The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI

by Will Durant

Monastic life had lost its lure; the Benedictines, numbering 6,434 in the France of 1770, had been reduced to 4,300 in 1790; nine orders of “religious” had been disbanded by 1780, and in 1773 the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had been dissolved. Religion in general had declined in the French cities; in many towns the churches were half empty; and among the peasantry pagan customs and old superstitions competed actively with the doctrines and ceremonies of the Church.

The state supported the Church because statesmen generally agreed that the clergy gave them indispensable aid in preserving social order. In their view the natural inequality of human endowment made inevitable an unequal distribution of wealth;

“The old nobility,” said Napoleon, “would have survived if it had known enough to become master of printing materials…. The advent of cannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern system.”

the deepest division was between those who treasured religious faith as their final support in a world otherwise unintelligible, meaningless, and tragic and those who had come to think of religion as a managed and costly superstition blocking the road to reason and liberty.

Robespierre believed that Catholicism was an organized exploitation of superstition,91 but he rejected atheism as an immodest assumption of impossible knowledge.

So began the especially “Great Terror,” lasting from June 10 to July 27, 1794. In not quite seven weeks 1,376 men and women were guillotined—155 more than in the sixty-one weeks between March, 1793, and June 10, 1794.113

power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

Aside from that small minority which had received a college education, and that upper middle class which had been touched by the Enlightenment, most Frenchmen, and nearly all Frenchwomen, preferred the saints and ceremonies of the Catholic calendar to the rootless festivals and formless Supreme Being of Robespierre.

Napoleon, like most rulers and revolutionists, never allowed morality to hinder victory, and he trusted to success to whitewash his sins.

Like the twenty years between Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon and the accession of Augustus (49–29 B.C.), the twenty-six years between the taking of the Bastille and the final abdication of Napoleon (1789–1815) were as rich in memorable events as centuries had been in less convulsive and remolding periods.

the Convention (1793) abolished primogeniture, and ruled that property must be willed in equal shares to all the testator’s children, including those born out of wedlock but acknowledged by the father. This legislation had important results, moral and economic: reluctant to condemn their heirs to poverty by periodic divisions of the patrimony among many children, the French cultivated the old arts of family limitation. The peasants remained prosperous, but the population of France grew slowly during the nineteenth century—from 28 million in 1800 to 39 million in 1914, while that of Germany rose from 21 million to 67 million.

Prospering on the land, French peasants were slow to move into towns and factories; so France remained predominantly agricultural, while England and Germany developed industry and technology, excelled in war, and dominated Europe.

The bourgeoisie triumphed in the Revolution because it had more money and brains than either the aristocracy or the plebs. It purchased from the state the most lucrative portions of the property that had been confiscated from the Church.

it is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

But individual freedom contains its own nemesis; it tends to increase until it overruns the restraints necessary for social order and group survival; freedom unlimited is chaos complete.

the kind of ability needed for a revolution is quite different from the kind required for building a new order: the one task is furthered by resentment, passion, courage, and disregard for law; the other calls for patience, reason, practical judgment, and respect for law.

Revolution—or legislation—repeatedly redistributes concentrated wealth, and the inequality of ability or privilege concentrates it again.

Liberty and equality are enemies: the more freedom men enjoy, the freer they are to reap the results of their natural or environmental superiorities; hence inequality multiplies under governments favoring freedom of enterprise and support of property rights. Equality is an unstable equilibrium, which any difference in heredity, health, intelligence, or character will soon end. Most revolutions find that they can check inequality only by limiting liberty, as in authoritarian lands.

The Revolution left some lessons for political philosophy. It led a widening minority to realize that the nature of man is the same in all classes; that revolutionists, raised to power, behave like their predecessors, and in some cases more ruthlessly; compare Robespierre with Louis XVI.

France had then almost no secondary schools, and its press was an agent of passionate partisanship that deformed, rather than informed, the public mind.

Napoleon, himself a skeptic, concluded that social order rested ultimately on the human animal’s natural and carefully cultivated fear of supernatural powers. He came to look upon the Catholic Church as the most effective instrument ever devised for the control of men and women, for their grumbling or silent habituation to economic, social, and sexual inequality, and for their public obedience to divine commandments uncongenial to human flesh.

Napoleon concluded that the chaos and violence of the Revolution had been due, above all, to its repudiation of the Church. He resolved to restore the association of Church and state

Realizing that England, controlling the seas, could at will take any French colony, Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to the United States for eighty million francs (May 3, 1803). England, still technically at peace, instructed its naval force to capture any French vessel they might encounter. War was officially declared on May 16, 1803, and continued for twelve years.

Augustus and Charlemagne, those great restorers, had no faith in democracy; they could not subject their trained and considered judgments, their far-reaching plans and policies, to carping criticism and inconclusive debate by the corruptible delegates of popular simplicity.

Some 1,200,000 Frenchmen had bought, from the state, property confiscated from the Church or from émigrés; they saw no security for their title deeds except in preventing a return of the Bourbons; and they saw in the permanence of Napoleon’s power the best protection against such a calamity.

he had the gift of command, and knew its secret: that most persons would rather follow a lead than give it—if the leader leads.

In a proclamation of 1799 he told his auditors: “The chief virtues of a soldier are constancy and discipline. Valor comes only in the second place.”

Napoleon expressed part of his strategy in a mathematical formula: “The strength of an army, like the amount of momentum in mechanics, is estimated by the mass times the velocity.

In the 3,680 days of his imperial rule (1804–14) he was in Paris for only 955,105

For major ministries he chose men of first-rate ability, like Talleyrand, Gaudin, and Fouché, despite their troublesome pride; for the rest, and generally for administrative posts, he preferred men of the second rank, who would not ask questions or propose measures of their own; he had no time or patience for such discussions; he would take a chance on his own judgment, assuming the responsibility and risk.

He not only employed a large force of police and detectives under Fouché or Régnier, but organized an additional secret police agency whose duty it was to help—and spy on—Fouché and Régnier,

By 1804 France was a police state. By 1810 it had a new supply of minor Bastilles—state prisons in which political offenders could be “detained” by imperial order, without a regular procedure in the courts.

Napoleon explained his omnipotence as necessary in the difficult transition from the licentious liberty of the Revolution after 1791 to the reconstructive order of the Consulate and the Empire. He recalled that Robespierre, as well as Marat, had recommended a dictatorship as needed to restore order and stability to a France verging on the dissolution of both the family and the state.

He felt that he had not destroyed democracy; what he had replaced in 1799 was an oligarchy of corrupt, merciless, and unscrupulous men. He had destroyed the liberty of the masses, but that liberty was destroying France with mob violence and moral license, and only the restoration and concentration of authority could restore the strength of France as a civilized and independent state.

Why did he fail? Because his grasp exceeded his reach, his imagination dominated his ambition, and his ambition domineered over his body, mind, and character. He should have known that the Powers would never be content to have France rule half of Europe.

In the end imagination toppled reason; the polyglot colossus, standing on one unsteady head, tumbled back into difference, and the rooted force of national character defeated the great dictator’s will to power.

Religion was one of the fields in which the ideologues had floated on a film of notions instead of grounding themselves in history. Only a logician, Napoleon felt, would bother long with the question, Does God exist? The real philosopher, schooled in history, would ask, why has religion, so often refuted and ridiculed, always survived, and played so notable a role in every civilization?

yet what thoughtful person has not at fifty discarded the dogmas he swore by in his youth, and will not at eighty smile at the “mature” views of his middle age?

“I should believe in religion if it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I read Socrates, Plato, Moses, or Mohammed, I have no more belief. It has all been invented by men.”

For all men are born unequal, and become more unequal with every advancement in technology and specialization; a civilization must elicit, develop, use, and reward superior abilities, and it must persuade the less fortunate to accept peaceably this inequality of rewards and possessions as natural and necessary. How can this be done? By teaching men that it is the will of God.

Most parents and teachers were glad to have the help of religious faith in rearing or training children—to counter the natural anarchism of youth with a moral code based upon religious and filial piety, and presented as coming from an omnipotent God watchful of every act, threatening eternal punishments, and offering eternal rewards.

Love generated by the physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous; it is une sottise faite à deux–”a folly committed in pair.”

utopias of equality are the consolatory myths of the weak; anarchist cries for freedom from laws and government are the delusions of immature and autocratic minds; and democracy is a game used by the strong to conceal their oligarchic rule.

He was Cesare Borgia with twice the brains, and Machiavelli with half the caution and a hundred times the will.

Tocqueville put it well: he was as great as a man can be without virtue, and he was as wise as a man can be without modesty.

As free enterprise progressively enriched the clever, some men perceived that equality withers under liberty, and that a laissez-faire government allows the concentration of wealth to exclude half of the population from the fruits of invention and the graces of civilization.

“Before 1789,” says Taine, “the peasant proprietor paid, on 100 francs’ net income, 14 to the seignior, 14 to the clergy, 53 to the state, and kept only 18 or 19 for himself; after 1800 he pays nothing of his 100 francs of income to the seignior or the clergy; he pays little to the state, only 25 francs to the commune and département, and keeps 70 for his pocket.”

between 1796 and 1814, Napoleon sent 506 works of art from Italy to France; of these, 249 were returned after his fall, 248 remained, 9 were lost.

She remarked prophetically that “scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.”

So one mood, passionately sustained, wears out its welcome, begets its opposite, and is revived, across the generations, through the embattled immoderation of mankind.