Napoleon himself looked on these achievements as his most enduring monument. “The allied powers cannot take from me hereafter,” he told O’Meara, “the great public works I have executed, the roads which I made over the Alps, and the seas which I have united. They cannot place their feet to improve where mine have not been before. They cannot take from me the code of laws which I formed, and which will go down to posterity.”
MOREAU, ABOUT 1801.
Engraved by Elizabeth G. Berhan, after Guérin.
CHAPTER VIII
RETURN OF THE EMIGRES—THE CONCORDAT—LEGION OF HONOR—CODE NAPOLEON
But there were wounds in the French nation more profound than those caused by lack of credit, by neglect and corruption. The body which in 1789 made up France had, in the last ten years, been violently and horribly wrenched asunder. One hundred and fifty thousand of the richest, most cultivated, and most capable of the population had been stripped of wealth and position, and had emigrated to foreign lands.
Napoleon saw that if the émigrés could be reconciled, he at once converted a powerful enemy into a zealous friend. In spite of the opposition of those who had made the Revolution and gained their positions through it, he accorded an amnesty to the émigrés, which included the whole one hundred and fifty thousand, with the exception of about one thousand, and this number, it was arranged, should be reduced to five hundred in the course of a year. More, he provided for their wants. Most of the smaller properties confiscated by the Revolution had been sold, and Napoleon insisted that those who had bought them from the state should be assured of their tenure; but in case a property had not been disposed of, he returned it to the family, though rarely in full. In case of forest lands, not over three hundred and seventy-five acres were given back. Gifts and positions were given to many émigrés, so that the majority were able to live in ease.
A valuable result of this policy of reconciliation was the amount of talent, experience, and culture which he gained for the government. France had been run for ten years by country lawyers, doctors, and pamphleteers, who, though they boasted civic virtue and eloquence, and though they knew their Plutarch and Rousseau by heart, had no practical sense, and little or no experience. The return of the émigrés gave France a body of trained diplomats, judges, and thinkers, many of whom were promptly admitted to the government.
More serious than the amputation of the aristocracy had been that of the Church. The Revolution had torn it from the nation, had confiscated its property, turned its cathedrals into barracks, its convents and seminaries into town halls and prisons, sold its lands, closed its schools and hospitals. It had demanded an oath of the clergy which had divided the body, and caused thousands to emigrate. Not content with this, it had tried to supplant the old religion, first with a worship of the Goddess of Reason, afterwards with one of the Supreme Being.
But the people still loved the Catholic Church. The mass of them kept their crucifixes in their houses, told their beads, observed fast days. No matter how severe a penalty was attached to the observance of Sunday instead of the day which had replaced it, called the “decade,” at heart the people remembered it. “We rest on the decade,” said a workman once, “but we change our shirts on Sunday.”