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Bonaparte's CHAP.

First Consul and the minister of police. Bonaparte's
idea prevailed, and 130 individuals, those best known
to have been ultra-revolutionists and terrorists, were
ordered to be seized and transported without trial.
Amongst them were nine known murderers of Septem-
ber, with whom were included such men as General
Rossignol, Charles de Hesse, and the Conventionalists,
Choudieu and Talot. There was a long debate in the
Council of State, whether the sentence on these men
should be passed simply by government, or by the
council. The former opinion prevailed.
It was a

repetition of the summary justice of the Committee of
Public Safety or the Directory. About the same time,
Arena, Cerrachi, and the first batch of conspirators,
were executed.*

Scarcely had these acts of severity been accomplished, when Fouché brought forward proofs that the infernal machine was the result of a Chouan plot, and that George Cadoudal was privy to it. The immediate actors in it, San Regent and Cambon, were seized, the formers till suffering from the wound inflicted by the explosion. This discovery shook the convictions, and modified the purposes, of Bonaparte. He had been allowing the émigrés to return and resume such of their property, chiefly in forest, which had been unsold. He now issued contrary decrees. The émigré was again considered to be civilly dead, whilst those who obtained permission to return, no longer recovered their property sold or unsold. Bonaparte had been much inclined to restore some of the old institutions of the monarchy. He deplored the want of an aristocracy, even in a republic. Intermediate grades and ranks between the supreme magistracy and the people were indispensable, he said. It was disgraceful to see those who had held the highest authority in the state descend to poverty

* Thibaudeau, Rapp's Memoirs, Bourrienne.

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CHAP. and neglect. War of course would produce a military hierarchy. But if society was not to be overshadowed and browbeaten by it, a class of civilian dignitaries were required. With this view the First Consul created the Legion of Honour, loudly and most inconsistently denounced, even by the democratic wearers of epaulettes, as an aristocracy.

But neither his Legion of Honour nor his Senate, nor aught that Bonaparte instituted, succeeded in forming a civilian body, like the noblesse, to counterbalance the high ranks of the army. And the result was that the Imperial system remained essentially a military one. The court was a camp, and the council, such as the government formed and presided, was one of war, not peace.

To restore the landed aristocracy was indeed impossible. The peasant had become proprietor even in La Vendée. There were no elective rights left to the people, no judicial or administrative privilege to the locality. A landed gentry thus, whatever its wealth, could have no influence. Functionaries might have replaced it, but functionaries, like gentry, require independence to command respect. The service of the State, the Law, and the Church formed three professions into which had liberty been infused, the civilian element might have risen to counterbalance the military. without freedom of speech, what was the bar, that freedom of speech developing liberty, and talent in its turn commanding place? Bonaparte would have none of these things.

But

He sedulously undertook to reform the Code, a task which the lawyers of the Convention had commenced. At first, its articles when framed were laid before the tribunate to be discussed. But the First Consul was irritated at any opposition, and disliked all discussion, save in his own presence and under his own control. He therefore withdrew the Code from the tribunate, and settled the disputes on different points in the Council of

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State. It was no doubt a boon to the population, sub- CHAP. ject previously to many conflicting laws, half feudal, half revolutionary. But the promulgation of the Code almost superseded the science of law, and promised to render legal learning useless, until difficult questions arose requiring reference to the principles and precedents on which the Code was founded. Thus deprived of freedom of speech, and of learning, or of winning its way by talent to office, the legal profession became a nullity. The Church was not more fortunate. Bonaparte restored it as an element of order, and as providing for a numerous class of clerical functionaries, performing the ceremonies and maintaining the appearance of religion. What he established, however, was mere form. He furnished but the shell, in which the dead body of the defunct Church was laid, and respected if not revered. He promised that he himself and his chief functionaries should attend and bow to the usual ceremonies, but the Pope must dispense him and them from what was essential either in faith or practice. Bonaparte declined confession and communion as indecorous and unsuited to the spirit of the age. In other words he re-established the Church, partly as a decoration, partly as a moral police. The bishops, appointed and paid by the government, formed a portion of its functionary aristocracy, and at the same time the lower clergy were placed completely under the jurisdiction and at the mercy of the prelates. He was enabled thus to render the clergy subservient to him by the low state to which the political and military events of Italy had reduced the Pope. That pontiff he was at first inclined to respect and restore, but he soon found that the spirit of the old ecclesiastical body was radically hostile to his system of government and to what the revolution had consummated. He saw, in consequence, the necessity of depriving the

*

* Thiers.

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CHAP. pontiff of all temporal power, which at a time when spiritual power was in abeyance was tantamount to a dethroning of the pontiff altogether.

It would be unfair to blame the First Consul for what was either lukewarm or ultra-sacerdotal in these arrangements. He did what was possible, and restored the old religion of the monarchy, whilst preserving the preponderance of the lay authority. He re-enacted the old laws of the Gallican Church, declared dissident creeds entitled to tolerance and the right of worship, and maintained the revolutionary prohibition against monastic institutions. Upon one liberal principle he largely insisted, the freedom of education from ecclesiastical dictation or control. With this view he proscribed the Jesuits altogether, and established a University under the most eminent and enlightened men that could be found. If he preferred the teaching of science to that of literature or philosophy, it was that he feared the resuscitation of doctrines and sentiments which had produced so much disgust and anarchy. But the chiefs of his university did not proscribe philosophy for all that, and founded a school between the materialism of the eighteenth century and the bigot theology of the seventeenth, which, though it produced its chief results and professors after the fall of the empire, still remains indebted to Napoleon for its birth and its development.

The Institute formed the Senatorial Body of Learning. Its members, chiefly men of science, did not shrink from ridiculing the First Consul's scheme of resuscitating religion and the priesthood. But he fought his battle well with them, and demonstrated priests to be as useful as philosophers. Far from taking revenge, he on the contrary protected his little aristocracy of science, and when a journal ventured to mock them, Louis Bonaparte, as Minister of the Interior, suppressed it, thus assimilating the Institute to the Divinity or the Sovereign, whom it was not permitted to ridicule. The

government retained full power over the press, as over printing and publishing. They were reduced to utter nullity.

This reversal of the principles of the revolution, save the much prized one of equality, even that being but equality of prostration, required that the forms of government should be changed to suit it. Even Siéyes' ingenious system of removing the legislature from the people and carefully separating the right to vote from the liberty to speak, was too liberal. That Solon had, however, rendered it easy to emasculate the republic altogether. With the senate rested the powers of election. It was made to eliminate and rechoose onefifth of the tribunate and the legislative body, and the government managed that the one-fifth chosen to go out should precisely be the liberal party. It was the old system of ostracism of the Directory. The conduct of the tribunate had rendered this especially necessary. Consisting of young and clever men chosen by the senate merely, it would appear, to show their oratory, it at once eschewed all moderation and rejected everything, codes, treaties, the most useful as well as most objectionable of measures. In one treaty the people were styled in diplomatic language subjects, and this raised a terrible storm. Bonaparte's temper and language were quite as menacing, and he proposed no less than a repetition of the 18th Brumaire. But Cambacérès dissuaded him from a coup d'état so violent, and invented the mode, which was adopted, of getting rid of the troublesome members of the Assembly by the elimination and re-election of one-fifth, for which the constitution had provided.

This veiled coup d'état, at which Siéyes grumbled, was followed by a formal abrogation of his constitution. His permanent list of notables was suppressed, and an election of two degrees was ordained; those whom the people chose were to form a college, and this college was to present a list, from which as before the senate

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