12

Lawgiver

‘I must give the people their full rights in religion. Philosophers will laugh, but the nation will bless me.’

Napoleon to Chaptal

‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles . . . What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.’

Napoleon on St Helena

Napoleon had no intention of resting on his laurels after Marengo. With his political capital rising, he decided on a gamble which, if it paid off, would significantly deepen his domestic support. ‘The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign’, wrote Jean Chaptal, ‘was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.’¹ Napoleon wanted to ensure that no independent Church would provide a focus of opposition to his rule, and the simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope.

Anti-clericalism had been a driving force during the French Revolution, which had stripped the Catholic Church of its wealth, expelled and in many cases murdered its priests, and desecrated its altars. Yet Napoleon sensed that many among his natural supporters – conservative, rural, hard-working skilled labourers, artisans and smallholders – had not abjured the faith of their fathers and yearned for a settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Consulate they were growing to admire. Any settlement, however, would have to ensure that those who had acquired biens nationaux previously owned by the Church (known as acquéreurs) should be allowed to retain their property, and there could be no return to the old days when the peasantry were forced to pay tithes to the clergy.

Napoleon had for some time respected the Pope’s ability to organize uprisings in Italy, telling the Directory in October 1796 that ‘it was a great mistake to quarrel with that Power’.² In his post-coital meeting with the Milanese priesthood on 5 June, 1800, he had promised ‘to remove all obstacles in the way of a complete reconciliation between France and the head of the Church’. Pius VI had died the previous August, aged eighty-one. The new Pope, Pius VII, was at heart a simple and holy monk whose views on social questions were not thought to be overtly hostile to the French Revolution.³ Napoleon knew that any negotiations would be delicate and occasionally hard fought, but the prize was great: the adherence of Catholic France to the Napoleonic cause. A papal agreement would remove one of the central grievances of the remaining rebels in the Vendée and might improve relations with Catholics in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the Rhineland too.

The population of France was about 28 million, only one-fifth of whom dwelt in urban areas of over 2,000 people; most of the rest lived in 36,000 rural communes of a few hundred residents.⁴ Napoleon appreciated how invaluable it would be if the person who played an important social role as the centre of information in those communities, who was often the most educated person and who read out government decrees, was also on the national payroll. ‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’⁵ His treaty with the Papacy has been accurately described as attempting ‘to enlist the parish clergy as Napoleon’s “moral prefects”’.⁶

As we have seen, Napoleon himself was at best sceptical about Christianity.⁷ ‘Did Jesus ever exist,’ he asked his secretary on St Helena, Gaspard Gourgaud, ‘or did he not? I think that no contemporary historian has ever mentioned him.’⁸ (He was clearly unfamiliar with Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews which does indeed mention Jesus.) He nonetheless enjoyed theological discussions and told his last doctor, Antommarchi, ‘Wishing to be an atheist does not make you one.’⁹ ‘Although Bonaparte was not devout,’ Chaptal reported, mirroring these ambiguities, ‘he did believe in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul. He always spoke about religion with respect.’¹⁰ When the Sermon on the Mount was read to him on St Helena, he told Bertrand: ‘Jesus should have performed his miracles not in remote parts of Syria but in a city like Rome, in front of the whole population.’¹¹ On another occasion he said, ‘Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the sun – the source of all life – the real god of the earth.’¹² On yet another he said: ‘I like the Muslim religion best; it has fewer incredible things in it than ours.’¹³ On that score he dictated a note logistically disproving the biblical claim that Moses could have quenched 2 million Israelites’ thirst by striking a rock.¹⁴ A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’¹⁵

Despite his own attitudes to the substance of the Christian faith, he was in no doubt about its social utility. ‘In religion,’ Napoleon told Roederer, one of the few state councillors allowed into the secret of the negotiations, ‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor . . . Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’¹⁶ He had already shown in Egypt how flexible he was in using religion for political ends; as he once remarked to Roederer: ‘If I ruled a people of Jews, I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon!’¹⁷ This essentially pragmatic view of religion was common among Enlightenment thinkers and writers. Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’¹⁸ ‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’¹⁹ ‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’²⁰

In June 1800, as soon as he returned to Paris from Milan, Napoleon opened negotiations with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Hercules Consalvi, offering to restore full public worship in France if all French bishops resigned their sees and allowed Napoleon to select new ones who would then be ‘nominated’ by the Pope.²¹ (Since 1790 French bishops had been split between the Orthodox, who recognized only the authority of the Pope, and the Constitutionalists, who had taken an oath of obedience to the government.) The negotiations, conducted by Joseph Bonaparte and the former Vendéen leader Étienne-Alexandre Bernier on the French side, and Consalvi, the papal legate Cardinal Giovanni Caprara and the Pope’s theological advisor Charles Caselli on the Vatican’s, were conducted in secret, without informing even the Conseil d’État. A total of 1,279 documents were sent back and forth over the course of a year, and there were no fewer than ten draft agreements. ‘One should render unto God that which is God’s,’ Napoleon was later to say, ‘but the Pope is not God.’²² Cardinal Consalvi visited the Tuileries in April 1802 and Napoleon had the rooms perfumed before his arrival. When the chemist Fourcroy commented on the smell, Napoleon teased him: ‘It’s a saintly odour which is going to purify your old sins.’²³

As the negotiations reached their climax in early July 1801, Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand: ‘I had a second blister on my arm yesterday. It is a fitting moment to come to terms with the priests when one is laid up ill.’²⁴ Although the Concordat was officially signed in July, it wasn’t ratified and published until nine months later, once Napoleon had tried to calm the deep opposition to it in the army and legislature. ‘The Government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens,’ the Concordat began. ‘His Holiness, in like manner, acknowledges that this same religion has derived, and is likely to derive, the greatest splendour from the establishment of the Catholic worship in France, and from its being openly professed by the consuls of the Republic.’²⁵ In the course of the next seventeen articles it stated that the Catholic faith ‘shall be freely exercised in France . . . conformable to the regulations . . . which the Government shall judge necessary for the public tranquillity’.

There were to be new dioceses and parishes. Ten archbishops (each on a 15,000-franc annual salary) and fifty bishops (10,000 francs each) would be appointed by Napoleon and the Pope together; bishops would swear to do nothing to ‘disturb the public tranquillity’ and would communicate all information about those who did to the government; all divine services would include a prayer for the Republic and the consuls; although the bishops would appoint the parish priests, they couldn’t appoint anyone unacceptable to the government. The Concordat cemented the land transfers of the Revolution; all former Church property belonged to the acquéreurs ‘for ever’.

Napoleon made a number of concessions, none too onerous. The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rest; the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1806; children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names; salaries were paid to all clergy; orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit.²⁶ Meanwhile, the Church would sing Te Deums for Napoleon’s victories, read his proclamations from its pulpits and depict conscription as a patriotic duty. On all the major points of contention, Napoleon got what he wanted. With the end of the schism, no fewer than 10,000 Constitutional priests returned to the bosom of the Roman Church and one of the deepest wounds of the Revolution was healed.²⁷ Any trust Pius might have had in Napoleon’s good faith was however undermined on April 8, 1802, when, without prior consultation, a whole new raft of restrictions and regulations, known as the Organic Articles, was appended to the Concordat, which protected the rights of France’s 700,000 Protestants and 55,000 Jews.*

Although it was generally welcomed in France, especially in conservative, rural France, the Concordat was deeply unpopular in the army, the Conseil and the Tribunate – where there were still plenty of former revolutionaries and ex-Jacobins. It was formally proclaimed with huge pomp at a Te Deum Mass at Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1802, when the tenor bells rang out for the first time in a decade and Napoleon was received by the recently nominated archbishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste de Belloy-Morangle. Senior state officials were ordered to arrive with suitable grandeur, but it was noticed that some of their coaches were actually hackney-carriages with their numbers painted over.²⁸ Generals scraped their spurs and sabres on the floor of the cathedral, refused to give up seats to the clergy and talked during the ceremony, making plain the anger of the very anti-clerical army over the Concordat. Augereau requested permission to be absent, which Napoleon refused. Moreau simply ignored the order and smoked a cigar ostentatiously on the Tuileries terrace. When General Antoine-Guillaume Delmas was heard to remark, ‘Quelle capucinade [what banal moralizing], the only thing missing are the one hundred thousand men who died to get rid of all this!’ Napoleon exiled him 50 miles from Paris.²⁹

The Concordat won Napoleon the soubriquet ‘Restorer of Religion’ from the clergy, though few clerics went as far as the archbishop of Besançon, who described him as ‘like God himself’.³⁰ Within a month the Tribunate had approved it by seventy-eight votes to seven. In the hamlets and small towns across France it had its intended effect. ‘Children listen with more docility to the voice of their parents, youth is more submissive to the authority of the magistrate, and the conscription is now effected in places where its very name used to arouse resistance,’ Napoleon told the legislature in 1803, illustrating that he primarily saw religious reconciliation in terms of propaganda and public discipline.³¹ The Concordat remained the basis for relations between France and the Papacy for a century. A recent study of Rouen during the Consulate concluded that Napoleon’s most popular measures to have been the Concordat, the defeat of brigandage and the guaranteeing of the land-ownership rights of the acquéreurs, in that order.³²

After the Concordat was finally adopted by the Legislative Body, Lucien gave a reception for his brother during which Napoleon sought out the Catholic philosopher and writer François-Réne de Chateaubriand, author of the successful new book Génie du christianisme, an emotional celebration of Catholicism. ‘Rank after rank opened up,’ Chateaubriand recalled in his memoirs,

each person hoping the Consul would stop at him . . . I was then left standing by myself, for the crowd drew back and soon gathered together to form a circle around the two of us. Bonaparte addressed me with simplicity, without paying me any compliments, without any idle questions, without any preamble, he spoke to me straight away about Egypt and the Arabs, as if I had always been a close friend of his and we were simply continuing a conversation we had already begun.³³

It was beguiling, and Chateaubriand accepted a diplomatic post to the Vatican soon afterwards. Later his admiration faded: in 1804 he resigned from the diplomatic service and in July 1807 he likened Napoleon to Nero, for which he was banished from Paris.

 • • •

At the end of January 1801, Napoleon inaugurated an ambitious project of legal reform whose consequences would outlast even the Concordat. The Ancien Régime had no fewer than 366 local codes in force, and southern France observed a fundamentally different set of legal principles, based on Roman law, rather than customary law as in the north.³⁴ Napoleon instinctively understood that if France was to function efficiently in the modern world, she needed a standardized system of law and justice, uniform weights and measures, a fully functioning internal market and a centralized education system, one that would allow talented adolescents from all backgrounds to enter careers according to merit rather than birth.

His first and most important task was to unify France’s forty-two legal codes into a single system. For this monumental undertaking Napoleon had an invaluable ally in Cambacérès, who had been the secretary of the committee which had been given the task of overhauling the civil law code back in 1792 and was the author of the Projet de Code Civil (1796). ‘If the whole Code were to be mislaid,’ Napoleon once quipped, ‘it could be found in Cambacérès’ head.’³⁵ To assist the Second Consul in revisiting this long-overdue reform, a commission was formed of the country’s most distinguished jurists and politicians, including Lebrun, François Tronchet, Félix Bigot de Préameneu and Jean-Étienne Portalis. Napoleon chaired no fewer than 55 of its 107 plenary sessions, frequently intervening on matters of particular interest such as divorce, adoption and the rights of foreigners.³⁶ Napoleon’s constant refrain on questions of ‘the general interest’ and civil justice were: ‘Is this fair? Is this useful?’³⁷ Some meetings started at noon and went on long into the night. Napoleon involved himself intimately in the entire lengthy and elaborate process of getting the new laws onto the statute books, from the initial debates in the Conseil, the drafting process, the critiques and attempted amendments of various interested parties, through the special committees, the subsequent assaults by special interest groups and lobbyists, and then the parliamentary legislative procedures. Nor was ratification a foregone conclusion: in December 1801 the preliminary bill was rejected in the Legislative Body by 142 votes to 139 and fared similarly in the Tribunate. If Napoleon hadn’t shown his resolute personal support, it could never have become law. Although Cambacérès did the groundwork, it deserved to be called the Code Napoléon because it was the product of the rationalizing universalism of the Enlightenment that Napoleon embraced.

Essentially a compromise between Roman and common law, the Code Napoléon consisted of a reasoned and harmonious body of laws that were to be the same across all territories administered by France, for the first time since the Emperor Justinian. The rights and duties of the government and its citizens were codified in 2,281 articles covering 493 pages in prose so clear that Stendhal said he made it his daily reading.³⁸ The new code helped cement national unity, not least because it was based on the principles of freedom of person and contract. It confirmed the end of ancient class privileges, and (with the exception of primary education) of ecclesiastical control over any aspect of French civil society.³⁹ Above all, it offered stability after the chaos of the Revolution.

The Code Napoléon simplified the 14,000 decrees and laws that had been passed by the various revolutionary governments since 1789, and the 42 different regional codes that were in force, into a single unified body of law applicable to all citizens, laying down general principles and offering wide parameters for judges to work within. (‘One should not overburden oneself with over-detailed laws,’ Napoleon told the Conseil. ‘Law must do nothing but impose a general principle. It would be vain if one were to try to foresee every possible situation; experience would prove that much has been omitted.’⁴⁰) It guaranteed the equality of all Frenchmen in the eyes of the law, freedom of person from arbitrary arrest, the sanctity of legal contracts freely entered into, and allowed no recognition of privileges of birth. Reflecting the Organic Articles, it established total religious toleration (including for atheists), separating Church and state. It allowed all adult men to engage in any occupation and to own property. Laws had to be duly promulgated and officially published, and could not apply retrospectively. Judges were of course required to interpret the law in individual cases but were not allowed to make pronouncements on principles, so that specific cases could not set precedents, as under Anglo-Saxon common law. Fearing the disintegration of the family as the basic social institution, the framers of the Code gave the paterfamilias almost total power, including over the property of his wife. Under Article 148 the father’s permission was required for the marriage of sons up to the age of twenty-five and daughters to twenty-one, and the marriage age was raised to fifteen for women, eighteen for men. Fathers also had the right to have their children imprisoned for disobedience for a month in the case of under-sixteens, and for six months for those between sixteen and twenty-one.

The major criticisms levelled at the Code over the past two centuries have been that it was socially conservative, too supportive of the middle classes, of the individual and of the paterfamilias, that it made wives too dependent on their husbands, and that its inheritance provisions were damaging for an agrarian economy. It was certainly true that the Code was deeply sexist by twenty-first century standards, with a strong patriarchal bias. Article 213 of the Civil Code stated: ‘A husband owes protection to his wife, a wife obedience to her husband.’⁴¹ Grounds for divorce were restricted to adultery (and then only if the husband introduced a permanent mistress into the family household), conviction of a serious crime, and grave insults or cruelty, but it could also be obtained by mutual agreement so long as the grounds were kept private.⁴² A wife could be imprisoned for two years for adultery, while a man would only be fined. A husband would not be prosecuted if he murdered his wife caught in flagrante. The Code protected married and single men from having to support an illegitimate child, or even being identified as the father.⁴³ It also prevented women from making legal contracts, taking part in lawsuits, serving as a witness in court or to births, deaths or marriages. Wives could not sell produce in markets without their husbands’ permission, and were forbidden to give, sell or mortgage property without their husbands’ written consent.⁴⁴ Unmarried women could not be legal guardians or witness wills. In all this, the Code reflects Napoleon’s profound sexism: ‘Women should not be looked upon as equals of men,’ he said. ‘They are, in fact, only machines for making babies.’⁴⁵

The Code also dealt a death blow to primogeniture. Property of up to 25 per cent of the total could be bequeathed away from the family, but the rest had to be divided equally among all sons on the death of their father, with no inheritance rights allowed for illegitimate children.⁴⁶* It displayed a powerful bias towards employers too, whose word was accepted in all points of law.⁴⁷ On December 1, 1802 a law was passed requiring every worker to keep a livret (passbook), which had to be handed over to the employer at the start of the period of employment and signed by them at the end, without which the worker was unemployable and liable to six months’ imprisonment.⁴⁸* Napoleon didn’t invent the tough anti-strike and anti-union legislation in the Code, which had been in place since the Le Chapelier Law of 1791 and wasn’t repealed until 1884. He did put it into effect, however. Building workers who went on strike in 1806 were arrested in their beds.⁴⁹*

The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was only one of several legal reforms promulgated by Napoleon, though undoubtedly the most important. By 1810 it had been joined by the Code of Civil Procedure, the Commercial Code, the Code on Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code. (In the last of these the provisions were extremely tough, but didn’t display the viciousness of Britain’s penal code of the time, under which children could be transported to Australia and adults hanged for the theft of goods worth more than a shilling.) It was this body of law together that came to be known as the Code Napoléon. The Code was extended to almost all parts of the French Empire in March 1804. It was imposed on those parts of Spain that were under martial law in 1808 and on Holland after its annexation in 1810. ‘The Romans gave their laws to their allies,’ Napoleon told his brother Louis, ‘why should France not have its laws adopted in Holland?’⁵⁰ In some places, such as Naples, it only ever received lip-service. In others, however, it was so popular that it was retained even after Napoleon’s fall.⁵¹ It survived in the Prussian Rhineland until 1900, and Belgium, Luxembourg, Mauritius and Monaco, as well as France, still operate it today. Aspects of it remain in a quarter of the world’s legal systems as far removed from the mother country as Japan, Egypt, Quebec and Louisiana.⁵²

 • • •

Although the Code Napoléon standardized the laws, it would take equally radical reforms to standardize the other aspects of French life that Napoleon wished to rationalize. In the Corbières region of the Languedoc, for example – whose 129 parishes spoke Occitan rather than French, except for three southern villages that spoke Catalan – the administrative, judicial, policing and taxation duties were undertaken by authorities in four cities, namely Carcassonne, Narbonne, Limoux and Perpignan, yet there was no consistency as to which city administered which commune. There were no fewer than ten different volumes for which the term setier (usually about 85 litres) could be used, and fifty different terms to measure area, one of which – the sétérée – differed depending on whether it applied to lowland or highland areas.⁵³ Napoleon didn’t personally admire the metric system that Laplace invented, saying, ‘I can understand the twelfth part of an inch, but not the thousandth part of a metre,’ but he nonetheless forced it through after 1801 in the interests of commercial consistency.⁵⁴ He also established a standardized coinage: copper coins of two, three and five centimes; silver coins of one-quarter, one-half and three-quarters of a franc, and of one, two and five francs, and gold coins of ten, twenty and forty francs. The silver one-franc piece was to weigh five grams, and quickly became western Europe’s standard unit of currency. Its value and metallic composition remained constant until 1926.

Out of the population of 28 million, 6 million were completely ignorant of the French tongue and another 6 million could only just about make themselves understood in it. Flemish was spoken in the north-east, German in Lorraine, Breton in Brittany, and Basque, Catalan, Italian, Celtic and Languedoc patois elsewhere.⁵⁵ Although Napoleon didn’t have particularly good French himself he knew from personal experience how important it was to speak the language in order to get on.⁵⁶ His educational reforms made French the only permitted language of instruction, as it became for all official documents.

Napoleon was conservative about primary education, putting it back, as we have seen, in the hands of the clergy, but in secondary education, which began at age eleven, he was revolutionary. In May 1802 he passed a law setting up forty-five lycées (state secondary schools) whose aim was to produce future soldiers, administrators and technicians. The lycée was his answer to the question of how to create a patriotic, loyal generation of future leaders.⁵⁷ All eligible French children were now taught Greek, Latin, rhetoric, logic, ethics, mathematics and physics, and also some of the other sciences and modern languages. Here religion was kept to a minimum: he did not want a secondary system dominated by the Church as that of the Ancien Régime had been. Discipline was strict, school uniforms of blue jackets and trousers with round hats were worn until fourteen, and pupils were grouped into companies with one sergeant and four corporals commanded by the best student, who was called the sergeant-major.

Lycées offered 6,400 full-fees scholarships for what were called ‘national students’, but were also open to others who passed exams to enter, and to those whose parents paid fees.⁵⁸ Students followed a mandatory programme of courses, instead of the old system where they could choose. The departmental prefects and presidents of the criminal and appeal courts oversaw the administration of these new schools, and there was a professional inspectorate.⁵⁹ By 1813 French secondary schools were the best in Europe and some of Napoleon’s original lycées, such as Condorcet, Charlemagne, Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV, are still among the best schools in France two centuries later. The concept was exported far beyond France; it served as a model in Spain and Holland, which accepted French educational ideas even as they denounced French occupation.⁶⁰

In an unscripted speech to the Conseil in 1806, which he made only because his education minister, Antoine Fourcroy, hadn’t brought his report to the meeting, Napoleon was almost poetic about how education was

the most important of all the institutions, since everything depends upon it, the present and the future. It is essential that the morals and political ideas of the generation which is now growing up should no longer be dependent on the news of the day or the circumstances of the moment . . . Men already differ enough in their inclinations, their characters and everything that education does not give and cannot reform . . . Let us have a body of doctrine that doesn’t vary and a body of teachers that doesn’t die.⁶¹

Napoleon planned to institute lycées throughout France. Overall, his educational reforms were, like his architectural plans for Paris, admirable, but cut off long before they could reach fruition. On March 17, 1808 Napoleon took his reorganization a stage further when he promulgated a decree calling for the creation of the Imperial University, which would oversee all education in France. All teachers were to be members of one of its five faculties (Theology, Law, Medicine, Literature, and Maths & Physics). He designed a military-style hierarchical structure, with a strong-willed chancellor in Louis Fontanes, the president of the Legislative Body between 1804 and 1810, and below him a Council of Thirty who controlled all French secondary schools and the universities.⁶² The Sorbonne had been closed by the Revolution, but in 1808 Napoleon resuscitated it.

Napoleon’s profound sexism emerged in his education provisions as elsewhere. ‘Public education almost always makes bad women flighty, coquettish and unstable,’ he told the Conseil in March 1806. ‘Being educated together, which is so good for men, especially for teaching them to help each other and preparing them by comradeship for the battle of life, is a school of corruption for women. Men are made for the full glare of life. Women are made for the seclusion of family life and to live at home.’⁶³ As with the Code Napoléon, the lack of girls’ formal education needs to be seen here too in the context of his time; at the beginning of the nineteenth century there were very few girls’ schools in England or America, and none run by the state.

 • • •

The greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État, which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine.⁶⁴ ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’ Napoleon gave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.⁶⁵ He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,

He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’⁶⁶

The Conseil discussed an extraordinary range of issues. On the single day of June 17, 1802, to take an example at random, its agenda covered the examination of surgeons; the organization of chemists; the appointment of sub-prefects to importantarrondissements; the state of the harvest; Maltese refugees; a draft law concerning the National Guard; responsibility for roadworks; the government of the commissariat; pawnbroking; larger communes’ accounts; gamekeepers; the chambers of commerce; the law allowing émigrés right of return to specific regions; electoral law; bridge-building in the Ardèche; merging two Corsican departments into one; and demarcating those on the left bank of the Rhine.⁶⁷

Some Conseil meetings lasted eight to ten hours, and Chaptal recalled that it was always Napoleon ‘who expended the most in terms of words and mental strain. After these meetings, he would convene others on different matters, and never was his mind seen to flag.’⁶⁸ When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’⁶⁹ (After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’⁷⁰) Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness – whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall – to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision. ‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’⁷¹ He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’⁷²

The Conseil was split into sections to cover various areas of government – army, navy, finance, justice, home affairs, police and provinces. ‘The long horseshoe-shaped table with its array of men of such varied origins and opinions,’ Comte Molé recalled, ‘was simply transformed when the organizing genius appeared on a dais at the end of the horseshoe.’⁷³ Another remembered how ‘His seat – a mahogany chair with green morocco seat and arms – was little more than an office chair, and was raised one step above the floor.’⁷⁴ It took a battering, as during the discussions Napoleon would display some of the classic signs of nervous energy:

In the middle of a debate, we would see him with a knife or scraper in his hand, carving at the arms of his chair and gouging out deep cuts. We were constantly busy bringing replacement parts for this chair that we were sure he would be cutting to pieces again tomorrow. To vary the pleasures of this kind, he would seize a quill pen and cover each sheet of paper in front of him with wide bars of ink. Once they were well blackened, he crumpled them up in his hands and threw them to the ground.⁷⁵

Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye. They formulated the proposed laws that the Conseil had agreed upon. As he grew older, if he wanted a particular auditeur to report to the Conseil he would use a lorgnette to search the window ledges on which they sat. Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion that a seat in the Senate.

Sometimes Napoleon would announce in advance that he was going to attend a session, at others the councillors didn’t know he was coming until they heard the drumroll on the Tuileries staircase. He would take his seat, ask searching questions, fall into reveries, go off on monologues. ‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’⁷⁶ A proposed decree would be read out, then the specialist committee’s report on it, and then Napoleon urged acknowledged experts on the subject to speak. The tone was matter-of-fact, and attempts at oratorical grandstanding tended only to inspire derision.

 • • •

Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’⁷⁷ Although it is too early to say whether the institutions Napoleon put in place will last as long as Caesar’s, he clearly put down what he called ‘some masses of granite as anchors in the soul of France’.