And truly, his strategy is admirable, lately against Catholic ideas and now against the secular mind. First of all, he has extended, selected and defined his field of operations, and here is his objective point, fixed by himself:
"On public affairs, which are my affairs in political, social and moral matters, on history, and especially on actual history, recent and modern, nobody of the present generation is to give any thought but myself and, in the next generation, everybody will follow my example."[6263]
The monopoly of education therefore belongs to him. He has introduced military uniforms, discipline and spirit into all the public and private secondary educational establishments. He has reduced and subjected the ecclesiastical superintendence of primary education to the minimum. He has removed the last vestige of regional, encyclopedic and autonomous universities and substituted for these special and professional schools, He has rendered veritable superior instruction abortive and stifled all spontaneous and disinterested curiosity in youth.—Meanwhile ascending to the source of secular knowledge, he has brought the Institute under his influence. On this government tool he has effected the necessary cuts, appropriated the credit to himself and imposed his favor or disfavor on the masters of science and literature. Then, descending from the source to the canals, constructing dams, arranging channels, applying his constraints and impulsions, he has subjected science and literature to his police, to his censorship and to his control of publishing and printing. He has taken possession of all the media—theatres, newspapers, books, pulpits and tribunes. He has organized all these into one vast industry which he watches over and directs, a factory of public attitudes which works unceasingly and in his hands to the glorification of his system, reign and person.[6264] Again here, he is found equal and similar to himself, a stern conqueror making the most of his conquest to the last extreme, a shrewd operator as meticulous as he is shrewd, as resourceful as he is consequent, incomparable in adapting means to ends, unscrupulous in carrying them out,[6265] fully satisfied that, through the constant physical pressure of universal and crushing dread, all resistance would be overcome. He is maintaining and prolonging the struggle with colossal forces, but against a historic and natural force lying beyond his grasp, lately against belief founded on religious instinct and on tradition, and now against evidence engendered by realities and by the agency of the testing process. Consequently, obliged to forbid the testing process, to falsify things, to disfigure the reality, to deny the evidence, to lie daily and each day more outrageously,[6266] to accumulate glaring acts so as to impose silence, to arouse by this silence and by these lies[6267] the attention and perspicacity of the public, to transform almost mute whispers into sounding words and insufficient eulogies into open protestations. In short, weakened by his own success and condemned beforehand to succumb under his victories, to disappear after a short triumph, Napoleon will leave intact and erect the indestructible rival (science and knowledge) whom he would like to crush as an adversary but turn to account as an instrument.[6268]
6201 ([return])
[ Lamennais, "Du Progrès de la Révolution," p.163.]
6202 ([return])
[ Any socialist or social-nationalist leader would undoubtedly have been impressed by Napoleon's ability to control and dominate his admiring people and do their best to copy his methods. (SR.)]
6203 ([return])
[ "The Modern Régime," I., 247.]