NAPOLEON REVIEWING THE CONSULAR GUARDS IN THE COURT OF THE TUILERIES.
1800.
Engraved in London, by C. Turner, after a painting by J. Masquerier.
His part in the work was interesting and important. After the laws had been well digested and arranged in preliminary bodies, they were submitted to the Council of State. It was in the discussion before this body that Napoleon took part. That a man of thirty-one, brought up as a soldier, and having no legal training, could follow the discussions of such a learned and serious body as Napoleon’s Council of State always was, seems incredible. In fact, he prepared for each session as thoroughly as the law-makers themselves. His habit was to talk over, beforehand generally with Cambacérès and Portalis, two legislators of great learning and clearness of judgment, all the matters which were to come up.
“He examined each question by itself,” says Roederer, “inquiring into all the authorities, times, experiences; demanding to know how it had been under ancient jurisprudence, under Louis XIV., or Frederick the Great. When a bill was presented to the First Consul, he rarely failed to ask these questions: Is this bill complete? Does it cover every case? Why have you not thought of this? Is that necessary? Is it right or useful? What is done nowadays and elsewhere?”
At night, after he had gone to bed, he would read or have read to him authorities on the subject. Such was his capacity for grasping any idea, that he would come to the Council with a perfectly clear notion of the subject to be treated, and a good idea of its historical development. Thus he could follow the most erudite and philosophical arguments, and could take part in them. He stripped them at once of all conventional phrases and learned terms, and stated clearly what they meant. He had no use for anything but the plain meaning. By thus going directly to the practical sense of a thing, he frequently cleared up the ideas of the revisers themselves.
In framing the laws, he took care that they should be worded so that everybody could understand them. Thus, when a law relating to liquors was being prepared, he urged that wholesale and retail should be defined in such a way that they would be definite ideas to the people. “Pot and pint must be inserted,” he said. “There is no objection to those words. An excise act isn’t an epic poem.”
Napoleon insisted on the greatest freedom of speech in the discussions on the laws, just as he did on “going straight to the point and not wasting time on idle talk.” This clearheadedness, energy, and grasp of subject, exercised over a body of really remarkable men, developed the Council until its discussions became famous throughout Europe. One of its wisest members, Chancellor Pasquier, says of Napoleon’s direction that “it was of such a nature as to enlarge the sphere of one’s ideas, and to give one’s faculties all the development of which they were capable. The highest legislative, administrative, and sometimes even political matters were taken up in it (the Council). Did we not see, for two consecutive winters, the sons of foreign sovereigns come and complete their education in its midst?”
It was the genius of the head of the state, however, which was the most impressive feature of the Council of State. De Molleville, a former minister of Louis XVI., said once to Las Cases:
“It must be admitted that your Bonaparte, your Napoleon, was a very extraordinary man. We were far from understanding him on the other side of the water. We could not refuse the evidence of his victories and his invasions, it is true; but Genseric, Attila, Alaric had done as much; so he made more of an impression of terror on me than of admiration. But when I came here and followed the discussions on the civil code, from that moment I had nothing but profound veneration for him. But where in the world had he learned all that? And then every day I discovered something new in him. Ah, sir, what a man you had there! Truly, he was a prodigy.”
The modern reader who looks at France and sees how her University, her special schools, her hospitals, her great honorary legion, her treaty with the Catholic Church, her code of laws, her Bank—the vital elements of her life, in short—are as they came from Napoleon’s brain, must ask, with De Molleville, How did he do it—he a foreigner, born in a half-civilized island, reared in a military school, without diplomatic or legal training, without the prestige of name or wealth? How could he make a nation? How could he be other than the barbaric conqueror the English and the émigrés first thought him.