The Modern Regime Volume I Part 15

Accordingly, considering his well-known character, the prompt.i.tude, the activity, the reach, the universality, and the cast of his intellect, he could not have proposed to himself a different work nor reduced himself to a lower standard. His need of governing and of administrating was too great; his capacity for governing and administrating was too great: his was an exacting genius.--Moreover, for the outward task that he undertook he required internally, not only undisputed possession of all executive and legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all legal authorities, but, again, the annihilation of all moral authority but his own, that is to say, the silence of public opinion and the isolation of each individual, and therefore the abolition, preventive and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic, pedagogic, charitable, literary, departmental, or communal initiative that might, now or in the future gather men against him or alongside of him. Like a good general he secures his rear. At strife with all Europe, he so arranges it as not to allow in the France he drags along after him refractory souls or bodies which might form platoons in his rear. Consequently, and through precaution, he suppresses in advance all eventual rallying points or centers of combination Henceforth, every wire which can stir up and bring a company of men together for the same object terminates in his hands; he holds in his firm grasp all these combined wires, guards them with jealous care, in order to strain them to the utmost. Let no one attempt to loosen them, and, above all, let no one entertain a thought of getting hold of them; they belong to him and to him alone, and compose the public domain, which is his domain proper.

But, alongside of his proper domain, he recognizes another in which he himself a.s.signs a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[2324]--This is due to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes. He sees things directly, in themselves; he does not imagine them through book formulae or party phrases, by a process of verbal reasoning, employing the gratuitous suppositions of humanitarian optimism or the dogmatic prejudices of Jacobin nonsense. He sees Man just as he is, not Man in himself, an abstract citizen, the philosophic puppet of the Contrat Social, but the real individual, the entire living man, with his profound instincts, his tenacious necessities, which, whether tolerated or not by legislation, still subsist and operate infallibly, and which the legislator must take into consideration if he wants to turn them to account.--This individual, a civilized European and a modern Frenchman, const.i.tuted as he is by several centuries of tolerable police discipline, of respected rights and hereditary property, must have a private domain, an enclosed area, large or small, which belongs and is reserved to him personally, to which the public power interdicts access and before which it mounts guard to prevent other individuals from intruding on it. Otherwise his condition seems intolerable to him; he is no longer disposed to exert himself, to set his wits to work, or to enter upon any enterprise. Let us be careful not to snap or loosen this powerful and precious spring of action; let him continue to work, to produce, to economize, if only that he may be in a condition to pay taxes; let him continue to marry, to bring forth and raise up sons, if only to serve the conscription. Let us ease his mind with regard to his enclosure;[2325] let him exercise full proprietorship over it and enjoy it exclusively; let him feel himself at home in his own house in perpetuity, safe from any intrusion, protected by the code and by the courts, not alone against his enemies, but against the administration itself. Let him in this well-defined, circ.u.mscribed abode be free to turn round and range as he pleases, free to browse at will, and, if he chooses, to consume all his hay himself. It is not essential that his meadows should be very extensive: most men live with their nose to the ground; very few look beyond a very narrow circle; men are not much troubled by being penned up; the egoism and urgent needs of daily life are already for them ready-made limits: within these natural barriers they ask for nothing but to be allowed to graze in security.

Let us give them this a.s.surance and leave them free to consult their own welfare.--As to the rest, in very small number, more or less imaginative, energetic, and ardent, there is, outside the enclosure, an issue expressly provided for them: the new administrative and military professions offer an outlet to their ambition and to their vanity which, from the start, keeps on expanding until, suddenly, the first Consul points to an infinite perspective on the horizon.[2326] According to an expression attributed to him, henceforth,

"the field is open to all talents,"

and hence all talents, gathered into the central current and precipitated headlong through compet.i.tion, swell with their inflow the immensity of the public power.

This done, the princ.i.p.al features of modern France are traced; a tool of a new and strange type arises, defines itself, and issues forth, its structure determining its destiny. It consists of a social body organized by a despot and for a despot, calculated for the use of one man, excellent for action under the impulsion of a unique will, with a superior intelligence, admirable so long as this intelligence remains lucid and this will remains healthy. It is adapted to a military life and not to civil life, and therefore badly balanced, hampered (gene) in its development, exposed to periodical crises, condemned to precocious debility, but viable for a long time, and, for the present robust, alone able to bear the weight of the new reign and to furnish for fifteen successive years the crushing labor, the conquering obedience, the superhuman, murderous, insensate effort which its master exacts.

IV. Napoleon's barracks.

General aspect and characteristics of the new State.

--Contrast between its structure and that of other contemporary or pre-existing States.--The plurality, complexity, and irregularity of ancient France.--The unity, simplicity, and regularity of modern France.--To what cla.s.s of works it belongs.--It is the modern masterpiece of the cla.s.sic spirit in the political and social order of things.

Let us take a nearer view of the master's idea and of the way in which, at this moment, he figures to himself the society which is a.s.suming new shape in his hands. All the leading features of the plan are fixed beforehand in his mind: they are already deeply graven on it through his education and through his instinct. By virtue of this instinct, which is despotic, by virtue of this education, which is cla.s.sic and Latin, he conceives human a.s.sociations not in the modern fashion, Germanic and Christian, as a concert of initiations starting from below, but in the antique fashion, pagan and Roman, as a hierarchy of authorities imposed from above. He puts his own spirit into his civil inst.i.tutions, the military spirit; consequently, he constructs a huge barracks wherein, to begin with, he lodges thirty million, men, women, and children, and, later on, forty-two million, all the way from Hamburg to Rome.

The edifice is, of course, superb and of a new style. On comparing it with other societies in surrounding Europe, and particularly France as she was previous to 1789, the contrast is striking.--Everywhere else the social edifice is a composition of many distinct structures--provinces, cities, seignories, churches, universities, and corporations. Each has begun by being a more or less isolated block of buildings where, on an enclosed area, a population has lived apart. Little by little the barriers have given way; either they have been broken in or have tumbled down of their own accord; pa.s.sages have been made between one and the other and new additions have been put up; at last, these scattered buildings have all become connected and soldered on as annexes to the central pile. But they combine with it only through a visible and clumsy juxtaposition, through incomplete and bizarre communications: the vestiges of their former independence are still apparent athwart their actual dependence. Each still rests on its own primitive and appropriate foundations; its grand lines subsist; its main work is often almost intact. In France, on the eve of 1789, it is easily recognized what she formerly was; for example, it is clear that Languedoc and Brittany were once sovereign States, Strasbourg a sovereign town, the Bishop of Mende and the Abbess of Remiremont, sovereign princes;[2327] every seignior, laic, or ecclesiastic, was so in his own domain, and he still possessed some remnants of public power. In brief, we see thousands of states within the State, absorbed, but not a.s.similated, each with its own statutes, its own legal customs, its own civil law, its own weights and measures; several with special privileges and immunities; some with their own jurisdiction and their own peculiar administration, with their own imposts and tariffs like so many more or less dismantled fortresses, but whose old feudal, munic.i.p.al, or provincial walls still rose lofty and thick on the soil comprehended within the national enclosure.

Nothing could be more irregular than this total aggregate thus formed; it is not really an entire whole, but an agglomeration. No plan, good or bad, has been followed out; the architecture is of ten different styles and of ten different epochs. That of the dioceses is Roman and of the fourth century; that of the seignories is Gothic and of the ninth century; one structure dates from the Capetians, another from the Valois, and each bears the character of its date. Because each has been built for itself and with no regard to the others, adapted to an urgent service according to the exigencies or requirements of time, place, and circ.u.mstance; afterward, when circ.u.mstances changed, it had to adapt itself to other services, and this constantly from century to century, under Philippe le Bel, under Louis XI., under Francis I., under Richelieu, under Louis XIV., through constant revision which never consists of entire destruction, through a series of partial demolitions and of partial reconstructions, in such a way as to maintain itself, during the transformation, in conciliating, well or ill, new demands and rooted habits, in reconciling the work of the pa.s.sing generation with the works of generations gone before.--The central seignory itself is merely a donjon of the tenth century, a military tower of which the enclosure has extended so as to embrace the entire territory, and of which the other buildings, more or less incorporated with it, have become prolongations.--A similar medley of constructions--disfigured by such mutilations, adjuncts, and patches, a pell-mell so complicated with such incongruous bits and fragments--can be comprehended only by antiquaries and historians; ordinary spectators--the public--p.r.o.nounce it absurd; it finds no favor with that cla.s.s of reasoners who, in social architecture as in physical architecture, repudiate disorder, posit theories, deduce consequences, and require that every work shall proceed from the application of a simple idea.

And worse still, not only is good taste offended but, again, good sense often murmurs. Practically, the edifice fails in its object, for, erected for men to dwell in, it is in many places scarcely habitable.

Because it endures it is found superannuated, ill-adapted to prevailing customs; it formerly suited, and still suits, the feudal, scattered, and militant way of living; hence it no longer suits the unity and repose of modern life. New-born rights obtain no place in it alongside of established rights; it is either not sufficiently transformed or it has been transformed in an opposite sense, in such a way as to be inconvenient or unhealthy, badly accommodating people who are useful and giving good accommodations to useless people, costing too much to keep up and causing discomfort and discontent to nearly all its occupants.--In France, in particular, the best apartments, especially that of the King, are for a century past too high and too large, too sumptuous and too expensive. Since Louis XIV. these have imperceptibly ceased to be government and business bureaus; they have become in their disposition, decoration, and furnishing, saloons for pomp and conversation, the occupants of which, for lack of other employment, delight in discussing architecture and in tracing plans on paper for an imaginary edifice in which everybody will find himself comfortable. Now, underneath these, everybody finds himself uncomfortable, the bourgeoisie in its small scanty lodgings on the ground-floor and the people in their holes in the cellar, which are low and damp, wherein light and air never penetrate. Innumerable vagabonds and vagrants are still worse off, for, with no shelter or fireside, they sleep under the stars, and as they are without anything to care for, they are disposed to pull everything down.--Under the double pressure of insurrection and theory the demolition begins, while the fury of destruction goes on increasing until nothing is left of the razed edifice but the soil it stood on.

The new one rises on this cleared ground and, historically as well as structurally, it differs from all the others.--In less than ten years it springs up and is finished according to a plan which, from the first day, is definite and complete. It forms one unique, vast, monumental block, in which all branches of the service are lodged under one roof; in addition to the national and general services belonging to the public power, we find here others also, local and special, which do not belong to it, such as worship, education, charity, fine arts, literature, departmental and communal interests, each installed in a distinct compartment. All the compartments are ordered and arranged alike, forming a circle around the magnificent central apartment, with which each is in communication by a bell; as soon as the bell rings and the sound spreads from division to sub-division, the entire service, from the chief clerk down to the lowest employee, is instantly in motion; in this respect the arrangement, as regards despatch, co-ordination, exact.i.tude, and working facilities, is admirable.[2328]

On the other hand, its advantages and attractions for employees and aspirants of every kind and degree are not mediocre. There is no separation between the stories, no insurmountable barrier or enclosure between large and small apartments; all, from the least to the finest, from the outside as well as from the inside, have free access.

s.p.a.cious entrances around the exterior terminate in broad, well-lighted staircases open to the public; everybody can clamber up that pleases, and to mount these one must clamber; from top to bottom there is no other communication than that which they present. There is no concealed and privileged pa.s.sage, no private stairway or false door; glancing along the whole rectilinear, uniform flight, we behold the innumerable body of clerks, functionaries, supernumeraries, and postulants, an entire mult.i.tude, ranged tier beyond tier and attentive; n.o.body advances except at the word and in his turn.--Nowhere in Europe are human lives so well regulated, within lines of demarcation so universal, so simple, and so satisfactory to the eye and to logic: the edifice in which Frenchmen are henceforth to move and act is regular from top to bottom, in its entirety as well as in its details, outside as well as inside; its stories, one above the other, are adjusted with exact symmetry; its juxtaposed ma.s.ses form pendants and counterpoise; all its lines and forms, every dimension and proportion, all its props and b.u.t.tresses combine, through their mutual dependencies, to compose a harmony and to maintain an equilibrium. In this respect the structure is cla.s.sic, belonging to the same family of productions which the same spirit, guided by the same method, had produced in Europe for the previous one hundred and fifty years.[2329] Its a.n.a.logues, in the physical order of things, are the architectural productions of Mansard, Le Notre, and their successors, from the structures and gardens of Versailles down to and embracing the Madeleine and the Rue de Rivoli. In the intellectual order, its a.n.a.logues consist of the literary forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the superb oratorical prose and correct, eloquent poetry, especially epics and tragedies, including those still manufactured according to rule about the year 1810. It corresponds to these and forms their pendant in the political and social order of things, because it emanates from the same deliberate purpose. Four const.i.tutions, in the same style, preceded it; but these were good only on paper, while this one stands firm on the ground. For the first time in modern history we see a society due to ratiocination and, at the same time, substantial; the new France, under these two heads, is the masterpiece of the cla.s.sic spirit.

V. Modeled after Rome.

Its a.n.a.logue in the antique world.--The Roman State from Diocletian to Constantine.--Causes and bearing of this a.n.a.logy.--Survival of the Roman idea in Napoleon's mind.

--The new Empire of the West.

Nevertheless, if we go back in time, beyond modern times, beyond the Middle Ages, as far as the antique world, we encounter during the Roman emperors Diocletian's and Constantine's era another monument whose architecture, equally regular, is developed on a still grander scale: back then we are in the natal atmosphere and stand on the natal soil of the cla.s.sic spirit.--At this time, the human material, more reduced and better prepared than in France, existed similarly in the requisite condition. At this date, we likewise see at work the prearranging reasoning-faculty

* which simplifies in order to deduce,

* which leaves out historic customs and local diversities,

* which considers the basic human being,

* which treats individuals as units and the people as totals,

* which forcibly applies its general outlines to all special lives, and

* which glories in const.i.tuting, legislating, and administering by rule according to the measurements of square and compa.s.s.

At this date, in effect, the turn of mind, the talent, the ways of the Roman architect, his object, his resources and his means of execution, are already those of his French successor; the conditions around him in the Roman world are equivalent; behind him in Roman history the precedents, ancient and recent, are almost the same.

In the first place,[2330] there is, since emperor Augustus, the absolute monarchy, and, since the Antonines, administrative centralization the result of which is that

* all the old national and munic.i.p.al communities are broken up or crushed out,

* all collective existences chilled or extinguished,

* local patriotism slowly worn away,

* an increasing diminution of individual initiative,

and, under the invasive interference, direction, and providence of the State, one hundred millions of men become more and more pa.s.sive and separated from each other.[2331]

And as a result, in full enjoyment of peace and internal prosperity under the appearances of union, force, and health, latent feebleness, and, as in France on the approach of 1789, a coming dissolution.

There is next, as after 1789 in France, the total collapse, not from below and among the people, but from above and through the army, a worse collapse than in France, prolonged for fifty years of anarchy, civil wars, local usurpations, ephemeral tyrannies, urban seditions, rural jacqueries, brigandage, famines, and invasions along the whole frontier, with such a ruin of agriculture and other useful activities, with such a diminution of public and private capital, with such a destruction of human lives that, in twenty years, the number of the population seems to have diminished one half.[2332] There is, finally, as after 1799, in France, the re-establishment of order brought about more slowly, but by the same means, the army and a dictatorship, in the rude hands of three or four great military parvenus, Pannonians or Dalmatians, Bonapartes of Sirmium or of Scutari, they too, of a new race or of intact energy, adventurers and children of their own deeds, the last Diocletian, like Napoleon, a restorer and an innovator. Around them, as around Napoleon, to aid them in their civil undertakings, is a crowd of expert administrators and eminent jurisconsults, all pract.i.tioners, statesmen, and businessmen, and yet men of culture, logicians, and philosophers.

They were imbued with the double governmental and humanitarian view, which for three centuries Greek speculation and Roman practice had introduced into minds and imaginations. This view, at once leveling and authoritative, tending to exaggerate the attributes of the State and the supreme power of the prince,[2333] was nevertheless inclined

* to put natural right in the place of positive law,[2334]

* to preferring equity and logic to antiquity and to custom,

* to reinstate the dignity of man among the qualities of mankind,

* to enhance the condition of the slave, of the provincial, of the debtor, of the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, of woman, of the child, and

* to recover for the human community all its inferior members, foreign or degraded, which the ancient const.i.tution of the family and of the city had excluded from it.

Therefore Napoleon could find the outlines of his construction in the political, legislative, and judicial organizations extending from Diocletian to Constantine, and beyond these down to Theodosius. At the base, popular sovereignty;[2335] the powers of the people delegated unconditionally to one man. This omnipotence conferred, theoretically or apparently, through the free choice of citizens, but really through the will of the army. No protection against the Prince's arbitrary edict, except a no less arbitrary rescript from the same hand. His successor designated, adopted, and qualified by himself. A senate for show, a council of state for administration; all local powers conferred from above; cities under tutelage. All subjects endowed with the showy t.i.tle of citizen, and all citizens reduced to the humble condition of taxpayers and of people under control. An administration of a hundred thousand officials taking all services into its hands, comprising public instruction, public succor, and public supplies of food, together with systems of worship. This was at first pagan cults, and after Constantine, the Christian cult. All these services were cla.s.sified, ranked, co-coordinated, carefully defined in such a way as not to encroach on each other, and carefully combined in such a way as to complete each other. An immense hierarchy of transferable functionaries was kept at work from above on one hundred and eighty square leagues of territory; thirty populations of different race and language-Syrians, Egyptians, Numidians, Spaniards, Gauls, Britons, Germans, Greeks, Italians--subject to the same uniform Regime. The territory was divided like a checker-board, on arithmetical and geometrical principles, into one hundred or one hundred and twenty small provinces; old nations or States dismembered and purposely cut up so as to put an end forever to natural, spontaneous, and viable groups. A minute and verified census taking place every fifteen years to correctly a.s.sign land taxes. An official and universal language; a State system of worship, and, very soon, a Church and State orthodoxy. A systematic code of laws, full and precise, admirable for the rule of private life, a sort of moral geometry in which the theorems, rigorously linked together, are attached to the definitions and axioms of abstract justice. A scale of grades, one above the other, which everybody may ascend from the first to the last; t.i.tles of n.o.bility more and more advanced, suited to more and more advanced functions; spectabiles, ill.u.s.tres, clarissimi, perfectissimi, a.n.a.logous to Napoleon's Barons, Counts, Dukes, and Princes. A programme of promotion once exhibiting, and on which are still seen, common soldiers, peasants, a shepherd, a barbarian, the son of a cultivator (colon), the grandson of a slave, mounting gradually upward to the highest dignities, becoming patrician, Count, Duke, commander of the cavalry, Caesar, Augustus, and donning the imperial purple, enthroned amid the most sumptuous magnificence and the most elaborate ceremonial prostrations, a being called G.o.d during his lifetime, and after death adored as a divinity, and dead or alive, a complete divinity on earth.[2336]

So colossal an edifice, so admirably adjusted, so mathematical, could not wholly perish; its hewn stones were too ma.s.sive, too nicely squared; too exactly fitted, and the demolisher's hammer could not reach down to its deepest foundations.--This one, through its shaping and its structure, through its history and its duration, resembles the stone edifices which the same people at the same epoch elevated on the same soil, the aqueducts, amphitheatres, and triumphal arches, the Coliseum, the baths of Diocletian and of Caracalla.

The medieval man, using their intact foundations and their shattered fragments, built here and there, haphazard, according to the necessities of the moment, planting his Gothic towers between Corinthian columns against the panels of walls still standing.[2337] But, under his incoherent masonry, he observed the beautiful forms, the precious marbles, the architectural combinations, the symmetrical taste of an anterior and superior art; he felt that his own work was rude. The new world, to all thinking minds, was miserable compared with the old one; its languages seemed a patois (crude dialect), its literature mere stammering or driveling, its law a ma.s.s of abuses or a mere routine, its feudality anarchy, and its social arrangements, disorder.--In vain had the medieval man striven to escape through all issues, by the temporal road and by the spiritual road, by the universal and absolute monarchy of the German Cesars, and by the universal and absolute monarchy of the Roman pontiffs. At the end of the fifteenth century the Emperor still possessed the golden globe, the golden crown, the scepter of Charlemagne and of Otho the Great, but, after the death of Frederick II., he was nothing more than a majesty for show; the Pope still wore the tiara, still held the pastoral staff and the keys of Gregory VII. and of Innocent III., but, after the death of Boniface VIII., he was nothing more than a majesty of the Church. Both abortive restorations had merely added ruins to ruins, while the phantom of the ancient empire alone remained erect amid so many fragments. Grand in its outlines and decorations, it stood there, august, dazzling, in a halo, the unique masterpiece of art and of reason, as the ideal form of human society.

For ten centuries this specter haunted the medieval epoch, and nowhere to such an extent as in Italy.[2338]

It reappears the last time in 1800, starting up in and taking firm hold of the magnificent, benighted imagination of the great Italian,[2339] to whom the opportunity afforded the means for executing the grand Italian dream of the Middle Ages; it is according to this retrospective vision that the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantine of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Civil Code, the Theodosius of the Tuileries and of St.

Cloud reconstructed France.

This does not mean that he copies--he restores; his conception is not plagiarism, but a case of atavism; it comes to him through the nature of his intellect and through racial traditions. In the way of social and political conceptions, as in literature and in art, his spontaneous taste is ultra-cla.s.sic. We detect this in his mode of comprehending the history of France; State historians, "encouraged by the police," must make it to order; they must trace it "from the end of Louis XIV. to the year VIII," and their object must be to show how superior the new architecture is to the old one.[2340] "The constant disturbance of the finances must be noted, the chaos of the provincial a.s.semblies,... the pretensions of the parliaments, the lack of energy and order in the administration, that parti-colored France with no unity of laws or of administration, being rather a union of twenty kingdoms than one single State, so that one breathes on reaching the epoch in which people enjoy the benefits of the unity of the laws, of the administration, and of the territory." In effect, he breathes; in thus pa.s.sing from the former to the latter spectacle, he finds real intellectual pleasure; his eyes, offended with Gothic disorder, turn with relief and satisfaction to majestic simplicity and cla.s.sic regularity; his eyes are those of a Latin architect brought up in the "ecole de Rome."

This is so true that, outside of this style, he admits of no other.

Societies of a different type seem to him absurd. He misconceives their local propriety and the historical reasons for their existence. He takes no account of their solidity. He is going to dash himself against Spain and against Russia, and he has no comprehension whatever of England.[2341]--This is so true that, wherever he places his hand he applies his own social system; he imposes on annexed territories and on va.s.sal[2342] countries the same uniform arrangements, his own administrative hierarchy, his own territorial divisions and sub-divisions, his own conscription, his civil code, his const.i.tutional and ecclesiastical system, his university, his system of equality and promotion, the entire French system, and, as far as possible, the language, literature, drama, and even the spirit of his France,--in brief, civilization as he conceives it, so that conquest becomes propaganda, and, as with his predecessors, the Cesars of Rome, he sometimes really fancies that the establishment of his universal monarchy is a great benefit to Europe.