Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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their son Charles, he took guardianship of the child himself, and then

immediately handed it over to Hortense. There were also strained relations

between Murat and Caroline. The treaty that had given them Naples offended

Murat, for the present was in fact meant for Caroline. She was to survive her

husband and wear the crown to the detriment of her eldest son, though she

lived quite apart from public life and in semi-seclusion. As for Lucien, he

ended by embarking for the United States on 7 August 1810, but was

captured and taken to England. Napoleon’s mother took the part of her

other children against Napoleon. He waited till she disavowed Jérôme’s ﬁ rst

marriage and then gave her an ofﬁ cial title, with the style ‘Son Altesse

Impériale, Madame, mère de l’empereur’; but she was not satisﬁ ed and

clamoured in vain for a dowry and ‘some political status’.

Thus from 1806 to 1810 we see the emperor growing more and more

annoyed with his vassals and threatening to annex their states. In this way

the evolution of the federated Empire, destined for ﬁ nal unity by the intro-

duction of Napoleonic institutions, was given more rapid development. The

Austrian marriage, the desire to increase the heritage of the king of Rome

and the prospect of having to ﬁ nd places for the future younger sons of the

family, made the Bonapartes’ position more and more precarious, though

they had known long before that it was already compromised. The annexa-

tion of Holland is almost contemporary with the marriage. It seemed to be

imminent as early as 1809; but early in 1810 Louis delayed it by ceding

Zeeland and the southern provinces as far as the Rhine, and on 2 July 1810

he ﬂ ed and succeeded in reaching Austria. In April Murat in Paris was equally

certain that his cause was lost; but Caroline, having accepted the position of

chaperone to Marie-Louise, patched up a reconciliation which only lasted

for a very brief space. The emperor forbade the king to appoint ambassadors.

Murat was surrounding himself with suspect Italians, such as Gallo and

Maghella, whom he appointed minister of police. This man was in touch

with the secret anti-French societies, and may have been one of the ﬁ rst to

conceive the idea of a united Italy under his master’s rule. Caroline was once

again sent into retirement and threatened with divorce. Murat took various

customs measures against France, dismissed several high French ofﬁ cials,

and ﬁ nally made those who continued to live there take an oath of loyalty.

Then matters came to a head. On 2 July 1811 Napoleon forbade his subjects

to take the oath, and a rumour went round that he was going to annex the

kingdom of Naples. But tempers were cooled by the threat from Russia.

Murat was present at the baptism and left for Russia with the Grande Armée.

But no one believed that matters would rest there. At the same moment,

Jérôme saw a part of Hanover taken away from him and was afraid it would

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be made over to Poland; and Joseph complained that he was no more than

a nominal king. And ﬁ nally, since Murat’s departure for Naples, the grand

duchy of Berg had been administered by the emperor.

In contradistinction to the vassal states, the protected federations, which

were linked to the Empire by a permanent alliance, continued to exist as

before. There was no reason for Napoleon to alter the Act of Mediation

which he had drawn up. Switzerland, now encircled by territories subject to

Napoleon, was no longer of any immediate strategic importance; and there

was no need to occupy it in order to reduce it to obedience. Swiss neutrality

was only violated by the use of the bridge at Basle in 1809 and by the occu-

pation of the Ticino. On the other hand, the Confederation of the Rhine

demanded reorganisation, for its territory still remained too fragmentary.

There was no equality even in the legal status of its members. The grand

duke of Berg and the king of Westphalia were vassal princes, while the grand

duke of Frankfurt, a puppet of Napoleon’s, did not belong either to the

family of the French Empire or to its great dignitaries, as long as Eugène did

not take the place of Dalberg. The existence of the grand duchy of Würzburg

was guaranteed by the treaty of 1809 with Austria, which secretly consid-

ered itself invested with the right of being next in succession that it had

possessed over Ferdinand’s former domains, Tuscany and Salzburg. The other

sovereigns’ rights were based upon legitimacy, although the most important

of them held their new titles under agreements signed with the emperor.

But above all the Confederation still had no constitution, and was without a

central authority able to push on with uniﬁ cation in administrative affairs,

in the Church, in social life and even in military matters.

In its further extensions, the Continental System was completed by alli-

ances that depended upon the ups and downs of policy, alliances that future

efforts would have to convert into permanent bonds. For Prussia and Austria,

resistance was impossible; and Prussia was in fact reduced to vassal status by

the treaty of 1812. Only Alexander, ﬁ rmly persuaded that he had negotiated

as one equal with another, although he had been conquered, ﬁ gured as a

genuine ally. He was resolved to consult nothing but his own interests and

to exact payment for his support, whenever this was required, by demanding

appropriate gratuities. This perpetual blackmail was a strong inducement to

undertake the campaign against Russia. As long as Alexander remained inde-

pendent, the political constitution of the Continental System would remain

incomplete. Once this last obstacle had been removed, Russia could be

absorbed into the Grand Empire; and with allies transformed into vassals,

the Grand Empire itself would in time have been absorbed into the French

Empire.

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Up till 1811 French supremacy was only represented legally by the status

of the vassal princes. Murat’s resistance led Napoleon to deﬁ ne the position

of Frenchmen in their service. While forbidding his subjects to take an

oath of allegiance to his brother-in-law, he decreed that they were legally

citizens of the kingdom of Naples. This decision was all the more remark-

able in that he had done his utmost to break the links which allowed the

great families under the ancien régime not to take on a particular nationality,

holding possessions as they did here and there across the frontiers, as vassals

of several sovereigns and serving whom they pleased, and forming a small

cosmopolitan society outside the national states. The law of 21 Floréal, Year

XIII (11 May 1805), conﬁ scated the possessions of the imperial princes in

France and only restored those of the other German lords subject to aliena-

tion unless their owners opted for French sovereignty. In the vassal

countries – Westphalia, for instance – he forbade the subjects of the new

princes to remain in foreign service. Schulenburg could only keep his lands

by leaving the king of Prussia’s service; and the other members of the

Confederation of the Rhine had been invited to recall those of their depend-

ants who had made their careers in Austria. The principle laid down for the

kingdom of Naples was therefore a privilege for the French, for without

losing their French nationality they were to become citizens of the states in

the Grand Empire to which they might happen to be sent. If this system had

lasted, it might have been the beginning of something like Roman citizen-

ship. This would have worked all the more conveniently in that the Grand

Empire was not simply a political unity, for Napoleon’s intention was to give

it the same institutions and social structure as those of imperial France.

THE NAPOLEONIC REFORMS

In implanting his system of government, the ﬁ rst idea in the emperor’s

mind was to give a certain sacrosanctity to his power, for it was important

that he, his vassals and his allies should all hold undisputed sovereignty. Any

intermediate bodies, privileges or feudal rights must therefore be swept

away, so that all men should become directly subject to the state. It was also

advisable for the laws of succession to reduce the size of the great fortunes,

so making the aristocracy subordinate to the sovereign, and the priests his

ofﬁ cials. Another primary obligation fell upon all the members of the Grand

Empire, namely to provide money and men. The ancien régime , with its slow

and chaotic administration, could not mobilise the country’s resources

quickly enough: a clean break had to be made, and the Napoleonic bureau-

cracy put in its place. In this respect the emperor was even urged on to

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further conquests by the desire to prove the superiority of the methods

which an ally like Charles IV seemed unable to appreciate.

These preoccupations did not prevent him from seeing that a renewal of

the administration and of society would give him a chance to conciliate the

peasants and the middle classes. He wrote to Jérôme:

What the peoples of Germany long for is that those who are not nobles and

have some abilities should have an equal right to your consideration, and

to employment. This means that all kinds of servitude, and all intermediate

links between the sovereign and the lowest classes, should be entirely

abolished . . . To be quite frank with you, I place more reliance on their

efforts for extending and strengthening this monarchy than on the results

of the greatest victories in the ﬁ eld.

Civil equality, religious liberty, the abolition of tithe and feudal rights, the

sale of Church property, the suppression of the corporations, the increase in

ofﬁ cials, ‘wise and liberal’ administration, a constitution carrying the right

to vote taxes and make laws on the part of the people who really counted

– all those were intended to weave a network of interests closely bound up

with maintaining French ascendancy; and the control of public opinion, as

in the French Empire, would see to the rest. The Civil Code embodied the

essentials of this policy, and that is why the emperor made such vigorous

efforts to introduce it everywhere. As early as 1807 he wanted to impose it

on the Hanseatic towns, on Danzig, on his German protégés and of course

on Holland and Westphalia. In 1808 he was thinking of applying it to

Portugal, and in 1809 to Spain.

A realist attitude could not justify the jealous passion with which he set

about its propagation, for he made this an all-out effort. The cast of mind

which he inherited from the eighteenth century gave him a sincere aversion

to feudalism, intolerance and the chaotic hand-to-mouth methods of the

old administrations. He resumed the work of the benevolent despots, and

although his task was made considerably easier by the tradition they had left

behind, he surpassed them all in speed and boldness. On the other hand, his

authoritarian spirit invested his work with a kind of perfection: ‘If you

retouch the Code Napoléon ,’ he said to Louis, ‘it will no longer be the Code

Napoléon. ’ And to Murat, who wanted to cut out divorce: ‘I would rather have

Naples in the hands of the ex-king of Sicily than emasculate the Code Napoléon

in this fashion.’ In the same way, the system became invested with an eternal

and universal value; he saw it as the framework for a European civilisation

which would consolidate the Continent’s political unity and be in harmony

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with it. The idea that the peoples might protest struck his mind as absurd: in

the ﬁ rst place, what was good enough for the French must be suitable for

everyone, for – as he wrote to Eugène – ‘There is very little difference

between one people and another.’ In any case, if particular differences

existed, they must be removed. When he reproached Louis for his behav-

iour, on 20 May 1810, and remarked that if only he had been loyal it would

have meant adding north-western Germany and Hamburg to his Dutch

kingdom, Napoleon added: ‘This would have formed a nucleus of peoples

to banish the German spirit, which is the foremost aim of my policy.’ In the

end, any objection was seen as rebellion against his despotic power. ‘I think

it is ridiculous for you to tell me that the people of Westphalia do not agree,’

he informed Jérôme. ‘If you listen to what the people think, you won’t do

anything at all. If the people refuse what makes for their own welfare they

are guilty of anarchism, and the ﬁ rst duty of the prince is to punish them.’

The expansion of French institutions was one of the expressions of his love

of power.

But the supreme goal of his endeavours never made him lose sight of the

need for taking circumstances into account. His mania for assimilation and

unity has been much criticised; yet this is what he wrote in the margin of a

letter dated 9 September 1807:

What interest can France have in her forms of administration being adopted

in Holland? What is there in common between French interests and the

imposition of a uniﬁ ed system in Holland and a hundred and one other

things connected with the various views that may be held about the

administration of the country?

In the vassal and allied states he did in fact put up with more than one

alteration to his plans, and even more than one pruning of his codes; but in

the countries where he was completely master – particularly in the kingdom

of Italy – his system reached a perfection even greater than in the French

Empire. On the other hand continual warfare, the need for dealing tactfully

with sovereign allies, the constant changes of frontier, the fragmentation

which was allowed to continue in Italy and Germany, all these worked

against the complete spread of his system, which remained very unequally

applied. For example, the grand duchy of Berg, although governed by the

emperor after Murat’s departure, was less thoroughly transformed than

Jérôme’s kingdom. When one considers how short was the period of

Napoleon’s ascendancy, the results achieved were really tremendous; but

they nevertheless remained uneven.

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But there were even worse hindrances from a social point of view, for

opportunism was often in conﬂ ict with the ‘system’. Being in need of

money and wishing to provide for the foreign territories, Napoleon saw in

the property of the dispossessed monarchs, émigrés and clergy a ready

source of help. Now tithes and feudal dues formed a substantial part of this

wealth: should they be given up? Then he needed a government and admin-

istrative staff to raise taxes and conscripts; and for this he had to fall back not

only on the middle classes but on the aristocracy, because outside France the

former were insufﬁ cient. Moreover, how was he to draw upon the kings’

courts without the help of the nobility? Once this was admitted, the agrarian

reforms could not take the radical shape that would have been needed to

win over the peasants to the Revolution, as they had in France. Besides,

Napoleon was everywhere getting rid of the Jacobins who would have

warmly approved of this course; in France, he was courting the old nobility

and looking for a dynastic alliance; there the Revolution was an accom-

plished fact for which he could decline responsibility; but in the Grand

Empire, the responsibility was his, and this contradiction crept into the very

heart of the system. In the end, the peasants were sacriﬁ ced: the personal

dues and sometimes even the tithes were declared redeemable, and this

constituted a stumbling-block both for French inﬂ uence and for the

Napoleonic reforms.

But it is not enough to analyse the components of Napoleon’s European

work and direct attention to his imaginative picture of a uniﬁ ed Europe.

More than this is needed in order to set the part he played in historical

perspective, for the Continental System was never fully formed, and however

inspired it may appear as a human dream, it proved to have no lasting legacy

in the long run.

On the other hand the creative side of his work comes out in what he

managed to infuse of the spirit of the Revolution into his conquered territo-

ries. At the head of the Grande Armée for which the Revolution had prepared

the way, Napoleon destroyed the ancien régime which the popular uprising of

1789 had uprooted in France, replacing it by an organisation which the

middle classes helped him to work out more fully under the Consulate.

Seeing that some at least of his principles – such as equality before the law

and a secular state – agreed with those of the Freemasons, it is not surprising

that everywhere in the lodges a large number of its members made common

cause with the upholders of the French regime, to such an extent that several

of his opponents spoke with horror of his Masonic Empire.

To remain a soldier of the Revolution was inconsistent with the plan of

reviving a legitimate dynasty and a hierarchical corporative society. But his

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intellectual make-up, his career and the needs of his policy of conquest

would not allow him to escape from the clutches of an evolution that was

working towards the downfall of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle

classes. Whatever he might say, his genius hastened on its course. One of the

permanent features of his work was that wherever his arms were trium-

phant, his progress was marked as it were by the emancipating forces like a

night of 4 August.

THE MEDITERRANEAN COUNTRIES:

ITALY, THE ILLYRIAN PROVINCES AND CATALONIA

Italy was the country where the system left its deepest mark, which is not

surprising, seeing that the intervention of the revolutionaries and Bonaparte

himself had opened the way. Piedmont, Liguria and Parma were entirely

assimilated to France by annexation. The kingdom of Italy was increased

by the addition of Venetia and Guastalla in the Marches in 1808, and the

Trentino in 1810. He could use it as a ﬁ eld for experiment, not having to

take account – as in France – of the traditions of monarchy and the memo-

ries of the Revolution. He paid no attention to the constitutional statute of

1805. When the Corps Législatif took upon itself to discuss and even reject

certain of his plans, he wrote to Eugène: ‘I shall not convene it any more,’

and proceeded to legislate by decree. He continued methodically with

centralisation. As from 1806 justice was organised on the French model.

Public works and education, hitherto left to the local authorities, were now

taken over by the state; so was the Public Health Department, and then in

1807 public assistance.

Having extended his powers, Napoleon proceeded to increase the number

of ofﬁ cials. In 1805 he had created a general superintendent of police; the

Bridges and Highways Department was set up in 1806; the magistrates in

charge of dykes and canals were put under the authority of the préfecture

councils. Central and departmental councils were established for public

health, a superintendent and departmental committees for assistance, and a

managing body for education under the Ministry of the Interior. Lycées were

opened, and at Milan a girls’ college, which had no equivalent in France; a

school for the Highways Department, a veterinary school, a music conserva-

toire and three academies for the ﬁ ne arts; and the theatres were put under

the control of a general director. In 1806 one of the Caffarelli brothers

* [In 1789, when the National Assembly abolished feudal privileges.]

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replaced Pino at the head of the army, which steadily improved and added

to its effective strength. Prima, the minister for ﬁ nance, met his growing

commitments by a special war tax, imposed in 1806 and then continued as

a personal tax, by extending indirect taxation, and by introducing registra-

tion. He was a remarkable administrator, both assiduous and inventive; but

his zeal aroused formidable hatred, and he lost his life in a riot in 1814. The

kingdom was systematically encircled by a ring of customs barriers and put

closely under the control of the French economy by the opening of the

Alpine roads; but it reaped certain advantages from some other public works.

The statute of 1805 envisaged the introduction of the Civil Code on

1 January 1806, but it had ﬁ rst to be translated and printed; and in spite of

work at high pressure, the date for the adoption of the code in civil proce-

dure had to be postponed till 1 April. The creation of facilities for mortgages

and the organisation of civil status then followed in due course. This was in

fact no more than a crowning of the work of the Republic, which had abol-

ished privilege and the feudal system. The effort of the code was nonetheless

sensational because it set up civil status, introduced divorce and made revo-

lutionary changes in the customary habits of succession. Nor were the

clergy at all pleased with the reforms that had followed the Concordat. On

8 June 1805 the parishes had been reduced in number, the establishments

of the seminaries strictly limited and the convents suppressed, except for a

few in which they grouped those religious who wished to continue a

monastic life; and in 1807 the brotherhoods were also dissolved. Yet the

secular clergy were more favourably treated than in the Empire, for the bish-

oprics were given an endowment in land or state funds, and so were the

chapters and seminaries; and the clergy’s property had not been national-

ised. Moreover, by the terms of the Concordat the priests came under the

authority of Napoleon, and on the whole they showed themselves compliant.

The imperial catechism was imposed on them in 1807, and the pulpit used

to preach submission to the payment of taxes and to conscription. It proved

much more difﬁ cult to win over the landed aristocracy, though the emperor

saw this as an essential. A few nobles succumbed to the allurements of

Eugène’s luxurious court, or accepted sinecures and gifts because they were

in need; but the majority boycotted all public ofﬁ ce, and their sons could

not be attracted into either the lycées or the armed forces. Only the middle

classes – including the ofﬁ cials who came from them – showed a certain

attachment to the regime. The ‘Royal Italian Freemasons’, which was organ-

ised on uniform lines by the Grand Orient of Milan, played an important

part in bringing all Napoleon’s supporters together under the leadership

of its high ofﬁ cials. As in France, Napoleon made the maximum use of

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decorations, giving the kingdom its own particular award – the Ordre de la

Couronne de Fer. But he attached supreme importance to the guards of

honour which became one of the most characteristic institutions of the

country, though he had hesitated to organise them in the Empire.

He needed ofﬁ cers, and was intent upon choosing them from among the

aristocracy and the middle classes, to some extent as hostages, but still more

because he considered the army to be a school for developing the civic and

dynastic feeling that had so far been completely unknown among Italians.

The coronation gave an opportunity for mounting some guards of honour;

then on 20 June 1805 a decree ordered the formation of four companies of

cavalry mounted for service at the palace. They were to be recruited on a

voluntary basis from the midst of the families whose heads ﬁ gured among

the electoral colleges or the most heavily taxed citizens. As the right of

ﬁ nding a substitute was suspended in those départements that had not

furnished contingents for guards of honour, the voluntary basis was purely

nominal. The relatives had to pay a sum of twelve hundred lire , and the young

man could become a lieutenant at the end of two years. For the lower middle

classes, a dozen companies of light-armed troops were formed, who paid

only two hundred lire and provided the non-commissioned ofﬁ cers. But

recruitment for the guards proved not at all easy: although the obligation

had been imposed in 1810, by 1811 there were only 367 of the required

551. They saw service for the ﬁ rst time in Russia. The light-armed troops

were easier to ﬁ nd. Though Napoleon’s expectations were not completely

realised, he cannot be said to have completely failed. The inﬂ uence of

conscription could not but penetrate down to the people, although they had

the least to congratulate themselves upon in the imperial regime. Neither

the abolition of feudalism nor the sale of the national lands seems to have

changed the condition of the peasants, at any rate in the plains, which

continued to be a land of large properties cultivated by smallholders and day

labourers in wretched conditions. For the small proprietors, the weight of

taxation must have made up for the disappearance of the tithe and the dues

which the Republic had admittedly abolished without compensation. A

comparison between the land registers of ﬁ fteen communes in the plains of

Bologna drawn up respectively in 1789, 1804 and 1835, shows that the

property belonging to the nobles had been reduced from eighty to sixty-

seven per cent, and then to ﬁ fty-one per cent, while the property in bour-

geois possession rose between these same dates from seventeen to thirty per

cent, and then to forty-eight per cent. The ﬁ gures show, however, that the

large landed estates had held their ground; they still accounted for 72.01 per

cent of the total area in 1835, as compared with 72.77 per cent in 1789.

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At the other end of Italy, the French impress on the kingdom of Naples

was also very marked. Reforms began as soon as Joseph came to the throne,

and were carried out by a group of Frenchmen and Italians whom he had

selected – Saliceti, Miot, Dumas, the son of Roederer and the lawyer

Ricciardi. They ﬁ rst reorganised the ministries, creating two new ones, a

Ministry of the Interior and a Secretary of State; then there was the Conseil

d’État and the Sommaria, or Court of Accounts. The provinces continued as

such, but were divided into districts, while the parishes were grouped into

municipal administrative bodies, on the pattern of the municipalities in the

French constitution of Year III. The préfet and sous-préfet crop up again, but

under different names, being now styled intendant and sous-intendant , and the

Conseil de Préfecture the Conseil d’Intendance . The province and the district both had

their councils, and the communal group came under a décurionat . But no

electoral colleges were set up: the king nominated the décurions put forward

by the sous-intendants and chose the members of councils from among the

candidates proposed by the décurions . The lawcourts and police were remod-

elled on the French pattern, and no time was lost in setting up an armed

police force. The minister of ﬁ nance was faced with a particularly tough

task. He replaced the countless taxes of the ancien régime by a land tax and a

tax on industry. Privileges were all abolished. The state resumed control of

indirect taxation, which had been farmed out. Steps were taken to liquidate

the debt by means of IOUs or cédules recorded in the Great Book of the

Public Debt; and as these changed hands at a loss, they were quickly extin-

guished by redemption at the market price. By 1808 the debt had been

reduced from one hundred million ducats to ﬁ fty-nine million. An impor-

tant part of the revenue came from the royal domain, which took over the

funds of the Jesuits, vacant bishoprics and a good many convents that had

been closed. This summary can give only a faint idea of the enormous task

of unifying, simplifying and cleaning up the administration undertaken

throughout the country by the new order. The suppression of sinecures and

corruption, the separation of justice from administration, the creation of

public accountancy, the formation of a disciplined body of ofﬁ cials with a

respect for the law – all these were much more of a novelty than in Piedmont

or Lombardy.

The abolition of the feudal system – here much more oppressive than in

Northern Italy – was decreed as from 2 August 1806. The barons kept their

titles and their own land; but they lost their right to administer justice, and

became subject to the common law, both for their lands and in their personal

status. The question of feudal rights and dues was settled according to the

principles laid down by the Constituent Assembly. Personal rights, the