Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

Internal Organisation of the Empire.

The administration of this vast empire was purely bureaucratic. Napoleon endeavoured to establish a hierarchy of civil officials, who should be as completely under his direct control as the officers of his army. He ruled the Empire like a general. Implicit obedience to orders was the only means to promotion in his civil, as well as in his military, organisation. He delighted in insisting on this comparison. The Legion of Honour was not a military order, but was conferred with equal freedom on civil officials, and in all matters the Emperor’s will could be consulted and was supreme. No subjects were too minute for his supervision. He reorganised the ancient theatrical company of the Comédie Française with the same attention to detail as a matter of State administration. The development of a bureaucracy dependent on absolutism was in curious contrast to the Constitution of 1791, and the theories which had prevailed at the beginning of the French Revolution. Freedom of petition, freedom of the press, individual liberty, representative institutions, and all the liberties won by the French people were entirely abolished. The censorship of the press was re-established, and carried out with more rigour than it had been even under the Bourbon monarchy. All manuscripts had to be revised before being sent to the printer, and perfectly innocent allusions, which might be interpreted into applying condemnation of the existing order of things, brought upon their authors immediate imprisonment, and the destruction of their books. Individual liberty ceased to exist; for the Emperor exiled and imprisoned at his will. The secret police, which had been organised by Fouché, exercised a minute inquisition into the most private affairs, and a crowd of spies kept the Emperor informed of every current of opinion in Paris and throughout the Empire. The arbitrariness of his government was greatly due to his sensitiveness to public opinion, and it is narrated that during his enforced residence in the island of Lobau he was far more exercised in mind by his spies’ reports of the conversations on the subject in the Faubourg St. Germain than by the movements of the Austrians. Representative institutions had been practically superseded by the Constitution of the Year VIII., but the last vestige of a power which could criticise the Emperor’s will, the Tribunate, was suppressed in 1808. The Senate became merely a dignified body to congratulate the Emperor on his victories, and the Legislative Body registered, without murmuring, all his decrees. It is a curious fact that, in 1811, Napoleon imitated the most arbitrary measure of the Committee of Public Safety, and, when the price of corn rose, he fixed a maximum price for its sale in Paris.

The Hereditary Principle.

Napoleon’s Aristocracy.

Next to his own absolutism Napoleon believed in the principle of heredity. He showed this primarily in the treatment of his own family. He not only brought his mother to Paris, and under the title of Madame Mère endowed her with a large income, but bestowed on his brothers and sisters, in spite of the marked incapacity of many of them, the most important posts. The kingdoms given to Joseph, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte were accompanied by the intimation that they were to rule subject to his will, and he exercised an autocratic power over all the members of his family. For instance, he insisted that Jerome should divorce his wife, an American lady named Patterson, because his own consent had not been obtained, and forced him to marry a Würtemberg princess. His own lack of children greatly grieved him, and he made various arrangements as to his successor. At one time it was thought he would nominate his step-son, Eugène de Beauharnais; at another he selected an infant son of his brother Louis to be his heir, and had him baptized by the Pope just after his own coronation in 1805; and when the infant died, he issued a decree, arranging the succession among his brothers and their children in order of seniority. He created his brothers, sisters, and step-children Princes of the Empire, and gave them honorary seats in the Senate and Council of State, and he insisted upon his wife Josephine surrounding herself with all the pomp of a monarchical Court. The desire of creating a Court which should outshine that of the Bourbons caused Napoleon to bid high for the support of the ancient noble families of France. By bestowing large incomes, rapid promotion, and repeated favours he was able to get men and women bearing the oldest names in France to accept office as chamberlains and lords and ladies-in-waiting, while many scions of former sovereign families in Germany and the Netherlands did not hesitate to request admission to such Court offices. But he did not trust solely to the old nobility to form the splendour of his Court; he always suspected that they were sneering at him, and endeavoured to counterbalance them by creating a new nobility. This new nobility was formed entirely from the men who did him good service, whether in military or civil departments. By the side of his marshals, most of whom he created dukes, he ranked his chief diplomatists and ministers, and the example was followed into inferior ranks. Good service as the préfet of a department led to a barony as certainly as gallant service in the field at the head of a regiment, and former members of the Convention, who, as Deputies on Mission, had exerted unlimited authority, were content to accept the title of Chevalier of the Empire, the lowest in his new peerage. The peerage of the Empire was strictly hereditary, though in many instances the Emperor assumed the right exercised by former kings of granting permission to adopt an heir. But the new peerage was purely ornamental; it conferred no political power whatever. Napoleon never dreamt of creating a House of Lords; he only conceived the notion of balancing the influence of the old aristocracy by the creation of one dependent entirely on himself. In his desire to maintain the dignity of his new nobles, he granted many of them large incomes and vast estates; his marshals were encouraged to live in the most extravagant fashion by the repeated payment of their debts; and the grant of a peerage was in many cases accompanied by what he called a dotation, which supplied an income sufficient to maintain the dignity. Some of these ‘dotations’ were of princely magnificence. They were largely situated in Italy and Poland, and were intended to make the new possessors independent barons, like the famous paladins of Charlemagne. Among the most important of these grants, after the Principality of Neufchâtel, which was a semi-independent sovereignty, may be noted the Principalities of Benevento, Ponte Corvo, Parma, Piacenza, and Gaeta, which were conferred upon Talleyrand, Bernadotte, Cambacérès, Le Brun, and Gaudin. By these means Napoleon hoped to keep his subordinates faithful to him, while their influence on opinion would rival that exercised by the old nobility.

Internal Reforms. Law.

Finance.

Education.

But while wielding an undisputed absolutism, Napoleon looked on his position in a spirit similar to that of the benevolent despots of the eighteenth century. Though he would do nothing by the people, he was ready to do much for them. In the path of legal reform he followed up the measure taken by the formation of the Civil Code. He had plenty of learned jurists to carry out his instructions, and the Civil Code was succeeded, in 1806, by the Codes of Civil and Criminal Procedure, in 1808 by the Commercial Code, and finally by the Penal Code. These great codes form an epoch in the legal history of Europe, and have earned for Napoleon the title of the modern Justinian, though they were only carried out by his directions, and based on the principles laid down, and the work done, by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention. Their great advantage was their simplicity and universality, which checked the tedious delays inherent in all systems of common or uncodified law. In jurisdiction Napoleon also followed the example of the statesmen of the Revolution. He encouraged rapidity in procedure and in the execution of judgments, and he greatly extended the powers of the commercial tribunals in which practical men of business had a voice. In financial matters, as in his legal reforms, Napoleon’s great aim was to attain simplicity, and he reduced the loss in the passage of taxes from the taxpayer to the Treasury to a minimum. His creation of the Bank of France has been mentioned, and by its side he established the Caisse d’Amortissement, which consisted of the pecuniary guarantees of all the collectors of the taxes merged into one fund. These guarantees formed an important sum of money for immediate use as well as a valuable security. Napoleon further managed to pay off that portion of the debt left to him by the Republic, which represented the sums due for the suppression of the old courts of judicature, etc. With regard to the ordinary debt, he preserved Cambon’s great creation of the Grand Livre, which enabled every creditor to become a fund-holder, while the Emperor knew the exact extent of the public debt. The Emperor’s first steps towards the formation of a national system of education have been described, but it was not until after the campaign of Wagram that the system was completed. In 1806 he had organised the Imperial University, but it did not take its final form until 1811. This university was not a university in the English sense. It consisted of the chief professors and teachers, and was intended to include all the professors and teachers throughout France. It was placed under the superintendence of a Grand Master, a celebrated man of letters, Fontanes, and its duty was to superintend the whole course of higher education. In the Emperor’s own words, he wished to create a teaching profession organised like the judicial or the military profession, of which all the professors scattered throughout the country might feel themselves an integral part. In 1808 he granted the university an income of 400,000 livres, in addition to the fees, etc., and declared in favour of the irremovability of its members. To recruit this new teaching profession, Napoleon established the Normal School of Paris for the instruction of those who desired to become professors or teachers.

Extension of the system to Germany.