After all their costly blunders and splendid victories the proud islanders were ready to let bygones be bygones. They wanted to turn their backs on an ungrateful Continent and resume their normal pursuits and amusements. Once the fight (in which they had given as good as they took) was called off, they ceased to feel jealousy of the young conqueror of Austria and Italy and good-humouredly took him at his own valuation as the man who had saved France and Europe from the Jacobin violence and lawlessness they had themselves so long opposed. They even accepted the incorporation in his dominions of the Austrian Netherlands and his control of the Dutch coast for which they had gone to war. For, imagining that everyone else felt as they did, they believed that the world was on the threshold of a new age of international goodwill and expanding commercial opportunity.
It was, perhaps, because of these things that Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, walking home to Grassmere over Kirkstone Pass that spring and seeing the lakeland woods beyond Gorbarrow full of daffodils, felt a more than usual impulse of hope and joy. Even the gloomy Windham,1 in his regret for the fallen Bourbon cause, could not suppress his pleasure at the sight of the holiday crowds in the Mall: they gave him, he noted in his diary, a pleasant feeling like former times. And all who during the siege years had longed for the delights of foreign travel and could afford it thronged the Dover Road in crested coach and carriage on their way to the Continent. At the Kentish port the York Hotel and its rival, the City of London, were crowded with rank and fashion. " Have you," wrote Charles Lamb wistfully from his London desk to a friend in Paris, "seen a man guillotined: is it as good as a hanging? Are all the women painted and the men all monkeys... . Are you and the First Consul thick?"
Travellers were at first agreeably impressed. The ragged rabble of Calais and Dieppe, who shouted and gesticulated on the quayside and so alarmed returning Emigres, stretched out civil, dirty hands to help the English milords down the landing-ladders and accompanied them with cheerful salutations to their inn. Those who, fearing an unmitigated diet of frogs; had prudently secreted home-' cured hams among their luggage, discovered that the new France lived not worse but better than the old. Instead of the villainous sansculottes and blood-stained scenes of Gilray's cartoons, there were everywhere friendly faces, clean streets and orderly citizens. A people till recently given over to gloomy savagery were fast coming round to order and civility. The women in their red camlet jackets and high aprons, the long flying lappets to their caps, the wooden sabots with scarlet tufts that clattered perpetually on the cobbles, the sound of all the world talking at once, the gaily painted eggs on the market stalls, the tang of garlic, the huge, uncouth diligences by the roadside, the coffee, boiled milk and long crisp rolls were all delightful to long starved senses.
The journey south confirmed these impressions. The fields were better cultivated than under the old dispensation, there was no waste land, the peasant women and children looked ruddy and well-fed. The postilions and people along the road were good-natured and
1 Windham Diary, 439. Lord Guilford remarked that he could never see Windham without picturing Don Quixote with a barber's basin on his head.—Glenbervie, I, 266.
obliging; at Montreuil a charming girl, with a most interesting countenance, dressed en paysanne and wearing ringlets,waited on tourists. Only in the towns and in the neighbourhood of former religious houses and chateaux were there signs of revolutionary destruction. At Abbeville the larger houses were shut up and the streets were full of beggars: the castle at Chantilly was in ruins and its beautiful garden laid waste. And everywhere the churches, now timidly reopening, were desolate: the tombs desecrated, the stones torn up and the windows smashed.
But it was in the capital that the "grand nation" could be seen in its glory and triumph. The new approach through the squalid suburbs was most imposing: the Norman Barrier with massive Doric pillars, the long quadruple avenue of elms,-and beyond the Place de la Concorde the Consular palace of the Tuileries. Behind this splendid facade clustered the Paris of beauty and pleasure, the corrupt, glittering profiteers' bauble that had miraculously risen out of the reeking miasma of the Terror; the gardens, dance halls and restaurants that graced the palaces of the former nobility; the Tivoli and Frascati; the Bois with its horses and carriages; the great new shops with their silks and trimmings, fashionable mahogany and ormulu furniture, bronzes and china; the Palais Royal, mecca of debauchees, where all the women wore draperies of woven hair and hair anointed with scented oil in the Grecian mode. For the classical style had become the rage in Consular Paris.
The first goal of Englishmen in the Revolutionary capital was the Louvre. Here, with the sun streaming through the windows of its glorious gallery, were crowded the finest pictures and sculptures of Italy—the plunder of a hundred battles and sieges. British painters like Opie and Benjamin West sat entranced for hours before the treasures of medieval monasteries and Renaissance palaces: even Miss Berry, who having known France under the ancien regime was always regretting its vanished graces, was impressed. But of the other wonders of Paris which delighted so many of her countrymen, she took a less favourable view. The great shops in the mansions of the former nobility might be imposing but they lacked taste; the dancing at the theatres was wonderful and the declamation resounding, but the effect was ruined by slovenly fellows—auditors who smoked and spat and failed to offer their seats to ladies. And even visitors as little like Miss Berry as the far from prim Lady Bess-borough were shocked by the gauze-like garments of the fair Parisiennes. The rubicund gentry from the English shires, however, showed a greater appreciation of these classical displays. When Madame Récamier at the height of her own ball retired, as was her wont, to her elegant Grecian bedroom, they gallantly crowded round the famous gold and muslin curtains to view her beautiful white shoulders exposed, citoyenne like, to the public gaze.
But if the haut ton of the new Paris seemed glittering and grating to those who had known the old—a world of showy parvenus who loaded themselves with jewels and finery but did not know how to dress, in which there was scarcely a well-cut coat, a gentlewoman or a man of breeding—the French capital offered one spectacle with an almost universal appeal. The minority who remembered the ancien regime might peer, shuddering deliciously, at the guillotine with its slanting axe and gaping wicker basket in the former Place de la Revolution, visit desecrated convents with gaping roofs, flapping hangings and torn-up vaults, or day-dream among the squalid decay of deserted palaces and weedy royal gardens. Some like little Emma Edgcumbe might even catch a glimpse in the Styx-like exile of a provincial town of the odious Barras, " with his ignoble figure and lowering, bad countenance, always alone and looking as if he felt that every one knew who he was and what he was." But these ghostly echoes of the past were drowned by the cheerful pomp and blare of the present. Miss Berry, who remembered Versailles in the old days, declared she had never seen such magnificence as in the First Consul's apartments in the Tuileries. The hundreds of footmen in their green and gold liveries, the gorgeously be-gilt peace officers who paraded the ante-chambers, the pages with their gold chains and medallions and the uniforms of the aides-de-camp dazzled even those most used to courtly splendour.1
Before this background moved the minute but dominating figure of the First Consul. It was only a few months since the English had seen him drawn by their cartoonists as an unshaven scaramouche from a Corsican hovel, looting, burning and murdering. Now they saw him the greatest man in Europe, taking the salute of his troops, the immense arena of the Carrousel crowded with all the pomp and splendour of royalty and half the nations of the world doing him homage. Riding a horse that had belonged to the late King of France, he passed along the lines with cropped hair, high nose and intent, searching eyes, attended by brilliant generals and Mameluke orderlies. It was like a dream, wrote young Augustus Foster, to see him at the head of the conquerors of Italy and Germany. The extreme simplicity of his garb, set against that glittering throng, enhanced the effect:
; 1 For British travellers' first impressions of the new France, sec Carr passim; Brownlow, 3-12; Berry, II, 125-84; Farington, II, 11-17; Granville, I, 373, 276-7, 406; Aberdeen, 1, 1-19; D'Arblay, III, 213-27; Dyott, I, 232-3; Romilly, II, 75-93; Cartwright, I, 306-7; Crcevey, I, 5; Ttvo Duchesses, 178; Glenbcrvie, I, 361.
his black, unlaced hat and plain blue uniform recalled an English sea captain in undress.1
Yet it was not of so homely a figure that the little sallow man on horseback made men think, but of Caesar. Behind the facade of Roman Republican forms he was driving fast that summer to imperial power. It was he who embodied the volonte generale which France in its first fine revolutionary rapture had enthroned above custom, morality and law. It was his will—and therefore France's— that had triumphed on the battlefield and was now carrying all before it in council and senate. He personified the Revolution and its' achievements in flesh and blood, the genius of man loosed from the shackles of the past by that great explosion of energy, and the future of the human race at a new and hitherto undreamed of level ,of achievement.
No force less passionate or dictatorial could have healed the wounds of France so quickly. Two years earlier Bonaparte had taken over a country on the verge of collapse, Within a few months he had shattered all her enemies save Britain and restored her national unity. Suspending the laws against the emigres, he brought home a hundred thousand exiles and closed the fratricidal strife of a decade. Conciliating the old propertied classes, he drove a wedge between the Bourbon diehards in English pay and the patriotic royalists who put loyalty to France above loyalty to a family. By re-legalising religion he satisfied the traditional piety of a peasantry robbed of its altars by urban doctrinaires. For ten years, two old dames told Fanny D'Arblay, they had lost le bon Dieu but now the good Bonaparte had found him. Seeing religion as the cement of society, the shrewd Corsican appealed over the heads of fanatics and pedants to the family and the village.
Yet in his work of restoration Bonaparte parted with none of the unique powers bequeathed by the Revolution. He used the goodwill of the Church and the emigres to widen them. The latter recovered only a fraction of their lands and none of their feudal rights; the new clergy found themselves little more than State pensioners. The Pope, despite his Concordat with the tamer of the terrible Republic, did not resume his old authority: he was rather called in to consecrate the Revolution. In return the First Consul, who made his unwilling pagan generals attend the thanksgiving celebrations in Notre Dame, consecrated, as it were, the Gallican Church. Henceforward it became his practice to grace Mass in the Tuileries chapel for ten
1 The comparison struck at least two of the English visitors to Paris, Lady Bessborough and Farington. See Granville, I, 390-1; Farington, II, 7, 55; Two Duchesses, 176-8; Berry, II, 181; D'Arblay, III, 232-3.
minutes every Sunday, piously transacting business in an adjoining chamber with open doors.
Still less had Bonaparte impaired the popular vested interests created by the Revolution. They remained the pillars on which his power depended. The Third Estate continued to inherit untrammelled opportunity; the privilege of birth was in abeyance, the career open to the talents. The peasant's land remained free from seignorial impost: the former properties of the Church in the hands of their new owners. To their enjoyment was now added security and internal tranquillity. The comfort of the blacksmith's shop at Pecquigny which so impressed the unimpressionable Miss Berry, the bright plates and dishes above the cottage dresser, the unwonted bacon hanging from the kitchen ceiling, the bit of garden at the back, these were the material benefits which the Corsican's strong rule assured. As much as his victories and his astonishing genius, they guaranteed his hold over France.
It was a hold that tightened every day. The spring of 1802 saw a new rise in Bonaparte's popularity. Victorious peace on the Continent had been crowned by peace with England, the end of the blockade and the return of the French colonial empire. During the prolonged negotiations at Amiens an intelligent people had watched with almost incredulous eyes the ease with which their leader niched advantage after advantage from their adversaries. The trickery and bad faith which ultimately shocked and angered the English only excited the admiration of a people whose moral sense had been dulled by revolutionary treachery and violence. At first they had regarded the British concessions as aristocratic tricks to lure the First Consul into demands that would revive popular enthusiasm for the war in England. But after the Treaty had been signed they saw them as marks of weakness. The whole country applauded the wizard's triumph as a masterpiece of cunning.
Bonaparte saw to it that France's gratitude for the twin blessings of peace and victory took the form he desired. The Treaties of Luneville and Amiens were commemorated not by a memorial in stone, but by a plebiscite making their author First Consul for life. By an overwhelming majority he was given powers greater than those of Louis XIV at the height of his glory. A few die-hard republicans like Carnot recorded their dissent, but the opposition was too trifling to excite more than ridicule. Thirteen years of civil upheaval had left the French without respect for anything but strength and success. To whoever commanded these they were ready to grant everything. Colonel Dyott was told by a republican banker that Bonaparte would shortly repudiate his wife, marry the daughter of some European monarchical house and make the Consulship hereditary. The man of finance saw nothing shocking in the prospect. Cromwell and Caesar had become the most popular historical characters in Revolutionary France.
Before he seized power Bonaparte told a fellow soldier that if he succeeded the reign of ranting would soon be at an end. With his accession popular clamour ceased to play any part in public affairs. When the terrible poisardes who had so often given mob law to Paris waited to congratulate him on his elevation, they were sent about their business with a curt command to attend to their husbands and children: a rebuke on which in pre-revolutionary days no King would have ventured. Even a royalist assassination plot was skilfully used as a pretext to liquidate unwanted Jacobin leaders.
The idea of criticism by, let alone dependence on, an assembly of politicians was utterly repugnant to Bonaparte's mind. He declined to share the powers he derived from popular favour with any one. He used his triumph at Amiens to secure the adoption of a new Constitution—the fifth since 1789—which reduced the Senate to a company of nominated retainers and the Legislative Assembly and Tribune to ciphers—the one "an assembly of mutes" passing laws without discussion, the other "a sort of legislative eunuch" debating without power in secret session, where, he graciously announced till he grew weary of their insolence, " they might jabber as they chose."
Centralisation was the soul of the new government. Everything turned on the will of the First Consul. He appointed the Prefects of the Departments and the Mayors of the larger cities, and his Prefects appointed the Mayors of the smaller towns. It was the despotism of Louis XIV over again without the limitations imposed by local and aristocratic privileges and corporations. For the Revolution admitted of no power which did not derive from the State itself. The State alone was holy and its officers above the law. The droit administratif invested every agent who enforced the dictator's will with virtual immunity from punishment.
No one but a great man could have administered such a State without stagnation or confusion. But Bonaparte was a great man. He possessed the supreme quality of genius—inexhaustible energy. He could work eighteen hours a day and take in the most complicated document at a glance. His mind, which could turn swiftly from subject to subject, was almost as universal as the France he controlled. Out of the chaos produced by the Terror, the long, wasting war and the corruption of the Directory, he constructed, almost single-handed, a rationally organised State strong in the allegiance of its members and capable of enduring stress and storm. He endowed it with laws culled from the best systems of the past and published them in a Code of more than two thousand articles covering every department of human activity. He gave France a new system of education. He
enriched it with roads, canals, bridges, harbours and magnificent public buildings.
On all that he wrought he left the indelible stamp of a clear, original, logical mind with a strong authoritarian bent. His educational system was as rational as an arithmetic table and directed to one aim: the enlargement of authority. His secondary schools or lycees and the University of Paris which was their apex were dedicated to the task of making obedient administrators, lawyers, officers, writers and teachers who could execute and express the "general will" of the Nation: in other words his own. Training was of a military type; school lessons began and ended with a roll of drums. Its ideal was not independence of thought but the efficiency born of uniformity and punctual subordination. It was devised for an armed nation on the march, which was how Bonaparte, alike interpreting and exploiting the Revolution, saw France. In the same way his legal reforms aimed everywhere at strengthening the forces of authority: of the father, the husband and the official. They subjected the libertarian anarchy of the Revolutionary theorists to the discipline required of the battlefield.
Nor did the French people object. They gloried in success, and the new system had brought them success unprecedented. So long as they were free to live their private lives with reasonable continuity, which they had never been under Convention or Directory, and enjoy the material benefits of the Revolution, they left their wonderful ruler to order the forms of government as he pleased. With the abolition of feudal uses, the destruction of hereditary caste and the secularisation of society, the divine discontent of eighteenth century bourgeois and peasant France had been assuaged. Bonaparte's authoritarianism outraged neither its passion for equality nor its Latin logic; unlike the weak rule of the Bourbons, it honoured both. Himself a Latin whose youthful pride had been bruised by the senseless arrogance of the ancien regime, he understood both feelings perfectly. When, to strengthen his hold on the country, he created a new privileged order he fashioned it with mathematical symmetry and grounded it on the broad, unenvying base of an egalitarian nation. The Legion of Honour, with its graded functionaries and cohorts, was recruited from the general body of France. It revived rank but not caste, and honoured not birth but talent.
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 2