Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

the world in 1812

384

Bank of France and other large undertakings, and to make advances to

industry in 1811, and above all to reward his servants or give them pensions.

Warfare therefore provided him with large resources. On the eve of the

Russian campaign he is reported to have said: ‘It will help my ﬁ nances too;

for haven’t I rehabilitated them by warfare? And wasn’t this how Rome

acquired the whole world’s wealth?’

For the nation, however, the advantage was more doubtful. A certain

number of individuals enriched themselves from these spoils; the stock of

metal was usefully augmented; and the budget was momentarily eased. But

the war fell no less heavily upon the tax-payer. Although Spain was said to

have contributed 350 million, it was still necessary to despatch just as many

supplies to it, apart from twenty-four to thirty million of monthly instal-

ments and the pensions for the fallen princes, all at French expense, for the

army treasury and the foreign estates did not contribute a halfpenny. And

ﬁ nally it must be noted that if Napoleon increased his personal authority in

these ways, his liquid reserves never rose to the ﬁ gure he had set himself, for

he had to spend a large part of the revenue from his domains under the

pressure of circumstance.

Whatever proﬁ t he made from war, it accordingly remained essential to

develop the country’s contributory capacity. To this end the enlightened

despots had encouraged production by obeying the principles of the

Mercantile Theory; and Napoleon did the same. Regimentation was natural

to an authoritarian government; and on various sides pleas were made for a

return to guilds and to trade marks. The upper middle classes remained in a

general way faithful to freedom of employment; and Napoleon showed

more respect for them than he has usually been credited with. At Lyon, he

conﬁ ned himself to imposing on the home workers a certiﬁ cate of book-

keeping. Trade marks were re-established for brocades and velvets in Year

XII; in 1807 for cloths for the Levant; in 1810 for Louviers cloth; in 1811

for soaps; in 1812 for the whole cloth trade, though they remained optional.

The monopoly in weapons of war, powder, minting and tobacco can be

explained for reasons of public order or ﬁ scal considerations. The same is

true of the laws governing expropriation for reasons of public utility, those

relating to unhealthy premises, and to the mines. Here, the law of 1810

attributed ownership of such property to the state, but allowed it to be

exploited by private individuals, with the exception of the Saar mines. The

same also applies to the control of the baking and butchery trades, where

the return to the ancien régime was most marked of all. The corporative consti-

tution of the bakers, which had been re-established under the Consulate,

was extended to several provincial towns; and in 1811 the syndical savings

385

imperial france

bank of the Paris butchers became once again the Caisse de Poissy, its duty

being to advance on behalf of the town the necessary sums for paying the

graziers. At the request of the wine merchants, their numbers in the capital

were limited and they had to be authorised by the police; the professions of

wine-dealer and wine-taster were made into ofﬁ cial posts under govern-

ment nomination.

As far as agriculture was concerned, it was more or less left to itself. The

forests were once more put under guards, but nothing was done to disrupt

the collective customs, nor were the land registers used so as to favour or

compel regrouping – a process which nearly all the peasants would have

opposed. The blockade simply made the emperor insist that certain crops

should be grown, in particular that thirty-two thousand and then one

hundred thousand hectares should be allotted to sugar-beet. Concern for

public order obliged him to do as the ancien régime had done, and act to some

extent as arbiter in ﬁ xing the price of corn as between peasant and consumer,

either by raising it by authorising its export, or by imposing a maximum

price – as he did in 1812.

But it was the working classes who particularly felt the hand of the law.

This was no novelty, for the law of 1791 had re-enacted the prohibition of

strikes and workers’ associations, and the law of Year XI and the penal code

did no more than conﬁ rm it. But apprenticeship was also re-established, and

the expression ‘master and workman’ was reintroduced. Certain administra-

tors went further still. For example in Paris, in 1806, the préfet of police ﬁ xed

the hours of work for the building trade, and in the Yonne, the préfet

regrouped the craftsmen and ﬁ xed a tariff for them. But the Conseil d’État

rejected schemes for apprenticeship and the regulation of workshops; and

the minister refused to intervene to sanction disciplinary action against the

Maine-et-Loire slaters, the paper-makers in the Paris region and the Bauwens

spinning-mills in Ghent. The setting up of ‘conciliation boards’ on 18 March

1806, for settling differences between employers and workmen, without

any representation for the latter, was solely due to the technical incompe-

tence of the ordinary judges. With certain reservations, the nascent forces of

capitalism were a law to themselves, quite independently of the regime.

They maintained the various regulations against the workers and prevented

all attempts to act in combination, which would have been contrary to their

own freedom of action.

Thus of the two principles of the Mercantile System, protection occupied

the foremost place. Yet war and the blockade were much more powerful than

any speciﬁ c measures in closing down national markets and handing over

allied or vassal countries to the power of France. This hardly produced any

the world in 1812

386

advantage for agriculture, since Napoleon insisted on controlling the price of

corn. On the contrary, it proved more difﬁ cult to sell its wines and brandies.

Industry was what Napoleon – like Colbert – chieﬂ y encouraged, using exhi-

bitions, special orders, honours for inventors and sometimes even conces-

sions in the form of buildings or advances. But he gave no privileges, and,

taking good care of the pence, was only willing to grant loans in times of

crisis, and then rather in order to avoid unemployment than to beneﬁ t the

industries concerned. In his opinion, the greatest service he could render

them was to lower the money rate by increasing the Bank of France’s discount.

He was less interested in proﬁ ts than in the amounts produced; but because

machinery was giving England an advantage, he did much for technical

progress, helping Douglas to set up a factory in Paris to produce machinery

for the woollen industry, and invited open competition for several inventions,

such as a light steam-engine in 1807 and a ﬂ ax-spinning loom in 1810. He

added a school of arts and crafts at Angers to the one at Châlons, opened

mining schools, resurrected the Gobelins dyeing school, added a practical

course to the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, and recommended new proce-

dures and tools by means of ofﬁ cial propaganda, as the Committee of Public

Safety had also done. Roads and canals would have been of great service in

knitting together the national markets and linking them to the vassal coun-

tries. Napoleon accordingly set work in train on the Burgundy, Rhône and

Rhine, Ille-et-Rance and Nantes to Brest canals, ﬁ nished the Central canal

and Saint-Quentin canal, repaired a big proportion of the routes nationales , and

opened the Alpine routes, which were vital for trade with Italy and the Levant.

He would have done more still if there had been the time and the money.

All the same in the plans for these various works the economy was of less

importance than military considerations and questions of prestige, the ﬁ rst

predominating for the Alpine routes, those to the Rhine and the West, the

extension of the Cherbourg dyke and the Antwerp undertakings; and

the second in the attractions and improvements carried out in Paris, where

he lengthened the quays, constructed new bridges, cleared the surround-

ings of Notre-Dame, the Place du Châtelet and the Carrousel, opened up the

rue de Rivoli, rue de la Paix, rue de Castiglione, built the Bourse and the

Vendôme column, undertook the construction of the Arc de Triomphe and

planned a Temple de la Gloire. In connection with the provisioning of the

capital, there was the Commarket and the Grande Halle, the Grand Reserve,

the slaughterhouses and the Ourcq canal. Great builder that the emperor

was, his motive was partly to give employment; for one of the essentials in

the policy of all Caesars has always been to provide the people with work

and cheap bread.

387

imperial france

In agriculture, progress followed the same lines as under the Directory,

but was extremely slow. There was far more perceptible advance in industry.

The production of luxury goods was resumed, especially in the silk trade;

and the blockade gave an impetus to metallurgy, ironmongery, cutlery and

the manufacture of machines and tools, sheet iron, tin and brass, pins and

needles. It was also favourable to chemical products and textiles; cotton-

spinning and printed materials continued to show the greatest activity and

the newest improvements, so much so that in 1812 the former had a million

spindles in action and produced ten million kilograms of thread. At the end

of the Empire, there was a ﬂ ourishing new industry with a great future, for

in the year 1811 the factories at Lille and Auby produced the ﬁ rst lumps of

sugar from sugar-beet. Allart at Chaillot and Delessert in Paris set up reﬁ n-

eries, and Napoleon established four technical schools and a sugar-works on

his own property at Rambouillet. By 1813 the estimated production was 3½

million kilograms in 334 factories; the amount actually realised seems to

have been about a third of this ﬁ gure.

But there was another and tragic side to these beneﬁ cial effects of the

blockade, namely the total ruin of the maritime ports. In 1807 Marseille still

had 330 ocean-going ships, but by 1811 only nine were left; and the product

of her manufactures fell from ﬁ fty million in 1789 to twelve million, while

her population fell in the same period from 120,000 to ninety thousand.

Bordeaux, which was reckoned to have the same number in 1789, only had

seventy thousand with the result that these two towns became the citadels of

royalism. On the other hand Strasbourg and Lyon, taking advantage of their

rivals’ misfortunes to acquire the monopoly of the German and Italian trade,

were bitterly to regret the fall of Napoleon. It is not surprising that in spite

of the annexations external trade remained below the ﬁ gure reached in

1789, seeing that France had lost her colonies. It goes without saying that

peace and a commercial treaty with England would have been of more

beneﬁ t to the national production than the blockade. Napoleon’s policy

being what it was, it is nonetheless true that the Empire succeeded in keeping

alive, and even enjoyed a certain measure of prosperity.

To sum up, it might be said that the emperor behaved much less despoti-

cally over the control of things than he did over persons; his state despotism

in the economic sphere has been exaggerated. On the other hand, although

he did not introduce many innovations in this department, he was successful

in conciliating a wide variety of motives and interests. Finally, he main-

tained sufﬁ cient activity in his various states to enable them to support the

war; and it must not be forgotten that as far as he was concerned, this was

the cardinal point.

the world in 1812

388

THE CONTROL OF MEN’S MINDS

His system did not consist simply and solely in prohibiting all criticism and

placating as many interests as possible. Although Napoleon usually affected

to despise ideas, he would sometimes admit their inﬂ uence. ‘There are only

two powers in the world,’ he said, ‘the sword and the spirit; and in the long

run, the sword is always conquered by the spirit.’ What was needed then

was to rally the spirit to the dominance of the sword, so that there might be

willing obedience, and as far as possible, joyful and devoted obedience. It

was in order to make the churches teach this along with morality that the

enlightened despots had gained control over the churches; and when the

Concordat had been concluded, this was one of the advantages Bonaparte

derived from it. He ﬁ lled the ranks of the Catholic clergy with a view to

holding their allegiance out of self-interest and getting them to produce

loyal subjects. Fearful of priests who were not his own ofﬁ cials, he intro-

duced his own supporters everywhere, especially in the state schools; and

this he did as a precaution, and to avoid worse possibilities. There were

always covert struggles going on around him between the friends and

enemies of the Roman Church; of the former Portalis and Fontanes ﬁ nally

won the victory over Fouché, and Cardinal Fesch, who had a good deal to

be forgiven, showed himself full of zeal. The emperor more than once

rebuffed him, ascribing his fears to ‘a delirious imagination’ and advising

him ‘to take cold baths’; but it suited his ends to give way to him on many

occasions.

The ﬁ rst requisite was to make certain of the clergy stipends and the

conduct of worship, for the pressure that had been put upon the munici-

palities to stimulate their generosity was only a moderate success. ‘The peas-

ants’, wrote one priest, ‘are well disposed to their religion and their priests,

provided they do not cost them anything.’ Napoleon decided to take a part

of the expense upon himself. From 1803 he granted stipends to the canons;

then in 1804, as the plebiscite and the coronation drew near, ﬁ ve hundred

francs a year to twenty-four thousand ofﬁ cials, raising the number in 1807

to thirty thousand. In 1804 he had handed over a monopoly in funerals to

the Church councils, and had guaranteed to support a large seminary in

each diocese, allotting six hundred thousand francs in 1807 for the provi-

sion of scholarships. The rest of the expenses fell on the local ﬁ nances – such

as the salaries of those ofﬁ ciants who were not paid by the state (26

December 1804), the parochial clergy’s board and lodging and the expenses

of worship (2 February 1805). In order to manage the Church services

subsidy, an ‘external’ council was set up in 1807. In 1809 the administration

389

imperial france

of parish funds was all handed over to the parochial church councils, who

were now appointed for the ﬁ rst time by the préfet , then added to by co-

optation, and who had to elect a body of churchwardens. The préfets continued

to require them to vote supplementary stipends and to support the curates.

Finally, the law of 14 February 1810 deﬁ nitely settled the charges falling on

the commune. The curates’ salaries, and the upkeep and repair of buildings,

also became a compulsory charge in cases where the church councils had

insufﬁ cient resources; but the supplementary payments remained optional.

This organisation of church ﬁ nances continued in being for nearly a century.

In 1811 it cost the communes of the Bouches-du-Rhône one hundred

thousand francs; and the state spent sixteen million, over and above the

thirty-one million for pensions.

The Church was very much aware of the respect shown to it, which gave

it good standing in the eyes of the people, and of the favours which helped

recruitment to the ministry and the extension of its inﬂ uence. The members

of seminaries were exempted from military service; Church dignitaries

were favourably placed in the decree of Year XII ﬁ xing the order of prece-

dence; processions were revived almost everywhere; ‘home missions’ were

subsidised, and Cardinal Fesch set up a society to organise them. Some préfets

closed the taverns on Sundays during the hours of divine service; and Portalis

gave them his approval, and even an assurance that the Conseil d’État would

be responsible for punishing those who remained standing, or kept their

hats on, while processions were passing by. As early as 1803 the lycées and

colleges had acquired almoners, and religious observance had become

compulsory. Portalis expected the bishops to keep him informed about their

staff. When the bishop of Versailles, in 1805, claimed the right to appoint

the schoolmasters, he signiﬁ ed his agreement; and in 1807 they were

authorised by decree to take charge of religious instruction in the schools.

In 1809 a circular from Fontanes advised them to get the curates to super-

vise the masters, promising to replace with their own nominees any on

whom there should be an unfavourable report. Besides this, the bishops

organised confessional teaching, being authorised to found smaller semi-

naries as preparatory for the main ones; and these became the equivalent of

colleges. The clergy were also admitted to the commission for hospices and

the ofﬁ ce for charitable aid; and the sisters reoccupied the hospitals. And

lastly, the unity of the Church was defended in face of the ‘little Church’,

and its discipline supported in at least one point, the marriage of priests

being forbidden by administrative action. It was due to Napoleon that the

secularising of the state did not run into further difﬁ culties, for he refused

to give way to Portalis over the observance of Sunday, the respect to be

the world in 1812

390

shown for processions and the nomination of schoolmasters. He blamed

Fontanes for having handed over control of the latter to the bishops.

It was owing to him moreover that the progress of the regular Orders was

kept within bounds. In principle, he disapproved of masculine Orders. ‘There

are to be no monks,’ he said, ‘for monastic discipline destroys all virtue,

energy and initiative.’ But under the Consulate, he had allowed the re-

establishment of some Orders, notably the Pères de la Foi or Paccanaristes,

whom the police quite rightly held to be the heirs of the Society of Jesus. In

the end, Fouché won the day, and the decree of 3 Messidor, Year XII (22 June

1804), made the existence of the regular Orders subject to authorisation.

The Lazarists, the Fathers of the Holy Spirit and those of foreign missions,

although in principle amalgamated, continued nevertheless to exist because

of the services they were able to render to French inﬂ uence in the outside

world. The Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne and those of Saint-Sulpice were

treated with equal favour; and toleration was extended to certain Trappist

houses because they looked after the Alpine hospices. The other Orders were

suppressed, including the Pères de la Foi, their superior, Paccanari, being a

foreigner. But this Order, claiming that they had been given back their

autonomy, nevertheless managed to be left in peace, Fesch even putting them

in charge of the Largentière seminary; and they were not deﬁ nitely

condemned till 15 December 1807. Nuns received better treatment from

Napoleon, because he reckoned that it paid to put them in charge of the

hospitals. He authorised a number of communities and tolerated the exist-

ence of others as well. To keep a more effective eye upon them, he would

have liked to group them together, and would gladly have united them. At

any rate in 1807 he called together ‘a chapter general of the hospital sister-

hoods and the daughters of charity’, presided over by Madame Mère, who

had been made their protectress; and in 1808 a decree gave them a certain

status. In fact, these hospital sisters often ran a school, like the new Order, the

Sisters of Mercy of the Reverend Mother Postel, or the Ladies of the Sacred

Heart of the Reverend Mother Barat, who were by profession contempla-

tives. There was moreover no lack of teaching Orders. The inquiry in 1808

noted a total of more than two thousand houses and ten thousand nuns. As

for the non-conventual groups and communities, Portalis decided that the

Year XII decree did not refer to them. The Penitents, for instance, reappeared

everywhere in the south; the Congrégation de la Vierge grew in numbers in

Paris, and added branches in the provinces; and the same thing happened at

Bordeaux and Lyon, where Ampère became an enthusiastic proselyte.

Taken as a whole, the bishops showed their gratitude. In 1806 they even

resigned themselves to accepting the catechism drawn up by Bernier and

391

imperial france

Abbé d’Astros, Portalis’s secretary, in which Napoleon himself had a hand. It

contained a long chapter detailing amongst a Christian’s duties obedience to

the emperor, payment of taxes and the acceptance of conscription. Some of

them – Bernier, for example – were zealous to the point of becoming auxil-

iaries of the police when Fouché wrote to them: ‘There are a number of

links between your functions and my own.’ Others, however, such as the

brother of Cambacérès at Rouen and Caffarelli at Saint-Brieuc, made them-

selves intolerable by their demands. But most of them reaped an advantage

from their prudent compliance and increased their inﬂ uence. Knowing that

in the end they would be sacriﬁ ced, the préfets gave up the struggle: in

Marseille, Thibaudeau consulted Champion de Cicé before choosing his

ofﬁ cials. The power of the bishops, protected by the ofﬁ cial Gallicanism

against the papacy, also put them into a position of strength over against the

lower clergy, since the latter had been unreservedly subordinated to them by

the Concordat, with the sole exception of the parish priests as such. All the

same, the position was far from being one of moral unity, and the conforming

bishops remained in bad odour. At Besançon, Archbishop Le Coz was

constantly at odds with his priests and seminarists, who were egged on by

rebellious spirits from revolutionary days. Nor did the parish priests resign

themselves at the outset to lay control, and there were numerous incidents;

but in the end the majority of the clergy remained attached to royalty, as the

sequel clearly showed. As for their inﬂ uence on the people, this must not be

measured by the material progress of the Church. In many regions, there

remained a large measure of indifference, and in the towns, there was always

a public ready to applaud a performance of Oedipus or Tartuffe . Moreover,

there is reason to believe that Napoleon was not anxious for a complete

re-Christianising of France; he was content with an arrangement which

gave him control of those whose ﬁ rst loyalty was to their priests; and this

was all he needed.

But the conﬂ ict with the papacy prevented this policy from being entirely

successful. It was not religious in origin; and although Pius VII rebuked the

emperor for the Organic Articles, and much more so for his policy towards

the clergy in the kingdom of Italy, there would never have been a rupture if

Napoleon had not been a temporal sovereign. But this rupture led Napoleon

to revive the claims of the Roman emperor to rule over the clergy, and to

treat the bishop of Rome as his vassal. As it was, the senatus consultum of 7

February 1810 made the declaration of the four articles into an imperial law;

and in the Conseil d’Etat Napoleon declared that he was about to ‘re-establish

the right, always possessed by the emperors, of conﬁ rming the papal nomi-

nation’ and demanding that ‘before his enthronement, the pope should place

the world in 1812

392

his hands in those of the emperor of the French and swear that he submits

to the four articles’. Popes can no longer make the monstrous claims which

in former times were so calamitous to the nations, and so shameful to the

Church; yet fundamentally, they have renounced none of their pretensions,

and even today they look upon themselves as masters of the world.

Pius VII was a prisoner at Savona. The cardinals had been taken to Paris,

and when thirteen out of twenty-seven had refused to be present at the

emperor’s marriage, he exiled the ‘black-leg’ cardinals. It then became

impossible to implement the Concordat. From 1808 onwards the papal

bulls granting investiture to the bishops had departed from the formula laid

down by the Concordat to such an extent that the Conseil d’Ètat refused to

accept them. It then became impossible to ﬁ ll the vacancies: the emperor

directed the nominated bishops to take up the administration of their

dioceses, and Cardinal Maury accepted the see of Paris, and d’Osmond that

of Florence. But this could only be a temporary expedient. In 1809 an eccle-

siastical committee gave the opinion that if for temporal reasons the pope

delayed a bishop’s investiture, the metropolitan could make provision; but it

refused to come to a decision, and advised the convening of a national

council. In 1811 a second committee tendered the same advice. The only

man to stand up for the authority of the Holy See – and that with great bold-

ness, in the very presence of the emperor – was Abbé Émery, whose

Gallicanism grew less and less pronounced as the temporal power became

more and more burdensome to the clergy. But he died before the opening

of the national council, which had been ﬁ xed for 17 June 1811. Up till now

the bishops had been cowed into silence, and were too frightened to utter a

word. As in the days of Louis XIV and the Constituent Assembly, they felt that

the Church of France, hard pressed on the one side by the head of the nation

and on the other by the head of the Catholic Church, was in danger of

having to bear the whole brunt of the dispute. Napoleon was obliged to get

round them one at a time in order to press them to agree to his plan; but

even then, they would only agree subject to the pope’s approval. If after six

months the pope had not conferred investiture, it was agreed that it could

be given by the metropolitan or the senior suffragan; and this amounted to

a return to the civil constitution of the clergy. Pius VII consented, provided

that the investiture was conferred ‘expressly in the name of the sovereign

pontiff’, which allowed him to forbid it if he thought ﬁ t. On 23 February

1812 Napoleon declared that this brief was unacceptable, and that he

regarded the Concordat as annulled.

This rupture with the pope changed the clergy’s feelings with regard to

the regime. A section of the priests gradually went back into open opposi-

393

imperial france

tion. The bishops were forced to resign, or sent into exile; priests had their

stipends or pensions suspended; refractory seminarists lost their scholar-

ships and had to join the army; the men’s Orders were disbanded. The Pères

de la Foi came under the decree in 1807; the Lazarists, the Fathers of the

Holy Spirit and of Foreign Missions were suppressed and their superior,

Hanon by name, arrested; and in 1810 it was the turn of Saint-Sulpice. The

Congrégation de la Vierge were struck down as early as 1809, but their

members spread the bull of excommunication throughout France and kept

up a secret correspondence with Pius VII. Next came a number of brother-

hoods; and ﬁ nally the reform of the University in 1811 involved the closure

of most of the episcopal schools or minor seminaries. The Concordat had

robbed the royalist cause and the counter-revolution of the clergy’s support:

the breach with the pope meant that this support was regained; it also

revived hostility to France in the countries that had been annexed.

Nevertheless the years gained by Napoleon bore their fruit. Most churchmen

hesitated to press their opposition once again to an extreme and thus lose

the beneﬁ t of the advantages already won. As long as worship was not

suspended or parish priests removed from ofﬁ ce, the people were not

inclined to protest overmuch. The conﬂ ict revived royalist hopes and helped

their intrigues; but it was not in itself enough to shake the regime.

The Protestants did not cause him any difﬁ culty; but it was a very different

matter with the Jews. If it had been a purely religious question, there would

have been no difﬁ culties, for the rabbis themselves asked for comprehensive

articles of agreement. The difﬁ culty was to know whether they thought the

law of Moses compatible with the civil law and the duties of a French citizen.

The Sephardim in the south and in Italy were thought to have long been well

adapted to the customs of the country, while the Ashkenazim of the east were

reckoned to be attached to ritualism; and in 1805 Bonald threw doubts upon

the possibility of assimilating the Jews. And ﬁ nally, certain Jews in Alsace and

Lorraine had aroused ﬁ erce hatred by lending at high rates of interest, which

often led to peasant expropriation. The emperor had a prejudice against

usury and on 30 May 1806, in spite of the Conseil d’État, he granted their

debtors a moratorium. There was thus a threefold problem. An assembly of

Jews, the seventy members being appointed by the préfets , met in Paris on

20 July 1806, and came to an agreement with the imperial commissioners.

It was then decided to resurrect in theatrical fashion the Great Sanhedrin,

consisting of twenty-six laymen and forty-ﬁ ve rabbis, which addressed a

proclamation to all European Jews, and on 9 February 1807 admitted the

abolition of polygamy, allowed civil marriage and military service without

the right to send a substitute, and such economic measures as might seem