The War of Wars (55 page)

Fox’s own view of Napoleon, while at one stage almost treasonable, had changed drastically after meeting the man of power during the peace. At first he was adulatory and fascinated, his secretary describing Napoleon as ‘a small and by no means commanding figure, dressed plainly, though richly, in the embroidered consular coat – without powder in his hair, [he] looked at the first view like a private gentleman, indifferent as to dress and devoid of all haughtiness.’

Napoleon spoke to Fox:

Ah! Mr Fox! I have heard with pleasure of your arrival. I have desired much to see you. I have long admired in you the orator and friend of this country, who, in constantly raising his voice for peace, consulted that country’s best interests, those of Europe and of the human race. The two great nations of Europe require peace; they have nothing to fear; they ought to understand and value one another. In you, Mr Fox, I see with much satisfaction, that great statesman who recommended peace because there was no just object for war; who saw Europe desolated to no purpose and who struggled for its relief.

Fox observed of Napoleon that he was ‘easy and desirous to please without effort . . . In one particular only he noticed the manner of a man who acts as a superior, which was that he sometimes put questions and did not wait for the answers before he proposes other questions. It has been observed that he smiles with his mouth but that his eyes never have a corresponding expression.’ But he was later appalled when Bonaparte grimly accused the war secretary, William Windham, and Pitt.

Bonaparte went on saying he would have forgiven open enemies in the cabinet, or the field but not cowardly attempts to destroy him, such as . . . setting on foot the infernal machine [a bomb attempt on his life]. Mr F. again with great warmth assured him he was deceived, that Mr Pitt and Mr Windham, like every other Englishman, would shrink with horror from the idea of secret assassination. ‘You do not know Pitt,’ said Bonaparte. ‘Yes, I do know him,’ replied Mr F. ‘and well enough to believe him incapable of such an action. I would risk my head in that belief.’ Bonaparte, after a moment, walked away in silence.

Napoleon needed this respite to impose his own stamp on French politics. Peace was as popular among ordinary Frenchmen as among the English. Many considered Napoleon’s greatest achievement to have been his decisive administration after the years of bloodshed and the years of alleged corruption and division under the Directory – although the comparative prosperity that so struck the British visitors in 1802 was in fact a legacy of the Directory.

Napoleon’s first priority was to build-up France’s finances through his highly competent economic adviser, Lebrun. He promptly raised some 5 million francs through a forced loan and raised another 9 million in a lottery. A corps of tax collectors was created: 840 senior officials sent to every department in the land: This increased the tax take by nearly 100 per cent. Indirect taxes were levied on wine, luxuries, salt and tobacco. He also sought to curb government waste and introduced an audit office.

The economy began to boom, particularly as banks and the moneyed classes began to reinvest in France in the belief that stability had been attained under Napoleon. A fall in the price of bread added to his popularity. Borrowing from Pitt’s experience in England, he set up a sinking fund to try and reduce national debt. More radically, he created the Bank of France, which controlled the money supply as well as issuing its own credit.

At the beginning of his rule, Napoleon also raised money by selling off state assets previously confiscated from the aristocracy as well as plunder from his Marengo campaign. He openly subsidized key industries and offered loans to manufacturers who provided jobs. He strictly controlled politically sensitive grain prices and when bread prices suddenly rose again in 1802 he took every conceivable measure to dampen popular anger, buying huge quantities of bread abroad and flooding France with it. Napoleon was an unashamed state interventionist or
dirigiste –
what would be called a corporatist today – meddling in every aspect of his country’s economic life to secure his political ends.

Napoleon’s second priority was to reform France’s labyrinthine legal system with its hundreds of different courts adjudicating different statutes in different areas – a legacy of feudalism. Since 1789 alone 14,000 decrees had been passed. Napoleon remarked: ‘We are a nation with 300 books of law yet without laws.’ His solution was to cut the Gordian knot with a stroke of his military blade. He produced a single ‘Code Napoleon’, a compromise between the common law practised in the north and the Roman law in the south. More than 2,000 articles were drafted. On the whole the Code was enlightened and liberal for its time, ensuring equality before the law, an end to feudal duties, freedom of employment and the rights of private property and civil marriage.

However, there were no workers’ rights enshrined in the law, and the employers’ decisions were always to be upheld. Workers were placed under police supervision and obliged to carry identity cards, while strikes and associations of workers were prohibited, and the police had the authority to settle disputes. The Code certainly represented the interests of the new moneyed business classes. Napoleon has often been congratulated for his liberal attitude to divorce. In fact he toughened up the Revolution’s approach, which had permitted fully a third of French couples to divorce in its first years, insisting that divorce by consent take place only if both sets of parents agreed, after two years’ separation and before twenty years of married life had passed. Under his new rules only sixty couples a year in Paris met the necessary requirements.

Napoleon also reflected his strong Mediterranean bias in his attitude to women. He once declared: ‘Women these days require restraint. They go where they like, they do what they like. It is not French to
give women the upper hand. They have too much of it already.’ He upheld the principle of wifely obedience in marriage. Women convicted of adultery could be gaoled for up to two years; men were merely fined. Fathers were given the right to imprison rebellious children.

Napoleon was more enlightened in establishing a system of independent circuit judges, freed from political control, and he tried to defend the jury system, which had been brought over from England under the Revolution, against widespread criticism. In practice the system of investigating magistrates gave the state legal authorities much greater power than their counterparts in Britain and there was virtually no presumption of innocence for those suspected of an offence. They were assumed to be guilty unless they could prove otherwise.

If justice was now perhaps less arbitrary than under the
ancien régime
, when it was largely administered in the interests of the local aristocracy and the central state, it was almost entirely centralized. The Code Napoleon, which was to ripple out to many other countries soon to be brought under French rule, also had the advantage for Napoleon of stripping the aristocracy of other lands of much of their power over their peoples, permitting the French to rule unhindered.

A third major reform lay in the field of education: Napoleon reopened the clerical primary schools and set up 300 secondary schools across France, with early specialization and the principal of universal entry. He also created elite lycées, in which pupils wore blue military-style uniforms and were drilled and learnt musketry, as well as Latin and mathematics as principal subjects, much as he had when a boy. In education as elsewhere, Napoleon’s prime purpose was subordination to the central state. He set up the University, a supervisory body to ensure that all schools turned out citizens ‘attached to their religion, their ruler, their native land and their family’. All teachers had to swear an oath to these principles. Another innovation was the Légion d’Honneur, to be awarded for distinction in every field, eventually encompassing 30,000 people.

Napoleon also splashed out on great public works projects: he lavished money on road-building – which was useful for moving his armies quickly across France – and built three great roads across the
Alpine passes of the Great St Bernard, the Little St Bernard and the Col de Tend whose main purpose, again, was to make easier Italy’s absorption into France.

He constructed three great ports – Cherbourg, Antwerp and Brest – to extend French naval power; and he built the canals connecting the Rhine to the Rhone, the 160-mile Nantes-Brest Canal and the San Quentin. These permitted the passage of goods and vessels across France rather than by sea, where they would be vulnerable to British attack, and facilitated the country’s industrial revolution later on.

Finally, Napoleon centralized France’s own internal administration. Each department was given its ‘prefect’. In theory they were nearly as powerful as the ‘intendants’ under the old regime, and in fact they were more powerful, as they were not countered by the power of the provincial nobility. The prefects were personally appointed by Napoleon, and their word in the departments was law. Beneath the ninety-eight prefects there were 420 sub-prefects in the
arondissements
and these controlled the 30,000 municipal councils and their mayors. The system was far more centralized than under Louis XVI, although in practice the strong local character of provincial France provided a considerable degree of autonomy.

Behind the power of the state stood Napoleon’s militaristic form of government. ‘It is the soldier who founds a Republic and it is the soldier who maintains it.’ Napoleon had little time for the talking shops he had set up under the new constitution. The senate was largely a rubber stamp and Napoleon further diluted this by increasing its membership from sixty to 100. The 300-member legislative body and the hundred-strong tribunate, which sometimes opposed him, were reduced in size and his principal critics removed from both. Decrees and orders in council were constantly issued to bypass the feeble legislature.

In reality it was military dictatorship, Napoleon ruthlessly cracked down on potential opponents. Madame de Staël, whose salon became the focus of opposition to Napoleon, whom she considered a crude and dangerous boor, was exiled from Paris after she had published
Delphine
, which criticized the new constitution. The hapless Abbé Sieyès was kept under virtual house arrest on his estate, while Barras
was exiled from France altogether. When the senate proposed that the dictator be given a further ten-year term, Napoleon called for his consulate to become one for life. This was subjected to a referendum in 1802: the figures were only marginally different from those in the previous referendum, with some 3,600,000 in favour, some 8,000 against. Again the result reflected the endorsement of only one-sixth of the electorate. A soldier reported the method used to secure his vote: ‘One of our generals summoned the soldiers in his command and said to them: “Comrades, it is a matter of nominating General Bonaparte consul for life. You are free to hold your own opinion; nevertheless, I must warn you that the first man not to vote for the Consulate for life will be shot in front of the regiment.” ’

Napoleon certainly enjoyed widespread support. He had brought order and stability, and economic confidence was increasing. Moreover he had brought peace after long years of suffering on terms favourable to France. He embodied the power of the wealthy, the new provincial bourgeoisie who had inherited the prestige of the old pre-revolutionary nobility, and the large class of prosperous peasants that now owned much of the land.

Napoleon was also happy to surround himself with old families, to create his own private court and endow it with a distinctly monarchical flavour. In 1801 he even revived court dress for men, including knee breeches. His own constumes became more fantastic as the years passed. He sported embossed ermine capes, fur-lined jackets and suspenders with white stockings. Josephine was given her own ladies-in-waiting from among France’s noblest families, and white was deemed the appropriate female attire in court. Napoleon was preparing to ascend a further rung on the ladder from military dictator to monarch. Before then, however, he had to subdue two dangerous nests of opposition: the royalists themselves, who regarded him as a usurper and an upstart, and the left-wing Jacobin opposition, many of them paradoxically concentrated in the meritocratic army. Both were minorities. The royalists were too small in numbers and too repressed to mount a serious popular challenge. However, the Jacobins, though equally small in numbers, did present a threat; for just as Napoleon was essentially a general who had come to power by force, so another general could depose him by force.

His response was to impose a vigorous police state and spying network under Fouché. Fouché, however, privately sympathized with the Jacobins. If Napoleon was paranoid, he had much to be paranoid about; for at the very heart of his system of absolute control there were challengers who wanted to seize the reins. Nor were they slow to show their hand. He was equally quick to respond, with the ruthlessness that had marked his ascent to power.

Napoleon was extremely careful to nurture his own power bases – the wealthier peasantry and the
haute bourgeoisie
represented by Talleyrand; the secret state represented by Fouché; and, above all, the army, which he treated as a privileged elite. Although he ran a dictatorship, he could not crush opposition with ruthless purges of a Stalinist kind without antagonizing these power bases. He was therefore forced to tolerate dangerous rivals about him, such as Talleyrand and Fouché, until they overplayed their hand. Even then he was cautious about cutting them down for fear of stimulating a far more general opposition. Thus there were limits to his absolutism and he felt himself continually under threat from internal opposition.

During 1800 a series of plots were hatched to murder or oust Napoleon. In October there was a plot to stab him with a stiletto in his box at the Opera – a forerunner of Lincoln’s assassination – spearheaded by the adjutant-general and reflecting dissent among senior military officers. He and his fellow conspirators were rounded up and executed. There followed the assassination plot that came nearest to succeeding. On 24 December 1800, a royalist conspirator disguised as a peddler, François Carbon, led an old carthorse and its wagon carrying a large wine cask to rue St Nicaise, just north of the Tuileries. There he asked a fourteen-year-old girl to hold the bridle for a few minutes and disappeared around the corner to watch. The barrel was full of gunpowder and he held a fuse that he was to light at a signal from an accomplice when Napoleon’s coach was on the way to Haydn’s
Creation
at the Opera. Inside the Tuileries, Josephine had persuaded a sleepy Napoleon to accompany her to the performance. He left with three aides in an advance carriage, preceded as usual by a troop of mounted grenadiers. Josephine had lingered to have her
shawl arranged, and her carriage followed some three minutes behind.