leave them free to consult their own welfare.—As to the rest,
in very small number, more or less imaginative, energetic, and ardent, there
is, outside the enclosure, an issue expressly provided for them: the new
administrative and military professions offer an outlet to their ambition and
to their vanity which, from the start, keeps on expanding until, suddenly, the
first Consul points to an infinite perspective on the horizon.2326 According
to an expression attributed to him, henceforth,
"the field is open to all talents,"
and hence all talents, gathered into the central current and precipitated
headlong through competition, swell with their inflow the immensity of the
public power.
This done, the principal features of modern France are traced; a tool of a
new and strange type arises, defines itself, and issues forth, its structure
determining its destiny. It consists of a social body organized by a despot
and for a despot, calculated for the use of one man, excellent for action
under the impulsion of a unique will, with a superior intelligence, admirable
so long as this intelligence remains lucid and this will remains healthy. It is
adapted to a military life and not to civil life, and therefore badly balanced,
hampered (géné) in its development, exposed to periodical crises,
condemned to precocious debility, but viable for a long time, and, for the
present robust, alone able to bear the weight of the new reign and to furnish
for fifteen successive years the crushing labor, the conquering obedience,
the superhuman, murderous, insensate effort which its master exacts.

IV. Napoleon's barracks.
General aspect and characteristics of the new State.
—Contrast between its structure and that of other
contemporary or pre-existing States.—The plurality,
complexity, and irregularity of ancient France.—The unity,
simplicity, and regularity of modern France.—To what class
of works it belongs.—It is the modern masterpiece of the
classic spirit in the political and social order of things.

Let us take a nearer view of the master's idea and of the way in which, at
this moment, he figures to himself the society which is assuming new shape
in his hands. All the leading features of the plan are fixed beforehand in his
mind: they are already deeply graven on it through his education and
through his instinct. By virtue of this instinct, which is despotic, by virtue
of this education, which is classic and Latin, he conceives human
associations not in the modern fashion, Germanic and Christian, as a
concert of initiations starting from below, but in the antique fashion, pagan
and Roman, as a hierarchy of authorities imposed from above. He puts his
own spirit into his civil institutions, the military spirit; consequently, he
constructs a huge barracks wherein, to begin with, he lodges thirty million,
men, women, and children, and, later on, forty-two million, all the way
from Hamburg to Rome.
The edifice is, of course, superb and of a new style. On comparing it with
other societies in surrounding Europe, and particularly France as she was
previous to 1789, the contrast is striking.—Everywhere else the social
edifice is a composition of many distinct structures—provinces, cities,
seignories, churches, universities, and corporations. Each has begun by
being a more or less isolated block of buildings where, on an enclosed area,
a population has lived apart. Little by little the barriers have given way;
either they have been broken in or have tumbled down of their own accord;
passages have been made between one and the other and new additions
have been put up; at last, these scattered buildings have all become
connected and soldered on as annexes to the central pile. But they combine
with it only through a visible and clumsy juxtaposition, through incomplete
and bizarre communications: the vestiges of their former independence are
still apparent athwart their actual dependence. Each still rests on its own

primitive and appropriate foundations; its grand lines subsist; its main work
is often almost intact. In France, on the eve of 1789, it is easily recognized
what she formerly was; for example, it is clear that Languedoc and Brittany
were once sovereign States, Strasbourg a sovereign town, the Bishop of
Mende and the Abbess of Remiremont, sovereign princes;2327 every
seignior, laic, or ecclesiastic, was so in his own domain, and he still
possessed some remnants of public power. In brief, we see thousands of
states within the State, absorbed, but not assimilated, each with its own
statutes, its own legal customs, its own civil law, its own weights and
measures; several with special privileges and immunities; some with their
own jurisdiction and their own peculiar administration, with their own
imposts and tariffs like so many more or less dismantled fortresses, but
whose old feudal, municipal, or provincial walls still rose lofty and thick on
the soil comprehended within the national enclosure.
Nothing could be more irregular than this total aggregate thus formed; it
is not really an entire whole, but an agglomeration. No plan, good or bad,
has been followed out; the architecture is of ten different styles and of ten
different epochs. That of the dioceses is Roman and of the fourth century;
that of the seignories is Gothic and of the ninth century; one structure dates
from the Capetians, another from the Valois, and each bears the character of
its date. Because each has been built for itself and with no regard to the
others, adapted to an urgent service according to the exigencies or
requirements of time, place, and circumstance; afterward, when
circumstances changed, it had to adapt itself to other services, and this
constantly from century to century, under Philippe le Bel, under Louis XI.,
under Francis I., under Richelieu, under Louis XIV., through constant
revision which never consists of entire destruction, through a series of
partial demolitions and of partial reconstructions, in such a way as to
maintain itself, during the transformation, in conciliating, well or ill, new
demands and rooted habits, in reconciling the work of the passing
generation with the works of generations gone before.—The central
seignory itself is merely a donjon of the tenth century, a military tower of
which the enclosure has extended so as to embrace the entire territory, and
of which the other buildings, more or less incorporated with it, have
become prolongations.—A similar medley of constructions—disfigured by
such mutilations, adjuncts, and patches, a pell-mell so complicated with
such incongruous bits and fragments—can be comprehended only by

antiquaries and historians; ordinary spectators—the public—pronounce it
absurd; it finds no favor with that class of reasoners who, in social
architecture as in physical architecture, repudiate disorder, posit theories,
deduce consequences, and require that every work shall proceed from the
application of a simple idea.
And worse still, not only is good taste offended but, again, good sense
often murmurs. Practically, the edifice fails in its object, for, erected for
men to dwell in, it is in many places scarcely habitable. Because it endures
it is found superannuated, ill-adapted to prevailing customs; it formerly
suited, and still suits, the feudal, scattered, and militant way of living; hence
it no longer suits the unity and repose of modern life. New-born rights
obtain no place in it alongside of established rights; it is either not
sufficiently transformed or it has been transformed in an opposite sense, in
such a way as to be inconvenient or unhealthy, badly accommodating
people who are useful and giving good accommodations to useless people,
costing too much to keep up and causing discomfort and discontent to
nearly all its occupants.—In France, in particular, the best apartments,
especially that of the King, are for a century past too high and too large, too
sumptuous and too expensive. Since Louis XIV. these have imperceptibly
ceased to be government and business bureaus; they have become in their
disposition, decoration, and furnishing, saloons for pomp and conversation,
the occupants of which, for lack of other employment, delight in discussing
architecture and in tracing plans on paper for an imaginary edifice in which
everybody will find himself comfortable. Now, underneath these,
everybody finds himself uncomfortable, the bourgeoisie in its small scanty
lodgings on the ground-floor and the people in their holes in the cellar,
which are low and damp, wherein light and air never penetrate.
Innumerable vagabonds and vagrants are still worse off, for, with no shelter
or fireside, they sleep under the stars, and as they are without anything to
care for, they are disposed to pull everything down.—Under the double
pressure of insurrection and theory the demolition begins, while the fury of
destruction goes on increasing until nothing is left of the razed edifice but
the soil it stood on.
The new one rises on this cleared ground and, historically as well as
structurally, it differs from all the others.—In less than ten years it springs
up and is finished according to a plan which, from the first day, is definite
and complete. It forms one unique, vast, monumental block, in which all

branches of the service are lodged under one roof; in addition to the
national and general services belonging to the public power, we find here
others also, local and special, which do not belong to it, such as worship,
education, charity, fine arts, literature, departmental and communal
interests, each installed in a distinct compartment. All the compartments are
ordered and arranged alike, forming a circle around the magnificent central
apartment, with which each is in communication by a bell; as soon as the
bell rings and the sound spreads from division to sub-division, the entire
service, from the chief clerk down to the lowest employee, is instantly in
motion; in this respect the arrangement, as regards despatch, co-ordination,
exactitude, and working facilities, is admirable.2328
On the other hand, its advantages and attractions for employees and
aspirants of every kind and degree are not mediocre. There is no separation
between the stories, no insurmountable barrier or enclosure between large
and small apartments; all, from the least to the finest, from the outside as
well as from the inside, have free access. Spacious entrances around the
exterior terminate in broad, well-lighted staircases open to the public;
everybody can clamber up that pleases, and to mount these one must
clamber; from top to bottom there is no other communication than that
which they present. There is no concealed and privileged passage, no
private stairway or false door; glancing along the whole rectilinear, uniform
flight, we behold the innumerable body of clerks, functionaries,
supernumeraries, and postulants, an entire multitude, ranged tier beyond tier
and attentive; nobody advances except at the word and in his turn.—
Nowhere in Europe are human lives so well regulated, within lines of
demarcation so universal, so simple, and so satisfactory to the eye and to
logic: the edifice in which Frenchmen are henceforth to move and act is
regular from top to bottom, in its entirety as well as in its details, outside as
well as inside; its stories, one above the other, are adjusted with exact
symmetry; its juxtaposed masses form pendants and counterpoise; all its
lines and forms, every dimension and proportion, all its props and buttresses
combine, through their mutual dependencies, to compose a harmony and to
maintain an equilibrium. In this respect the structure is classic, belonging to
the same family of productions which the same spirit, guided by the same
method, had produced in Europe for the previous one hundred and fifty
years.2329 Its analogues, in the physical order of things, are the architectural
productions of Mansard, Le Notre, and their successors, from the structures

and gardens of Versailles down to and embracing the Madeleine and the
Rue de Rivoli. In the intellectual order, its analogues consist of the literary
forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the superb oratorical
prose and correct, eloquent poetry, especially epics and tragedies, including
those still manufactured according to rule about the year 1810. It
corresponds to these and forms their pendant in the political and social
order of things, because it emanates from the same deliberate purpose. Four
constitutions, in the same style, preceded it; but these were good only on
paper, while this one stands firm on the ground. For the first time in modern
history we see a society due to ratiocination and, at the same time,
substantial; the new France, under these two heads, is the masterpiece of the
classic spirit.

V. Modeled after Rome.
Its analogue in the antique world.—The Roman State from
Diocletian to Constantine.—Causes and bearing of this
analogy.—Survival of the Roman idea in Napoleon's mind.
—The new Empire of the West.

Nevertheless, if we go back in time, beyond modern times, beyond the
Middle Ages, as far as the antique world, we encounter during the Roman
emperors Diocletian's and Constantine's era another monument whose
architecture, equally regular, is developed on a still grander scale: back then
we are in the natal atmosphere and stand on the natal soil of the classic
spirit.—At this time, the human material, more reduced and better prepared
than in France, existed similarly in the requisite condition. At this date, we
likewise see at work the prearranging reasoning-faculty
* which simplifies in order to deduce,
* which leaves out historic customs and local diversities,
* which considers the basic human being,
* which treats individuals as units and the people as totals,
* which forcibly applies its general outlines to all special lives, and
* which glories in constituting, legislating, and administering by rule
according to the measurements of square and compass.
At this date, in effect, the turn of mind, the talent, the ways of the Roman
architect, his object, his resources and his means of execution, are already
those of his French successor; the conditions around him in the Roman
world are equivalent; behind him in Roman history the precedents, ancient
and recent, are almost the same.
In the first place,2330 there is, since emperor Augustus, the absolute
monarchy, and, since the Antonines, administrative centralization the result
of which is that
* all the old national and municipal communities are broken up or
crushed out,
* all collective existences chilled or extinguished,

* local patriotism slowly worn away,
* an increasing diminution of individual initiative,
and, under the invasive interference, direction, and providence of the
State, one hundred millions of men become more and more passive and
separated from each other.2331
And as a result, in full enjoyment of peace and internal prosperity under
the appearances of union, force, and health, latent feebleness, and, as in
France on the approach of 1789, a coming dissolution.
There is next, as after 1789 in France, the total collapse, not from below
and among the people, but from above and through the army, a worse
collapse than in France, prolonged for fifty years of anarchy, civil wars,
local usurpations, ephemeral tyrannies, urban seditions, rural jacqueries,
brigandage, famines, and invasions along the whole frontier, with such a
ruin of agriculture and other useful activities, with such a diminution of
public and private capital, with such a destruction of human lives that, in
twenty years, the number of the population seems to have diminished one
half.2332 There is, finally, as after 1799, in France, the re-establishment of
order brought about more slowly, but by the same means, the army and a
dictatorship, in the rude hands of three or four great military parvenus,
Pannonians or Dalmatians, Bonapartes of Sirmium or of Scutari, they too,
of a new race or of intact energy, adventurers and children of their own
deeds, the last Diocletian, like Napoleon, a restorer and an innovator.
Around them, as around Napoleon, to aid them in their civil undertakings, is
a crowd of expert administrators and eminent jurisconsults, all practitioners,
statesmen, and businessmen, and yet men of culture, logicians, and
philosophers. They were imbued with the double governmental and
humanitarian view, which for three centuries Greek speculation and Roman
practice had introduced into minds and imaginations. This view, at once
leveling and authoritative, tending to exaggerate the attributes of the State
and the supreme power of the prince,2333 was nevertheless inclined
* to put natural right in the place of positive law,2334
* to preferring equity and logic to antiquity and to custom,
* to reinstate the dignity of man among the qualities of mankind,
* to enhance the condition of the slave, of the provincial, of the debtor, of
the bastard, of woman, of the child, and

* to recover for the human community all its inferior members, foreign or
degraded, which the ancient constitution of the family and of the city had
excluded from it.
Therefore Napoleon could find the outlines of his construction in the
political, legislative, and judicial organizations extending from Diocletian to
Constantine, and beyond these down to Theodosius. At the base, popular
sovereignty;2335 the powers of the people delegated unconditionally to one
man. This omnipotence conferred, theoretically or apparently, through the
free choice of citizens, but really through the will of the army. No
protection against the Prince's arbitrary edict, except a no less arbitrary
rescript from the same hand. His successor designated, adopted, and
qualified by himself. A senate for show, a council of state for
administration; all local powers conferred from above; cities under tutelage.
All subjects endowed with the showy title of citizen, and all citizens
reduced to the humble condition of taxpayers and of people under control.
An administration of a hundred thousand officials taking all services into its
hands, comprising public instruction, public succor, and public supplies of
food, together with systems of worship. This was at first pagan cults, and
after Constantine, the Christian cult. All these services were classified,
ranked, co-coordinated, carefully defined in such a way as not to encroach
on each other, and carefully combined in such a way as to complete each
other. An immense hierarchy of transferable functionaries was kept at work
from above on one hundred and eighty square leagues of territory; thirty
populations of different race and language-Syrians, Egyptians, Numidians,
Spaniards, Gauls, Britons, Germans, Greeks, Italians—subject to the same
uniform Régime. The territory was divided like a checker-board, on
arithmetical and geometrical principles, into one hundred or one hundred
and twenty small provinces; old nations or States dismembered and
purposely cut up so as to put an end forever to natural, spontaneous, and
viable groups. A minute and verified census taking place every fifteen years
to correctly assign land taxes. An official and universal language; a State
system of worship, and, very soon, a Church and State orthodoxy. A
systematic code of laws, full and precise, admirable for the rule of private
life, a sort of moral geometry in which the theorems, rigorously linked
together, are attached to the definitions and axioms of abstract justice. A
scale of grades, one above the other, which everybody may ascend from the
first to the last; titles of nobility more and more advanced, suited to more

and more advanced functions; spectabiles, illustres, clarissimi,
perfectissimi, analogous to Napoleon's Barons, Counts, Dukes, and Princes.
A programme of promotion once exhibiting, and on which are still seen,
common soldiers, peasants, a shepherd, a barbarian, the son of a cultivator
(colon), the grandson of a slave, mounting gradually upward to the highest
dignities, becoming patrician, Count, Duke, commander of the cavalry,
Cæsar, Augustus, and donning the imperial purple, enthroned amid the most
sumptuous magnificence and the most elaborate ceremonial prostrations, a
being called God during his lifetime, and after death adored as a divinity,
and dead or alive, a complete divinity on earth.2336
So colossal an edifice, so admirably adjusted, so mathematical, could not
wholly perish; its hewn stones were too massive, too nicely squared; too
exactly fitted, and the demolisher's hammer could not reach down to its
deepest foundations.—This one, through its shaping and its structure,
through its history and its duration, resembles the stone edifices which the
same people at the same epoch elevated on the same soil, the aqueducts,
amphitheatres, and triumphal arches, the Coliseum, the baths of Diocletian
and of Caracalla.
The medieval man, using their intact foundations and their shattered
fragments, built here and there, haphazard, according to the necessities of
the moment, planting his Gothic towers between Corinthian columns
against the panels of walls still standing.2337 But, under his incoherent
masonry, he observed the beautiful forms, the precious marbles, the
architectural combinations, the symmetrical taste of an anterior and superior
art; he felt that his own work was rude. The new world, to all thinking
minds, was miserable compared with the old one; its languages seemed a
patois (crude dialect), its literature mere stammering or driveling, its law a
mass of abuses or a mere routine, its feudality anarchy, and its social
arrangements, disorder.—In vain had the medieval man striven to escape
through all issues, by the temporal road and by the spiritual road, by the
universal and absolute monarchy of the German Cesars, and by the
universal and absolute monarchy of the Roman pontiffs. At the end of the
fifteenth century the Emperor still possessed the golden globe, the golden
crown, the scepter of Charlemagne and of Otho the Great, but, after the
death of Frederick II., he was nothing more than a majesty for show; the
Pope still wore the tiara, still held the pastoral staff and the keys of Gregory
VII. and of Innocent III., but, after the death of Boniface VIII., he was

nothing more than a majesty of the Church. Both abortive restorations had
merely added ruins to ruins, while the phantom of the ancient empire alone
remained erect amid so many fragments. Grand in its outlines and
decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique
masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society. For ten
centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere to such an
extent as in Italy.2338
It reappears the last time in 1800, starting up in and taking firm hold of
the magnificent, benighted imagination of the great Italian,2339 to whom the
opportunity afforded the means for executing the grand Italian dream of the
Middle Ages; it is according to this retrospective vision that the Diocletian
of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Civil
Code, the Theodosius of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud reconstructed
France.
This does not mean that he copies—he restores; his conception is not
plagiarism, but a case of atavism; it comes to him through the nature of his
intellect and through racial traditions. In the way of social and political
conceptions, as in literature and in art, his spontaneous taste is ultra-classic.
We detect this in his mode of comprehending the history of France; State
historians, "encouraged by the police," must make it to order; they must
trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to the year VIII," and their object must
be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.2340 "The
constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the
provincial assemblies,... the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of
energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no
unity of laws or of administration, being rather a union of twenty kingdoms
than one single State, so that one breathes on reaching the epoch in which
people enjoy the benefits of the unity of the laws, of the administration, and
of the territory." In effect, he breathes; in thus passing from the former to
the latter spectacle, he finds real intellectual pleasure; his eyes, offended
with Gothic disorder, turn with relief and satisfaction to majestic simplicity
and classic regularity; his eyes are those of a Latin architect brought up in
the "École de Rome."
This is so true that, outside of this style, he admits of no other. Societies
of a different type seem to him absurd. He misconceives their local
propriety and the historical reasons for their existence. He takes no account

of their solidity. He is going to dash himself against Spain and against
Russia, and he has no comprehension whatever of England.2341—This is so
true that, wherever he places his hand he applies his own social system; he
imposes on annexed territories and on vassal2342 countries the same
uniform arrangements, his own administrative hierarchy, his own territorial
divisions and sub-divisions, his own conscription, his civil code, his
constitutional and ecclesiastical system, his university, his system of
equality and promotion, the entire French system, and, as far as possible,
the language, literature, drama, and even the spirit of his France,—in brief,
civilization as he conceives it, so that conquest becomes propaganda, and,
as with his predecessors, the Cesars of Rome, he sometimes really fancies
that the establishment of his universal monarchy is a great benefit to
Europe.

2301 (return)
[ De Tocqueville, "L'Ancien régime et la Revolution." p. 64
and following pages, also p.354 and following pages.—"The
Ancient Régime," p. 368.]
2302 (return)
[ "The Revolution," I., book I., especially pp. 16, 17, 55, 61,
62-65. (Laffont I., 326, 354, 357 to 360.)]
2303 (return)
[ "The Ancient Regime," pp.—36-59. (Laff. I. pp. 33-48.)]
2304 (return)
[ Ibid., pp. 72-77. (Laff. I. pp. 59 to 61.)]
2305 (return)
[ Ibid., pp. 78-82. (Laff. I. pp. 50-52)]
2306 (return)
[ Cf. Frédéric Masson, "Le Marquis de Grignan," vol. I.]
2307 (return)
[ "The Revolution," I., p. 161 and following pages; II., book
VI., ch. I., especially p. 80 and following pages. (Laffont I.
428 to 444, 632 and II 67 to 69.)]
2308 (return)
[ Ibid., I., P.193 and following pages, and p.226 and
following pages.(Ed. Laffont. I. 449 to 452, 473 to 481.)]
2309 (return)
[ "Souvenirs", by PASQUIER (Etienne-Dennis, duc),
chancelier de France. in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris
1893. I., 148 (in relation to the institution prefects and sub-
prefects): "The perceptible good resulting from this change
was the satisfaction arising from being delivered in one day
from a herd of insignificant men, mostly without any merit

or shadow of capacity and to who the administration of
department and arrondissement had been surrendered for the
past ten years. As nearly all of them sprung from the lowest
ranks in society, they were only the more disposed to make
the weight of their authority felt."]
2310 (return)
[ Guyot, "Répertoire de jurisprudence" (1785), article King:
"It is a maxim of feudal law that the veritable ownership of
lands, the domain, directum dominium, is vested in the
dominant seignior or suzerain. The domain in use, belonging
to the vassal or tenant, affords him really no right except to
its produce."]
2311 (return)
[ Luchaire," Histoire des institutions monarchiques de la
France sous les premiers Capétiens," I., 28, 46. (Texts of
Henry I., Philip I., Louis VI., and Louis VII.) "A divine
minister."—(Kings are) "servants of the kingdom of
God."—"Gird on the ecclesiastical sword for the punishment
of the wicked."—"Kings and priests alone, by ecclesiastical
ordination, are made sacred by the anointing of holy oils."]
2312 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., p.94. (Laffont II, p. 75)]
2313 (return)
[ Janssen, "L'Allemagne à la fin du moyen âge" (French
translation), I., 457. (On the introduction of Roman law into
Germany.)—Declaration of the jurists at the Diet of
Roncaglia: "Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem."—
Edict of Frederick I., 1165: "Vestigia praedecessorum
suorum, divorum imperatorum, magni Constantini scilicet et
Justiniani et Valentini,... sacras eorum leges,... divina
oracula.... Quodcumque imperator constituerit, vel
cognoscens decreverit, vel edicto praeceperit, legem esse
constat."—Frederick II.: "Princeps legibus solutus est."—
Louis of Bavaria: "Nos qui sumus supra jus."]
2314 (return)
[ Guyot, ibid., article Régales. "The great 'régales,' majora
regalia, are those which belong to the King, jure singulari et
proprio, and which are incommunicable to another,
considering that they cannot be divorced from the scepter,
being the attributes of sovereignty, such as... the making of
laws, the interpretation or change of these, the last appeal
from the decisions of magistrates, the creation of offices, the
declaration of war or of peace,... the coining of money, the
augmentation of titles or of values, the imposition of taxes
on the subjects,... the exemption of certain persons from
these, the award of pardon for crimes,... the creation of
nobles, the foundation of universities,... the assembling of
the états-généraux or provinciaux, etc."—Bossuet, "Politique
tirée de l'Écriture sainte": The entire state exists in the

person of the prince."—Louis XIV., "æuvres," I., 50 (to his
son): "You should be aware that kings can naturally dispose
fully and freely of all possessions belonging as well to
persons of the church as to laymen, to make use of at all
times with wise economy, that is to say, according to the
general requirements of their government."—Sorel,
"L'Europe et la Révolution française," I., 231 (Letter of the
"intendant" Foucault): "It is an illusion, which cannot
proceed from anything but blind preoccupation, that of
making any distinction between obligations of conscience
and the obedience which is due to the King."]
2315 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," p.9 and following pages.
—"Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de le Marck,"
II., 74 (Note by Mirabeau, July 3, 1790): "Previous to the
present revolution, royal authority was incomplete: the king
was compelled to humor his nobles, to treat with the
parliaments,, to be prodigal of favors to the court."]
2316 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., p.318. (Laff.II. p. 237-238).—" The
Ancient Régime," p. 10 (Laff. I. 25n.) Speech by the
Chancellor Séguier, 1775: "Our kings have themselves
declared that they are fortunately powerless to attack
property."]
2317 (return)
[ Rousseau's text in the "Contrat Social."—On the meaning
and effect of this principle cf "The Revolution," I., 217 and
following pages, and III., book VI., ch. I. Laff. 182-186 et II.
47 to 74).]
2318 (return)
[ The opinion, or rather the resignation which confers
omnipotence on the central power, goes back to the second
half of the fifteenth century, after the Hundred Years' war,
and is due to that war; the omnipotence of the king was then
the only refuge against the English invaders, and the ravages
of the Écorcheurs.—Cf. Fortescue, "In leges Angliæ," and"
"The Difference between an Absolute and a Limited
Monarchy" (end of the fifteenth century), on the difference
at this date between the English and the French government.
—The same decision is found in the dispatches of the
Venetian ambassadors of this date: "In France everything is
based on the will of the king. Nobody, whatever might be his
conscientious scruples, would dare express an opinion
opposed to his. The French respect their king to such an
extent that they would not only sacrifice their property for
him, but again their souls." (Janssen, "L'Allemagne à la fin
du moyen âge. I. 484.)—As to the passage of the
monarchical to the democratic idea, we see it plainly in the
following quotations from Restif de la Bretonne: "I

entertained no doubt that the king could legally oblige any
man to give me his wife or his daughter, and everybody in
my village (Sacy in Burgundy) thought so too." ("Monsieur
Nicolas," I., 443.)—In relation to the September massacres:
"No, I do not pity them, those fanatical priests... When a
community or its majority wants anything, it is right. The
minority is always culpable, even when right morally.
Common sense is that is needed to appreciate that truth. It is
indisputable that the nation has the power to sacrifice even
an innocent person." ("Nuits de Paris," XVth, p.377.)]
2319 (return)
[ "The Revolution," III., 393. (Laff. II. p. 291)]
2320 (return)
[ "Contrat Social," book 1st, ch. III.: "It is accordingly
essential that, for the enunciation of the general will, no
special organization should exist in the State, and that the
opinion of each citizen should accord with that. Such was
the unique and sublime law of the great Lycurgus."]
2321 (return)
[ "The Revolution," I., 170. (Laff. I. 433.)]
2322 (return)
[ Ibid., II., 93; III., 78-82. (Laff. I. p. 632 and II. pp. 65-68.)]
2323 (return)
[ "Correspondance de Mirabeau et du Comte de la
Marck,"II., 74 (Letter of Mirabeau to the King, July 3,
1790): "Compare the new state of things with the ancient
régime.... One portion of the acts of the national assembly
(and that the largest) is evidently favorable to monarchical
government. Is it to have nothing, then, to have no
parliaments, no provincial governments, no privileged
classes, no clerical bodies, no nobility? The idea of forming
one body of citizens would have pleased Richelieu: this
equalized surface facilitates the exercise of power. Many
years of absolute rule could not have done so much for royal
authority as this one year of revolution."—Sainte-Beuve,
"Port-Royal," V., 25 (M. Harlay conversing with the
supérieure of Port-Royal): "People are constantly talking
about Port-Royal, about these Port-Royal gentlemen: the
King dislikes whatever excites talk. Only lately he caused
M. Arnaud to be informed that he did not approve of the
meetings at his house; that there is no objection to his seeing
all sorts of people indifferently like everybody else, but why
should certain persons always be found in his rooms and
such an intimate association among these gentlemen?... The
King does not want any rallying point; a headless
assemblage in a State is always dangerous."—Ibid., p.33:
"The reputation of this establishment was too great. People
were anxious to put their children in it. Persons of rank sent
theirs there. Everybody expressed satisfaction with it. This

provided it with friends who joined those of the
establishment and who together formed a platoon against the
State. The King would not consent to this: he regarded such
unions as dangerous in a State."]
2324 (return)
[ "Napoleon Ire et ses lois civiles," by Honoré Pérouse, 280:
Words of Napoleon: "I have for a long time given a great
deal of thought and calculation to the re-establishment of the
social edifice. I am to-day obliged to watch over the
maintenance of public liberty. I have no idea of the French
people becoming serfs."—"The prefects are wrong in
straining their authority."—"The repose and freedom of
citizens should not depend on the exaggeration or
arbitrariness of a mere administrator."—"Let authority be
felt by the people as little as possible and not bear down on
them needlessly."—(Letters of January 15, 1806, March 6,
1807, January 12, 1809, to Fouché, and of March 6, 1807, to
Regnault.)—Thibaudeau, "Mémoires sur le Consulat," P.
178 (Words of the first consul before the council of state):
"True civil liberty depends on the security of property. In no
country can the rate of the tax-payer be changed every year.
A man with 3000 francs income does not know how much
he will have left to live on the following year; his entire
income may be absorbed by the assessment on it... A mere
clerk, with a dash of his pen, may overcharge you thousands
of francs... Nothing has ever been done in France in behalf
of real estate. Whoever has a good law passed on the
cadastre (official valuation of all the land in France) will
deserve a statue."]
2325 (return)
[ Honoré Pérouse, Ibid, 274 (Speech of Napoleon to the
council of state on the law on mines):" "Myself, with many
armies at my disposition, I could not take possession of any
one's field, for the violation of the right of property in one
case would be violating it in all. The secret is to have mines
become actual property, and hence sacred in fact and by
law."—Ibid., 279:" "What is the right of property? It is not
only the right of using but, again, of abusing it. ... One must
always keep in mind the advantage of owning property. The
best protection to the owner of property is the interest of the
individual; one may always rely on his activity.... A
government makes a great mistake in trying to be too
paternal; liberty and property are both ruined by over-
solicitude."—"If the government prescribes the way in
which property shall be used it no longer exists.".—Ibid.,
284 (Letters of Aug.21 and Sept. 7, 1809, on expropriations
by public authority): "It is indispensable that the courts
should supervise, stop expropriation, receive complaints of
and guarantee property-owners against the enterprises of our
prefects, our prefecture councils and all other agents....

Expropriation is a judicial proceeding.... I cannot conceive
how France can have proprietors if anybody can be deprived
of his field simply by an administrative decision."—In
relation to the ownership of mines, to the cadastre, to
expropriation, and to the portion of property which a man
might bequeath, Napoleon was more liberal than his jurists.
Madame de Staël, "Dix années d'exil," ch. XVIII. (Napoleon
conversing with the tribune Gallois): "Liberty consists of a
good civil code, while modern nations care for nothing but
property."—"Correspondance," letter to Fouché, Jan. 15,
1805. (This letter gives a good summary of his ideas on
government.) "In France, whatever is not forbidden is
allowed, and nothing can be forbidden except by the laws,
by the courts, or police measures in all matters relating to
public order and morality."]
2326 (return)
[ Roederer, "æuvres complètes," III., 339 (Speech by the
First Consul, October 21, 1800): "Rank, now, is a
recompense for every faithful service—the great advantage
of equality, which has converted 20,000 lieutenancies,
formerly useless in relation to emulation, into the legitimate
ambition and honorable reward of 400,000 soldiers."—
Lafayette, "Mémoires," V., 350: "Under Napoleon, the
soldiers said, he has been promoted King of Naples, of
Holland, of Sweden, or of Spain, as formerly it was said that
a than had been promoted sergeant in this or that company."]
2327 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," book I., ch.2, the Structure of
Society, especially pp.19-21. (Laff. I. p. 21-22)]
2328 (return)
[ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène"—Napoleon, speaking of his
imperial organization, said that he had made the most
compact government, one with the quickest circulation and
the most nervous energy, that ever existed. And, he
remarked, nothing but this would have answered in
overcoming the immense difficulties around us, and for
effecting the wonderful things we accomplished. The
organization of prefectures, their action, their results, were
admirable and prodigious. The same impulsion affected at
the same time more than forty millions of men, and, aided
by centers of local activity, the action was as rapid at every
extremity as at the heart."]
2329 (return)
[ "The Ancient Régime," book III., chs. 2 and 3. (Laff. I, pp.
139 to 151 and pp. 153 to 172.)]
2330 (return)
[ Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," chs. I, 2,
3, and 13.—Duruy, "Histoire des Romains" (illustrated
edition), tenth period, chs. 82, 83, 84, and 85; twelfth period,

chs. 95 and 99; fourteenth period, ch. 104.—(The reader will
find in these two excellent works the texts and monuments
indicated to which it is necessary to resort for a direct and
satisfactory impression.)]
2331 (return)
[ See in Plutarch (Principles of Political Government) the
situation of a Greek city under the Antonines.]
2332 (return)
[ Gibbon, ch. 10.—Duruy, ch. 95. (Decrease of the
population of Alexandria under Gallien, according to the
registers of the alimentary institution, letter of the bishop
Dionysius.)]
2333 (return)
[ "Digest," I., 4, I.: "Quod principi placuit legis habet
vigorem, utpote, cum lege regia, quæ de imperio ejus lata
est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem
conferat. Quodcumque igitur imperator per epistolam et
subscriptionem statuit, vel cognoscens decrevit, vel de plano
interlocutus est, vel edicto præcepit, legis habet vigorem."
(Extracts from Ulpian.)—Gaius, Institutes, I., 5: "Quod
imperator constituit, non dubium est quin id vicem legis
obtineat, quum ipse imperator per legem imperium
obtineat."]
2334 (return)
[ "Digest," I, 2. (Extracts from Ulpian): "Jus est a justitia
appellatum; nam, ut eleganter Celsus definit, jus est ars boni
et æqui. Cujus merito quis nos sacerdotes appellat: justitiam
namque colimus, et boni et æqui notitiam profitemur,
æquum ab iniquo separantes, licitum ab illicito
discernentes,... veram, nisi fallor, philosophiam, non
simulatam affectantes.... Juris præcepta sunt hæc: honeste
vivere, alterum non lædere, suum cuique tribuere."—cf.
Duruy, 12th period, ch. 87.]
2335 (return)
[ Cf., on this immemorial principle of the entire body of
Roman public law, cf. Fustel de Coulanges, "Histoire des
institutions politiques et privées de l'ancienne France," vol.
I., book II., ch. I, p.66 and following pages.]
2336 (return)
[ Read the "Notitia dignitatum tam civilium quam militarium
in partibus orientis et occidentis." It is the imperial almanac
for the beginning of the fifth century. There are eleven
ministers at the centre, each with his bureaux, divisions,
subdivisions and squads of superposed functionaries,]
2337 (return)
[ Cf. Piranesi's engravings.]
2338 (return)
[ Cf., among other clues see Dante's: "De Monarchia".]

2339 (return)
[ We can trace in Napoleon's brain and date the formation of
this leading idea. At first, it is simply a classic reminiscence,
as with his contemporaries; but suddenly it takes a turn and
has an environment in his mind which is lacking in theirs,
and which prevents the idea from remaining a purely literary
phrase. From the beginning he speaks of Rome in the
fashion of a Rienzi. (Proclamation of May 20, 1796.) "We
are the friends of every people, and especially of the
Brutuses, the Scipios, and of the great men whom we have
chosen as models. To re-establish the Capitol, to place there
with honor the statues of heroes who render it famous, to
arouse the Roman people benumbed by centuries of slavery,
such will be the fruit of our victories."—Fifteen months
afterwards, on becoming master of Italy, his historic
meditations turn into positive ambition henceforth, the
possession of Italy and of the Mediterranean is to be with
him a central and preponderant idea. (Letter to the Directory,
Aug. 16, 1797, and correspondence on the subject of
Corsica, Sardinia, Naples, and Genoa; letters to the pasha of
Scutari, to the Maniotes, etc.) "The islands of Corfu, Zante,
and Cephalonia are of more interest to us than all Italy put
together.... The Turkish empire is daily tottering; the
possession of these islands will enable us to support it as
long as possible, or to take our portion of it. The time is not
remote when we shall feel that, for the real destruction of
England, we must get possession of Egypt." Formerly, the
Mediterranean was a Roman lake; it must become a French
lake. (Cf. "Souvenirs d'un Sexagénaire," by Arnault, vol. IV.,
p.102, on his dream, in 1798, of making Paris a colossal
Rome.)—At this same date, his conception of the State is
fixed and wholly Roman. (Conversations with Miot, June
1797, and letter to Talleyrand, Sep. 19, 1797.) "I do not see
but one thing in fifty years well defined, and that is the
sovereignty of the people.... The organization of the French
nation is still only sketched out....The power of the
government, with the full latitude I give to it, should be
considered as really representing the nation." In this
government, "the legislative power, without rank in the
republic, deaf and blind to all around it, would not be
ambitious and would no longer inundate us with a thousand
chance laws, worthless on account of their absurdity." It is
evident that he describes in anticipation his future senate and
legislative corps.—Repeatedly, the following year, and
during the expedition into Egypt, he presents the Romans as
an example to his soldiers, and views himself as a successor
to Scipio and Cæsar.—(Proclamation of June 22, 1798.):
"Be as tolerant to the ceremonies enjoined by the Koran as
you are for the religion of Moses and Jesus. The Roman
legions protected all religions."—(Proclamation of May 10,

1798.) "The Roman legions that you have often imitated but
not yet equaled fought Carthage in turn on this wall and in
the vicinity of Zama."—Carthage at this time is England: his
hatred of this community of merchants which destroys his
fleet at Aboukir, which forces him to raise the siege of Saint-
Jean d'Acre, which holds on to Malta, which robs him of his
substance, his patrimony, his Mediterranean, is that of a
Roman consul against Carthage; it leads him to conquer all
western Europe against her and to "resuscitate the empire of
the Occident." (Note to Otto, his ambassador at London,
Oct.. 23, 1802.)—Emperor of the French, king of Italy,
master of Rome, suzerain of the Pope, protector of the
confederation of the Rhine, he succeeds the German
emperors, the titularies of the Holy Roman Empire which
has just ended in 1806; he is accordingly the heir of
Charlemagne and, through Charlemagne, the heir of the
ancient Cæsars.—In fact, he reproduces the work of the
ancient Cæsars by analogies of imagination, situation and
character, but in a different Europe, and where this
posthumous reproduction can be only an anachronism.]
2340 (return)
[ "Correspondance," note for M. Cretet, minister of the
interior, April 12, 1808.]
2341 (return)
[ Metternich, "Mémoires," I., 107 (Conversations with
Napoleon,, 1810): "I was surprised to find that this man, so
wonderfully endowed, had such completely false ideas
concerning England, its vital forces and intellectual
progress. He would not admit any ideas contrary to his own,
and sought to explain these by prejudices which he
condemned."—Cf. Forsyth, "History of the Captivity of
Napoleon at Saint-Helena," III., 306, (False calculations of
Napoleon at Saint-Helena based on his ignorance of the
English parliamentary system,) and Stanislas Girardin, III.,
296, (Words of the First Consul, Floreal 24, year XI, quoted
above.)]
2342 (return)
[ Cf., amongst other documents, his letter to Jerome, King of
Westphalia, October 15, 1807, and the constitution he gives
to that kingdom on that date, and especially titles 4 to 12:
"The welfare of your people concerns me, not only through
the influence it may exercise on your fame and my own, but
likewise from the point of view of the general European
system.... Individuals who have talent and are not noble
must enjoy equal consideration and employment from you.
... Let every species of serfage and of intermediary lien
between the sovereign and the lowest class of people be
abolished. The benefits of the code Napoleon, the publicity
of proceedings, the establishment of juries, will form so

many distinctive characteristics of your monarchy."—His
leading object is the suppression of feudalism, that is to say,
of the great families and old historic authorities. He relies
for this especially on his civil code: "That is the great
advantage of the code;... it is what has induced me to preach
a civil code and made me decide on establishing it." (Letter
to Joseph, King of Naples, June 5, 1806.)—"The code
Napoleon is adopted throughout Italy. Florence has it, and
Rome will soon have it." (Letter to Joachim, King of the
Two Sicilies, Nov. 27, 1808.)—"My intention is to have the
Hanseatic towns adopt the code Napoleon and be governed
by it from and after the 1st of January."—The same with
Dantzic: "Insinuate gently and not by writing to the King of
Bavaria, the Prince-primate, the grand-dukes of Hesse-
Darmstadt and of Baden, that the civil code should be
established in their states by suppressing all customary law
and confining themselves wholly to the code Napoleon."
(Letter to M. de Champagny, Oct. 31, 1807.)—"The Romans
gave their laws to their allies. Why should not France have
its laws adopted in Holland?... It is equally essential that you
should adopt the French monetary system." (Letter to Louis,
King of Holland, Nov. 13, 1807.)—To the Spaniards: "Your
nephews will honor me as their regenerator." (Allocution
addressed to Madrid Dec. 9, 1808.)—"Spain must be
French. The country must be French and the government
must be French." (Roederer, III., 529, 536, words of
Napoleon, Feb. 11, 1809.)—In short, following the example
of Rome, which had Latinized the entire Mediterranean
coast, he wanted to render all western Europe French. The
object was, as he declared, "to establish and consecrate at
last the empire of reason and the full exercise, the complete
enjoyment of every human faculty." (Mémorial.)]

BOOK THIRD. OBJECT AND MERITS OF THE
SYSTEM.

CHAPTER I. RECOVERY OF SOCIAL ORDER.

I. Rule as the mass want to be ruled.
How Napoleon comprehends the sovereignty of the people.—His
maxim on the will of the majority and on the office of
government.—Two groups of prominent and obvious desires in
1799.

However clear and energetic his artistic convictions may be, his mind is
absorbed by the preoccupations of the ruler: It is not enough for him that his
edifice should be monumental, symmetrical, and beautiful. As he lives in it
and derives the greatest benefit from it, he wants first of all that it should be
fit to live in, habitable for Frenchmen of the year 1800. Consequently, he
takes into account the habits and dispositions of his tenants, the pressing
and permanent wants. But these needs must not be theoretic and vague, but
verified and defined; for he is as accurate as he is shrewd, and deals only
with positive facts.
"My political system," says he to the Council of State,3101 "is to rule men
as the mass want to be ruled... By constituting myself a Catholic I put an
end to the war in La Vendée; by turning into a Moslem I established myself
in Egypt: by turning ultramontane3102 I gained over the priests in Italy.
Were I to govern a population of Jews, I would restore the temple of
Solomon. I shall speak just in this fashion about liberty in the free part of
St. Domingo; I shall confirm slavery in the Ile-de-France and even in the
slave section of St. Domingo, with the reservation of diminishing and
limiting slavery where I maintain it, and of restoring order and keeping up
discipline where I maintain freedom. I think that is the way to recognize the
sovereignty of the people."
"Now, in France, at this epoch, there are two groups of preponderant
desires which evidently outweigh all others, one dating back the past ten
years, and the other for a century or more: the question is how to satisfy
these, and the sagacious constructor, who estimates them for what they are
worth, combines to this end the proportions, plan, arrangement, and entire
interior economy of his edifice.

II. The Revolution Ends.
Necessities dating from the Revolution.—Lack of security
for Persons, Property, and Consciences.—Requisite
conditions for the establishment of order.—End of Civil
war, Brigandage, and Anarchy.—Universal relief and final
security.

The first of these two needs is urgent, almost physical. For the last ten
years, the government has not done its duty, or has ruled in a contrary sense.
By turns or at the same time its impotence and injustice have been
deplorable. It has committed or allowed too many outrages on persons,
property, and consciences. All in all the Revolution did nothing else, and it
is time that this should stop. Safety and security for consciences, property,
and persons is the loud and unanimous outcry vibrating in all hears.3103—
To calm things down, many novelties are required: To start with, the
political and administrative concentration just described, a centralization of
all powers in one hand, local powers conferred by the central power, and, to
exercise this supreme power a resolute chief, equal in intelligence to his
high position. Next, a regularly paid army,3104 carefully equipped, properly
clothed and fed, strictly disciplined and therefore obedient and able to do its
duty without wavering or faltering, like any other instrument of precision.
An active police force and gendarmerie kept on a tight rein. Administrators
independent of those under their jurisdiction, and judges independent of
those due to be tried. All appointed, maintained, watched, and restrained
from above, as impartial as possible, sufficiently competent, and, in their
official spheres, capable functionaries. Finally, freedom of worship, and,
accordingly, a treaty with Rome and the restoration of the Catholic Church,
that is to say, a legal recognition of the orthodox hierarchy and of the only
clergy which the faithful may accept as legitimate, in other words, the
institution of bishops by the Pope, and of priests by the bishops.
This done, the rest is easily accomplished. A well-led army corps
marches along and tramples out the embers of the conflagration now
kindling in the West, while religious toleration extinguishes the smoldering
fires of popular insurrection. Henceforth, there is an end to civil war.3105
Regiments ready to act in harmony with the military commissions3106 purge

the South and the valley of the Rhône; thenceforth, there are no more
roving bands in the rural districts, while brigandage on a grand scale,
constantly repressed, ceases, and after this, that on a small scale. No more
chouans, chauffeurs, or barbets;3107 The mail-coach travels without a guard,
and the highways are safe.3108 There is longer any class or category of
citizens oppressed or excluded from the common law, the latest Jacobin
decrees and the forced loan have been at once revoked: noble or plebeian,
ecclesiastic or layman, rich or poor, former émigré or former terrorist, every
man, whatever his past, his condition, or his opinions, now enjoys his
private property and his legal rights; he has no longer to fear the violence of
the opposite party; he may relay on the protection of the authorities,3109 and
on the equity of the magistrates.3110 So long as he respects the law he can
go to bed at night and sleep tranquilly with the certainty of awaking in
freedom on the morrow, and with the certainty of doing as he pleases the
entire day; with the privilege of working, buying, selling, thinking, amusing
himself,3111 going and coming at his pleasure, and especially of going to
mass or of staying away if he chooses. No more jacqueries either rural or
urban, no more proscriptions or persecutions and legal or illegal spoliations,
no more intestine and social wars waged with pikes or by decrees, no more
conquests and confiscations made by Frenchmen against each other. With
universal and unutterable relief people emerge from the barbarous and
anarchical régime which reduced them to living from one day to another,
and return to the pacific and regular régime which permits them to count on
the morrow and make provision for it. After ten years of harassing
subjection to the incoherent absolutism of unstable despotism, here, for the
first time, they find a rational and stable government, or, at least, a
reasonable, tolerable, and fixed degree of it. The First Consul is carrying
out his declarations and he has declared that "The Revolution has
ended."3112

III. Return of the Emigrés.
Lasting effect of revolutionary laws.—Condition of the
Émigrés.—Progressive and final amnesty.—They return.—They
recover a portion of their possessions.—Many of them enter
the new hierarchy.—Indemnities for them incomplete.

The main thing now is to dress the severe wounds it has made and which
are still bleeding, with as little torture as possible, for it has cut down to the
quick, and its amputations, whether foolish or outrageous, have left sharp
pains or mute suffering in the social organism.
One hundred and ninety-two thousand names have been inscribed on the
list of émigrés3113 the terms of the law, every émigré is civilly dead, and his
possessions have become the property of the Republic;" if he dared return
to France, the same law condemned him to death; there could be no appeal,
petition, or respite; it sufficed to prove identity and the squad of
executioners was at once ordered out. Now, at the beginning of the
Consulate, this murderous law is still in force; summary proceedings are
always applicable,3114 and one hundred and forty-six thousand names still
appear on the mortuary list. This constitutes a loss to France of 146,000
Frenchmen, and not those of the least importance—gentlemen, army and
navy officers, members of parliaments, priests, prominent men of all
classes, conscientious Catholics, liberals of 1789, Feuillantists of the
Legislative assembly, and Constitutionalists of the years III and V. Worse
still, through their poverty or hostility abroad, they are a discredit or even a
danger for France, as formerly with the Protestants driven out of the country
by Louis XIV.3115—To these 146,000 exiled Frenchmen add 200,000 or
300,000 others, residents, but semi-proscribed:3116 First, those nearly
related and allied to each émigré, excluded by the law from "every
legislative, administrative, municipal and judicial function," and even
deprived of the elective vote. Next, all former nobles or ennobled, deprived
by the law of their status as Frenchmen and obliged to re-naturalize
themselves according to the formalities.
It is, accordingly, almost the entire elite of old France which is wanting in
the new France, like a limb violently wrenched and half-detached by the

unskillful and brutal scalpel of the revolutionary "sawbones"; for both the
organ and the body are not only living, but they are still feverish and
extremely sensitive; it is important to avoid too great irritation;
inflammation of any kind would be dangerous. A skilful surgeon, therefore,
must mark the places for the stitches, not force the junctures, but anticipate
and prepare for the final healing process, and await the gradual and slow
results of vital effort and spontaneous renewal. Above all he must not alarm
the patient. The First Consul is far from doing this; on the contrary his
expressions are all encouraging. Let the patient keep quiet, there shall be no
re-stitching, the wound shall not be touched. The constitution solemnly
declares that the French people shall never allow the return of the
émigrés,3117 and, on this point, the hands of future legislators are already
tied fast; it prohibits any exception being added to the old ones.—But, first,
by virtue of the same constitution, every Frenchman not an émigré or
banished has the right to vote, to be elected, to exercise every species of
public function; consequently, twelve days later,3118 a mere order of the
Council of State restores civil and political rights to former nobles and the
ennobled, to the kinsmen and relations of émigrés, to all who have been
dubbed émigrés of the interior and whom Jacobin intolerance had excluded,
if not from the territory, at least from the civic body: here are 200,000 or
300,000 Frenchmen already brought back into political communion if not to
the soil.—They had succumbed to the coup-d'état of Fructidor; naturally,
the leading fugitives or those transported, suffering under the same coup-
d'état, were restored to political rights along with them and thus to the
territory—Carnot, Barthélémy, Lafont-Ladébat, Siméon, Poissy d'Anglas,
Mathieu Dumas, in all thirty-nine, designated by name;3119 very soon after.
Through a simple extension of the same resolution, others of the Fructidor
victims, a crowd of priests huddled together and pining away on the Ile-de-
Ré, the most unfortunate and most inoffensive of all.3120—Two months
later, a law declares that the list of émigrés is definitely closed;3121 a
resolution orders immediate investigation into the claims of those who are
to be struck off the list; a second resolution strikes off the first founders of
the new order of things, the members of the National Assembly "who voted
for the establishment of equality and the abolition of nobility;" and, day
after day, new erasures succeed each other, all specific and by name, under
cover of toleration, pardon, and exception:3122 on the 19th of October 1800,
there are already 1200 of them. Bonaparte, at this date, had gained the battle

of Marengo; the surgical restorer feels that his hands are more free; he can
operate on a larger scale and take in whole bodies collectively. On the 20th
of October 1800, a resolution strikes off entire categories from the list, all
whose condemnation is too grossly unjust or malicious,3123 at first, minors
under sixteen and the wives of émigrés; next, farmers, artisans, workmen,
journeymen and servants with their wives and children and at last 18,000
ecclesiastics who, banished by law, left the country only in obedience to the
law. Besides these, "all individuals inscribed collectively and without
individual denomination," those already struck off, but provisionally, by
local administrations; also still other classes. Moreover, a good many
emigrants, yet standing on the lists, steal back one by one into France, and
the government tolerates them.3124 Finally, eighteen months later, after the
peace of Amiens and the Concord at,3125 a sénatus-consulte ends the great
operation; an amnesty relieves all who are not yet struck off, except the
declared leaders of the militant emigration, its notables, and who are not to
exceed one thousand; the rest may come back and enjoy their civic rights;
only, they must promise "loyalty to the government established under the
constitution and not maintain directly or indirectly any connection or
correspondence with the enemies of the State." On this condition the doors
of France are thrown open to them and they return in crowds.
But their bodily presence is not of itself sufficient; it is moreover
essential that they should not be absent in feeling, as strangers and merely
domiciliated in the new society. Were these mutilated fragments of old
France, these human shreds put back in their old places, simply attached or
placed in juxtaposition to modern France, they would prove useless,
troublesome and even mischievous. Let us strive, then, to have them grafted
on afresh through adherence or complete fusion; and first, to effect this,
they must not be allowed to die of inanition; they must take root physically
and be able to live. In private life, how can former proprietors, the noblesse,
the parliamentarians, the upper bourgeoisie, support themselves, especially
those without a profession or pursuit, and who, before 1789, maintained
themselves, not by their labor, but by their income? Once at home, they can
no longer earn their living as they did abroad; they can no longer give
lessons in French, in dancing, or in fencing.—There is no doubt but that the
sénatus-consulte which amnesties them restores to them a part of their
unsold possessions;3126 but most of these are sold and, on the other hand,
the First Consul, who is not disposed to re-establish large fortunes for

royalists,3127 retains and maintains the largest portion of what they have
been despoiled of in the national domain: all woods and forests of 300
arpents3128 and over, their stock and property rights in the great canals, and
their personal property already devoted to the public service. The effective
restitution is therefore only moderate; the émigrés who return recover but
little more than one-twentieth of their patrimony, one hundred millions3129
out of more than two milliards. Observe, besides, that by virtue even of the
law and as admitted by the First Consul,3130 this alms is badly distributed;
the most needy and the greatest number remain empty-handed, consisting of
the lesser and medium class of rural proprietors, especially of country
gentlemen whose domain, worth less than 50,000 francs, brings in only
2000 or 3000 francs income;3131 a domain of this size came within reach of
a great many purses, and hence found purchasers more readily and with
greater facility than a large holding; the State was almost always the seller,
and thenceforth the old proprietor could make no further claim or
pretension.—Thus, for many of the émigrés, "the sénatus-consulte of the
year X is simply a permit to starve to death in France "and,3132 four years
later,3133 Napoleon himself estimates that "40,000 are without the means of
subsistence." They manage to keep life and soul together and nothing
more;3134 many, taken in and cared for by their friends or relations, are
supported as guests or parasites, somewhat through compassion and again
on humanitarian grounds. One recovers his silver plate, buried in a cellar;
another finds notes payable to bearer, forgotten in an old chest. Sometimes,
the purchaser of a piece of property, an honest man, gives it back at the
price he paid for it, or even gratis, if, during the time he had held it, he had
derived sufficient profit from it. Occasionally, when the adjudication
happens to have been fraudulent, or the sale too irregular, and subject to
legal proceedings, the dishonest purchaser does not refuse a compromise.
But these cases are rare, and the evicted owner, if he desires to dine
regularly, will wisely seek a small remunerative position and serve as clerk,
book-keeper or accountant. M. des Echerolles, formerly a brigadier-general,
keeps the office of the new line of diligences at Lyons, and earns 1200
francs a year. M. de Puymaigre, who, in 1789, was worth two millions,
becomes a contrôleur des droits réunis at Briey with a salary of 2400 francs.
—In every branch of the new administration a royalist is welcome to apply
for a post;3135 however slightly recommended, he obtains the place.
Sometimes he even receives one without having asked for it; M. de

Vitrolles3136 thus becomes, in spite of himself, inspector of the imperial
sheepfolds; this fixes his position and makes it appear as if he had given in
his adhesion to the government.—Naturally, the great political recruiter
singles out the tallest and most imposing subjects, that is to say, belonging
to the first families of the ancient monarchy, and, like one who knows his
business, he brings to bear every means, constraint and seduction, threats
and cajoleries, supplies in ready money, promises of promotion with the
influence of a uniform and gold-lace embroidery.3137 It matters little
whether the enlistment is voluntary or extorted; the moment a man becomes
a functionary and is enrolled in the hierarchy, he loses the best portion of
his independence; once a dignitary and placed at the top of the hierarchy, he
gives his entire individuality up, for henceforth he lives under the eye of the
master, feels the daily and direct pressure of the terrible hand which grasps
him, and he forcibly becomes a mere tool.3138 These historic names,
moreover, contribute to the embellishment of the reign. Napoleon hauls in a
good many of them, and the most illustrious among the old noblesse, of the
court of the robe and of the sword. He can enumerate among his
magistrates, M. Pasquier, M. Séguier, M. Molé; among his prelates, M. de
Boisgelin, M. du Barral, M. du Belley, M. de Roquelaure, M. de Broglie;
among his military officers, M. de Fézensac, M. de Ségur, M. de
Mortemart, M. de Narbonne;3139 among the dignitaries of his palace,
chaplains, chamberlains and ladies of honor—the Rohan, Croy, Chevreuse,
Montmorency, Chabot, Montesquiou, Noailles, Brancas, Gontaut,
Grammont, Beauvau, Saint-Aignan, Montalembert, Haussonville, Choiseul-
Praslin, Mercy d'Argenteau, Aubusson de la Feuillade, and many others,
recorded in the imperial almanac as formerly in the royal almanac.
But they are only with him nominally and in the almanac. Except certain
individuals, M. de las Cases and M. Philippe de Ségur, who gave
themselves up body and soul, even to following him to Saint Helena, to
glorifying, admiring and loving him beyond the grave, the others are
submissive conscripts and who remain more or less refractory spirits. He
does nothing to win them over. His court is not, like the old court, a
conversational ball-room, but a hall of inspection, the most sumptuous
apartment in his vast barracks; the civil parade is a continuation of the
military parade; one finds one's self constrained, stiff, mute and
uncomfortable.3140

He does not know how to entertain as the head of his household, how to
welcome guests and be gracious or even polite to his pretended courtiers; he
himself declares that3141 "they go two years without speaking to him, and
six months without seeing him; he does not like them, their conversation
displeases him." When he addresses them it is to browbeat them; his
familiarities with their wives are those of the gendarme or the pedagogue,
while the little attentions he inflicts upon them are indecorous criticisms or
compliments in bad taste. They know that they are spied upon in their own
homes and responsible for whatever is said there; "the upper police is
constantly hovering over all drawing-rooms."3142 For every word uttered in
privacy, for any lack of compliance, every individual, man or woman, runs
the risk of exile or of being relegated to the interior at a distance of forty
leagues.3143 And the same with the resident gentry in the provinces; they are
obliged to pay court to the prefect, to be on good terms with him, or at least
attend his receptions; it is important that their cards should be seen on his
mantel piece.3144 Otherwise, let them take heed, for it is he who reports on
their conduct to the minister Fouché or to Savary who replaced him. In vain
do they live circumspectly and confine themselves to a private life; a refusal
to accept an office is unpardonable; there is a grudge against them if they do
not employ their local influence in behalf of the reign.3145 Accordingly, they
are, under the empire as under the republic, in law as in fact, in the
provinces as well as at Paris, privileged persons the wrong way, a
suspicious class under a special surveillance" and subject to exceptional
rigor.3146 In 1808,3147 Napoleon orders Fouché "to draw up ... among the
old and wealthy families who are not in the system... a list of ten in each
department, and of fifty for Paris," of which the sons from sixteen to
eighteen years of age shall be forced to enter Saint-Cyr and from thence go
into the army as second lieutenants. In 1813, still "in the highest classes of
society," and arbitrarily selected by the prefects, he takes ten thousand other
persons, exempt or redeemed from the conscription, even the married, even
fathers of families, who, under the title of guards of honor, become soldiers,
at first to be slaughtered in his service, and next, and in the mean time, to
answer for the fidelity of their relatives. It is the old law of hostages, a
resumption of the worst proceedings of the Directory for his account and
aggravated for his profit.—Decidedly, the imperial Régime, for the old
royalists, resembles too much the Jacobin régime; they are about as
repugnant to one as to the other, and their aversion naturally extends to the

whole of the new society.—As they comprehend it, they are more or less
robbed and oppressed for a quarter of a century. In order that their hostility
may cease, the indemnity of 1825 is essential, fifty years of gradual
adaptation, the slow elimination of two or three generations of fathers and
the slow elimination of two or three generations of sons.
Nothing is so difficult as the reparation of great social wrongs. In this
case the incomplete reparation did not prove sufficient; the treatment which
began with gentleness ended with violence, and, as a whole, the operation
only half succeeded.

IV. Education and Medical Care.
Confiscation of collective fortunes.—Ruin of the Hospitals
and Schools.

Other wounds are not less deep, and their cure is not less urgent; for they
cause suffering, not only to one class, but to the whole people—that vast
majority which the government strives to satisfy. Along with the property of
the émigrés, the Revolution has confiscated that of all local or special
societies, ecclesiastic or laic, of churches and congregations, universities
and academies, schools and colleges, asylums and hospitals, and even the
property of the communes. All these fortunes have been swallowed up by
the public treasury, which is a bottomless pit, and are gone forever.—
Consequently, all services thus maintained, especially charitable
institutions, public worship and education, die or languish for lack of
sustenance; the State, which has no money for itself, has none for them.
And what is worse, it hinders private parties from taking them in charge;
being Jacobin, that is to say intolerant and partisan, it has proscribed
worship, driven nuns out of the hospitals, closed Christian schools, and,
with its vast power, it prevents others from carrying out at their own
expense the social enterprises which it no longer cares for.
And yet the needs for which this work provides have never been so great
nor so imperative. In ten years,3148 the number of foundlings increased from
23,000 to 62,000; it is, as the reports state, a deluge: there are 1097 instead
of 400 in Aisne, 1500 in Lot-et-Garonne, 2035 in la Manche, 2043 in
Bouches-du-Rhône, 2673 in Calvados. From 3000 to 4000 beggars are
enumerated in each department and about 300,000 in all France.3149 As to
the sick, the infirm, the mutilated, unable to earn their living, it suffices, for
an idea of their multitude, to consider the régime to which the political
doctors have just subjected France, the Régime of fasting and bloodletting.
Two millions of Frenchmen have marched under the national flag, and eight
hundred thousand have died under it;3150 among the survivors, how many
cripples, how many with one arm and with wooden legs! All Frenchmen
have eaten dog-bread for three years and often have not had enough of that
to live on; over a million have died of starvation and poverty; all the

wealthy and well-to-do Frenchmen have been ruined and have lived in
constant fear of the guillotine; four hundred thousand have wasted away in
prisons; of the survivors, how many shattered constitutions, how many
bodies and brains disordered by an excess of suffering and anxiety, by
physical and moral wear and tear!3151
Now, in 1800, assistance is lacking for this crowd of civil and military
invalids, the charitable establishments being no longer in a condition to
furnish it. Under the Constituent Assembly, through the suppression of
ecclesiastical property and the abolition of octrois, a large portion of their
revenue had been cut off, that assigned to them out of octrois and the tithes.
Under the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, through the dispersion
and persecution of nuns and monks, they were deprived of a body of able
male and female volunteer servants who, instituted for centuries, gave their
labor without stint. Under the Convention, all their possessions, the real-
estate and the debts due them, had been confiscated;3152 and, in the
restitution to them of the remainder at the end of three years, a portion of
their real-estate is found to have been sold, while their claims, settled by
assignats or converted into state securities, had died out or dwindled to such
an extent that, in 1800, after the final bankruptcy of the assignats and of the
state debt, the ancient patrimony of the poor is two-thirds or one-half
reduced.3153 It is for this reason that the eight hundred charitable
institutions which, in 1789, had one hundred thousand or one hundred and
ten thousand occupants, could not support more than one-third or one-half
of them; on the other hand, it may be estimated that the number of
applicants tripled; from which it follows that, in 1800, there is less than one
bed in the hospitals and asylums for six children, either sick or infirm.

V. Old and New.
Complaints of the Poor, of Parents, and of Believers.
—Contrast between old and new educational facilities.
—Clandestine instruction.—Jacobin teachers.

Under this wail of the wretched who vainly appeal for help, for nursing
and for beds, another moan is heard, not so loud, but more extensive, that of
parents unable to educate their children, boys or girls, and give them any
species of instruction either primary or secondary.
Previous to the Revolution "small schools" were innumerable: in
Normandy, Picardy, Artois, French Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, in the
Ile-de-France, in Burgundy and Franche-Comté, in the Dombes, Dauphiny
and Lyonnais, in the Comtat, in the Cévennes and in Béarn,3154 almost as
many schools could be counted as there were parishes, in all probably
twenty or twenty-five thousand for the thirty-seven thousand parishes in
France, and all frequented and serviceable; for, in 1789, forty-seven men
out of a hundred, and twenty-six girls or women out of a hundred, could
read and write or, at least, sign their names.3155—And these schools cost the
treasury nothing, next to nothing to the tax-payer, and very little to parents.
In many places, the congregations, supported by their own property,
furnished male or female teachers,—Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne,
Frères de Saint-Antoine, Ursulines, Visitandines, Filles de la Charité, Sæurs
de Saint-Charles, Sæurs de la Providence, Sæurs de la Sagesse, Sæurs de
Notre-Dame de la Croix, Vatelottes, Miramiones, Manettes du Tiers Ordre,
and many others. Elsewhere, the curate of the parish was obliged through a
parish regulation to teach himself, or to see that his vicar taught. A very
large number of factories or of communes had received legacies for
maintaining a school; the instructor often enjoyed, through an endowment,
a métayer farm or a piece of ground; he was generally provided with a
lodging; if he was a layman he was exempt, besides, from the most onerous
taxes; as sexton, beadle, chorister or bell-ringer, he had small perquisites;
finally, he was paid for each child four or five sous3156 a month; sometimes,
especially in poor districts, he taught only from All Saints' day down to the
spring, and followed another occupation during the summer. In short, his

salary and his comfort were about those of a rural vicar or of a suitably paid
curate.
Higher education (éducation secondaire) was provided for in the same
manner, and still better by local and private enterprise. More than one
hundred and eight establishments furnished it completely, and more than
four hundred and fifty-four partially.3157 Like the others, and not less
liberally than the smaller schools, these were supported by endowments,
some of which were very ample and even magnificent; a certain upper
school in the provinces, Rodez,3158 possessed twenty-seven thousand livres
income, and one in Paris, Louis-le-Grand, an income of four hundred and
fifty thousand livres, each of these, large or small, having its own distinct
endowment, in real property, lands and houses, and in revenues on
privileges derived from the hotel-de-ville, the octroi and from transportation
lines.—And, in each of them, the scholarships, or half-scholarships, were
numerous-six hundred alone in Louis-le-Grand. In total, out of the seventy-
two thousand scholars in the kingdom, there were forty thousand for whom
a high-school education was gratuitous or half-gratuitous; nowadays, it is
less than five thousand out of seventy-nine thousand.3159 The reason why is
that, before 1789, the revenues were not only large, but the expenses were
small. The salary of a head-master, teacher, or assistant-teacher was not
large, say four hundred and fifty, six hundred, nine hundred, or twelve
hundred livres per annum at most, just enough for a single man to live on;
in effect, most of the teachers were priests or monks, Benedictines, regular
canons, Oratorians, the latter alone officiating in thirty colleges. Not subject
to the expenses and necessities which a family imposes, they were
abstemious through piety, or at least through discipline, habit, and respect
for persons; frequently, the statutes of the school obliged them to live in
common,3160 which was much cheaper than living apart.—The same
economical accord is found with all the wheels, in the arrangement and
working of the entire system. A family, even a rural one, never lived far
away from a high-school, for there were high-schools in nearly all the small
towns, seven or eight in each department, fifteen in Ain, seventeen in
Aisne.3161 The child or youth, from eight to eighteen, had not to endure the
solitude and promiscuity of a civil barracks; he remained within reach of his
parents. If they were too poor to pay the three hundred francs board
required by the school, they placed their son in a respectable family, in that
of some artisan or acquaintance in the town; there, with three or four others,

he was lodged, had his washing done, was cared for and watched, had a seat
at the family table and by the fireside, and was provided with light; every
week, he received from the country his supply of bread and other
provisions; the mistress of the house cooked for him and mended his
clothes, the whole for two or three livres a month.3162—Thus do institutions
flourish that arise spontaneously on the spot; they adapt themselves to
circumstances, conform to necessities, utilize resources and afford the
maximum of returns for the minimum of expense.
This great organization disappears entirely, bodily and with all its
possessions, like a ship that sinks beneath the waves. The teachers are
dismissed, exiled, transported, and proscribed; its property is confiscated,
sold and destroyed, and the remainder in the hands of the State is not
restored and again applied to its former service. Public education, worse
treated than public charity, does not recover a shred of its former
endowment. Consequently, in the last years of the Directory, and even early
in the Consulate,3163 there is scarcely any instruction given in France; in
fact, for the past eight or nine years it has ceased,3164 or become private and
clandestine. Here and there, a few returned priests, in spite of the intolerant
law and with the connivance of the local authorities, also a few scattered
nuns, teach in a contraband fashion a few small groups of Catholic children;
five or six little girls around a disguised Ursuline nun spell out the alphabet
in a back room;3165 a priest without tonsure or cassock secretly receives in
the evening two or three youths whom he makes translate the De Viris.—
During the intervals, indeed, of the Reign of Terror, before the 13th of
Vendémiaire and the 18th of Fructidor, sundry schools spring up again like
tufts of grass in a mowed pasture-ground, but only in certain spots and
meagerly; moreover, as soon as the Jacobin returns to power he stubbornly
stamps them out;3166 he wants to have teaching all to himself.—Now the
institution by which the State pretends to replace the old and free
establishments makes a figure only on paper. One école centrale in each
department is installed or decreed, making eighty eight on the territory of
ancient France; this hardly supplies the place of the eight or nine hundred
high-schools (collèges), especially as these new schools are hardly viable,
being in ruin at the very start,3167 poorly maintained, badly furnished, with
no preparatory schools nor adjacent boarding-houses,3168 the programme of
studies being badly arranged and parents suspicious of the spirit of the
studies.3169 Thus, there is little or no attendance at most of the courses of

lectures; only those on mathematics are followed, particularly on drawing,
and especially mechanical and geometrical drawing, probably by the future
surveyors and engineers of roads and bridges, by building contractors and a
few aspirants to the École Polytechnique. As to the other courses, on
literature, history, and the moral sciences, as comprehended by the Republic
and imposed by it, these obtain not over a thousand auditors in all France;
instead of 72,000 pupils, only 7000 or 8000 seek superior education, while
six out of seven, instead of seeking self-culture, simply prepare themselves
for some practical pursuit.3170
It is much worse with primary instruction. This task is given to the local
authorities. But, as they have no money, they generally shirk this duty, and,
if they do set up a school, are unable to maintain it.3171 On the other hand,
as instruction must be laic and Jacobin, "almost everywhere,"3172 the
teacher is an outcast layman, a fallen Jacobin, some old, starving party
member, unemployed, foul-mouthed and of ill-repute. Families, naturally,
refuse to trust their children with him; even when honorable, they avoid
him; and the reason is that, in 1800, Jacobin and scoundrel have become
synonymous terms. Henceforth, parents desire that their children should
learn to read in the catechism and not in the declaration of rights:3173 as
they view it, the old manual formed polite and civilized youths and
respectful sons; the new one forms only insolent rascals and precocious,
slovenly blackguards.3174 Consequently, the few primary schools in which
the Republic has placed its people and imposed its educational system
remain three-quarters empty; in vain does she close the doors of those in
which other masters teach with other books; fathers persist in their
repugnance and distaste; they prefer for their sons utter ignorance to
unsound instruction.3175—A secular establishment, created and provided for
by twenty generations of benefactors, gave gratis, or at a much lower rate,
the first crumbs of intellectual food to more than 1,200,000 children.3176 It
was demolished; in its place, a few improvised and wretched barracks
distributed here and there a small ration of moldy and indigestible bread.
Thereupon, one long, low murmur, a long time suppressed, breaks out and
keeps on increasing, that of parents whose children are condemned to go
hungry; in any event, they demand that their sons and daughters be no
longer forced, under penalty of fasting, to consume the patent flour of the
State, that is to say a nauseous, unsatisfactory, badly-kneaded, badly-baked

paste which, on trial, proves offensive to the palate and ruinous to the
stomach.

VI. Religion
The Spirit and Ministrations of Catholicism.—How the
Revolution develops a sense of this.

Another plaint is heard, deeper and more universal, that of all souls in
which regret for their established church and forms of worship still subsists
or is revived.
In every religious system discipline and rites depend upon faith, for it is
faith alone which suggests or prescribes these; they are the outcome and
expansion of this; it attains its ends through these, and manifests itself by
them; they are the exterior of which it is the interior; thus, let these be
attacked and it is in distress; the living, palpitating flesh suffers through the
sensitive skin.—In Catholicism, this skin is more sensitive than elsewhere,
for it clings to the flesh, not alone through ordinary adhesiveness, the effect
of adaptation and custom, but again through a special organic attachment,
consisting of dogmatic doctrine; theology, in its articles of belief, has here
set up the absolute necessity of the sacraments and of the priesthood;
consequently, between the superficial and central divisions of religion the
union is complete. The Catholic sacraments, therefore, are not merely
symbols; they possess in themselves "an efficacious power, a sanctifying
virtue." "That which they represent, they really work out."3177 If I am
denied access to them, I am cut off from the fountains to which my soul
resorts to drink in grace, pardon, purity, health and salvation. If my children
cannot be regularly baptized, they are not Christians; if extreme unction
cannot be administered to my dying mother, she sets out on the long
journey without the viaticum; if I am married by the mayor only, my wife
and I live in concubinage; if I cannot confess my sins, I am not absolved
from them, and my burdened conscience seeks in vain for the helping hand
which will ease the too heavy load; if I cannot perform my Easter duties,
my spiritual life is a failure; the supreme and sublime act by which it
perfects itself through the mystic union of my body and soul with the body,
soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, is wanting.—Now, none of these
sacraments are valid if they have not been conferred by a priest, one who
bears the stamp of a superior, unique, ineffaceable character, through a final

sacrament consisting of ordination and which is conferred only on certain
conditions; among other conditions, it is essential that this priest should
have been ordained by a bishop; among other conditions, it is essential that
this bishop3178 should have been installed by the Pope. Consequently,
without the Pope there are no bishops; without bishops no priests; without
priests no sacraments; without the sacraments no salvation. The
ecclesiastical institution is therefore indispensable to the believer. The
canonical priesthood, the canonical hierarchy is necessary to him for the
exercise of his faith.—He must have yet more, if fervent and animated with
true old Christian sentiment, ascetic and mystic, which separates the soul
from this world and ever maintains it in the presence of God. Several things
are requisite to this end:
* First, vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, that is to say, the steady
and voluntary repression of the most powerful animal instinct and of the
strongest worldly appetites;
* Next, unceasing prayer, especially prayer in common, where the
emotion of the prostrate soul increases through the emotion of the souls that
surround it; in the same degree, active piety, meaning by this the doing of
good works, education and charity, especially the accomplishment of
repulsive tasks, such as attending the sick, the infirm, the incurable, idiots,
maniacs and repentant prostitutes;
* Finally, the strict daily rule which, a sort of rigorous and minute
countersign, enjoining and compelling the repetition of the same acts at the
same hours, renders habit the auxiliary of will, adds mechanical enthusiasm
to a serious determination, and ends in making the task easy.
Hence, communities of men and of women, congregations and convents,
these likewise, the same as the sacraments, the priesthood and the hierarchy,
form a body along with belief and thus constitute the inseparable organs of
faith.
Before 1789, the ignorant or indifferent Catholic, the peasant at his plow,
the artisan at his work-bench, the good wife attending to her household,
were unconscious of this innermost suture. Thanks to the Revolution, they
have acquired the sentiment of it and even the physical sensation. They had
never asked themselves in what respect orthodoxy differed from schism,
nor how positive religion was opposed to natural religion; it is the civil
organization of the clergy which has led them to distinguish the difference

between the unsworn curé and the interloper, between the right mass and
the wrong mass; it is the prohibition of the mass which has led them to
comprehend its importance; it is the revolutionary government which has
transformed them into theologians and canonists.3179 Compelled, under the
Reign of Terror, to sing and dance before the goddess Reason, and next, in
the temple of the "Étre Supreme," subjected, under the Directory, to the
new-fangled republican calendar, and to the insipidity of the decade
festivals, they have measured, with their own eyes, the distance which
separates a present, personal, incarnate deity, redeemer and savior, from a
deity without form or substance, or, in any event, absent; a living, revealed,
and time-honored religion, and an abstract, manufactured, improvised
religion; their spontaneous worship, which is an act of faith, and a worship
imposed on them which is only frigid parade; their priest, in a surplice,
sworn to continence, delegated from on high to open out to them the infinite
perspectives of heaven or hell beyond the grave, and the republican
substitute, officiating in a municipal scarf, Peter or Paul, a lay-man like
themselves, more or less married and convivialist, sent from Paris to preach
a course of Jacobin morality.3180—Their attachment to their clergy, to the
entire body regular and secular, is due to this contrast. Previously, they were
not always well-disposed to it; the peasantry, nowhere, were content to pay
tithes, and the artisan, as well as the peasant, regarded the idle, well-
endowed, meditative monks as but little more than so many fat drones. The
man of the people in France, by virtue of being a Gaul, has a dry, limited
imagination; he is not inclined to veneration, but is rather mocking, critical
and insubordinate at the powers above him, with a hereditary undertone of
distrust and envy at every man who wears a cloth suit and who eats and
drinks without doing manual labor.—At this time, his clergy do not excite
his envy, but his pity; monks and nuns, cure's and prelates, roofless, without
bread, imprisoned, transported, guillotined, or, at best, fugitives, hunted
down and more unfortunate than wild beasts—it is he who, during the
persecutions of the years II, IV and VI, harbors them, conceals them, lodges
them and feeds them. He sees them suffering for their faith, which is his
faith, and, before their constancy, equal to that of the legendary martyrs, his
indifference changes into respect and next into zeal. From the year IV,3181
the orthodox priests have again recovered their place and ascendancy in his
soul which the creed assigns to them; they have again become his
serviceable guides, his accepted directors, the only warranted interpreters of

Christian truth, the only authorized dispensers and ministers of divine
grace. He attends their mass immediately on their return and will put up
with no other. Brutalized as he may be, or indifferent and dull, and his mind
filled with nothing but animal concerns, he needs them;3182 he misses their
solemnities, the great festivals, the Sunday; and this privation is a periodical
want both for eyes and ears; he misses the ceremonial, the lights, the chants,
the ringing of the bells, the morning and evening Angelus.—Thus, whether
he knows it or not, his heart and senses are Catholic3183 and he demands the
old church back again. Before the Revolution, this church lived on its own
revenues; 70,000 priests, 37,000 nuns, 23,000 monks, supported by
endowments, cost the State nothing, and scarcely anything to the tax-payer;
at any rate, they cost nothing to the actual, existing tax-payer not even the
tithes, for, established many centuries ago, the tithes were a tax on the soil,
not on the owner in possession, nor on the farmer who tilled the ground,
who has purchased or hired it with this tax deducted. In any case, the real
property of the Church belonged to it, without prejudice to anybody,
through the strongest legal and most legitimate of property titles, the last
will and testament of thousands of the dead, its founders and benefactors.
All is taken from it, even the houses of prayer which, in their use,
disposition and architecture, were, in the most manifest manner, Christian
works and ecclesiastical objects, 38,000 parsonages, 4000 convents, over
40,000 parochial churches, cathedrals and chapels. Every morning, the man
or woman of the people, in whom the need of worship has revived, passes
in front of one of these buildings robbed of its cult; these declare aloud to
them through their form and name what they have been and what they
should be to-day. This voice is heard by incredulous philosophers and
former Conventionalists;3184 all Catholics hear it, and out of thirty-five
millions of Frenchmen,3185 thirty-two millions are Catholics.

VII. The Confiscated Property.
Reasons for the concordat.—Napoleon's economical
organization of the Church institution.—A good bargainer.
—Compromise with the old state of things.

How withstand such a just complaint, the universal complaint of the
destitute, of relatives, and of believers?—The fundamental difficulty
reappears, the nearly insurmountable dilemma into which the Revolution
has plunged every steady government, that is to say the lasting effect of
revolutionary confiscations and the conflict which sets two rights to the
same property against each other, the right of the despoiled owner and the
right of the owner in possession. This time, again the fault is on the side of
the State, which has converted itself from a policeman into a brigand and
violently appropriated to itself the fortune of the hospitals, schools, and
churches; the State must return this in money or in kind. In kind, it is no
longer able; everything has passed out of its hands; it has alienated what it
could, and now holds on only to the leavings. In money, nothing more can
be done; it is itself ruined, has just become bankrupt, lives on expedients
from day to day and has neither funds nor credit. Nobody dreams of taking
back property that is sold; nothing is more opposed to the spirit of the new
Régime: not only would this be a robbery as before, since its buyers have
paid for it and got their receipts, but again, in disputing their title the
government would invalidate its own. For its authority is derived from the
same source as their property: it is established on the same principle as their
rights of possession and by virtue of the same accomplished facts
* because things are as they are and could not be different,
* because ten years of revolution and eight years of war bear down on the
present with too heavy a weight,
* because too many and too deep interests are involved and enlisted on
the same side,
* because the interests of twelve hundred thousand purchasers are
incorporated with those of the thirty thousand officers to whom the
Revolution has provided a rank, along with that of all the new functionaries

and dignitaries, including the First Consul himself, who, in this universal
transposition of fortunes and ranks, is the greatest of parvenus and who
must maintain the others if he wants to be maintained by them.
Naturally, he protects everybody, through calculation as well as
sympathy, in the civil as in the military order of things, particularly the new
property-owners, especially the smaller and the average ones, his best
clients, attached to his reign and to his person through love of property, the
strongest passion of the ordinary man, and through love of the soil, the
strongest passion of the peasant.3186 Their loyalty depends on their security,
and consequently he is lavish of guarantees. In his constitution of the year
VIII,3187 he declares in the name of the French nation that after a legally
consummated sale of national property, whatever its origin, the legitimate
purchaser cannot be divested of it." Through the institution of the Legion of
Honor he obliges each member "to swear, on his honor, to devote himself to
the conservation of property sanctioned by the laws of the republic."3188
According to the terms of the imperial constitution3189 "he swears" himself
"to respect and to enforce respect for the irrevocability of the sale of
national possessions."
Unfortunately, a cannon-ball on the battle-field, an infernal machine in
the street, an illness at home, may carry off the guarantor and the
guarantees.3190 On the other hand, confiscated goods preserve their original
taint. Rarely is the purchaser regarded favorably in his commune; the
bargain he has made excites envy; he is not alone in his enjoyment of it, but
the rest suffer from it. Formerly, this or that field of which he reaps the
produce, this or that domain of which he enjoys the rental, once provided
for the parsonage, the asylum and the school; now the school, the asylum
and the parsonage die through inanition for his advantage; he fattens on
their fasting. In his own house, his wife and mother often look melancholy,
especially during Easter week; if he is old, or becomes ill, his conscience
disturbs him; this conscience, through habit and heredity, is Catholic: he
craves absolution at the last moment at the priest's hands, and says to
himself that, at the last moment, he may not probably be absolved.3191 In
other respects, he would find it difficult to satisfy himself that his legal
property is legitimate property; for, not only is it not so rightfully before the
tribunal of conscience, but again it is not so in fact on the market; the
figures, in this particular, are convincing, daily and notorious. A patrimonial
domain which brings in 3000 francs finds a purchaser at 100,000 francs;

alongside of this a national domain which brings in just as much, finds a
purchaser only at 60,000 francs; after several sales and resale, the
depreciation continues and 40 % of the value of the confiscated property is
lost.3192 A low, indistinct murmur is heard, and reverberates from sale to
sale, the muttering of private probity protesting against public probity,
declaring to the new proprietor that his title is defective; it lacks one clause
and a capital one, that of the surrender and cession, the formal renunciation,
the authentic withdrawal of the former owner. The State, the first seller,
owes this voucher to the purchasers; let it procure this and negotiate
accordingly; let it apply for this to the rightful party, to the owners whom it
has dispossessed, to the immemorial and legitimate authorities, I mean to
the ancient corporations. These have been dissolved by revolutionary law
and have no longer a representative who can sign for them. Nevertheless, in
spite of revolutionary law, one of these corporations, with more vitality than
the rest, still subsists with its proper, if not legal, representative, its regular
and undisputed chief. This chief is qualified and authorized to bind the
body; for, institutionally, he is supreme, and the conscience of all its
members is in his hand. His signature is of the highest value; it is very
important to obtain this, and the First Consul concludes the Concordat with
the Pope.
By this Concordat, the Pope "declares that neither himself nor his
successors shall in any manner disturb the purchasers of alienated
ecclesiastical property, and that the ownership of the said property, the
rights and revenues derived there from, shall consequently remain in
commutable in their hands or in those of their assigns."3193 Henceforth the
possession of this property is no longer a sin; at least, it is not condemned
by the spiritual authority, by that external conscience which, in Catholic
countries, governs the inward conscience and often supplies its place; the
Church, the moral head, removes with its own hands the moral scruple, the
last small stone, troublesome and dangerous, which, lying underneath the
cornerstone of lay society, breaks the level of the entire structure and
compromises the equilibrium of the new government.—In exchange, the
State endows the Church. By the same Concordat, and by the decrees which
follow it, "the government3194 ensures a suitable salary to bishops and
cure's," 15,000 francs to each archbishop, 10,000 francs to each bishop,
1500 francs to each curé of the first class and 1000 francs to each curé of
the second class,3195 also, later on,3196 a maximum of 500 francs and a

minimum of 300 francs to each assistant-priest or vicar. "If circumstances
require it,3197 the conseils-généraux of the large communes may grant to
prelates or to curés an increase of salary out of their rural possessions or
octrois." In all cases, archbishops, bishops, curés and priests shall be
lodged, or receive a lodging indemnity. So much for the support of
persons.-As to real property,3198 "all the metropolitan churches, cathedrals,
parochial buildings and others, not alienated, and needed for the purposes of
worship, shall be subject to the disposition of the bishops."—The
parsonages and gardens attached to these, not alienated, shall be given up to
the curés and assistant-priests."—"The possessions of the fabriques,3199 not
alienated, as well as the rentals they enjoyed, and which have not been
transferred, shall be restored to their original purpose.—As to the outlay
and expenditure for worship,31100 for the parochial center or cathedral, if its
revenue is not sufficient, this shall receive aid from its commune or from its
department; besides, "an assessment of 10 %.31101 shall be laid on the
revenues of all the real estate of the communes, such as houses, woods, and
rural possessions, for the formation of a common fund of subsidy," a
general sum with which to provide for "acquisitions, reconstructions or
repairs of churches,... seminaries and parsonages." Moreover,31102 the
government allows "the French Catholics to make endowments, if so
disposed, in favor of churches.. . for the support of ministers and the
exercise of worship," that is to say to bequeath or make gifts to the
fabriques or seminaries; in fine, it exempts seminarists, the future cure's,
from the conscription.
It also exempts the "Ignorantins," or brethren of the Christian schools,
who are the instructors of the common people. With respect to these and in
relation to every other Catholic institution, it follows the same utilitarian
principle, the fundamental maxim of laic and practical good sense: when
religious vocations make their appearance and serve the public, it welcomes
and makes use of them; it grants them facilities, dispensations and favors,
its protection, its donations, or at least its tolerance. Not only does it turn
their zeal to account, but it authorizes their association.31103 Numerous
societies of men or of women again spring up with the assent of the public
authorities—the "Ignorantins," the "Filles de la Charité," the "Seurs
Hospitalières," the "Sæurs de Saint-Thomas," the "Sæurs de Saint-Charles,"
the "Sæurs Vatelottes." The Council of State accepts and approves of their
statutes, vows, hierarchy, and internal regulations. They again become

proprietors; they may accept donations and legacies. The State frequently
makes presents to them. In 1808,31104 thirty-one communities of Sisters of
Charity, and mostly educational, thus obtain the buildings and furniture they
ask for, in full possession and gratuitously. The State, also, frequently
supports them;31105 it repeatedly decides that in this asylum, or in that
school, the "sisters" designated by the ancient foundation shall resume their
work and be paid out of the income of the asylum or school. Better still, and
notwithstanding threatening decrees,31106 Napoleon, between 1804 and
1814, allows fifty-four communities to arise and exist, outside of the
congregations authorized by him, which do not submit their statutes to him
and which dispense with his permission to exist; he lets them live and does
not disturb them; he judges31107 "that there is every sort of character and
imagination, that eccentricities even should not be repressed when they do
no harm," that, for certain people, an ascetic life in common is the only
refuge; if that is all they desire they should not be disturbed, and it is easy to
feign ignorance of them; but let them remain quiet and be sufficient unto
themselves!—Such is the new growth of the regular clergy alongside of the
secular clergy, the two main branches of the Catholic trunk. Owing to the
help, or to the authorization, or to the connivance of the State, inside or
outside of its limitations, both clerical bodies, legally or in reality, recover a
civil existence, and thus obtain, or at least nearly so, their physical
maintenance.31108
And nothing more. Nobody, better than Napoleon, knows how to make a
good bargain, that is to say, to give a little in order to gain a great deal. In
this treaty with the Church he tightens his purse-strings and especially
avoids parting with his ready money. Six hundred and fifty thousand francs
for fifty bishops and ten archbishops, a little more than four million francs
for the three or four thousand cantonal curés, in all five million francs per
annum, is all that the State promises to the new clergy. Later on,31109 he
takes it on himself to pay those who officiate in the branch chapels;
nevertheless, in 1807, the entire appropriation for public worship costs the
State only twelve million francs a year;31110 the rest, as a rule, and
especially the salaries of the forty thousand assistant-priests and vicars,
must be provided by the fabriques and the communes.31111 Let the clergy
benefit by occasional contributions;31112 let it appeal to the piety of
believers for its monstrances, chalices, albs and chasubles, for decorations
and the other expenses of worship; they are not prohibited from being