Array Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne - The Collected Works of Napoleon Bonaparte

The executive power was vested in three Consuls who were to be elected for ten years and to be re-eligible. They were to be elected by the Senate but, to get the system started, the constitution indicated who they should be Bonaparte, First Consul; Cambaceres, the second, and Lebrun, the third. Practically all the powers were to be in the hands of the First Consul, the appointment of ministers, ambassadors, officers of the army and navy, and numberless civil officials, including judges, the right to make war and peace, and treaties, subject to the sanction of the legislature.

The First Consul was also to have the initiative in all legislation. Bills were to be prepared by a Council of State, were then to be submitted to a body called the Tribunate, which was to have the right to discuss them but not to vote them. Then they were to go to the Legislative Body which was to have the power to vote them, but not discuss them. Moreover this "assembly of 300 mutes" must discharge its single function of voting in secret. There was also to be a fourth body, higher than the others the Senate, which was to be the guardian of the constitution and was also to be an electing Senate body, choosing the Consuls, the members of the Tribunate and the Legislative Body from certain lists, prepared in a cumbersome and elaborate way, and pretending to safeguard the right of the voters, for the suffrage was declared by the constitution to be universal. No time need be spent on this aspect of the constitution, for it was a sham and a deception.

All this elaborate machinery was designed to keep up the fiction of the sovereignty of the people, the great assertion of the Revolution. The Republic continued to exist. The people were voters. They had their various assemblies, thus ingeniously selected. Practically, however, and this is the matter that most concerns us, popular sovereignty was gone, Bonaparte was sovereign. He had more extensive executive powers than Louis XVI had had under the Constitution of 1791. He really had the legislative power also. No bill could be discussed or voted that had not been first prepared by his orders. Once voted it could not go into force until he promulgated it. France was still a republic in name; practically, however, it was a monarchy, scarcely veiled at that. Bonaparte's position was quite as attractive as that of any monarch by divine right, except for the fact that he was to hold it for a term of ten years only and had no power to bequeath it to an heir. He was to remedy these details later.

Having given France a constitution, he secured the enactment of a law which placed all the local government in his hands. There was to be a prefect at the head of each department, a subprefect for each arrondissement, a mayor for every town or commune. The citizens lost the power to manage their own local affairs, and thus their training in self-government came to an end. Government, national and local, was centralized in Paris, more effectively, even, than in the good old days of the Bourbons and their intendants.

Having set his house in order, having gained a firm grip on the reins of power, Bonaparte now turned his attention to the foreign enemies of France. The coalition consisted of England, Austria, and Russia. England was difficult to get at. The Russians were dissatisfied with their allies and were withdrawing from cooperation. There remained Austria, the enemy Bonaparte had met before.

One Austrian army was on the Rhine and Bonaparte sent Moreau to attack it. Another was in northern Italy and he went in person to attend to that. While he had been in Egypt the Austrians had won back northern Italy. Melas, their general, had driven Massena into Genoa where the latter hung on like grim death, with rations that would soon be exhausted. Bonaparte's plan was to get in between the Austrians and their own country, to attack them in the rear, thus to force them to withdraw from the siege of Genoa, in order to keep open their line of communication. In the pursuit of this object he accomplished one of his most famous exploits, the crossing of the Great Saint Bernard Pass over the Alps, with an army of 40,000, through snow and ice, dragging the cannon in troughs made out of hollowed logs. It was a matter of a week. Once in Italy he sought out the Austrians and met them unexpectedly at Marengo (June 14, 1800). The battle came near being a defeat, owing to the fact that Bonaparte blundered badly, having divided his forces, and that Desaix's division was miles away. The battle began at dawn and went disastrously for the French. At one o'clock the Austrian commander rode back to his headquarters, believing that he had won and that the remaining work could be left to his subordinates. The French were pushed back and their retreat threatened to become a stampede. The day was saved by the appearance of Desaix's division on the scene, at about five o'clock. The battle was resumed with fury, Desaix himself was killed, but the soldiers avenged his glorious death by a glorious victory. By seven o'clock the day of strange vicissitudes was over. The Austrians signed an armistice abandoning to the French all northern Italy as far as the Mincio.

Six months later Moreau won a decisive victory over the Austrians in Germany at Hohenlinden (December 3, 1800), Moreau thus opening the road to Vienna. Austria was now compelled to sue for peace. The Treaty of Luneville (February 9, 1801) was in the main a repetition of the Treaty of Campo Formio.

As had been the case after Campo Formio, so now, after the break-up of this second coalition, France remained at war with only one nation, England. These two nations had been at war continuously for eight years. England had defeated the French navy and had conquered many of the colonies of France and of the allies or dependencies of France, that is, of Holland and Spain. She had just compelled the French in Egypt, the army left there by Bonaparte, to agree to evacuate that country. But her debt had grown enormously and there was widespread popular dislike of the war. A change in the ministry occurred, removing the great war leader, William Pitt. England agreed to discuss the question of peace. The discussion went on for five months and ended in the Peace of Amiens (March, 1802). England recognized the existence of the French Republic. She restored all the French colonies and some of the Dutch and Spanish, retaining only Ceylon and Trinidad. She promised to evacuate Malta and Egypt, which the French had seized in 1798 and which she had taken from them. Nothing was said of the French conquest of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine. This was virtual acquiescence in the new boundaries of France, which far exceeded those of the ancient monarchy.

Thus Europe was at peace for the first time in ten years. Great was the enthusiasm in both France and England. The peace, however, was most unstable. It lasted just one year.

Napoleon said on one occasion, "I am the Revolution." On another he said that he had "destroyed the Revolution." There was much error and some truth in both and the these statements.

The Consulate, and the Empire which succeeded the Consulate, preserved much of the work of the Revolution and abolished much, in conformity with the ideas and also the personal interests of the new ruler. Bonaparte had very definite opinions concerning the Revolution, concerning the French people, and concerning his own ambitions.

These opinions constituted the most important single factor in the life of France after 1799. Bonaparte sympathized with, or at least tolerated, one of the ideas of the Revolution, Equality. He detested the other leading idea, Liberty. In his youth he had fallen under the magnetic spell of Rousseau. But that had passed and thenceforth he dismissed Rousseau summarily as a "madman." He accepted the principle of equality because it alone made possible his own career and because he perceived the hold it had upon the minds of the people. He had no desire to restore the Bourbons and the feudal system, the incarnation of the principle of inequality and privilege. He stood right athwart the road to yesterday in this respect. It was he and his system that kept the Bourbons exiles from France fifteen years longer, so long indeed that when they did finally return it was largely without their baggage of outworn ideas. Bonaparte thus prevented the restoration of the Old Regime. That was done for, for good and all. Privilege, abolished in 1789, remained abolished. The clergy, nobility, and third estate had been swept away. There remained only a vast mass of French citizens subject to the same laws, paying the same taxes, enjoying equal chances in life, as far as the state was concerned. The state showed no partiality, had no favorites. All shared in bearing the nation's burdens in proportion to their ability. And no class levied taxes upon another - tithes and feudal dues were not restored. No class could exercise a monopoly of any craft or trade the guilds with all their restrictions remained abolished. Moreover, all now had an equal chance at public employment in the state or in the army.