NAPOLEON
As First Consul, at Malmaison. From a painting by J. B. Isabey
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Without the slightest apparent effort, Napoleon’s genius expanded to the great work of reorganizing the Republic. Heretofore he had been a man of camps and battle-fields; but he had so completely mastered everything connected with the recruiting equipment and maintenance of an army, had served so useful an apprenticeship in organizing the Italian republics, and had been to school to such purpose in dealing with politicians of all sorts, negotiating treaties, and sounding the secrets of parties, that he really came to his great task magnificently trained by actual experience.
In theory the new government of the three consuls was only experimental, limited to sixty days. The two councils had not been dissolved. Purged of about sixty violently anti-Bonaparte members, the Ancients and the Five Hundred were but adjourned to the 19th of February, 1800. If by that time the consuls had not been able to offer to France a new scheme of government which would be accepted, the councils were to meet again and decide what should be done. On paper, therefore, Napoleon was a consul on probation, a pilot on a trial trip. In his own eyes he was permanent chief of the State; and his every motion was made under the impulse of that conviction.
Determined that there should be no reaction, that the scattered forces of the opposition should have no common cause and centre of revolt, he stationed his soldiers at threatened points; and then used all the art of the finished politician to deceive and divide the enemy. To the royalists he held out the terror of a Jacobin revival; to the Jacobin, the dread of a Bourbon restoration. To the clergy he hinted a return of the good old days when no man could legally be born, innocently married, decently die, or be buried with hope of heaven, unless a priest had charge of the functions. But above all was his pledge of strong government, one which would quell faction, restore order, secure property, guarantee civil liberty, and make the Republic prosperous and happy. The belief that he would make good his word was the foundation of the almost universal approval with which his seizure of power was regarded. He was felt to be the one man who could drag the Republic out of the ditch, reinspire the armies, cleanse the public service, restore the ruined finances, establish law and order, and blend into a harmonious nationality the factions which were rending France. Besides, it was thought that a strong government would be the surest guarantee of peace with foreign nations, as it was believed that the weakness of the Directory was an encouragement to the foreign enemies of the country.
One of Napoleon’s first acts was to proclaim amnesty for political offences. He went in person to set free the hostages imprisoned in the Temple. Certain priests and émigrés who had been cast into prison, he released. The law of hostages, which held relatives responsible for the conduct of relatives, he repealed.
The victims of Fructidor (September, 1797) who had been banished, he recalled—Pichegru and Aubrey excepted.
Mr. Lanfrey says that this exception from the pardon is proof of Napoleon’s “mean and cruel nature.” Let us see. Pichegru, a republican general, in command of a republican army, had taken gold from the Bourbons, and had agreed to betray his army and his country. Not only that, he had purposely allowed that army to be beaten by the enemy. As Desaix remarked, Pichegru was perhaps the only general known to history who had ever done a thing of the kind. Was Napoleon mean and cruel in letting such a man remain in exile? Had Washington captured and shot Benedict Arnold, would that have been proof that Washington’s nature was mean and cruel? In leaving Pichegru where he was, Napoleon acted as leniently as possible with a self-convicted traitor.
As to Aubrey, he had held a position of the highest trust under the Republic, while he was at heart a royalist; he had used that position to abet royalist conspiracies; he had gone out of his way to degrade Napoleon, had refused to listen to other members of the government in Napoleon’s favor, and had urged against Napoleon two reasons which revealed personal malice,—Napoleon’s youth, and Napoleon’s politics. To pardon such a man might have been magnanimous; to leave him under just condemnation was neither mean nor cruel.