The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  In the 3,680 days of his imperial rule (1804–14) he was in Paris for only 955,105 but in these he remade France. When at home, and before 1808, he presided regularly, twice a week, over the Council of State; and then, said Las Cases (himself a member), “none of us would have been absent for the whole world.”106 He worked hard; in his eagerness to get things done he sometimes rose at 3 A.M. to begin his working day. He expected almost as much from his administrative aides. They were always to be ready to give him precise up-to-the-hour information on any matter falling within their jurisdiction; and he judged them by the accuracy, order, readiness, and adequacy of their reports. He did not consider his day finished until he had read the memoranda and documents that almost daily came to him from the various departments of his government. He was probably the best-informed ruler in history.

  For major ministries he chose men of first-rate ability, like Talleyrand, Gaudin, and Fouché, despite their troublesome pride; for the rest, and generally for administrative posts, he preferred men of the second rank, who would not ask questions or propose measures of their own; he had no time or patience for such discussions; he would take a chance on his own judgment, assuming the responsibility and risk. He required of his appointees an oath of fidelity, not only to France but to himself; in most cases they readily agreed, feeling the mesmerism of his personality and the grandeur of his designs. “I aroused emulation, rewarded every merits and pushed back the limits of glory.”107 He paid for his method of selecting aides by gradually surrounding himself with servitors who rarely dared to question his views, so that in the end there was no check upon his haste or pride except the power of his foreign foes. Caulaincourt in 1812 was an exception.

  He was severe on his subordinates: stern to reprove and slow to praise, but ready to reward exceptional service. He did not believe in putting them confidently at their ease; some uncertainty of tenure would encourage diligence. He did not necessarily object to their liaisons, nor even to some shady elements in their past, for these gave him a hold on their good behavior.108 He used his assistants to the limit, then let them retire with a generous pension, and perhaps some sudden title of nobility. Some of them did not survive to that denouement; Villeneuve, defeated at Trafalgar, killed himself rather than face reproof. Napoleon was not long moved by protests against his severity. “A statesman’s heart must be in his head”;109 he must not let sentiment interfere with policy; in the operation of an empire the individual counts for little—unless he is a Napoleon. Perhaps he exaggerated his insensitivity to personal charms when he said, “I like only those people who are useful to me, and only so long as they are useful”;110 he continued to love Josephine long after she had become a hindrance to his plans. Of course he lied at need, like most of us; and, like most governments, he doctored his war bulletins to keep up public spirit. He had studied Machiavelli with pencil in hand; an annotated copy of The Prince was found in his carriage at Waterloo. He considered good anything that furthered his aims. He did not wait for Nietzsche to lead him “beyond good and evil” in “the will to power”; hence Nietzsche called him “that Ens realissimum” and the only good product of the Revolution. “The strong are good, the weak are wicked,”111 said the Emperor. “Joseph,” he mourned, “is too good to be a great man”; but he loved him.

  Akin to these views—learned in Corsica and war—was his oft-repeated opinion that men are moved, and can be ruled, only by interest or fear.112 So, year by year, these feelings became the levers of his government. In 1800, sending General Hédouville to suppress a rising in the Vendée, he advised him, “as a salutary example, to burn down two or three large communes [towns], chosen among those whose conduct is worst. Experience has taught him [the First Consul] that a spectacularly severe act is, in the conditions you are facing, the most humane method. Only weakness is inhuman.”113 He instructed his judicial appointees to pass severe sentences. “The art of the police,” he told Fouché, “consists in punishing rarely and severely.”114 He not only employed a large force of police and detectives under Fouché or Régnier, but organized an additional secret police agency whose duty it was to help—and spy on—Fouché and Régnier, and to report to the Emperor any anti-Napoleonic sentiments expressed in the newspapers, the theater, the salons, or in books. “A prince,” he said, “should suspect everything.”115 By 1804 France was a police state. By 1810 it had a new supply of minor Bastilles—state prisons in which political offenders could be “detained” by imperial order, without a regular procedure in the courts.116 We should note, however, that the Emperor had moments of mercy. He issued many pardons, even to those who had plotted to kill him,117 and sometimes he reduced the severity of a court penalty.118 To Caulaincourt, in December, 1812, he mused:

  “They think I am stern, even hardhearted. So much the better—this makes it unnecessary for me to justify my reputation. My firmness is taken for callousness. I shall not complain, since this notion is responsible for the good order that is prevailing. … Look here, Caulaincourt, I am human. No matter what some people say, I too have entrails [‘bowels of mercy’], a heart—but the heart of a sovereign. I am not moved by the tears of a duchess, but the sufferings of the people touch me.”119

  Unquestionably he was a despot, often enlightened, often hastily absolute. He confessed to Las Cases, “The state was myself.”120 Something of his tyranny might be excused as the usual control, by the government, of a nation’s economy, theaters, and publications in time of war. Napoleon explained his omnipotence as necessary in the difficult transition from the licentious liberty of the Revolution after 1791 to the reconstructive order of the Consulate and the Empire. He recalled that Robespierre, as well as Marat, had recommended a dictatorship as needed to restore order and stability to a France verging on the dissolution of both the family and the state. He felt that he had not destroyed democracy; what he had replaced in 1799 was an oligarchy of corrupt, merciless, and unscrupulous men. He had destroyed the liberty of the masses, but that liberty was destroying France with mob violence and moral license, and only the restoration and concentration of authority could restore the strength of France as a civilized and independent state.

  Until 1810 Napoleon could forgivably feel that he had been true to the Revolution’s second goal—equality. He had upheld and spread the equality of all before the law. He had established not an impossible equality of abilities and merits, but an equality of opportunity for all talents, wherever born, to develop themselves in a society offering education, economic opportunity, and political eligibility to all; perhaps this carrière ouverte aux talents was his most lasting gift to France. He almost ended corruption in public life;121 this alone should immortalize him. He gave to all the example of a man using himself up in administration when not called to the battlefield. He remade France.

  Why did he fail? Because his grasp exceeded his reach, his imagination dominated his ambition, and his ambition domineered over his body, mind, and character. He should have known that the Powers would never be content to have France rule half of Europe. He succeeded measurably in leading Rhineland Germany out of feudalism into the nineteenth century, but it was beyond him, or any man at that time, to bring into a lasting federation an area long since partitioned into states each with its jealous traditions, dialect, manners, creed, and government. Just to name those diverse realms, from the Rhine to the Vistula, from Brussels to Naples, is to feel the problem: kingdoms or principalities like Holland, Hanover, Westphalia, the Hanseatic cities, Baden, Bavaria, Württemberg, Illyria, Venice, Lombardy, the Papal States, the Two Sicilies—where could he find men strong enough to rule these areas, to tax them, finally to take their sons to war against nations more akin to them than the French? How could he forge a unity between those forty-four additional departments and the eighty-six of France, or between those proud and sturdy 16 million added people and these proud and volatile 26 million Frenchmen? Perhaps it was magnificent to try, but it was certain to fail. In the end imagination toppled reason; the polyg
lot colossus, standing on one unsteady head, tumbled back into difference, and the rooted force of national character defeated the great dictator’s will to power.

  VI. THE PHILOSOPHER

  And yet, when imagination folded its wings, he could reason with the ablest of the savants in the French and Egyptian Institutes. Though he contrived no formal system of thought in which to imprison a universe that seemed to escape every formula, his realistic mind made short work of “ideologues” who mistook ideas for facts and built airy castles without foundations in biology and history. After trying Laplace and other scientists in administrative posts he concluded, “You can’t do anything with a philosopher.”122 However, he encouraged the sciences, and recommended history. “My son should study much history, and meditate upon it,” he said at St. Helena, “for it is the only true philosophy.”123

  Religion was one of the fields in which the ideologues had floated on a film of notions instead of grounding themselves in history. Only a logician, Napoleon felt, would bother long with the question, Does God exist? The real philosopher, schooled in history, would ask, why has religion, so often refuted and ridiculed, always survived, and played so notable a role in every civilization? Why did the skeptic Voltaire say that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him?

  Napoleon himself lost his religious faith at the early age of thirteen. Sometimes he wished he had kept it; “I imagine it must give great and true happiness.”124 Everyone knows the story how, on the trip to Egypt, hearing some scientists discourse irreverently, he challenged them, pointing to the stars, “You may talk as long as you please, gentlemen, but who made all that?”125 It is possible to quote him pro and con on this and many other subjects, for he changed his views and moods with time, and we tend to ignore their dates; yet what thoughtful person has not at fifty discarded the dogmas he swore by in his youth, and will not at eighty smile at the “mature” views of his middle age? Generally Napoleon retained belief in an intelligence behind or in the physical world,126 but he disclaimed any knowledge of its character or purpose. “Everything proclaims the existence of a God,” he concluded at St. Helena,127 but “to say whence I came, what I am, or where I am going is above my comprehension.”128 At times he spoke like a materialistic evolutionist: “Everything is matter;129 … man is only a more perfect and better reasoning animal.”130 “The soul is not immortal; if it were it would have existed before our birth.”131 “If I had to have a religion, I should adore the sun, for it is the sun that fertilizes everything; it is the true god of the earth.”132 “I should believe in religion if it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I read Socrates, Plato, Moses, or Mohammed, I have no more belief. It has all been invented by men.”133

  But why did they invent it? To comfort the poor, Napoleon answered, and to keep them from killing the rich. For all men are born unequal, and become more unequal with every advancement in technology and specialization; a civilization must elicit, develop, use, and reward superior abilities, and it must persuade the less fortunate to accept peaceably this inequality of rewards and possessions as natural and necessary. How can this be done? By teaching men that it is the will of God. “I do not see in religion the mystery of the Incarnation but the mystery of the social order. Society cannot exist without inequality of [rewards and therefore] property, an inequality which cannot be maintained without religion. … It must be possible to tell the poor: ‘It is God’s will. There must be rich and poor in this world, but hereafter, and for eternity, there will be a different distribution.’ “134 “Religion introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”135

  If all this be true, it was a mistake of the Enlightenment to attack Christianity, and of the Revolution to make Catholic preaching difficult. “The intellectual [moral?] anarchy which we are undergoing is the result of the moral [intellectual?] anarchy—the extinction of faith, the negation of principles [beliefs] which have preceded.”136 Perhaps for this reason, and for political use, Napoleon restored the Catholic Church as the “sacred gendarmerie [police] of the French nation.”*He did not interpret the new alliance as binding him to the Ten Commandments; he wandered from them now and then, but he paid the priests to preach them to a generation weary of chaos and ready for a return to order and discipline. Most parents and teachers were glad to have the help of religious faith in rearing or training children—to counter the natural anarchism of youth with a moral code based upon religious and filial piety, and presented as coming from an omnipotent God watchful of every act, threatening eternal punishments, and offering eternal rewards. Most of the governing class were grateful for an educational process that would produce a public taught to accept, as natural and inevitable, the inequality of abilities and possessions. The old aristocracy was excused as cleansing its wealth with manners and grace; a new aristocracy was established; and revolution, for a generation, muted its voice and hid its guns.

  In this regenerated society marriage and motherhood had to be resanctified, and property, not romantic love, had to be restored as their base and goal. Love generated by the physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous; it is une sottise faite à deux–”a folly committed in pair.”138 Much of it is artificially induced by romantic literature; it would probably disappear if men were illiterate. “I firmly believe that [romantic] love does more harm than good, and that it would be a blessing … if it were banished” as a reason for uniting a man and a woman in the lifelong enterprise of rearing children and acquiring and transmitting property. “Marriage should be forbidden to individuals who have known each other less than six months.”139

  Napoleon had a Mohammedan view of marriage: its function is to produce abundant offspring under conditions of freedom for the man and protection for the faithful and obedient wife. The marriage ceremony, though it may be civil, should be ceremonious and solemn, as emphasizing the obligation undertaken.140 The married couple should sleep together; this “exerts a singular influence upon married life, guarantees the position of the wife and the dependence of the husband, and preserves intimacy and morality”;141 Napoleon followed this old custom until he set his mind upon divorce.

  However, even a faithful wife is not enough for a man. “I find it ridiculous that a man should not be able to have more than one legitimate wife. When she is pregnant it is as if the man had no wife at all.”142 Polygyny is better than divorce or adultery. There should be no divorce after ten years of marriage. A woman should be permitted only one divorce, and should not be allowed to remarry for five years afterward.143 Adultery on the husband’s part should not be sufficient ground for a divorce, unless there is the additional circumstance of the husband’s keeping his concubine under the same roof with his wife.144 “When a husband commits an act of unfaithfulness to his wife, he should confess it to her and regret his action; then every trace of guilt is wiped away. The wife is angry, forgives, and is reconciled to him; often she even gains through it. But that is not the case with the unfaithfulness of the wife. It is all very well for her to confess and regret, but who knows whether something else remains” in her mind or womb? “Therefore she must not, and cannot ever come to an understanding with him.”145 (But he had twice forgiven Josephine.)

  He guarded himself against feminine charms by adhering to the Mohammedan view of women. “We treat women too well, and in this way have spoiled everything. We have done every wrong in raising them to our level. Truly the Oriental nations have more mind and sense than we in declaring the wife to be the actual property of the husband. In fact nature has made woman our slave. … Woman is given to man that she may bear him children; … consequently she is his property, just as the fruit tree is the property of the gardener.”146

  All this is so primitive (and so contrary to biology, where the female usually is the predominant sex, and the male is a tribut
ary food-provider, sometimes himself eaten) that we should be glad to accept Las Cases’ assurance that much of it was playful bravado, or the military man’s dream of endless conscripts pouring from fertile wombs; but it was quite in harmony with the views of any Corsican condottiere. The Code Napoléon insisted on the absolute power of the husband over his wife, and over her property, as a necessity of social order. “I have always thought,” Napoleon wrote to Josephine in 1807, “that woman was made for man, and man for country, family, glory, and honor.”147 On the day after the mutual massacre known as the battle of Friedland (June 14, 1807) Napoleon drew up a program for a school to be built at Écouen “for girls who have lost their mothers, and whose people are too poor to bring them up properly.”

  What are the girls at Écouen to be taught? You must begin with religion in all its strictness. … What we ask of education is not that girls should think, but that they should believe. The weakness of women’s brains, the instability of their ideas, … their need for perpetual resignation … all this can be met only by religion … I want the place to produce not women of charm but women of virtue; they must be attractive because they have high principles and warm hearts, not because they are witty or amusing. … In addition the girls must be taught writing, arithmetic, and elementary French; … a little history and geography; … not Latin … They must learn to do all kinds of women’s work. … With the single exception of the headmaster, all men must be excluded from the school … Even the gardening must be done by women.148