The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Pledged to equality of rights, the Convention (1793) abolished primogeniture, and ruled that property must be willed in equal shares to all the testator’s children, including those born out of wedlock but acknowledged by the father. This legislation had important results, moral and economic: reluctant to condemn their heirs to poverty by periodic divisions of the patrimony among many children, the French cultivated the old arts of family limitation. The peasants remained prosperous, but the population of France grew slowly during the nineteenth century—from 28 million in 1800 to 39 million in 1914, while that of Germany rose from 21 million to 67 million.1 Prospering on the land, French peasants were slow to move into towns and factories; so France remained predominantly agricultural, while England and Germany developed industry and technology, excelled in war, and dominated Europe.

  2. The proletariat. Poverty remained, and was most severe, among the landless peasants, the miners, and the workers and tradesmen in the towns. Men delved into the earth to find the metals and minerals for industry and war; saltpeter was necessary to gunpowder, and coal increasingly replaced wood as a generator of motive power. Towns were bright and lively by day, dark and subdued at night, till 1793, when the communes installed street lighting in Paris. Craftsmen worked in their candle-lit shops; tradesmen displayed, and peddlers hawked, their goods; at the center an open market; near the summit a castle and a church; on the outskirts a factory or two. Guilds were abolished in 1791, and the National Assembly declared that henceforth every person was to be “free to do such business, exercise such profession, art, or trade, as he may choose.”2 The “Law of Le Chapel” (in 1791) forbade workers to combine for united economic action; this prohibition remained in effect till 1884. Strikes were forbidden but frequent and sporadic.3 The workers struggled to keep their wages from being diluted by inflation of the currency; generally, however, they kept their wages abreast of rising prices.4 After the fall of Robespierre the employers tightened their control, and the condition of the proletariat worsened. By 1795 the sansculottes were as poor and harassed as before the Revolution. By 1799 they had lost faith in the Revolution, and in 1800 they submitted hopefully to the dictatorship of Napoleon.

  3. The bourgeoisie triumphed in the Revolution because it had more money and brains than either the aristocracy or the plebs. It purchased from the state the most lucrative portions of the property that had been confiscated from the Church. Bourgeois wealth was not tied up in immobile land; it could be transferred from place to place, from purpose to purpose, from person to person, and from anywhere to any legislator. The bourgeoisie could pay for troops and governments and insurrectionary crowds. It had acquired experience in the administration of the state; it knew how to collect taxes, and it influenced the Treasury through its loans. It was more practically educated than the nobility or the clergy, and was better equipped to rule a society in which money was the circulating blood. It looked upon poverty as the punishment for stupidity, and upon its own riches as the just reward of application and intelligence. It took no stock in government by sansculottes; it denounced the interruption of government by proletarian uprisings as an intolerable impertinence. It was resolved that when the sound and fury of revolution subsided, the bourgeoisie would be master of the state.

  It was in France a commercial rather than an industrial bourgeoisie. There was no such replacement of farms by pasturage as was then driving English peasants from their fields to the towns to form a cheap labor force for factories; and the British blockade prevented in France the export trade that could sustain expanding industries. So the factory system developed more slowly in France than in England. There were some substantial capitalistic organizations in Paris, Lyons, Lille, Toulouse …, but most French industry was still in the craft and shop stage, and even the capitalists delegated much handwork to rural or other homes. Except for wartime authoritarian flurries, and some Jacobin flirtations with socialism, the Revolutionary government accepted the Physiocratic theory of free enterprise as the most stimulating and productive economic system. The peace treaties with Prussia in 1795 and Austria in 1797 released the restrictions upon the economy, and French capitalism, like the English and the American, entered the nineteenth century with the blessings of a government that governed least.

  4. The aristocracy had lost all power in the direction of the economy or the government. Most of its members were still émigrés, living abroad in humiliating occupations; their properties had been confiscated, their incomes had stopped. Of those nobles who had remained or had returned, many were guillotined, some joined the Revolution, the rest, till 1794, hid in precarious obscurity and repeated harassment on their estates. Under the Directory these disabilities were lessened; many émigrés came back; some recovered part of their property; and by 1797 many voices whispered that only a monarchy, supported and checked by a functioning aristocracy, could restore order and security to French life. Napoleon agreed with them, but after his own fashion, and in his own time.

  5. Religion in France, as the Revolution neared its end, was learning to get along without the help of the state. Protestants, then five percent of the population, were freed from all civil disabilities; the limited freedom of worship granted them by Louis XVI in 1787 was made complete by the Constitution of 1791. A decree of September 28, 1791, extended all civil rights to the Jews of France, and set them on a legal equality with all other citizens.

  The Catholic clergy, formerly the First Estate, now suffered from the hostility of a Voltairean anticlerical government. The upper classes had lost belief in the doctrines of the Church; the middle classes had acquired most of its landed wealth; by 1793 the property of the Church, once valued at two and a half billion livres,5 had been sold to its enemies. In Italy the Papacy had been deprived of its states and their revenues, and Pius VI had been made a prisoner. Thousands of French priests had fled to other countries, and many of them were living on Protestant alms.6 Hundreds of churches had been closed, or had had their treasures confiscated. Church bells had been silenced or melted down. Voltaire and Diderot, Helvétius and d’Holbach had apparently won their war against the Church.

  The victory was not clear. The Church had lost its wealth and political power, but its vital roots remained in the loyalty of the clergy and the needs and hopes of the people. Many males in the large cities had strayed from the faith; yet nearly all became churchgoers for a day on Christmas and Easter; and at the height of the Revolution (May, 1793), when a priest carried the consecrated Host along a Paris street, all onlookers (an eyewitness reported)—”men, women, and children—fell on their knees in adoration.”7 Even skeptics must have felt the mesmerism of the ceremony, the never-fading beauty of the tale; and they may have pondered Pascal’s “wager”—that one would be wise to believe, since in the end the believer would lose nothing, unbelievers everything, if proved wrong.

  Under the Directory the French nation was divided between a people slowly returning to its traditional faith and a government resolved to establish, by law and education, a purely secular civilization. On October 8, 1798, the purged and newly radical Directory sent to all teachers in the departmental schools the following instructions:

  You must exclude from your teaching all that relates to the dogmas or rites of any religion or sect whatever. The Constitution certainly tolerates them, but the teaching of them is not part of public instruction, nor can it ever be. The Constitution is founded on the basis of universal morality; and it is this morality of all times, all places, all religions—this law engraven on the tablets of the human family—it is this that must be the soul of your teaching, the object of your precepts, and the connecting link of your studies, as it is the binding knot of society.8

  Here, clearly put, was one of the most difficult enterprises of the Revolution, as it is one of the difficult problems of our time: to build a social order upon a system of morality independent of religious belief. Napoleon was to judge the proposal impracticable; America was to cleave to it till our time.
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br />   6. Education. So the state took control of the schools from the Church, and strove to make them the nursery of intelligence, morality, and patriotism. On April 21, 1792, Condorcet, as chairman of public instruction, presented to the Legislative Assembly an historic report pleading for the reorganization of education, so that the “ever-increasing progress of enlightenment may open an inexhaustible source of aid to our needs, of remedies for our ills, of means to individual happiness and common prosperity.”9 War delayed the implementation of this ideal, but on May 4, 1793, Condorcet renewed the appeal, though on a narrower basis. “The country,” he said, “has a right to bring up its own children; it cannot confide this trust to family pride nor to the prejudices of individuals…. Education [should be] common and equal for all French people…. We stamp upon it a great character, analogous to the nature of our government and the sublime doctrines of our republic.”10 This formulation seemed to substitute one form of indoctrination for another—nationalist instead of Catholic; nationalism was to be the official religion. On October 28, 1793, the Convention ordained that no ecclesiastic could be appointed as teacher in state schools. On December 19 it proclaimed that all primary schools were to be free, and attendance at them was made compulsory on all boys. Girls were expected to get education from their mothers, or from convents or tutors.

  The reorganization of secondary schools had to wait for peace; even so, on February 25, 1794, the Convention began to establish those “Écoles Centrales” which were to be the departmental lycées, or high schools, of the future. Special schools were opened for mines, public works, astronomy, music, arts and crafts; and on September 28, 1794, the École Polytechnique began its prestigious career. The French Academy was suppressed on August 8, 1793, as an asylum of old reactionaries, but on October 25, 1795, the Convention inaugurated the Institut National de France, which was to include various academies for the encouragement and regulation of all sciences and arts. Here gathered the scientists and scholars who carried on the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, and gave lasting significance to Napoleon’s foray into Egypt.

  7. The “Fourth Estate”—the journalists and the press—may have been more influential than the schools in forming the mind and the mood of France in these effervescent years. The people of Paris—and, somewhat less so, of France—swallowed newsprint greedily every day. Satirical sheets prospered, goring politicians and pundits to the delight of the commonalty. The Revolution, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, had pledged itself to maintain the freedom of the press; it did so throughout the rule of the National and Constituent Assemblies (1789–91); but as the heat of party strife rose, each side signalized its victories by limiting the publications of its enemies; in effect the liberty of the press died with the execution of the King (January 21, 1793). On March 18 the Convention decreed death for “whosoever should propose an agrarian law, or any law subversive of territorial, commercial, or industrial property”; and on March 29 the triumphant regicides persuaded the Convention to decree death for “whosoever should be convicted of having composed or printed works or writings which might provoke the … reestablishment of royalty, or any other power injurious to the sovereignty of the people.”11 Robespierre had long defended the freedom of the press, but after sending Hébert, Danton, and Desmoulins to the guillotine he put an end to the journals that had supported them. During the Terror all liberty of speech disappeared, even in the Convention. The Directory restored freedom of the press in 1796, but revoked it a year later after the coup d’état of the 18th Fructidor, and deported the editors of forty-two journals.12 Liberty of speech and press was not destroyed by Napoleon; it was dead when he came to power.13

  II. THE NEW MORALITY

  1. Morality and Law

  Having discarded the religious basis of morals—love and fear of a watchful, recording, rewarding, and punishing God, and obedience to laws and commandments ascribed to him—the liberated spirits of France found themselves with no defense, except through the ethical echoes of their abandoned creeds, against their oldest, strongest, most individualistic instincts, ingrained in them by primitive centuries of hunger, greed, insecurity, and strife. Leaving the Christian ethic to their wives and daughters, they cast about for a new conception that might serve as a moral anchor in a sea of turbulent individuals who feared nothing but force. They hoped to find this in civisme—citizenship in the sense of accepting the duties as well as the privileges of belonging to an organized and protective society; in every moral choice the individual, in return for that protection and many communal services, must recognize the good of the community to be the overriding law—salus populi suprema lex. It was a noble attempt to establish a natural ethic. Going back across Christian centuries, the philosopher deputies—Mirabeau, Condorcet, Vergniaud, Roland, Saint-Just, Robespierre—discovered in classical history or legend the models they sought: Leonidas, Epaminondas, Aristides, the Brutuses, Catos, and Scipios; these were men to whom patriotism was the sovereign obligation, so that a man might righteously kill his children or his parents if he thought it necessary for the good of the state.

  The first round of revolutionaries fared reasonably well with the new morality. The second round began on August 10, 1792: the Paris populace deposed Louis XVI, and assumed the irresponsible absolutism of power. Under the Old Regime some graces of the aristocracy, some touches of the humanitarianism preached by philosophers and saints, had mitigated the natural tendencies of men to despoil and attack one another; but now there followed, in macabre procession, the September Massacres, the execution of the King and the Queen, and the spread of the Terror and the guillotine in what one victim, Mme. Roland, described as “a vast Golgotha of carnage.”14 The Revolutionary leaders became profiteers of war, making the liberated regions pay liberally for the Rights of Man; the French armies were told to live on the conquered regions; the art treasures of the liberated or the defeated belonged to victorious France. Meanwhile legislators and army officers connived with suppliers to cheat the government and the troops. In the laissez-faire economy, producers, distributors, and consumers labored to mulct one another, or to evade the maximum allowable price or wage. These or analogous deviltries had of course existed for some millenniums before the Revolution; but in the attempt to control them the new morality of civisme seemed as helpless as the fear of the gods.

  As the Revolution increased the insecurity of life and the instability of laws, the rising tensions in the people expressed themselves in crime, and sought distraction in gambling. Duels continued, but less frequently than before. Gambling was forbidden by edicts of 1791 and 1792, but secret maisons de jeu multiplied, and by 1794 there were three thousand gambling houses in Paris.15 During the upper-class affluence of the Directory years men wagered large sums, and many families were ruined by the turn of the wheel. In 1796 the Directory entered the game by restoring the Loterie Nationale. In a petition to the Convention the Tuileries section of the Paris Commune asked for a law suppressing all gambling houses and brothels. “Without morals,” it argued, “there can be no law and order; without personal safety, no liberty.”16

  The Revolutionary governments labored to give a new system of laws to a people excitable, violent, and left morally and legally unmoored by the decline of faith and the death of the King. Voltaire had called for a total revision of French law, and a unifying reconciliation of the 360 provincial or district codes into one coherent digest for all of France. That call was not heard amid the uproar of revolution; it had to wait for Napoleon. In 1780 the Academy of Châlons-sur-Marne offered a prize for the best essay on “The Best Way of Mitigating the Harshness of French Penal Law Without Endangering Public Safety.”17 Louis XVI responded by abolishing torture (1780), and in 1788 he announced his intention to have all French criminal law revised into a consistent national code; moreover, “we shall seek all means of mitigating the severity of punishments without compromising good order.” The conservative lawyers then dominating the parlements of Paris, Metz, and Be
sançon opposed the plan, and the King, fighting for his life, laid it aside.

  The cahiers presented to the States-General of 1789 appealed for several legal reforms: trials should be public, the accused should be allowed the help of counsel, lettres de cachet should be banned, trial by jury should be established. In June the King announced an end to lettres de cachet, and the other reforms were soon made law by the Constituent Assembly. The jury system, which had existed in medieval France, was restored. The legislators were now sufficiently immune to ecclesiastical influence, and alert to business needs, to proclaim, October 3, 1789 (centuries after the fact), that the charging of interest was not a crime. Two laws of 1794 freed all slaves in France and her colonies, and gave Negroes the rights of French citizens. On the ground that “an absolutely free state cannot allow any corporation within its bosom,” diverse laws of 1792–94 forbade all fraternities, academies, literary societies, religious organizations, and business associations. Strangely enough, the Jacobin clubs were spared, but labor unions were forbidden. The Revolution was rapidly replacing the absolute monarch with the omnipotent state.

  The diversity of old legislation, the enactment of new laws, and the growing complexity of business relations fostered the multiplication of lawyers, who now replaced the clergy as the first estate. Since the dissolution of the parlements they were not formally organized, but their knowledge of the law in all its loopholes, and of legal procedure in all its devices and delays, gave them a power which the state—itself a conglomerate of lawyersfound it hard to control. Citizens began to protest against the law’s delays, the subtleties of attorneys, and the expensive legislation that made exasperatingly unreal the equality of all citizens before the courts.18 The successive assemblies tried various measures to reduce the number and the power of the attorneys. In a fury of antilawyer laws they suppressed notaries (September 23, 1791), closed all schools of law (September 15, 1793), and decreed (October 24, 1793): “The office of attorney-at-law is abolished, but litigants may empower mere mandatories to represent them.”19 These regulations, often evaded, remained on the books until Napoleon reinstated the attorneys on March 18, 1800.