Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Read Online Free Page B

teachers who could execute and express the "general will" of the Nation: in other words his own. Training was of a military type; school lessons began and ended with a roll of drums. Its ideal was not independence of thought but the efficiency born of uniformity and punctual subordination. It was devised for an armed nation on the march, which was how Bonaparte, alike interpreting and exploiting the Revolution, saw France. In the same way his legal reforms aimed everywhere at strengthening the forces of authority: of the father, the husband and the official. They subjected the libertarian anarchy of the Revolutionary theorists to the discipline required of the battlefield.
    Nor did the French people object. They gloried in success, and the new system had brought them success unprecedented. So long as they were free to live their private lives with reasonable continuity, which they had never been under Convention or Directory, and enjoy the material benefits of the Revolution, they left their wonderful ruler to order the forms of government as he pleased. With the abolition of feudal uses, the destruction of hereditary caste and the secularisation of society, the divine discontent of eighteenth century bourgeois and peasant France had been assuaged. Bonaparte's authoritarianism outraged neither its passion for equality nor its Latin logic; unlike the weak rule of the Bourbons, it honoured both. Himself a Latin whose youthful pride had been bruised by the senseless arrogance of the ancien regime, he understood both feelings perfectly. When, to strengthen his hold on the country, he created a new privileged order he fashioned it with mathematical symmetry and grounded it on the broad, unenvying base of an egalitarian nation. The Legion of Honour, with its graded functionaries and cohorts, was recruited from the general body of France. It revived rank but not caste, and honoured not birth but talent.
    So it was with the Army—the ultimate source of Bonaparte's power. It had repudiated the licence o f the Revolution for discipline but retained the Revolution's governing principle of equality. Its officers were drawn almost exclusively from the Third Estate. "I have never appointed even a sub-lieutenant," the First Consul boasted, " unless he was either promoted from the ranks or was the son of a man attached to the Revolution." Off parade privates took snuff with their officers and accosted them as "citoyens." In place of the cowed, rigid drill of the old Prussian school was an air of confident camaraderie; the troops marched with their muskets at as many angles as an English militia regiment. 1 It was these things that made the Army so popular in the new France. Young Lord Aberdeen, who hated war and militarism, noticed that most of the Paris statues were of Generals. "A martial air reigns through the town, soldiers parade most of the principal streets and keep the peace; the utmost respect is paid to everything military."
    To an Englishman such a regime seemed " the completest military despotism." 2 In his own country soldiers were regarded as necessary evils allowed only under strict subordination to the civil authority. The creed of France which owed its frontiers and existence to the Army was the exact opposite. " It is the soldier," declared Bonaparte, "who founds a Republic and it is the soldier who maintains it." He voiced the sentiment of millions. They saw the Army and its Chief as the guarantors of the material gains of the Revolution: their defence against the priest, the aristocrat and the foreigner. The glistening bayonets in the streets, the dragoons who marshalled the Paris traffic and kept order in the Opera with drawn swords did not shock Frenchmen. Instead they filled them with confidence and hope of renewed glory. 3
    It was because they were impressed by the unmistakeablc solidarity and vigour of this new France that certain of the more uncritical English tourists fell under the Firsf: Consul's spell. They saw