by Will Durant
FIG. 1—JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: Unfinished portrait of Bonaparte. Louvre, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux).
FIG. 2—ENGRAVING AFTER A DAGUERREOTYPE: The Palace of Versailles. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 3—ENGRAVING: The Destruction of the Bastille, July 14, 1789. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 4—ENGRAVING: Louis XVI. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 5—ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY CHAPPEL: Marie Antoinette. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 6—MINIATURE ON IVORY BY AVY: Vicomte Paul de Barras (dated Year XII—1804). Muséum Calvet, Avignon.
FIG. 7—SKETCH: Georges Jacques Danton, April 5, 1789. (The New York Society Library)
FIG. 8—JEAN-ANTOINE HOUDON: Mirabeau. Musée de Versailles. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 9—ENGRAVING BY HENRY COLBURN AFTER AN 1808 PAINTING BY FFRANÉOIS GÉRARD: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1845). (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 10—BOZE: Jean-Paul Marat. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 11—ANTOINE-JEAN GROS: Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole, DETAIL. Louvre, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 12—STUDIO OF FRANÉOIS GÉRARD: The Empress Josephine. Musée de Malmaison, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 13—Napoleon’s study at Malmaison. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 14—JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801). Musée de Malmaison, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 15—FRANÉOIS GÉRARD: Emperor Napoleon I in His Coronation Robes (1805). The Dresden Museum. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 16—JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: The Coronation of Napoleon. Louvre, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 17—MME. VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Madame de Staël as Corinne. Collection Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva. (Gift of Mme. Necker of Saussure)
FIG. 18—GIRODET: François-René de Chateaubriand (1809). Musée de S. Malo. (Photo J. C. Philippot)
FIG. 19—FRANÉOIS GÉRARD: Madame Récamier. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. (Photo Giraudon)
FIG. 20—JJACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: Self-Portrait July, 1794). Louvre, Paris. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 21—ENGRAVING: François-Joseph Talma. (The New York Society Library)
FIG. 22—SÈVRES PLAQUE: Baron Georges-Léopold Cuvier. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris. (Cliché Bibl. Mus. Paris)
FIG. 23—ENGRAVING: Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 24 —ENGRAVING BY B. METZEROTH: Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 25—ENGRAVING: Napoleon I (1807).
FIG. 26—FRANÉOIS GÉRARD: Empress Marie Louise. Louvre, Paris. Cliché des Musées Nationaux)
FIG. 27—WOODCUT: Edmund Kean as Hamlet. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 28—S KETCH BY C. M ARTIN: J. M. W. Turner. The National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 29—JOHN CONSTABLE: The Hay Wain (1824). The National Gallery, London.
FIG. 30—J. M. W. TURNER: Calais Pier. The National Gallery, London.
FIG. 31—ENGRAVING BY WILLIAM SHARP AFTER A PAINTING BY GGEORGE ROMNEY: Thomas Paine. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 32—SKETCH: Robert Owen. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 33—Portrait of Erasmus Darwin. (The New York Society Library)
FIG. 34—ENGRAVING: Sir Humphry Davy. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 35—LITHOGRAPH AFTER A PAINTING BY JOHN OPIE: Mary Wollstonecraft. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 36—Caricature from a drawing by Machse: William Godwin, “The Ridiculous Philosopher.” (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 37—ENGRAVING BY JOHN LINNELL: Thomas Malthus (1830). (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 38—J. WATTS: Jeremy Bentham. Collection of Millard Cox. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 39—ENGRAVING: Jane Austen. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 40—WILLIAM ALLAN: Sir Walter Scott (1832). The National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 41—P. VANDYKE: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1795). The National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 42—F. L. CHANTREY: Robert Southey (1832). The National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 43—R. WESTALL: Lord Byron (1813). The National Portrait Gallery, London.
FIG. 44—ENGRAVING BY THOMAS LANDSEER AFTER AN 1818 DRAWING BY BENJAMIN R. HAYDON: William Wordsworth. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 45—WILLIAM BLAKE: Percy Bysshe Shelley, WATERCOLOR. (The Bettmann Archive)
FIG. 46—WILLIAM BLAKE: The Flight into Egypt (1806), WATERCOLOR. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (The Bettmann Archive)
BOOK II
NAPOLEON ASCENDANT
1799–1811
CHAPTER VII
The Consulate
November 11, 1799—May 18, 1804
I. THE NEW CONSTITUTION
1. The Consuls
ON November 12, 1799, the Provisional Consuls—Napoleon, Sieyès, and Roger Ducos—aided by two committees from the old Councils, met in the Luxembourg Palace to rebuild France. Sieyès and Ducos, as members of the late Directory, already had apartments there; Napoleon, Josephine, Eugène, Hortense, and their staffs had moved in on November 11.
The victors in the coup d’état faced a nation in economic, political, religious, and moral disarray. Peasants worried lest some returning Bourbon should revoke their title deeds. Merchants and manufacturers saw their prosperity threatened by blockaded ports, neglected roads, and highway robbery. Financiers hesitated to invest in the securities of a government that had been so often overturned; now, when the situation cried out for law enforcement, public works, and poor relief, the Treasury had only twelve hundred francs at its disposal. Religion was in constant opposition: out of eight thousand Catholic priests in France, six thousand had refused to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and labored in quiet or open hostility to the state. Public education, withdrawn from the Church, was in ruins despite magnificent pronouncements and plans. The family, chief prop of social order, had been shaken by the freedom and prevalence of divorce, extempore marriages, and filial revolt. Public spirit, which in 1789 had risen to rare heights of patriotism and courage, was dying in a people weary of revolution and war, skeptical of every leader, and cynical of its own hopes. Here was a situation that called not for politics but for statesmanship, and not for leisurely democratic debate in spacious assemblies, but (as Marat had foreseen and urged) for dictatorship—for a combination of large perspectives, objective thought, tireless labor, discerning tact, and commanding will. The condition prescribed Napoleon.
At their first sitting Ducos proposed that the thirty-year-old general should take the chair. Bonaparte soothed Sieyès by arranging that each of the three should preside in turn, and suggesting that Sieyès should take the lead in formulating a new constitution. The aging theorist retired to his study and left Napoleon (Ducos complaisant) to issue decrees calculated to secure order in the administration, solvency in the Treasury, patience among factions, and a term of trust from a people disturbed by the forcible usurpation of power.
One of the ruling Consul’s first acts was to put away his military uniform, and to adopt a modest civilian dress; he was to be a master of theater. He announced his intention, as soon as the new government should be established, to propose terms of pacification to England and Austria. His apparent ambition in those early days was not to drive England to surrender, but to quiet and strengthen France. He was at this time what Pitt was to call him, the Son of the Revolution—its product and protector, the consolidator of its economic gains; but he made it clear, too, that he wished to be the end of the Revolution—the healer of its internal strife, the organizer of its prosperity and peace.
He pleased the bourgeoisie—whose economic support was to be indispensable to his power—by condemning to deportation (November 17, 1799) thirty-eight individuals considered dangerous to the public peace; this was dictatorship with a vengeance, which aroused more murmurs than applause; soon he modified the decree to banishment i
n the provinces.1 He rescinded the confiscatory tax, of twenty to thirty percent, which the Directory had levied upon all incomes above a moderate level. He revoked the law by which prominent citizens were kept under watch as hostages to be fined or deported for any antigovernment crimes committed in their localities. He pacified the Catholics of the Vendée by inviting their leaders to a conference, offering them assurances of goodwill, and signing with them (December 24) a truce that for a time put an end to the religious wars. He ordered all Catholic churches that had been consecrated before 1793 to be restored to Catholic worship on all days except the décadi.2 On, or soon after, December 26 he recalled from banishment the victims of triumphant Revolutionary factions: former liberals of the National Assembly, including Lafayette; defused members of the Committee of Public Safety, like Barère; conservatives proscribed by the coup d’état of the 18th Fructidor, like Lazare Carnot, who returned to his labors in the Ministry of War. Bonaparte restored civic rights to well-behaved nobles, and to the peaceful relatives of émigrés. He put an end to the hate-feeding festivals like those that celebrated the execution of Louis XVI, the proscription of the Girondins, and the fall of Robespierre. He announced that he proposed to govern in the interest not of any one part—Jacobin, bourgeois, or royalist—but as a representative of the entire nation. “To govern in the interest of a party,” he declared, “is sooner or later to be dependent upon it. They will never get me to do it. I am national.”3
And so the people of France came to view him—nearly all but jealous generals and immovable Jacobins. As early as November 13 public opinion had turned decisively in his favor. “Every previous revolution,” wrote the Prussian ambassador to his government on that day, “had inspired much distrust and fear. This one, on the contrary, as I myself can testify, has cheered the spirits of everyone, and has wakened the liveliest hopes.”4 On November 17 the Bourse had fallen to eleven francs; on the 20th it rose to fourteen; on the 21st, to twenty.5
When Sieyès brought to the other Consuls his plan for a “Constitution of the Year VIII” (1799) they soon saw that the former midwife of the Revolution had lost much of that admiration for the Third Estate which had inspired his challenging pamphlet of a decade back. He was now quite certain that no constitution could long uphold a state if the roots of both lay in the fluent will of an uninformed and emotional multitude. France had then almost no secondary schools, and its press was an agent of passionate partisanship that deformed, rather than informed, the public mind. His new constitution aimed to protect the state from popular ignorance at one end and despotic rule at the other. He half succeeded.
Napoleon revised Sieyès’ proposals, but accepted most of them, for he too was in no mood for democracy. He did not conceal his opinion that the people were not equipped to decide wisely about candidates or policies; they were too amenable to personal charm, declamatory eloquence, bought periodicals, or Rome-oriented priests. The people themselves, he thought, would recognize their unfitness to meet the problems of government; they would be content if the new constitution as a whole should be submitted to them for acceptance or rejection in a general referendum. Sieyès now reformulated his political philosophy in a basic maxim: “Confidence ought to come from below; power ought to come from above.”6
He began with a brief bow to democracy. All Frenchmen aged twenty-one or more were to vote for one tenth of their number to be communal notables; these were to vote for one tenth of their number to be departmental notables; these to vote for one tenth of their number to be national notables. There democracy ended: local officials were to be appointed from —not elected by—communal notables; departmental officials were to be appointed from departmental notables; national officials, from national notables. All appointments were to be made by the central government.
This was to consist of (1) a Conseil d’État, or Council of State, usually twenty-five men appointed by the chief of state, and authorized to propose new laws to (2) a Tribunat of one hundred tribunes authorized to discuss the measures so proposed, and to present its recommendations to (3) a Corps Législatif, or Legislature, of three hundred men authorized to reject, or to enact into law—but not to discuss—the measures so submitted; (4) a Sénat, usually of eighty men of mature mind, authorized to annul laws judged by it to be unconstitutional, to appoint the members of the Tribunate and the Legislature, to recruit new members for itself from the national notables, and to accept new members appointed to it by (5) the “grand elector.”
This was the term that Sieyès had proposed for the head of the state, but Napoleon rejected the term and its description. He saw in the office, as Sieyès proceeded to describe it, a mere executive agent of laws passed without his participation or consent, and a starched figurehead to receive delegations and diplomats, and preside at official ceremonies. He felt no talent for such rituals; on the contrary, his head was swelling with proposals that he was resolved to transform into laws as soon as possible for a nation crying out for order, direction, and continuity. “Your Grand Elector,” he told Sieyès, “is a do-nothing king, and the time of such rois fainéants is gone. What man of head and heart would submit to such a sluggish life at the price of six million francs and an apartment in the Tuileries? What?—nominate persons who act, and not act oneself? It is inadmissible.”7 He demanded the right to initiate legislation, to issue ordinances, to appoint to office in the central government not only from national notables, but wherever he found willing competence. His program of political, economic, and social reconstruction required a guaranteed tenure of ten years. And he wished to be called not “grand elector,” which savored of Prussia, but “first consul,” which carried the aroma of ancient Rome. Sieyès saw his constitution falling into monarchy, but was mollified by the presidency of the Senate and lucrative estates. He and Ducos resigned as consuls, and were replaced, at Napoleon’s request (December 12, 1799), by Jean-Jacques Cambacérès as second consul, and Charles-François Lebrun as third.
It would be a mistake to class these two men as mere obedient functionaries. Each was a man of tried ability. Cambacérès, who had been minister of justice under the Directory, served now as legal counselor to Napoleon. He presided over the Senate, and (in the absence of the First Consul) over the Council of State. He played a leading role in formulating the Code Napoléon. He was a bit vain, and proud of the Lucullan dinners that he served; but his calm and thoughtful temper often saved the First Consul from impetuous mistakes. He warned Napoleon not to antagonize Spain, and to avoid Russia as a mattress grave. —Lebrun had been secretary to René de Maupeou in the effort to avert the bankruptcy of Bourbon France; he had shared in the financial legislation of the National Assembly and the Directory; now starting with an empty Treasury, he helped to organize the finances of the new government. Napoleon appreciated the quality of these men; when he became emperor he made Lebrun archtreasurer and Cambacérès archchancellor, and they remained faithful to him to the end.
Despite his conviction that the condition of France required early decisions and quick implementation of policies, Napoleon, in this freshman year of his course, submitted his proposals to the Council of State, heard them attacked and defended, and took an active part in the discussion. This was a new role for him; he was accustomed to command rather than to debate, and his thoughts now often outran his words: but he learned quickly and worked arduously, in and out of Council, to analyze problems and find solutions. He was as yet only “Citoyen-Consul,” and allowed himself to be overruled.8 The leaders of the Council—like Portalis, Roederer, Thibaudeau—were men of high caliber, not to be dictated to; and their memoirs abound in tributes to the Consul’s willingness to work. Hear Roederer:
Punctual at every sitting, prolonging the session five or six hours, … always returning to the question, “Is that just? Is that useful?” … subjecting each question to exact and elaborate analysis, obtaining information about bygone jurisprudence, the laws of Louis XIV and 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…. What characterizes him above them all … [is] the force, flexibility, and constancy of his attention. I never saw him tired. I never found his mind lacking in inspiration, even when weary in body…. Never did man more wholly devote himself to the work in hand, nor better devote his time to what he had to do.9
In those days one could have loved Napoleon.
2. The Ministers