* the suppression of legal formalities,
* the persecution of religious beliefs and of personal opinions,
* the right of condemning publications and of coercing thought,
* the right of instruction and education,
* the rights of pre-emption, of requisition, of confiscation, and of proscription,
in short, pure and perfect arbitrariness. The result is visible in the deeds of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambacérès, in those of the Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention, under the Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent for combining despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their professional skill in fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible arguments with which to properly strangle the individual, their adversary, to the profit of the State, their eternal master.
In effect, not only had they almost strangled their adversary, but likewise, through an aftereffect, their master: France which, after fourteen months of suffocation, was approaching physical suicide.[2319] Such success, too great, had obliged them to stop; they had abandoned one-half of their destructive creed, retaining only the other half, the effect of which, less imminent, was less apparent. If they no longer dared paralyze individual acts in the man, they persisted in paralyzing in the individual all collective acts.—There must be no special associations in general society; no corporations within the State, especially no spontaneous bodies endowed with the initiative, proprietary and permanent: such is Article II. of the Revolutionary Creed, and the direct consequence of the previous one which posits axiomatically the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the State. Rousseau,[2320] inventor of the first, had like-wise enunciated the second; the constituent assembly had solemnly decreed it and applied it on a grand scale,[2321] and successive assemblies had applied it on a still grander scale;[2322] it was a faith with the Jacobins, and, besides, in conformity with the spirit of Roman imperial right and with the leading maxim of French monarchical right. On this point the three known jurisprudential systems were in accord, while their convergence brought together around the same table the jurists of the three doctrines in a common task, ex-parliamentarians and ex-members of the Committee of Public Safety, former pro-scribers and the proscribed, the purveyors of Sinamari with Treilhard and Merlin de Douai, returned from Guiana, alongside of Simeon, Portalis, and Barbé-Marbois. There was nobody in this conclave to maintain the rights of spontaneous bodies; the theory, on all three sides, no matter from whom it proceeded, refused to recognize them for what they are originally and essentially, that is to say, distinct organisms equally natural with the State, equally indispensable in their way, and, therefore, as legitimate as itself; it allowed them only a life on trust, derived from above and from the center. But, since the State created them, it might and ought to treat them as its creatures, keep them indefinitely under its thumb, use them for its purposes, act through them as through other agencies, and transform their chiefs into functionaries of the central power.
III. Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.
The Organizer.—Influence of Napoleon's character and mind
on his internal and French system.—Exigencies of his
external and European rôle.—Suppression of all centers of
combination and concord.—Extension of the public domain and
what it embraces.—Reasons for maintaining the private
domain.—The part of the individual.—His reserved
enclosure.—Outlets for him beyond that.—His talents are
enlisted in the service of public power.—Special aptitude
and temporary vigor, lack of balance, and doubtful future of
the social body thus formed.