The Modern Regime, Volume 1

Contents

PREFACE

The following third and last part of the Origins of Contemporary France is to consist of two volumes. After the present volume, the second is to treat of the Church, the School and the Family, describe the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a society like our own encounters in this new milieu: here, the past and the present meet, and the work already done is continued by the work which is going on under our eyes.—The undertaking is hazardous and more difficult than with the two preceding parts. For the Ancient Régime and the Revolution are henceforth complete and finished periods; we have seen the end of both and are thus able to comprehend their entire course. On the contrary, the end of the ulterior period is still wanting; the great institutions which date from the Consulate and the Empire, either consolidation or dissolution, have not yet reached their historic term: since 1800, the social order of things, notwithstanding eight changes of political form, has remained almost intact. Our children or grandchildren will know whether it will finally succeed or miscarry; witnesses of the denouement, they will have fuller light by which to judge of the entire drama. Thus far four acts only have been played; of the fifth act, we have simply a presentiment.—On the other hand, by dint of living under this social system, we have become accustomed to it; it no longer excites our wonder; however artificial it may be it seems to us natural. We can scarcely conceive of another that is healthier; and what is much worse, it is repugnant to us to do so. For, such a conception would soon lead to comparisons and hence to a judgment and, on many points, to an unfavorable judgment, one which would be a censure, not only of our institutions but of ourselves. The machine of the year VIII,1101 applied to us for three generations, has permanently shaped and fixed us as we are, for better or for worse. If, for a century, it sustains us, it represses us for a century. We have contracted the infirmities it imports—stoppage of development, instability of internal balance, disorders of the intellect and of the will, fixed ideas and ideas that are false. These ideas are ours; therefore we hold on to them, or, rather, they have taken hold of us. To get rid of them, to impose the necessary recoil on our mind, to transport us to a distance and place us at a critical point of view, where we can study ourselves, our ideas and our institutions as scientific objects, requires a great effort on our part, many precautions, and long reflection.—Hence, the delays of this study; the reader will pardon them on considering that an ordinary opinion, caught on the wing, on such a subject, does not suffice. In any event, when one presents an opinion on such a subject one is bound to believe it. I can believe in my own only when it has become precise and seems to me proven.

Menthon Saint-Bernard, September, 1890.

BOOK FIRST. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE OF HIS CHARACTER AND GENIUS.

If you want to comprehend a building, you have to imagine the circumstances, I mean the difficulties and the means, the kind and quality of its available materials, the moment, the opportunity, and the urgency of the demand for it. But, still more important, we must consider the genius and taste of the architect, especially whether he is the proprietor, whether he built it to live in himself, and, once installed in it, whether he took pains to adapt it to how own way of living, to his own necessities, to his own use.—Such is the social edifice erected by Napoleon Bonaparte, its architect, proprietor, and principal occupant from 1799 to 1814. It is he who has made modern France; never was an individual character so profoundly stamped on any collective work, so that, to comprehend the work, we must first study the character of the Man.1102

I. Napoleon's Past and Personality.

Disproportionate in all things, but, stranger still, he is not only out of the common run, but there is no standard of measurement for him; through his temperament, instincts, faculties, imagination, passions, and moral constitution he seems cast in a special mould, composed of another metal than that which enters into the composition of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently he is not a Frenchman, nor a man of the eighteenth century; he belongs to another race and another epoch.1103 We detect in him, at the first glance, the foreigner, the Italian,1104 and something more, apart and beyond these, surpassing all similitude or analogy.-Italian he was through blood and lineage; first, through his paternal family, which is Tuscan,1105 and which we can follow down from the twelfth century, at Florence, then at San Miniato; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it vegetates obscurely in provincial isolation, through a long line of notaries and municipal syndics. "My origin," says Napoleon himself,1106 "has made all Italians regard me as a compatriot.... When the question of the marriage of my sister Pauline with Prince Borghése came up there was but one voice in Rome and in Tuscany, in that family, and with all its connections: 'It will do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves, it is one of our own families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting political arguments with the following slight tribute to national amour propre: 'After all we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.'" Significant words, which will one day throw light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with her right of primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the transalpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.1107

From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule, municipal independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral principalities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the energy and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages begins to run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,1108 a small detached branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging to the primitive medieval epoch,1109 and in a social atmosphere sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.—Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to Sarténe,1110 a Corsican canton par excellence where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the permanent strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where, in many villages, nobody stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenellated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia Ramolini, from whom, in character and in will, he derived much more than from his father,1111 is a primitive soul on which Civilization has taken no hold. She is simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly life; indifferent to comforts, without literary culture, as parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band. She is powerful, physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in desperate resolutions. She is, in short, a "rural Cornelia," who conceived and gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, in the thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback, nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry.1112

"Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders."

Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to the last, he was of his people and country.

"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,1113 "even the very smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes shut; nowhere had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there again in early infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth, amidst precipices, traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow defiles, enjoying the honors and pleasures of hospitality, "treated everywhere as a brother and compatriot," without any accident or insult ever suggesting to him that his confidence was not well grounded." At Bocognano,1114 where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken refuge, "where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of relationship, and where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,1115" was a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can!"—"Corsican by nation and character," wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if circumstances favor him."1116—Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old bitterness returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood—such was the odious spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth... I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of infamy.... vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"1117 A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective.—From the age of fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds refuge in imagination in the past of his island;1118 he recounts its history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and dedicates the abridgment to Abbé Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves, and murders,—in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this work, as in other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in vogue—Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy imitation of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their humanitarian grandiloquence. But these borrowed clothes, which incommode him, do not fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is too fine; they require too much circumspection in walking; he does not know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning, connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of phrases, the exact significance of imagery;1119 he strides on impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies, Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of heat;1120 his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion, indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the Academy, the professor of belles-lettres1121 notes down that "in the strange and incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see granite fused in a volcano." However original in mind and in sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society around him, different from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the current ideas which take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other, although accepting neither.—Pensioner of the king, who supported him at Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also supported his sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the benefactor of his family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses entreating or grateful letters over his mother's signature—he does not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his mind to take sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of noble cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.1122—Poor and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal, and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality, if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it. The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas, or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by democratic illusions, and entertains no other feeling than disgust for the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace.—At Paris, in April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful speculation,"1123 and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard," Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease all the occurrences of the day.1124 Finally, the chateau is forced and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring cafés, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is unknown and suspicious."—Similarly, after the 31st of May and the 2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue, hardship, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."1125 Here was something with which the Girondists could be converted!—None of the political or social convictions which then exercised such control over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months in Provence, "the favorite and confidential adviser of young Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder Robespierre,1126 intimate at Nice with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has passed, he frees himself with bombast from this compromising friendship: "I thought him sincere," says he of the younger Robespierre, in a letter intended to be shown, "but were he my father and had aimed at tyranny, I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to Paris, after having knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron. Barras, the most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and contrived the death of his two former protectors.1127 Among the contending parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and free to dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause and concerning himself only with his own interests.—On the evening of the 12th of Vendémiaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and noticing the preparations of the sectionists,1128 he said to Junot: