The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5

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The Modern Regime, Volume 1 [Napoleon]
^M
The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5
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by Hippolyte A. Taine^M

Contents:

PREFACE

BOOK FIRST. Napoleon Bonaparte.

Chapter I. Historical Importance of his Character and Genius.

Chapter II. His Ideas, Passions and Intelligence.

BOOK SECOND. Formation and Character of the New State.

Chapter I. The Institution of Government.

Chapter II. Use and Abuse of Government Services.

Chapter III. The New Government Organization.

BOOK THIRD. Object and Merits of the System.

Chapter I. Recovery of Social Order.

Chapter II. Taxation and Conscription.

Chapter III. Ambition and Self-esteem.

BOOK FOURTH. Defect and Effects of the System.

Chapter I. Local Society.

Chapter II. Local society since 1830.

___________________________________________________________________

PREFACE

The following third and last part of the Origins of Contemporary
France is to consist of two volumes. After the present volume, the
second is to treat of the Church, the School and the Family, describe
the modern milieu and note the facilities and obstacles which a
society like our own encounters in this new milieu: here, the past and
the present meet, and the work already done is continued by the work
which is going on under our eyes. - -The undertaking is hazardous and
more difficult than with the two preceding parts. For the Ancient
Régime and the Revolution are henceforth complete and finished
periods; we have seen the end of both and are thus able to comprehend
their entire course. On the contrary, the end of the ulterior period
is still wanting ; the great institutions which date from the
Consulate and the Empire, either consolidation or dissolution, have
not yet reached their historic term: since 1800, the social order of
things, notwithstanding eight changes of political form, has remained
almost intact. Our children or grandchildren will know whether it
will finally succeed or miscarry; witnesses of the denouement, they
will have fuller light by which to judge of the entire drama. Thus
far four acts only have been played; of the fifth act, we have simply
a presentiment. - On the other hand, by dint of living under this
social system, we have become accustomed to it; it no longer excites
our wonder; however artificial it may be it seems to us natural. We
can scarcely conceive of another that is healthier; and what is much
worse, it is repugnant to us to do so. For, such a conception would
soon lead to comparisons and hence to a judgment and, on many points,
to an unfavorable judgment, one which would be a censure, not only of
our institutions but of ourselves. The machine of the year VIII,[1]
applied to us for three generations, has permanently shaped and fixed
us as we are, for better or for worse. If, for a century, it sustains
us, it represses us for a century. We have contracted the infirmities
it imports - stoppage of development, instability of internal balance,
disorders of the intellect and of the will, fixed ideas and ideas that
are false. These ideas are ours; therefore we hold on to them, or,
rather, they have taken hold of us. To get rid of them, to impose the
necessary recoil on our mind, to transport us to a distance and place
us at a critical point of view, where we can study ourselves, our
ideas and our institutions as scientific objects, requires a great
effort on our part, many precautions, and long reflection. - Hence,
the delays of this study; the reader will pardon them on considering
that an ordinary opinion, caught on the wing, on such a subject, does
not suffice. In any event, when one presents an opinion on such a
subject one is bound to believe it. I can believe in my own only when
it has become precise and seems to me proven.

Menthon Saint-Bernard, September, 1890.

_____________________________________________________________________

BOOK FIRST. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.

CHAPTER I. Historical Importance of his Character and Genius.

If you want to comprehend a building, you have to imagine the
circumstances, I mean the difficulties and the means, the kind and
quality of its available materials, the moment, the opportunity, and
the urgency of the demand for it. But, still more important, we must
consider the genius and taste of the architect, especially whether he
is the proprietor, whether he built it to live in himself, and, once
installed in it, whether he took pains to adapt it to how own way of
living, to his own necessities, to his own use. - Such is the social
edifice erected by Napoleon Bonaparte, its architect, proprietor, and
principal occupant from 1799 to 1814. It is he who has made modern
France; never was an individual character so profoundly stamped on any
collective work, so that, to comprehend the work, we must first study
the character of the Man.[2]

I. Napoleon's Past and Personality.

He is of another race and another century. - Origin of his paternal
family. - Transplanted to Corsica. - His maternal family. -
Laetitia Ramolino. - Persistence of Corsican souvenirs in Napoleon's
mind. - His youthful sentiments regarding Corsica and France. -
Indications found in his early compositions and in his style. -
Current monarchical or democratic ideas have no hold on him. - His
impressions of the 20th of June and 10th of August after the 31st of
May. - His associations with Robespierre and Barras without
committing himself. - His sentiments and the side he takes Vendémiaire
13th. - The great Condottière. - His character and conduct in Italy.
- Description of him morally and physically in 1798. - The early and
sudden ascendancy which he exerts. Analogous in spirit and character
to his Italian ancestors of the XVth century.

Disproportionate in all things, but, stranger still, he is not only
out of the common run, but there is no standard of measurement for
him; through his temperament, instincts, faculties, imagination,
passions, and moral constitution he seems cast in a special mould,
composed of another metal than that which enters into the composition
of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently he is not a Frenchman,
nor a man of the eighteenth century; he belongs to another race and
another epoch.[3] We detect in him, at the first glance, the
foreigner, the Italian,[4] and something more, apart and beyond these,
surpassing all similitude or analogy.-Italian he was through blood and
lineage; first, through his paternal family, which is Tuscan,[5] and
which we can follow down from the twelfth century, at Florence, then
at San Miniato ; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in
the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it vegetates obscurely
in provincial isolation, through a long line of notaries and municipal
syndics. "My origin," says Napoleon himself,[6] " has made all
Italians regard me as a compatriot. . . . When the question of the
marriage of my sister Pauline with Prince Borghése came up there was
but one voice in Rome and in Tuscany, in that family, and with all its
connections: 'It will do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves,
it is one of our own families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about
coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave
prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting political arguments
with the following slight tribute to national amour propre: 'After all
we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them.
We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.'" Significant words, which
will one day throw light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the
eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with her right of
primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the transalpines, the
rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.[7]

From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes
himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken
and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de
Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under
Spanish rule, municipal independence, private feuds, the great
exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the
system of ephemeral principalities, based on force and fraud, all give
way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order,
and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time
when the energy and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle
Ages begins to run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,[8] a
small detached branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but
almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging
to the primitive medieval epoch,[9] and in a social atmosphere
sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.
- Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the
island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and
mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa,
belonged to Sarténe,[10] a Corsican canton par excellence where, in
1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh
century; where the permanent strife of inimical families was suspended
only by truces; where, in many villages, nobody stirred out of doors
except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenellated like
fortresses. His mother, Laetitia Ramolini, from whom, in character
and in will, he derived much more than from his father,[11] is a
primitive soul on which Civilization has taken no hold. She is
simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the refinements, charms, and
graces of a worldly life; indifferent to comforts, without literary
culture, as parsimonious as any peasant woman, but as energetic as the
leader of a band. She is powerful, physically and spiritually,
accustomed to danger, ready in desperate resolutions. She is, in
short, a "rural Cornelia," who conceived and gave birth to her son
amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, in the thickest of the
French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback, nocturnal
surprises, and volleys of musketry.[12]

"Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and
braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders."

Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to
the last, he was of his people and country.

"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,[13] "even the
very smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes
shut; nowhere had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there
again in early infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth,
amidst precipices, traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow
defiles, enjoying the honors and pleasures of hospitality," treated
everywhere as a brother and compatriot," without any accident or
insult ever suggesting to him that his confidence was not well
grounded." At Bocognano,[14] where his mother, pregnant with him, had
taken refuge, "where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh
degree of relationship, and where the dowry of a young girl was
estimated by the number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made
welcome, and everybody would have died for me." Forced to become a
Frenchman, transplanted to France, educated at the expense of the king
in a French school, he became rigid in his insular patriotism, and
loudly extolled Paoli, the liberator, against whom his relations had
declared themselves. "Paoli," said he, at the dinner table,[15]" was
a great man. He loved his country. My father was his adjutant, and
never will I forgive him for having aided in the union of Corsica with
France. He should have followed her fortunes and have succumbed only
with her." Throughout his youth he is at heart anti-French, morose,
"bitter, liking very few and very little liked, brooding over
resentment," like a vanquished man, always moody and compelled to work
against the grain. At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades,
takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens
himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you
Frenchmen all the harm I can! - "Corsican by nation and character,"
wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go
far if circumstances favor him."[16] - Leaving the Academy, and in
garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile,
denationalized; his old bitterness returns, and, addressing his
letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when our country perished.
Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores, drowning the throne
of liberty in floods of blood -such was the odious spectacle on which
my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the
oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth. . .
I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of
infamy. . . . vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[17] A little
later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly
and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of
renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain
it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-
hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective. - From the age of
fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds
refuge in imagination in the past of his island;[18] he recounts its
history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his
work to Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and
dedicates the abridgment to Abbé Raynal, recapitulating in a strained
style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small
community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary
outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals,
revenges, loves, and murders, - in short, a history similar to that of
the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the
sympathies, denotes the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this work, as in
other youthful writings, he follows as well as he can the authors in
vogue - Rousseau, and especially Raynal; he gives a schoolboy
imitation of their tirades, their sentimental declamation, and their
humanitarian grandiloquence. But these borrowed clothes, which
incommode him, do not fit him; they are too tight, and the cloth is
too fine; they require too much circumspection in walking; he does not
know how to put them on, and they rip at every seam. Not only has he
never learned how to spell, but he does not know the true meaning,
connections, and relations of words, the propriety or impropriety of
phrases, the exact significance of imagery;[19] he strides on
impetuously athwart a pell-mell of incongruities, incoherencies,
Italianisms, and barbarisms, undoubtedly stumbling along through
awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of
heat;[20] his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion,
indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the
Academy, the professor of belles-lettres[21] notes down that "in the
strange and incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see
granite fused in a volcano." However original in mind and in
sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society around him, different
from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the current ideas which
take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it
might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other,
although accepting neither. - Pensioner of the king, who supported
him at Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also
supported his sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the
benefactor of his family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses
entreating or grateful letters over his mother's signature - he does
not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his mind to take
sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a
gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of
noble cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.[22] - Poor
and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal,
and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality,
if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it.
The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas,
or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by
democratic illusions, and entertains no other feeling than disgust for
the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace. - At Paris, in
April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the
revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful
speculation,"[23] and thinks he will hire and sublet houses at a
profit. On the 20th of June he witnesses, only as a matter of
curiosity, the invasion of the Tuileries, and, on seeing the king at a
window place the red cap on his head, exclaims, so as to be heard, "
Che Caglione!" Immediately after this: "How could they let that rabble
enter! Mow down four or five hundred of them with cannons and the rest
would run away." On August 10, when the tocsin sounds, he regards the
people and the king with equal contempt; he rushes to a friend's house
on the Carrousel and there, still as a looker-on, views at his ease
all the occurrences of the day.[24] Finally, the chateau is forced
and he strolls through the Tuileries, looks in at the neighboring
cafés, and that is all: he is not disposed to take sides, he has no
Jacobin or royalist inclination. His features, even, are so calm "as
to provoke many hostile and distrustful stares, as someone who is
unknown and suspicious." - Similarly, after the 31st of May and the
2nd of June, his "Souper de Beaucaire" shows that if he condemns the
departmental insurrection it is mainly because he deems it futile: on
the side of the insurgents, a defeated army, no position tenable, no
cavalry, raw artillerymen, Marseilles reduced to its own troops, full
of hostile sans-culottes and so besieged, taken and pillaged. Chances
are against it: "Let the impoverished regions, the inhabitants of
Vivaris, of the Cevennes, of Corsica, fight to the last extremity, but
if you lose a battle and the fruit of a thousand years of fatigue,
hardship, economy, and happiness become the soldier's prey."[25] Here
was something with which the Girondists could be converted! - None of
the political or social convictions which then exercised such control
over men's minds have any hold on him. Before the 9th of Thermidor he
seemed to be a "republican montagnard," and we follow him for months
in Provence. "the favorite and confidential adviser of young
Robespierre," "admirer" of the elder Robespierre,[26] intimate at Nice
with Charlotte Robespierre. After the 9th of Thermidor has passed, he
frees himself with bombast from this compromising friendship: "I
thought him sincere," says he of the younger Robespierre, in a letter
intended to be shown, "but were he my father and had aimed at tyranny,
I would have stabbed him myself." On returning to Paris, after having
knocked at several doors, he takes Barras for a patron. Barras, the
most brazen of the corrupt, Barras, who has overthrown and contrived
the death of his two former protectors.[27] Among the contending
parties and fanaticisms which succeed each other he keeps cool and
free to dispose of himself as he pleases, indifferent to every cause
and concerning himself only with his own interests. - On the evening
of the 12th of Vendémiaire, on leaving the Feydeau theatre, and
noticing the preparations of the sectionists,[28] he said to Junot:

"Ah, if the sections put me in command, I would guarantee to place
them in
the Tuileries in two hours and have all those Convention rascals
driven out! "

Five hours later, summoned by Barras and the Conventionalists, he
takes "three minutes" to make up his mind, and, instead of "blowing up
the representatives," he mows down the Parisians. Like a good
condottière, he does not commit himself, considers the first that
offers and then the one who offers the most, only to back out
afterwards, and finally, seizing the opportunity, to grab everything.
- He will more and more become a true condottière, that is to say,
leader of a band, increasingly independent, pretending to submit under
the pretext of the public good, looking out only for his own interest,
self-centered, general on his own account and for his own advantage in
his Italian campaign before and after the 18th of Fructidor.[29] He
is, however, a condottière of the first class, already aspiring to the
loftiest summits, "with no stopping-place but the throne or the
scaffold,"[30] "determined[31] to master France, and through France
Europe. Without distraction, sleeping only three hours during the
night," he plays with ideas, men, religions, and governments,
exploiting people with incomparable dexterity and brutality. He is,
in the choice of means as of ends, a superior artist, inexhaustible in
glamour, seductions, corruption, and intimidation, fascinating, and
yet more terrible than any wild beast suddenly released among a herd
of browsing cattle. The expression is not too strong and was uttered
by an eye-witness, almost at this very date, a friend and a competent
diplomat: "You know that, while I am very fond of the dear general, I
call him to myself the little tiger, so as to properly characterize
his figure, tenacity, and courage, the rapidity of his movements, and
all that he has in him which maybe fairly regarded in that sense."[32]

At this very date, previous to official adulation and the adoption of
a recognized type, we see him face to face in two portraits drawn from
life, one physical, by a truthful painter, Guérin, and the other
moral, by a superior woman, Madame de Staël, who to the best European
culture added tact and worldly perspicacity. Both portraits agree so
perfectly that each seems to interpret and complete the other. "I saw
him for the first time,"[33] says Madame de Staël, "on his return to
France after the treaty of Campo-Formio. After recovering from the
first excitement of admiration there succeeded to this a decided
sentiment of fear." And yet, "at this time he had no power, for it was
even then supposed that the Directory looked upon him with a good deal
of suspicion." People regarded him sympathetically, and were even
prepossessed in his favor;

"thus the fear he inspired was simply due to the singular effect of
his person on almost all who approached him. I had met men worthy of
respect and had likewise met men of ferocious character; but nothing
in the impression which Bonaparte produced on me reminded me of
either. I soon found, in the various opportunities I had of meeting
him during his stay in Paris, that his character was not to be
described in terms commonly employed; he was neither mild nor)violent,
nor gentle nor cruel, like certain personages one happens to know. A
being like him, wholly unlike anybody else, could neither feel nor
excite sympathy; he was both more and less than a man; his figure,
intellect, and language bore the imprint of a foreign nationality . .
. . far from being reassured on seeing Bonaparte oftener, he
intimidated me more and more every day. I had a confused impression
that he was not to be influenced by any emotion of sympathy or
affection. He regards a human being as a fact, an object, and not as
a fellow-creature. He neither hates nor loves, he exists for himself
alone; the rest of humanity are so many ciphers. The force of his
will consists in the imperturbable calculation of his egoism. He is a
skillful player who has the human species for an antagonist, and whom
he proposes to checkmate. . . Every time that I heard him talk I
was struck with his superiority; it bore no resemblance to that of men
informed and cultivated through study and social intercourse, such as
we find in France and England. His conversation indicated the tact of
circumstances, like that of the hunter in pursuit of his prey. His
spirit seemed a cold, keen sword-blade, which freezes while it wounds.
I felt a profound irony in his mind, which nothing great or beautiful
could escape, not even his own fame, for he despised the nation whose
suffrages he sought. . . " - "With him, everything was means or
aims; spontaneity, whether for good or for evil, was entirely absent."

No law, no ideal and abstract rule, existed for him;

"he examined things only with reference to their immediate
usefulness; a general principle was repugnant to him, either as so
much nonsense or as an enemy."

Now, if we contemplate Guérin's portrait,[34] we see a spare body,
whose narrow shoulders under the uniform wrinkled by sudden movements,
the neck swathed in its high twisted cravat, the temples covered by
long, smooth, straight hair, exposing only the mask, the hard features
intensified through strong contrasts of light and shade, the cheeks
hollow up to the inner angle of the eye, the projecting cheek-bones,
the massive, protuberant jaw, the sinuous, mobile lips, pressed
together as if attentive, the large, clear eyes, deeply sunk under the
broad, arched eyebrows, the fixed, oblique look, as penetrating as a
rapier, and the two creases which extend from the base of the nose to
the brow, as if in a frown of suppressed anger and determined will.
Add to this the accounts of his contemporaries[35] who saw or heard
the curt accent or the sharp, abrupt gesture, the interrogating,
imperious, absolute tone of voice, and we comprehend how, the moment
they accosted him, they felt the dominating hand which seizes them,
presses them down, holds them firmly and never relaxes its grasp.

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