But all this was little compared with the contemplated reconciliation with the Church for which the way was now carefully prepared. Pius VI had died a prisoner on French soil, and had been buried without honor. Befitting memorial ceremonies having been performed, the priesthood were released from the ban which the Jacobins had laid upon them. No oath in support of the new charter was required from the many priests who could not accept the civil constitution of the clergy, enacted in 1790; they could minister to their adherents without fear of persecution; they at once returned from exile or emerged from their hiding-places in large numbers. In the rôle of philosopher the First Consul professed to see the necessity of the Church as the main prop of a strong social organism and good government. As a far-seeing schemer he clearly felt that military power was a stanch support, but that in the end a firm moral foundation would likewise be needed in the hearts of hundreds of thousands in Europe, who would bless the man that should restore to them the institution which was the visible sign of their hopes for eternity. This desirable affection and approbation Bonaparte meant from the outset to secure. Had the scoffer, the worshiper of science, the would-be Mohammedan prophet, himself experienced a change of heart? Perhaps. Responsibility often breaks down indifference.

This policy of tolerance was well understood to be an interim measure, to be succeeded by a permanent settlement satisfactory to all the faithful. Furthermore, the ban having been removed from the exiled royalists as well, a number of emigrants had likewise returned: these and their clergy soon conceived the idea that Bonaparte was preparing a restoration of the monarchy, and would consider propositions for reëstablishing the close alliance of church and state, the identity almost, which had been the one outstanding feature of French absolutism. For this reason the insurrectionary West made overtures to the First Consul, and emissaries were passed through the lines, admitted to an audience, and permitted to state their case. Bonaparte gave heed and attention. Andigné proved exacting and impossible, Hyde was smooth and uncertain; it was only later that in Bernier, a simple village priest, he found a man to his liking, shrewd and scheming, but reasonable and efficient. He soon became an important agent in resolving the knotty problem of restoring the West to French nationality. Hitherto the rebels of lower Normandy and Brittany had followed either the resident nobility, of whom Andigné and Frotté were types, or peasant reactionaries like Georges Cadoudal, bold, desperate, irreconcilable men who demanded either war or their king. Bonaparte determined to ignore alike the high and the low, the desperate men with everything to gain and little to lose; he therefore appealed to the middle sort of gentle and simple through the intermediation of Hédouville for the government and Bernier for the people. The latter, accompanied by Count Bourmont, finally came to Paris, and both were won, Bourmont to the undoing of Napoleon, as it turned out. A method of pacification was arranged and soon put into successful operation, largely through the superlative adroitness of Bernier. Frotté was captured and executed, Cadoudal fled to England. The royalist agitation of the West was ended for a time: the efforts of the party in Provence, though carefully studied and widely exerted, proved ineffectual, and the internal reforms of administration were there, as throughout all France, efficiently put in operation. The policy of tolerance and moderation won over thousands upon thousands, and reduced the sullen minority to inactivity.

The upheaval of Brumaire is unique in French history. When consummated, there appeared among the people no remnant of fear or distrust. The radical side of the Revolution had ceased to exist. Its ideals of civil liberty were embodied in Bonaparte, the national spirit was invigorated, and hopes ran high. Such was the testimony of all the most disinterested observers. Brinkmann, a Swede of great ability, wrote on November eighteenth that no legitimate monarch had ever found on his accession a people more submissive than Bonaparte had found. "It is literally true," runs his letter: "France will perform the impossible to help him. Excepting the despicable horde of anarchists, the people are so weary, so disgusted with revolutionary horrors and follies, that they are sure any change will be for the better. Every class in society makes fun of the heroism of the demagogues, and from all sides comes a call for their expulsion rather than for the realization of their ideal visions. Even the royalists of every shade are honestly devoted to Bonaparte; for they attribute to him the intention of gradually restoring the old order. The indifferent are attached to him as being the man best fitted to give peace to France; and enlightened republicans, though trembling for their institutions, prefer to see a single man of talent, rather than a club of intriguers, seize and hold the public power."

None of Bonaparte's measures was more masterly than the financial policy whereby he won the devotion of the capitalists. If the country had been exhausted by the old régime, what had the recklessness of the Jacobins done for it? Bankruptcy, disorder, and utter distrust—chaos, in short—held sway in all departments of finance. The new order restored public confidence to such an extent that the revival of credit seemed miraculous. After the events of Brumaire the five per cents., which had fallen to one and a half per cent. of their par value, immediately rose to twelve per cent.; and on the final, satisfactory fulfilment of what the day appeared to foreshadow, they advanced to seventeen. The disgraceful laws for enforcing compulsory loans which had been passed under the Directory disappeared, with their companion the Hostage Law. Instantaneously order was brought into the system of direct taxation, and regularity into the collection of the taxes. The mysterious anti-Jacobin measures, promulgated as a warning, and then modified so as to paralyze and drive away the worthless spendthrifts of the Directory, while sobering and retaining for public use the able and sensible men like Jourdan, worked as a charm; they were a notification that the irregularities of all visionaries whatsoever were ended, and that waste of capacity as well as of money was to be succeeded by wholesome economy. For measures of temporary relief the new constitution permanently substituted a financial system of far-sighted regulations which completely revived general confidence, and with it the public credit, thereby restoring the producing capacity of the country. The Bank of France, organized in January, 1800, fixed a norm for the rates of discount, gave a sound currency to the country, and was the visible sign of a new era.

CHAPTER XIII

Bonaparte Embodies the Revolution[14]

End of the Revolution — The Alternatives — French Glory — Bonaparte as an Idealist — Reconstruction of the Army — Russia and the Great Powers — Slackness of the Coalition — The Policy of England — Debates in Parliament — Canning's Influence — Austrian Schemes — French Opinion and the Press — Consolidation of French Power — Bonaparte in the Tuileries — The Washington Festival.

No one understood better than Bonaparte the connection in a state between external and internal affairs. The second coalition, so far as Russia, Austria, England, and Turkey were concerned, was very loosely cemented indeed. They were united in their determination to subdue revolutionary France, but they had not an interest in common beyond that. Such was their jealousy as regarded the control of the Mediterranean that a strong government at Paris might hope to create discord among them. When, therefore, on December fifteenth, 1799, the provisional consulate came to an end, and the new constitution, known in French history as that of the twenty-second of Frimaire, year VIII, came into operation, the government entered upon life, as was most essential for French interests, not as an empty scheme, but as a full-fledged organism, with every office filled, the machinery actually in motion, and the administration ready for intercourse with the other governments of Europe. The words of Bonaparte's proclamation were: "Citizens, the Revolution is planted on the principles from which it proceeded. It is ended." As regarded the internal life of France, no truer words could have been written. There had never been true liberty nor true brotherhood under its banners; the leveling had been more successful, and equality in the matter of civil rights might be considered as won. What was left of those principles, as the event proved, was embodied for France herself in the First Consul and in his beneficent measures. To Europe at large this embodiment of the Revolution in the new sovereign was soon made equally evident. France had adopted him. Would the surviving dynasties admit him, as the representative of French nationality, to a seat on their Olympus? Nothing but an imperative necessity would compel them to do so, and then only for the moment.

1799—1800

Two courses were therefore open to the new power: first, to extort an acquiescence, however distasteful, by consolidating France as the nation and the homogeneous people which the Revolution had made it, by increasing her prosperity, by fostering her genius, by showing an example to the world of what the people of a peaceful, enlightened, industrious state could be in contrast to the case-hardened, unreceptive, and sullen populations who still remained passive under dynastic rule; or, second, to restore the expansive anti-national character of the Revolution, and, using the magnificent military system created in that epoch as a destroying power, to menace the dynasties in their very existence, and thus make them first respectful neutrals and then subservient tools both in their own reconstruction and in the liberation of their subjects. These seemed, in this emergency, the two alternatives at the First Consul's command. Choosing neither permanently, but one or the other at will, as each rising question made it expedient, the result was an interference which brought first this and then that policy into prominence, made both partly successful, but neither entirely so, and ended in the ruin of the schemer.