"Henceforth, all careers are open to talent!"
IV. The Struggle for Office and Title.
Competition and prizes.—Multitude of offices.—How their
number is increased by the extension of central patronage
and of the French territory.—Situation of a Frenchman
abroad.—It gives him rank.—Rapidity of promotion.
—Constant elimination and multiplicity of vacancies in the
army.—Preliminary elimination in the civil service.
—Proscription of cultivated men and interruption of education
during the Revolution.—General or special instruction rare
in 1800.—Small number of competent candidates.—Easy
promotion due to the lack of competitors.—Importance and
attraction the prizes offered.—The Legion of Honor.—The
imperial nobility.—Dotations and majorities.—Emulation.
Let us now consider the career which he thus opens to them and the prizes he offers. These prizes are in full view, ranged along each racecourse, graduated according to distances and more and more striking and magnificent. Every ambition is provided for, the highest as well as the lowest, and these are countless; for they consist of offices of every grade in the civil and military hierarchies of a great centralized State whose intervention is universal, under a government which systematically tolerates no authority or influence outside of itself and which monopolizes every species of social importance for its own functionaries.[3335]—All these prizes, even the smallest and most insignificant, are awarded by it. In the first place, Napoleon has two or three times as many offices to bestow, on the soil of old France alone, as the former kings; for, even in the choice of their staff of officials, the latter were not always free; in many places they did not have, or no longer had the right of appointment. At one time, this right be longed from time immemorial to provincial or municipal corporations, laic or ecclesiastic, to a certain chapter, abbey or collegiate church, to a bishop in his diocese, to the seignior in his seignory. At another time the king, once possessing the right, had surrendered or alienated it, in whole or in part through gratuitous favor and the concession of a survivorship or for money and through the sale of an office; in brief, his hands were tied fast by hereditary or acquired privileges There are no privileges now to fetter the hands of the First Consul. The entire civil organization dates from him. The whole body of officials is thus of his own selection, and under him it is much more numerous than that of the ancient Régime; for he has extended the attributions of the State beyond all former bounds. Directly or indirectly, he appoints by hundreds of thousands the mayors and councilors of municipalities and the members of general councils, the entire staff of the administration, of the finances, of the judicature, of the clergy, of the University, of public works and of public charity. Besides all this, myriads of ministerial and notarial officials lawyers, ushers, auctioneers, and by way of surplus, or as a natural result, the members of every great private association since no collective enterprise, from the Bank of France and the press to stage lines and tontines, may be established without his permission, nor exist without his tolerance. Not counting the latter, and after deducting likewise the military or active duty and the functionaries who draw pay, the prefect from the earliest years report that, since 1789, the number of people "employed or under government pay" has more than doubled: In Doubs, in the year IX, instead of 916 there are 1820; in Meurthe in the year XIII, instead of 1828 there are 3091; in Ain, in 1806 instead of 955 there are 1771[3336]. As to the army, it has tripled, and according to the First Consul's own calculations, instead of 9,000 or 10,000 officers as in 1789, there are more than 20,000.—These figures go on increasing on the old territory through the very development of the new organization, through the enormous increase of the army, through the re-establishment of religious worship, through the installation of droits réunis, through the institution of the University, owing to the increasing number of officials, curés and assistant-priests, of professors and school-teachers, and of retired and pensioned invalids.[3337]
And these figures, which already swell of themselves, are to swell an additional half through the extension of the ancient territory. Instead of 86 departments with a population of 26 millions, France ends in comprising 130 departments with 42 million inhabitants—Belgium and Piedmont, then Hanover, Tuscany, Central Italy, Illyria, Holland and the Hanseatic provinces, that is to say 44 departments and 16 millions of annexed Frenchmen;[3338] affording another large outlet for little and big ambitions.—Add still another, as a surplus and not less extensive outlet, outside of France: for the subject princes and the vassal kings, Eugène, Louis, Jerome, Murat, and Joseph, each with their governments, import into their realms a more or less numerous body of French officials, familiars, court dignitaries, generals, ministers, administrators, even clerks and other indispensable subalterns, if for no other purpose than to bring the natives within the military and civil compartments of the new Régime and teach them on the spot the conscription, the administration, the civil code, and systems of accounts like those of Paris. Even in the independent or allied States, in Prussia, in Poland, in the confederation of the Rhine, there are, at intervals or permanently, Frenchmen in position and in authority to command contingent forces, to garrison fortresses, to receive supplies and secure the payment of war contributions. Even with the corporal and custom-house inspector on duty on coast at Dantzig and at Reggio, the sentiment of victorious priority equals the possession of rank; in their eyes the natives of the country are semi-barbarians or semi-savages, a backward or prejudiced lot, not even knowing how to speak their language; they feel themselves superior, as formerly the señor soldado of the sixteenth century, or the civis romanus. Never since the great Spanish monarchy and the Old Roman empire has a conquering State and propagator of a new régime afforded its subjects such gratifications of self-esteem, nor opened so vast a career to their ambitions.
For, having once adopted their career, they know better than the Spaniards under Charles V. or the Romans under Augustus, how far they can go and how fast they can get ahead. No obstacle impedes them; nobody feels himself confined his post; each considers the one he occupies as provisional, each takes it only to await a better one, anticipating another at a very early date; he dashes onward, springs aloft and occupies in advance the superior post which he means to secure on the first vacancy, and, under this Régime, the vacancies are numerous.—These vacancies, in the military service and in the grade of officers, may be estimated at nearly four thousand per annum;[3339] after 1808 and 1809, but especially after the disaster of 1812 and 1813, places are no longer lacking but subjects fill them; Napoleon is obliged to accept youths for officers as beardless as his conscripts, eighteen-year-old apprentices who, after a year or six months in the military academy, might finish their apprenticeship on the battle-field, pupils taken from the philosophy or rhetoric classes, willing children (de bonne volonté): On the 13th of December 1808, he draws 50 from his lycées, who don the gold-lace of under-officers at once; in 1809, he calls out 250, to serve in the depot battalions; in 1810, he calls out 150 of the age of nineteen who "know the drill," and who are to be sent on distant expeditions with the commission of second-lieutenant; in 1811, 400 for the school of noncommissioned officers at Fontainebleau, 20 for the Ile-de-Ré and 84 who are to be quartermasters; and, in 1812, 112 more and so on. Naturally, thanks to annually increasing gaps made by cannon and bayonet, the survivors in this body of youth mount the faster; in 1813 and 1814, there are colonels and lieutenant-colonels of the age of twenty-five.
In the civil service, if fewer are killed everybody is almost equally over tasked. Under this reign one is soon used up, physically and morally, even in pacific employments, and this also supplies vacancies. Besides, in default of deaths, wounds and violent elimination, there is another elimination, not less efficacious, operating in this direction, and for a long time, in favor of men of ability, preparing places for them and accelerating their advancement. Napoleon accepts none but competent candidates; now, in 1800, there is a dearth of acceptable candidates for places in the civil service and not, as in 1789, or at the present time, a superabundance and even too great a crowd.—In the military service especially, capacity is innate; natural endowments, courage, coolness, quick perception, physical activity, moral ascendancy, topographical imagination form its principal elements; men just able to read, write and cipher became, in three or four years, during the Revolution, admirable officers and conquering generals.—It is not the same in relation to civil capacity; this requires long and continuous study. To become a priest, magistrate, engineer, professor, prefect or school-teacher, one must have studied theology or law, mathematics or Latin, administration or the finances. If not, the functionary is not qualified to serve: he must, at the very least, know how to spell, be able to write French, examine a law-case, draw up a report, keep accounts, and if needs be, comprehend a plan, make an estimate and read off a map. Men of this stamp are rare at the beginning of the Consulate. As notables,[3340] the Revolution mowed them down first. Among all their sons and so many well-bred youth who have become soldiers through patriotism, or who have left their families to prevent these from becoming suspect, one half repose on the battlefield or have left the hospital only for the cemetery; "the muscadin[3341] died from the first campaign." In any event, for them and their younger brothers, for the children beginning to learn Latin and mathematics, for all who hoped to pursue liberal professions, for the entire generation about to receive either a superior, a common, or even a primary instruction, and hence to furnish brains prepared for intellectual work, there was a lack of this for ten years. Not only were the endowments which provided for instruction confiscated but the educational staff, nearly all ecclesiastic, was one of the most proscribed among those proscribed. Whilst military requisition and the closing of the schools suppressed the pupils, massacres, banishment, imprisonment, destitution and the scaffold suppressed the teachers. Whilst the ruin of universities and colleges did away with theoretical apprenticeship, the ruin of manufactures and of trade abolished practical apprenticeship. Through the long interruption of all studies, general instruction as well as special competency became rare product in the market.—Hence it is that, in 1800, and during the three or four following years, whoever brought to market either one the other of these commodities was certain of a quick sale;[3342] the new government needed them more than anybody. The moment the seller made up his mind, he was bought, and, whatever he may be, a former Jacobin or a former émigré; he is employed. If he brings both commodities and is zealous, he is promptly promoted; if, on trial, he is found of superior capacity, he will, like Mollien, Gaudin, Tronchet, Pasquier and Molé, attain to the highest posts, for he finds scarcely any competitors. These he would have had had things followed their usual course; it is the Revolution which has cleared the ground around him; without that the road would have been obstructed; competent candidates would have swarmed. Reckon, if possible, how many men of talent who were destroyed, royalists, monarchists, feuillants, Girondists and even Jacobins. They were the élite of the noblesse, of the clergy, of the bourgeoisie, of the youth and those of riper age. Thus rid of their most formidable rivals the survivors pursue their way at top speed; the guillotine has wrought for them in advance; it has effected openings in their own ranks, made by bullets in every battle in the ranks of the army, and, in the civil hierarchy as in the military hierarchy, merit, if demonstrated by services, or not arrested by death, reaches the highest summit in very few years.
The prizes offered on these summits are splendid; no attraction is lacking. The great trainer who displays them has omitted none of the seductions which excite and stimulate an ordinary mind. He has associated with the positive values of power and wealth every value incident to imagination and opinion; hence his institution of decorations and the Legion of Honor.[3343]
"They call it a toy,"[3344] said he, "but men are led by toys... Frenchmen are not changed by ten years of revolution.... See how the people prostrate themselves before foreign decorations: they have been surprised by them and accordingly do not fail to wear them.... The French cherish but one sentiment, honor: that sentiment, then, requires nourishing—they must have honors."