Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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the pacification of france and europe (1799–1802) 134

These were patterned on the Prytanée, formerly known as the Collège Louis-

le-Grand and the only such school preserved by the Revolution: under the

Directory it had again become a school of resident students, unlike the écoles

centrales , and it was remodelled in Year VIII (22 March 1800) by Lucien

Bonaparte, then minister of the interior. Every appeal court district was to

have a state-supported lycée . It was also intended that there would be

secondary schools, privately administered but government-authorised and

-controlled; in Year XII the state began appointing their teachers. Six thou-

sand four hundred scholarships were created for the lycées , of which 2,400

were awarded to the sons of military ofﬁ cers and government ofﬁ cials, and

the remaining four thousand were set aside for the best pupils in the

secondary schools. To a degree, these grants met the wishes of the Idéologues ;

but being in fact beyond the reach of the poor, they constituted an endow-

ment only in favour of civilian and military ofﬁ cials and were an induce-

ment to bind the petite bourgeoisie to the notables and to seduce its most

talented elements: as public servants or as leaders in the nation’s economic

life, they would no longer be a ferment of unrest. Institutions of education

which were not administered by the state continued to exist in principle,

although in Paris at least, Frochot, prefect of the Seine, claimed the right to

authorise and supervise them. The Catholic clergy immediately beneﬁ ted

from this tolerance; the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes became active once

again and founded an institute at Lyon in Year XII. Bonaparte never created

any obstacles for the clergy when it came to primary education, and because

he attached no importance to the education of women, he permitted the

restoration of several sisterly teaching orders. The lycées and the clerical

secondary schools for boys soon came into conﬂ ict with each other, however,

and in the end, Napoleon was driven towards the establishment of a govern-

ment monopoly over all forms of public instruction.

Even as he sanctioned its social ascendancy, Bonaparte evidenced his

distrust of the middle class. In the Conseil d’Ètat he spoke harshly of wealth:

‘Afﬂ uence carries no merit. The rich are often a pack of undeserving idlers,

and a rich merchant usually gets his wealth either by selling dear or by

outright thievery.’ More critical still was his attitude towards men of ﬁ nance.

Clearly, his was not an attack upon all forms of wealth, but one directed

against the masses of liquid capital which were precisely the origin of bour-

geois fortunes. First, it was a wealth not readily seizable, be it to tax or to

conﬁ scate. Then, too, it produced at every turn individuals who, taking

pride in not being indebted to anyone but themselves and being all

the more determined to preserve their independence, tended to shatter the

social structures which Bonaparte strove to establish. In his pursuit of the

135bonaparte consul for life

throne, Bonaparte evidently contemplated a monarchy based on the support

of a landed aristocracy, in return for which the monarch would guarantee

the servitude of the peasantry. This ideal was not to be realised, and Bonaparte

did not even consider restoring a nobility at this time; but he found himself

guided by preference even more than by the national interest in bringing

about a reconciliation with the counter-revolution. In the months following

the establishment of the Constitution of Year X, what struck contemporaries

most was the very progress of this reconciliation.

The application of the Concordat followed its course. Caprara, the papal

legate, was conciliatory, and Portalis endeavoured to please him without

completely concealing his own attachments to Gallican traditions. By the

nature of things, the refractory priests began to play an increasingly impor-

tant role in the new clergy. The government recognised the inevitability of

the situation and forced the constitutional bishops to accede to it, for even

had circumstances been otherwise, they would have been unable to ﬁ nd a

sufﬁ cient number of priests who had taken the oath. In the département of

Bas-Rhin, for example, Bishop Saurine was unable to appoint more than

sixteen ‘constitutionals’ out of 351 priests to parishes and chapels, making

less than ﬁ ve per cent; as for the former refractory bishops, La Tour

d’Auvergne in the Pas-de-Calais and Caffarelli in the Côtes-du-Nord, they

awarded the ‘constitutionals’ seventy-eight positions out of 634, and forty-

three out of 340 respectively, or about twelve per cent. Then again, a number

of bishops imposed an oath of submission, which amounted to a retraction,

on the juring clergy of 1791, and when the prefects objected, they succeeded

at best in making the wording of the formula somewhat less precise. The

constitutional bishops were exposed to the insolence of their subordinates,

and the case was worse for ordinary priests.

Fouché insisted in his circulars on maintaining liberty of conscience, and

he presumed, not without impertinence, the right to treat bishops as if they

were government ofﬁ cials or police auxiliaries, a sort of spiritual gendarmerie .

He fell into disgrace, however, and Portalis, the director of cults, almost

always sided against the prefects. In order to pacify the bishops, the prefects

of the Pas-de-Calais and Bouches-du-Rhône were at last removed. The

Organic Articles, no sooner promulgated, encountered many a snag. Prelates

were addressed as Monseigneur; ecclesiastical garb reappeared; religious

processions and bell-ringing were freely restored; and bishops were allowed

to add to their title, ‘by divine mercy and by grace of the Holy See’. Contrary

to his personal feelings, Portalis refused to make the observance of Sunday

obligatory, believing that habit would see to it soon enough. He did, however,

permit the revival of marriage banns, and above all he supported bishops in

the pacification of france and europe (1799–1802) 136

their efforts to secure the right to watch over government ofﬁ cials. ‘You are

in a better position than anyone else’, he wrote to Champion de Cicé, ‘to

inform the government on all that touches upon the public interest.’ The

subprefect of Boulogne, Masclet, although distrustful of the clergy, neverthe-

less instructed his mayors that no matter what their personal convictions,

they were still obliged by virtue of their ofﬁ ce to conform to religion.

The lower (non-beneﬁ ced) clergy immediately complained of their

wretched condition. The peasants were not hostile to them, merely indif-

ferent, and no one wished to support them. Although the Organic Articles

made religious worship free of cost, charitable donations were to be divided

among parish priests ( curés ) and curates ( vicaires ), and this practice was

promptly revived. Bishops began to publish schedules of expected contribu-

tions, and they set about establishing church councils which were intended

to assure the material well-being of the parishes. But the non-beneﬁ ced

clergy still were accorded neither lodgings nor salaries by their congrega-

tions, and Bonaparte in Year XI began to press the administrative bodies to

deliberate upon these matters; he also restored to parishes non-alienated

Church lands. These measures were not truly effective but under the Empire

the State became increasingly open-handed to the Church. And so the

Concordat became a point of departure for a development which prepared

the Catholic clergy for the later triumphs of the Restoration.

The return of the émigrés did not give rise to any debates such as those

generated by the Concordat, but it made a deeper impression still, and it is

worth mentioning that if Bonaparte did receive numerous compliments on

the occasion of the Life Consulate, he did not receive a single one apropos

the amnesty. The amnesty put the émigrés under the surveillance of the

police for the next ten years, and they, like others, could be incarcerated by

simple administrative action. Consequently, the émigrés exercised great

caution as a rule, but this did not stop them from behaving like masters in

the villages or from seeking to force upon the purchasers of their alienated

properties a restitution or a settlement. The purchasers of national lands

took alarm, especially since Bonaparte ordered an audit of the accounts on

23 July 1803, to determine the balance of their payments outstanding. This

provoked all manner of chicanery and even some frantic speculation, the

impression being that the sales themselves might be called into question.

Had the choice been left to Bonaparte, the decree of 17 July 1793, which

had abolished without indemnity the feudal seigneurial dues ( rentes foncières ),

might have been revised so as to have provided a compensation to former

landowners as well as revenue to the treasury – these landed rents being

largely tied in with the national lands. However, Bonaparte did not venture

137bonaparte consul for life

to override the decision of the Conseil d’État which declared on 19 February

1803 that the law could in no way be revised. Already a number of émigrés

had taken positions in the regime: Louis-Philippe Séguier had been

appointed to the Conseil d’État; Séguier sat in the Court of Appeals of Paris,

and the duc de Luynes sat in the Senate; and in 1804 Joseph-Marie Gérando

became chief of a department in the Ministry of the Interior. Bonaparte also

married several of his top-ranking ofﬁ cers – Junot, Lannes, Augereau, Savary

– to daughters of the nobility. Others, Duroc and Marmont for example,

preferred money.

The reconciliation was most apparent at the court of the First Consul. The

Tuileries Palace, more than Malmaison, rapidly took on the ﬂ avour of the

old monarchy. Duroc was already governor of the palace. In November 1802

Josephine received an ofﬁ cial rank and was henceforth surrounded by four

ladies-in-waiting chosen from the old nobility. It was in this company that

she travelled with Bonaparte to Belgium. There seemed to be no end to the

minute reﬁ nements of etiquette. The populace was again dazzled by the

spectacle of costumes, carriages, liveried attendants, festivities and fancy-

dress balls at the Opéra. When General Leclerc, Pauline Bonaparte’s husband,

died in San Domingo in January 1803, ceremonial mourning was reintro-

duced at the court. A new saint’s day, the festival of St Napoleon, was insti-

tuted on 15 August 1802, and the republican holidays of 14 July and 1

Vendémiaire were celebrated, until 1804, only for the sake of appearance.

Finally, in 1803, coins were struck in Bonaparte’s efﬁ gy.

The salons eagerly followed the tone set by the court. This newly emerging

aristocracy kept the nouveaux riches and men of ﬁ nance at a distance. Bonaparte

prescribed for it a certain decorum which had not been characteristic of the

pre-revolutionary aristocracy. He took Josephine away from her former

friends, Madame Tallien and Madame Hamelin, and he recalled women to a

sense of propriety. But this austerity of morals was never more than a façade,

and Bonaparte was never one to deny himself the pleasures of indulgence.

His sole concern was that outward appearances be maintained, and in this

he himself set the prime example. The fact of the matter was that this society

was still thoroughly middle-class, and it condemned the ease and abandon

of the eighteenth-century nobility for its lack of ‘considerateness’. Moreover,

its transformation was far from complete, as the fate of the Legion of Honour

clearly demonstrated: having violated his own law by appointing the

members of the Legion’s ‘Grand Council’ (they should have been elected),

Bonaparte proceeded to postpone the nomination of the legionaries. Already

this institution which he had designed seemed to him too closely tied to the

Revolution.

the pacification of france and europe (1799–1802) 138

By the end of 1802 many indications left no doubt as to Bonaparte’s real

intentions. Thus from the standpoint of national policy Bonaparte reached

his pinnacle with the Treaty of Amiens. More than anything the French

people wanted peace, and Bonaparte gave it to them; they were attached to

the social accomplishments of the Revolution; and Bonaparte had preserved

them. Satisﬁ ed and proud of their leader, they had not yet begun to realise

that he was abusing his power and that he contemplated objects inimical to

their own interests. But they did not want their leader to become king, and

they wanted still less that he create a nobility, while Bonaparte in his heart

had broken with the Republic and with the notion of égalité . Pleased with

having secured the natural frontiers, they did not in the least desire to go

beyond them, but their master had already done so, making war inevitable.

The French people still saw him as a hero of the nation at the very moment

that he had ceased to be one.

III

Imperial Conquest to

the Treaty of Tilsit

(1802–1807)

Contemporaries and early chroniclers of Bonaparte attributed the imperial

conquests and the Empire itself to what they called the ‘ambition’ of

Napoleon. Not that ambition was the only factor. Opportunities did present

themselves, but even then the national interest would have counselled a

prudent refusal. For many historians of a later time, such an interpretation

seemed too simple. Some wished to see him only as the defender of the

‘natural frontiers’: they argued that the republicans had made him a consul

and then an emperor for this very purpose, but that this task, the baleful

legacy of the Revolution, compelled him to conquer Europe and at last

destroyed him. These historians were merely transposing, in an obvious way,

the idolatrous myth of the Old Guard, to which Napoleon himself, while at

St Helena, gave wide currency – a soldier of the Revolution, he had done no

more than to defend himself against monarchy and Old Europe. Other

historians, loath to diminish the role of the individual in history and

refusing to regard Napoleon as simply an instrument of destiny, persisted in

seeking in his character the wellspring of his policy, thinking it could be

found in some grand unifying design. There were those for whom the

thematic idea was the struggle with England over maritime supremacy; and

for these, the period after the rupture of the Treaty of Amiens was the apoth-

eosis of the struggle begun under Louis XIV and had its roots in the old

history of France. There were others for whom it was the ‘oriental’ mirage

that lured him towards the precipice. For still others, Bonaparte was more

European than French, and endeavoured to re-create the Carolingian, and

imperial conquest to the treaty of tilsit (1802–1807) 140

later the Roman, Empire – the well-ordered world of Western Christian

civilisation.

In each of these interpretations there is a piece of the truth, but all are

insufﬁ cient. It is true that Bonaparte’s sponsors wished to hold on to the

‘natural frontiers’, and that to defend them one might have been tempted to

venture beyond them; but this was neither the surest nor the only means of

protecting them; nor is it clear that he had only the interests of the nation in

mind in extending his conquests. It is true that England was his constant and

tenacious enemy, and that in beating him, she triumphed over France once

and for all; but if, in accordance with a maturely considered plan, he was

aiming at England alone, his continental policy would have been greatly

different – the blockade itself, of which so much has been made, was much

more the offspring of the Grand Empire than its cause. Nothing would have

pleased the new Alexander so much as a thrust towards Constantinople or

India, but most of his enterprises were only ephemerally connected with

this dream. It is a fact that he compared himself to Charlemagne and to

Caesar, and that he aimed at a political federation of the Western world, but

it was not an intellectual desire to restore the past which drove him to

action. The legend of the hatred of the Coalition powers for the soldier of

the Revolution contains a keen insight, and it is surprising that so many

historians should have forgotten it. But there was more to Bonaparte’s policy

than justiﬁ able self-defence.

The truth is, no unifying concept can be found that will rationally explain

Napoleon’s foreign policy; he simultaneously pursued ends that were

contradictory. In the last analysis, we must return to his ‘ambition’.

Contemporaries were blinded by the crude and gaudy theatrical apparatus,

the wanton adventures, the quarrels of a rapacious family and the malversa-

tions of ofﬁ cials. While appreciating Napoleon’s genius, they depreciated his

ambition to the common level of humanity. With time’s perspective, the

dimness of his image has been brought to focus and his mystery unveiled:

the heroic urge to take risks, the magic lure of the dream, his irresistible

force of character.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND: THE

STRUGGLE RENEWED (1802–1805)

At no time were the traits of Napoleon’s personality better revealed than in

the critical years between the Treaty of Amiens and the War of 1805. The

treaty with England did not last much over a year. But so long as the struggle

on the Continent was not renewed, the political arrangement which had

been possible in 1799 – a victorious but peaceful France, facing England,

mistress of the seas – had not been completely discarded. After the Peace of

Pressburg, this solution was no longer possible.

BONAPARTE’S ECONOMIC POLICY AND THE RUPTURE OF

THE TREATY OF AMIENS

It would be difﬁ cult to disprove Prime Minister Addington’s serious resolve

to try the experiment of peace and his faith in its substantial duration. He

repealed the income tax and cut naval expenditures by £2 million. St Vincent,

First Lord of the Admiralty, suspended ship construction and dismissed the

workers in the naval dockyards. The timber trust broke with him after he

initiated an investigation of their peculations, and supplies to the dockyards

dried up. Nevertheless, the government encountered opposition in its own

party. Convinced that the peace would permit France to rearm for a new

assault against the British Empire, the Tory dissidents preached war to the

death, as had the Whigs a hundred years earlier. The Tories controlled part of

the press, and the French émigré Peltier assisted them in vituperating the

Revolution and the military dictatorship of Bonaparte.

imperial conquest to the treaty of tilsit (1802–1807)

142

The business community hesitated between these two policies. Peace

endangered many interests: the war industries were grinding to a halt;

English merchants were on the point of losing their monopoly of commerce

in the Baltic and in Germany, not to mention the harm to the colonial

trade; the restitution to France of her lost colonies was a material loss to

England, the trade of Dutch Guiana alone being valued at £10 million.

Finally, after the signature of the Treaty of Amiens, world prices fell to such

a point that even the neutrals, and especially the United States, regarded the

peace as a calamity. Nevertheless, it was generally thought that these evils

were only temporary. The tocsin rung by the Tories left some impression,

but on the sea and in the colonies, the peril did not seem imminent. As for

the Continent, English opinion was not overconcerned. The relevant ques-

tion was whether Bonaparte would open the vast market of France and her

satellites to British commerce, for England would not tolerate the treaty for

long if proﬁ table business relations did not quickly ensue. In May 1802 the

foreign minister Hawkesbury stated that it would be necessary to hasten the

re-establishment of commercial relations in order to win over the greatest

possible number of people to the peace. The key to the problem thus lay in

the economic policy of the First Consul.

Like all enlightened despots, Napoleon always devoted great attention to

economic progress; not, indeed, because it improved the lot of mankind

and permitted the common people to share in the fruits of civilisation, but

simply for political reasons. He was interested in sound ﬁ nance, in the

growth of population and the consequent fresh supply of recruits to the

army, and in ‘order’, that is, a minimum of idleness and an abundance of

commodities. Yet he was more receptive to some branches of production

than to others. Military by nature, he distrusted business and ﬁ nance, which

were cosmopolitan and closely linked with England. He was interested in

industry, especially to the extent that it consumed native raw materials. He

was inclined to regard agriculture as the strength of a great military state, of

a Sparta or a Rome. Thence came the soldiers, and thence the capacity, if

necessary, to be economically self-sufﬁ cient. In this his ideas were physio-

cratic, and to the extent that he turned from the bourgeoisie and envisaged

the re-creation of a landed aristocracy, he approached that school of thought

from a second direction. But, as always happened when he ran into concrete

difﬁ culties, he did not trouble himself with pursuing a single theory.

Although he favoured agriculture, he continually carped at the right to

export grain, because the masses stirred with every increase in the price of

bread as the experience of Year X had conﬁ rmed. For reasons of state, he

shared the popular prejudice against speculators in the grain trade and culti-

143

france and england: the struggle renewed (1802–1805)

vators who sought to reap undue proﬁ ts. Industrial crises, when they threw

workers out of jobs, caused similar problems; and so it was necessary for

him to keep a close watch over the cotton industry, despite the fact that it

utilised an imported raw material.

Of all the practical considerations which Bonaparte faced, it was the

monetary problem which demanded his greatest attention. While England

was giving way to a mild, controlled inﬂ ation, one which kept prices at a

high level and stimulated production, France, apart from the limited issu-

ances of banks, was saddled with a metallic currency that was persistently

being hoarded, and she experienced a continued shortage of louis d’or . This

inconvenienced her economy because capital continued to be scarce and

expensive. Bonaparte never ceased reproving the Bank of France for its

extreme caution in discounting commercial paper, and he would have

wanted to see it branch out into the provinces making credit widely avail-

able. The scarcity of coin also affected public ﬁ nances adversely by placing a

great burden on the treasury. After the ﬁ asco of the assignats , Bonaparte was

loath to return to paper money; such an attempt would surely have incurred

a loss of prestige. Like Colbert in analogous circumstances, he was converted

to mercantilism and so to the belief that France had to protect her supply of

specie by purchasing little from abroad and by creating metal inﬂ ows either

through increased exports or simple conquest.

The Consulate also took pains to encourage manufactures, particularly of

luxuries. A Bureau of Statistics, created in 1800, resumed the investigations

begun by the Committee of Public Safety and François de Neufchâteau.

Working through the prefects, it undertook an economic and demographic

census of France, and in the course of the following years, a substantial part

of its ﬁ ndings was published. An attempt was made to unify the French

economy by adopting the decimal-metric system which, however, only

gradually gained acceptance. On 17 Germinal, Year XI (7 April 1803), the

ratio between silver and gold was set at 1 to 15.5, but owing to a lack of

resources an insufﬁ cient number of coins were struck to replace the old

currency. The new regime stood ﬁ rmly behind its money; the franc was

legally deﬁ ned in terms of silver (4.5 grams of pure silver, or ﬁ ve grams of

silver

pure). Since the livre had never been legally deﬁ ned, money of

account and metallic currency became identical in value for the ﬁ rst time.

The regulation of commerce was entrusted to a general council, and with

the advent of the Empire it was brought under the jurisdiction of a section

of the Conseil d’État. On 19 March 1801 the exchanges were reorganised;

on 24 December 1802 Chambers of Commerce reappeared; on 28 April

1803 sixteen seaports were designated as ports of international trade and