After the Terror, and the decadence and disorder of the Directory, the majority of Frenchmen wanted a conservative Republic, and they got one from a man whose ideal society looked like merely a much larger version of the Army, led politically as well as militarily by its commander-in-chief. ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ the First Consul told an early meeting of his Conseil d’État, ‘we must now begin its history.’4 In many respects, he was the last and greatest of the enlightened authoritarians of eighteenth-century Europe who had begun to introduce rationalism to
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