THE FRENCH REPUBLIC UNDER THE CONSULATE, 1799-1804
[Sidenote: Napoleon Bonaparte]
When General Bonaparte executed the coup d'état of 1799 and seized personal power in France, he was thirty years of age, short, of medium build, quiet and determined, with cold gray eyes and rather awkward manners. His early life had been peculiarly interesting. He was born at Ajaccio in Corsica on 15 August, 1769, just after the island had been purchased by France from Genoa but before the French had fully succeeded in quelling a stubborn insurrection of the Corsicans. Belonging to a prominent and numerous Italian family,—at the outset his name was written Napoleone di Buonaparte,—he was selected along with sons of other conspicuous Corsican families to be educated at public expense in France. In this way he received a good military education at Brienne and at Paris. He early displayed a marked fondness for the study of mathematics and history as well as for the science of war; and, though reserved and taciturn, he was noticeably ambitious and a keen judge of men.
During his youth Buonaparte dreamed of becoming the leader in establishing the independence of Corsica, but the outbreak of the French Revolution afforded him a wider field for his enthusiasm and ambition. Already an engineer and artilleryman, he threw in his lot with the Jacobins, sympathized at least outwardly with the course of the Revolution, and was rewarded, as we have seen, with an important place in the recapture of Toulon (1793) and in the defense of the Convention (1795). It was not, however, until his first Italian campaign,—when incidentally he altered his name to the French form, Bonaparte,—that he acquired a commanding reputation as the foremost general of the French Republic.
[Sidenote: Character of Bonaparte]
How Bonaparte utilized his reputation in order to make himself master of his adopted country has already been related. It was due in large part to an extraordinary opportunity which French politics at that time offered. But it was due, likewise, to certain characteristic qualities of the young general. In the first place, he was thoroughly convinced of his own abilities. Ambitious, selfish, and egotistical, he was always thinking and planning how he might become world-famous. Fatalistic and even superstitious, he believed that an unseen power was leading him on to higher and grander honors. He convinced his associates that he was "a man of destiny." Then, in the second place, Bonaparte possessed an effective means of satisfying his ambition, for he made himself the idol of his soldiers. He would go to sleep repeating the names of the corps, and even those of some of the individuals who composed them; he kept these names in a corner of his memory, and this habit came to his aid when he wanted to recognize a soldier and to give him a cheering word from his general. He spoke to the subalterns in a tone of good fellowship, which delighted them all, as he reminded them of their "common feats of arms." Then, in the third place, Bonaparte was a keen observer and a clever critic. Being sagacious, he knew that by 1799 France at large was weary of weak government and perpetual political strife and that she longed to have her scars healed by a practical man. Such a man he instinctively felt himself to be. In the fourth place, Bonaparte was a politician to the extreme of being unscrupulous. Knowing what he desired, he was ready and willing to employ any means to attain his ends. No love for theories or principles, no fear of God or man, no sentimental aversion from bloodshed, nothing could deter him from striving to realize his vaulting but self-centered ambition. Finally, there was in his nature an almost paradoxical vein of poetry and art which made him human and often served him well. He dreamed of empires and triumphs. He reveled in the thought of courts and polished society. He entertained a sincere admiration for learning. His highly colored speeches to his soldiers were at once brilliant and inspiriting. His fine instinct of the dramatic gave the right setting to all his public acts. And in the difficult arts of lying and deception, Bonaparte has never been surpassed.
[Sidenote: The Government Of The Consulate: Constitution Of The Year
VIII]
Such was the man who effected the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (November, 1799). His first work in his new rôle was to publish a constitution, which he prepared in conjunction with the Abbé Sieyès and which was to supersede the Constitution of the Year III. It concealed the military despotism under a veil of popular forms. The document named three "consuls," the first of whom was Bonaparte himself, who were to appoint a Senate. From lists selected by general election, the Senate was to designate a Tribunate and a Legislative Body. The First Consul, in addition to conducting the administration and foreign policies and having charge of the army, was to propose, through a Council of State, all the laws. The Tribunate was to discuss the laws without voting on them. The Legislative Body was then to vote on the laws without discussing them. And the Senate, acting as a kind of supreme court, was to decide all constitutional questions. Thus a written constitution was provided, and the principle of popular election was recognized, but in last analysis all the power of the state was centered in the First Consul, who was Napoleon Bonaparte.
The document was forthwith submitted for ratification to a popular vote, called a plebiscite. So great was the disgust with the Directory and so unbounded was the faith of all classes in the military hero who offered it, that it was accepted by an overwhelming majority and was henceforth known in French history as the Constitution of the Year VIII.
[Sidenote: Foreign Danger Confronting France]
One reason why the French nation so readily acquiesced in an obvious act of usurpation was the grave foreign danger that threatened the country. As we have noted in another connection, the armies of the Second Coalition in the course of 1799 had rapidly undone the settlement of the treaty of Campo Formio, and, possessing themselves of Italy and the Rhine valley, were now on the point of carrying the war into France. The First Consul perceived at a glance that he must face essentially the same situation as that which confronted France in 1796.
[Sidenote: Dissolution of the Second Coalition]
The Second Coalition embraced Great Britain, Austria, and Russia. Bonaparte soon succeeded by flattery and diplomacy not only in securing the withdrawal of Russia but in actuating the half-insane Tsar Paul to revive against Great Britain an Armed Neutrality of the North, which included Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark. Meanwhile the First Consul prepared a second Italian campaign against Austria. Suddenly leading a French army through the rough and icy passes of the Alps, he descended into the fertile valley of the Po and at Marengo in June, 1800, inflicted an overwhelming defeat upon the enemy. French success in Italy was supplemented a few months later by a brilliant victory of the army under Moreau at Hohenlinden in southern Germany. Whereupon Austria again sued for peace, and the resulting treaty of Lunéville (1801) reaffirmed and strengthened the provisions of the peace of Campo Formio.
[Sidenote: Truce between France and Great Britain: Treaty of Amiens, 1802]
Meanwhile, steps were being taken to terminate the state of war which had been existing between France and Great Britain since 1793. Although French arms were victorious in Europe, the British squadron of Lord Nelson (1758-1805) had managed to win and retain the supremacy of the sea. By gaining the battle of the Nile (1 August, 1798) Nelson had cut off the supplies of the French expedition in Egypt and eventually (1801) obliged it to surrender. Now, by a furious bombardment of Copenhagen (2 April, 1801), Nelson broke up the Armed Neutrality of the North. But despite the naval feats of the British, republican France seemed to be unconquerable on the Continent. Under these circumstances a treaty was signed at Amiens in March, 1802, whereby Great Britain promised to restore all the colonial conquests made during the war, except Ceylon and Trinidad, and tacitly accepted the Continental settlement as defined at Lunéville. The treaty of Amiens proved to be but a temporary truce in the long struggle between France and Great Britain.
[Sidenote: French Reforms under the Consulate]
So far, the Consulate had meant the establishment of an advantageous peace for France. With all foreign foes subdued, with territories extended to the Rhine, and with allies in Spain, and in the Batavian, Helvetic, Ligurian, and Cisalpine republics, the First Consul was free to devote his marvelous organizing and administrative instincts to the internal affairs of his country. The period of the Consulate (1799- 1804) was the period of Bonaparte's greatest and most enduring contributions to the development of French institutions.
[Sidenote: The Revolutionary Heritage]
Throughout his career Bonaparte professed himself to be the "son of the Revolution," the heir to the new doctrine of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It was to the Revolution that he owed his position in France, and it was to France that he claimed to be assuring the results of the Revolution. Yet, in actual practice, it was equality and fraternity, but not liberty, that were preserved by the First Consul. "What the French people want," he declared, "is equality, not liberty." In the social order, therefore, Bonaparte rigidly maintained the abolition of privilege, of serfdom and feudalism, and sought to guarantee to all Frenchmen equal justice, equal rights, equal opportunity of advancement. But in the political order he exercised a tyranny as complete, if less open, than that of Louis XIV.
[Sidenote: Administrative Centralization]
The Constitution of the Year VIII (1799) placed in Bonaparte's hands all the legislative and executive functions of the central government, and a series of subsequent acts put the law courts under his control. In 1800 the local government of the whole country was subordinated to him. The extensive powers vested by the Constituent Assembly in elective bodies of the departments and smaller districts (arrondissements) were now to be wielded by prefects and sub- prefects, appointed by the First Consul and responsible to him. The local elective councils continued to exist, but sat only for a fortnight in the year and had to deal merely with the assessment of taxes: they might be consulted by the prefect or sub-prefect but had no serious check upon the executive. The mayor of every small commune was henceforth to be chosen by the prefect, while the police of all cities containing more than 100,000 inhabitants were directed by the central government and the mayors of towns of more than 5000 population were chosen by Bonaparte.
This highly centralized administration of the country afforded the people little direct voice in governmental matters but it possessed distinct advantages in assuring the prompt, uniform, military-like execution of the laws and decrees of the central government. In essence it was a continuation of the system of intendants instituted by Cardinal Richelieu. How conservative are the French people, at least in the institutions of local government, may be inferred from the fact that despite many changes in France during the nineteenth century from republic to empire to monarchy to republic to empire to republic, Bonaparte's system of prefects and sub-prefects has survived to the present day.
[Sidenote: Bonaparte's Centralizing Tendencies]
As in administration, so in all his internal reforms, Bonaparte displayed the same fondness for centralization, with consequent thoroughness and efficiency, at the expense of idealistic liberty. His reforms of every description—financial, ecclesiastical, judicial, educational,—and even his public works, showed the guiding hand of the victorious general rather than that of the convinced revolutionary. They were the adaptation of the revolutionary heritage to the purposes and policies of one-man power.
[Sidenote: Financial Readjustment]
[Sidenote: The Bank of France]
It will be remembered that financial disorders had been the immediate cause of the downfall of the absolute monarchy as well as of the Directory. From the outset, Bonaparte guarded against any such recurrence. By careful collection of taxes he increased the revenue of the state. By rigid economy, by the severe punishment of corrupt officials, and by the practice of obliging people whose lands he invaded to support his armies, he reduced the public expenditures. The crowning achievement of his financial readjustments was the establishment (1800) of the Bank of France, which has been ever since one of the soundest financial institutions in the world.
[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical Settlement: the Concordat, 1801]
Another grave problem which Bonaparte inherited from the Revolution was the quarrel between the state and the Roman Catholic Church. He was determined to gain the political support of the large number of conscientious French Catholics who had been alienated by the harsh anti-clerical measures of the revolutionaries. After delicate and protracted negotiations, a settlement was reached in a concordat (1801) between Pope Pius VII and the French Republic, whereby the pope, for his part, concurred in the confiscation of the property of the Church and the suppression of the monasteries, and the First Consul undertook to have the salaries of the clergy paid by the state; the latter was to nominate the bishops and the former was to invest them with their office; the priests were to be appointed by the bishops. In this way the Catholic Church in France became a branch of the lay government much more completely than it had been in the time of Louis XIV. So advantageous did the arrangement appear that the Concordat of 1801 continued to regulate the relations of church and state until 1905.
[Sidenote: Judicial Reforms]
[Sidenote: The Code Napoléon]
One of the fondest hopes cherished by enlightened liberals was to clear away the confusion and discrepancies of the numerous legal systems of the old régime and to reduce the laws of the land to a simple and uniform code, so that every person judicial who could read would be able to know what was legal and what was illegal. The constitution of 1791 had promised such a work; the National Convention had actually begun it; but the preoccupations of the leading revolutionaries, combined with the natural caution and slowness of the lawyers to whom the task was intrusted, delayed its completion. It was not until the commanding personality of Bonaparte came into contact with it that real progress was made. Then surrounding himself with excellent legal advisers [Footnote: Chief among these legal experts was Cambacérès (1753-1824), the Second Consul.] whom he literally drove to labor, the First Consul brought out a great Civil Code (1804), which was followed by a Code of Civil Procedure, a Code of Criminal Procedure, a Penal Code, and a Commercial Code. These codes were of the utmost importance. The simplicity and elegance of their form commended them not only to France, but to the greater part of continental Europe. Moreover, they preserved the most valuable social conquests of the Revolution, such as civil equality, religious toleration, equality of inheritance, emancipation of serfs, freedom of land, legal arrest, and trial by jury. It is true that many harsh punishments were retained and that the position of woman was made distinctly inferior to that of man, but, on the whole, the French Codes long remained not only the most convenient but the most enlightened set of laws in the world. Bonaparte was rightly hailed as a second Justinian.
[Sidenote: The New Educational System]
A similar motive and the same enthusiasm actuated the First Consul in pressing forward important educational reforms. On the foundation laid several years earlier by Condorcet was now reared an imposing system of public instruction. (1) Primary or elementary schools were to be maintained by every commune under the general supervision of the prefects or sub-prefects. (2) Secondary or grammar schools were to provide special training in French, Latin, and elementary science, and, whether supported by public or private enterprise, were to be subject to governmental control. (3) Lycées or high schools were to be opened in every important town and instruction given in the higher branches of learning by teachers appointed by the state. (4) Special schools, such as technical schools, civil service schools, and military schools, were brought under public regulation. (5) The University of France was established to maintain uniformity throughout the new educational system. Its chief officials were appointed by the First Consul, and no one might open a new school or teach in public unless he was licensed by the university. (6) The recruiting station for the teaching staff of the public schools was provided in a normal school organized in Paris. All these schools were directed to take as the bases of their teaching the principles of the Catholic Church, loyalty to the head of the state, and obedience to the statutes of the university. Despite continued efforts of Bonaparte, the new system was handicapped by lack of funds and of experienced lay teachers, so that at the close of the Napoleonic Era, more than half of the total number of French children still attended private schools, mostly those conducted by the Catholic Church.
[Sidenote: Public Works]
Bonaparte proved himself a zealous benefactor of public works and improvements. With very moderate expenditure of French funds, for prisoners of war were obliged to do most of the work, he enormously improved the means of communication and trade within the country, and promoted the economic welfare of large classes of the inhabitants. The splendid highways which modern France possesses are in large part due to Bonaparte. In 1811 he could enumerate 229 broad military roads which he had constructed, the most important of which, thirty in number, radiated from Paris to the extremities of the French territory. Two wonderful Alpine roads brought Paris in touch with Turin, Milan, Rome, and Naples. Numerous substantial bridges were built. The former network of canals and waterways was perfected. Marshes were drained, dikes strengthened, and sand dunes hindered from spreading along the ocean coast. The principal seaports, both naval and commercial, were enlarged and fortified, especially the harbors of Cherbourg and Toulon.
Along with such obviously useful labor went desirable embellishment of life. State palaces were restored and enlarged, so that, under Bonaparte, St. Cloud, Fontainebleau, and Rambouillet came to rank with the majesty of Versailles. The city of Paris was beautified. Broad avenues were projected. The Louvre was completed and adorned with precious works of art which Bonaparte dragged as fruits of victory from Italy, or Spain, or the Netherlands. During the Consulate, Paris was just beginning to lay claim to a position as the pleasure city of Europe. Its population almost doubled during the Era of Napoleon.
[Sidenote: Colonial Enterprises and their Failure]
The First Consul also entertained the hope of appearing as the restorer of the French colonial empire. In 1800 he prevailed upon the Spanish government to re-cede to France the extensive territory—called Louisiana—lying west of the Mississippi River. Soon afterwards he dispatched his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, with an army of 25,000 men, to make good the French claims to the large island of Haiti. But the colonial ventures of Napoleon ended in failure. In Haiti, Leclerc's efforts to reestablish negro slavery encountered the stubborn resistance of the blacks, organized and led by one of their number, Toussaint L'Ouverture, a remarkable military genius. After a determined and often ferocious struggle Leclerc proposed a compromise, and Toussaint, induced by the most solemn guarantees on the part of the French, laid down his arms. He was seized and sent to France, where he died in prison in 1803. The negroes, infuriated by this act of treachery, renewed the war with a barbarity unequaled in previous contests. The French, further embarrassed by the appearance of a British fleet, were only too glad to relinquish the island in November, 1803. Meanwhile, expectation of war with Great Britain had induced Bonaparte in April, 1803, to sell the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States.
[Sidenote: Success of the Consulate]
If we except these brief and ill-starred colonial exploits, we may pronounce the First Consul's government and achievements eminently successful. Bonaparte had inspired public confidence by the honesty of his administration and by his choice of officials, for he was served by such a consummate diplomat as Talleyrand and by such a tireless chief of police as Fouché. His speedy and victorious termination of the War of the Second Coalition and his subsequent apparent policy of peace had redounded to his credit. His sweeping and thorough reforms in internal affairs had attracted to his support many and varied classes in the community—the business interests, the bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and the sincere Catholics.
[Sidenote: Dwindling Opposition to Bonaparte]
Only two groups—and these continually dwindling in size and importance—stood in the way of Bonaparte's complete mastery of France. One was the remnant of the Jacobins who would not admit that the Revolution was ended. The other was the royalist party which longed to undo all the work of the Revolution. Both these factions were reduced during the Consulate to secret plots and intrigues. Attempts to assassinate the First Consul served only to increase his popularity among the masses. Early in 1804 Bonaparte unearthed a conspiracy of royalists, whom he punished with summary vengeance. General Pichegru, who was implicated in the conspiracy, was found strangled in prison soon after his arrest. Moreau, who was undoubtedly the ablest general in France next to Bonaparte, was likewise accused of complicity, although he was a stanch Jacobin, and escaped more drastic punishment only by becoming an exile in America. Not content with these advantages, Bonaparte determined thoroughly to terrorize the royalists: by military force he seized a young Bourbon prince, the due d'Enghien, on German soil, and without a particle of proof against him put him to death.
[Sidenote: Transformation of the Consulate into the Empire]
In 1802 a plébiscite had bestowed the Consulate on Bonaparte for life. Now there was little more to do than to make the office hereditary and to change its name. This alteration was proposed in 1804 by the subservient Senate and promptly ratified by an overwhelming popular vote. On 2 December, 1804, amid imposing ceremonies in the ancient cathedral of Notre Dame, in the presence of Pope Pius VII, who had come all the way from Rome to grace the event, General Bonaparte placed a crown upon his own head and assumed the title of Napoleon I, emperor of the French.