The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (48 page)

the royalist Marquis de Barthélemy to the Directory, the remaining directors called on Napoleon to save the republic. The general

was happy to oblige. His men deported Barthélemy to South America, removed almost two hundred royalist councilors, and imposed

martial law on much of the country. These authoritarian measures

made the directors increasingly dependent on the military to stay in

power. Their situation grew even more precarious as the demands of

renewed warfare with Britain, Austria, and Russia (the Second Coalition) undermined what was left of their legitimacy. Unable to maintain the massive national army at full strength, the Directory suffered

a series of military defeats in 1798 that once again left France open

to invasion.

Napoleon took advantage of this situation when a cabal of senior

offi cials, including the director Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, invited

him to join a plot to save France by overthrowing the Directory. The

conspirators planned to create a propertied oligarchy and viewed

Napoleon as a pawn and popular fi gurehead. The general’s reputation

246 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

survived his 1798 failed invasion of Egypt, and he seemed the most

malleable of the revolutionary generals. Instead, when the Coup of 18

Brumaire brought him to power as part of a three-consul triumvirate

consisting of himself, Sieyès, and the ex-director Roger Ducos, he

swiftly assumed real power. In 1799, a lopsided plebiscite confi rmed

the new Constitution of the Year VIII and legitimized his authority

as fi rst consul.

Napoleon was content with this role for almost fi ve years as he

gradually consolidated his power. Exploiting his fame as a war hero,

the general outmaneuvered his fellow consuls to become consul for

life. He ruled through a handpicked forty-member Council of State

consisting of lawyers, judges, legislators, and administrators who

wrote his laws and turned his orders into policy. Napoleon personally

appointed the Senate, while special electoral colleges consisting of the

richest taxpayers in each department chose members of national and

local assemblies. This was largely for show, however, for these bodies

existed only to consult rather than legislate.

Napoleon maintained the façade of revolutionary democracy by

staging plebiscites to validate the constitutional changes that gradually gave him total control of France. Claiming to be above politics and factionalism, he invoked French nationalism to solidify his

popular support and rallied the wealthy and professional classes with

patronage and civil positions. After the revolutionary turmoil of the

1790s, French elites were now willing to back an absolutist leader who

promised to respect their rank and property. Napoleon encouraged

this rapprochement by granting amnesty to the royalist émigrés who

accepted the loss of their estates and offered him an oath of loyalty.

This was the basis of
ralliement
. The revolutionaries and the

men of the ancien régime would now work together for the glory of

France under Napoleonic rule. The architects of the 1789 revolution

could console themselves that Napoleon expanded and systematized

many of their innovations, while French nobles and men of property were relieved to regain their status. Moreover, their sons were

eligible for service in the Council of State’s
auditoriat
, an elite body

of select young men from prominent families who served as trusted

couriers, bureaucrats, and imperial administrators in conquered

territories and the sister republics. Napoleon similarly made peace

with the Catholic Church. Under the Concordat of 1802, Pope Pius

VII recognized Napoleon’s consulate, renounced claims to former

Napoleonic

Italy 247

Church property, and placed the French clergy under the authority

of the secular government. In return, Napoleon acknowledged that

Catholicism was the predominant religion of France.

Napoleon’s success in using
ralliement
to lessen the divisions in

French society gave him the support and resources to defeat the Second

Coalition. In 1801, this alliance collapsed with the assassination of the

Russian tsar Paul I and French victories over the Austrians. Napoleon

owed his military successes to his skill in building on the innovations

in recruiting, weapons, and tactics inherited from his revolutionary

predecessors. His forces did not enjoy substantial advantages over

their enemies in terms of military technology. They were, however,

battle-hardened, professional, and superbly led by offi cers who owed

Napoleon their personal loyalty. Most of the rank-and-fi le soldiery

came into the army as conscripts, but nearly constant campaigning

and a string of victories taught them to be loyal to each other, their

supreme commander, and the larger French nation.

By 1802, no continental power could stand against this formidable

force. Only Britain’s Royal Navy and the English Channel blocked

France’s total control of western Europe. The British fought on after

their Austrian and Russian allies deserted them, but eventually they

also came to terms with Napoleon. The resulting accord signed at

Amiens was more of a truce than a peace treaty; the British never

renounced their opposition to a French empire in Europe. Nevertheless, they recognized the Napoleonic annexations and puppet republics

in return for a break from their almost decade-long global struggle

with the French.

The Peace of Amiens barely lasted a year, but Britain could do little to change the reality that the demise of the Second Coalition confi rmed Napoleon as the master of continental Europe. Backed by his

Grande Armée of roughly six hundred thousand men, he now had the

stability and security to realize his dynastic ambitions. In December

1804, the Senate proclaimed him emperor. A sham plebiscite provided

a veneer of legitimacy, with a vote of 3.5 million in favor of abolishing

the last democratic vestiges of the revolution against only 2,579 dissenters.16 France now was an empire in name as well as in practice.

In taking the fi nal step of crowning himself emperor of the French,

Napoleon formally linked the nation to his personal and family fortunes. He made no apologies for ending the revolutionaries’ democratic experiment and portrayed himself as a new kind of liberal

248 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

emperor. Where the Convention and Directory had been riven by

factionalism and weakened by corruption, he claimed to blend the

enlightened absolutism of the Bourbons with the nationalist social

engineering of the revolution to rule for the good of France, its people,

and ultimately all of Europe.

In practical terms, the French nation was the instrument of

Napoleon’s ambition and the stepping-stone to empire. He therefore

sought to make France as strong as possible. Abandoning the Directory’s distrust of central authority, he built one of the fi rst modern

state bureaucracies with a staff that almost tripled in size from 1,650

to roughly 4,000 civil servants over the course of his reign. These

offi cials extended Napoleon’s authority into the countryside. Prefects,

whom Napoleon appointed personally, ran French departments with

total authority, while subprefects oversaw
arrondissements
(districts).

Like their master, the prefects were “little emperors” with absolute

authority over almost all matters in their departments except for tax

collection and policing. All told, 306 prefects served in France and

the
départements réunis
between 1800 and 1814. The majority were

under the age of forty and came from bourgeois French families, but

over time some assimilated “new Frenchmen” from the annexed territories joined their ranks.

As would be expected, tax collection was one of the central functions of this expanded bureaucracy. Napoleon repudiated the Directory’s unpaid debts, but he still inherited an empty treasury upon

coming to power. Although tribute and loot from imperial conquests

provided an important revenue stream, Napoleon recognized that he

needed to tap the wealth of the French nation to fund his imperial

ambitions. The Convention had already done much of the messy work

by introducing direct taxation, and Napoleonic bureaucrats made the

tax system more effi cient by surveying the ownership and usage of

all French land.

In terms of law, Napoleon co-opted and redirected the Directory’s earlier efforts to create a uniform legal system. Focusing on

personal and property rights, this new Civil Code, which became the

Code Napoleon in 1807, abolished the last vestiges of feudal privilege

and corporatism. The Church lost its role in keeping civil records, the

guilds lost their infl uence, and all French men became equal before the

law. Civil marriage and divorce became possible, but male householders retained absolute authority over their wives and daughters. While

Napoleonic

Italy 249

the new Criminal Code abolished arbitrary arrest and imprisonment,

it allowed torture with judicial supervision. These illiberal contradictions are not surprising, for Napoleon’s goals were more pragmatic

than egalitarian. He sought to break down the communal and corporate barriers that had limited his monarchical predecessors’ ability to

rule directly. This is why he insisted on applying the Code Napoleon

throughout the French Empire in all annexed territories and client

states.

Napoleon was no revolutionary. In rallying French nobles,

republicans, property owners, professionals, businessmen, bureaucrats, and military offi cers, he sought to engineer a class of elites

that would draw their infl uence and status solely from ties to his

regime. Claiming that state service was now the basis of aristocratic

privilege, Napoleon created 31 dukes, 451 counts, and 1,474 chevaliers (knights) by 1808. But their backgrounds were hardly common.

Most of the dukes were either Bonaparte family members or trusted

generals and civil offi cials.17 Unwilling to provoke further instability with another redivision of French estates, he rewarded this new

imperial nobility with land grants (
majorats
) carved from conquered

territory. By the end of his reign, there were approximately six thousand recipients of these bequests (
donataires
), mostly in eastern

Europe, collecting thirty million francs’ worth of rent from liberated

French subjects.

Dismissing peasants and the urban lower orders, Napoleon

courted the old nobility and the most able republican elites. Focusing on the next generation, he promoted
amalgame
by establishing

prestigious secondary schools (
lycées
) to train their sons for state service. Although they taught conventional subjects such as mathematics, science, and modern languages, the
lycée
culture was ultimately

martial.
Lycée
students wore uniforms, held military-style ranks, and

marched and drilled regularly.

Napoleon’s empire did not last long enough to give these experiments in social engineering a chance to run their course.
Ralliement

and
amalgame
might have eventually produced a loyal imperial citizenry, but in the near term his new imperial order was fundamentally coercive. For all of its commitment to legal reform and equality

before the law, the Napoleonic regime was Europe’s fi rst modern

police state. Building on the Directory’s internal security apparatus, the Ministry of General Police under Joseph Fouché oversaw

250 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

a network of uniformed policemen and clandestine informers. The

eighteen-thousand-man paramilitary police force (
gendarmerie
),

which the Convention created to enforce military conscription, gave

the imperial regime an important counterbalance to the police. Ever

mindful of the fate of the Bourbon monarchy, the Convention, and

the Directory, Napoleon’s men were constantly on the lookout for

subversion. The Ministry of General Police monitored theaters for

seditious plays and censored newspapers, journals, and illustrations.

Postal inspectors opened the mail, and spies and unpaid informers

listened in on barroom and café conversations and reported directly

to the emperor. These measures were not born entirely of paranoia:

the emperor survived several attacks on his life by royalist and

republican plotters.

Political surveillance became particularly necessary after the

resumption of war in 1805 cost the imperial regime much of its

popular support. In the ensuing seven years, Napoleon pushed the

borders of the French Empire to their greatest extent by dispatching

the various alliances of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Sweden

that formed the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Coalitions. The Royal Navy’s

destruction of the French fl eet at Trafalgar in 1805 ensured that Britain was safe from invasion, but the French victories over the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians made Napoleon master of the continent.

In 1812, the Napoleonic empire covered three-quarters of a million

square miles and ruled forty-four million subjects.18

The French people theoretically shared in this imperial glory, but