CHAPTER III.

TH

NAPOLEON AND EFFICIENCY IN

GOVERNMENT.

HE fame of Napoleon Bonaparte as a soldier is so great, and warfare formed so large an element in his amazing life, that the world

is apt to overlook his very remarkable work as a statesman in non-military affairs. It certainly is no part of the purpose of the present study to pretend that his achievements as a commander were in any way secondary in importance to his other activities. Such a contention would not only be false, but would be especially absurd when the application of Napoleonic ideas by a general who has been a pupil of the great master's methods has but lately carried France and her Allies to victory in the greatest war in history. For Napoleon was the "creator of the modern art of war,"1 and Marshal Foch has been a most assiduous student of his maxims and principles-has, indeed, put them into scientific shape in his own writings and into ever-memorable effect on the field of battle.

Nor need we, in concentrating attention on Napoleon's reconstructive work, overlook his personal feelings. Egoism blazed out of him. Perhaps a man with such a career as his could hardly have avoided thinking himself a super-normal phenomenon-as, indeed, he rather was. But, even so, he outraged the canons of good sense, to say nothing of good taste, by his blatant effrontery and selfassertion. Principalities and powers, popes and peoples, must bend to his will. He saw himself as an improved and more powerful reincarnation of Alexander, Cæsar and Charlemagne, and the whole world was made for him to

1 Colonel Jean Colin's "Napoléon," p. 173-the last book from the hand of this excellent French military historian, who was killed in battle in December, 1917.

refashion according to his desire. The train of his errors sprang from this egoism, but many of his great qualities are also traceable to it. A man with a less complete belief in himself could not have carried through as he did the coups which placed him in supreme power in France. It may be that most vices are virtues in excess: Napoleon's were, at all events. The qualities by which he forced his ascent, grown stupendous, were the cause of his ruin. On seeing a workman fall from a roof at St. Helena, he said, "Ah! well, he has not fallen so far as I have done." It was not so much a matter of distance as of moral decline.

But when we have said all that need be said about Napoleon's passion for war, his egoism, his ambition, there remains what is now our theme-his statesmanship; and that is worth studying, both for what it was in itself and for what is to be learnt from the circumstances of it. Much of it has been of enduring value. If, for example, we compare the work of Napoleon in France and that of Pitt, his distinguished contemporary in Great Britain, and ask how much of what each did is of any importance in the life of the two countries to-day, the answer is all in favour of Napoleon. Pitt is an illustrious name in British history, and he was a very great man, but there is nothing in actual operation by which to remember him in Great Britain,' except the Income Tax, the Dog Tax and the Act of Union. But how different is the case with Napoleon may be seen shortly stated in one page of Bodley's France:

"Before the ambitious conqueror had got the better of the ruler and the organiser, he had accomplished work which at the end of the century, after revolutions and invasions, after changes of dynasty and misgovernment of every form, lasts as the solid foundation and framework of French society. The whole centralised administration of France, which in its stability has survived every political crisis, was the creation of Napoleon and the keystone of his fabric. It was he who organised the existing administrative divisions of the departments, with the officials supervising them and the local assemblies attached to them. The relations of church and state are still regulated by his Concordat.1 The University, which remains the basis of public education, was his foundation. The Civil Code, the Penal Code,

1 Mr. Bodley, of course, wrote this passage before 1906.

the Conseil d'Etat, the Judicial System, the Fiscal System -in fine, every institution which a law-abiding Frenchman respects, from the Legion of Honour to the Bank of France and the Comédie Française, was either formed or reorganised by Napoleon. No doubt the revolutionary assemblies sometimes paused in their work of demolition to essay a constructive project. The Constituent Assembly created the departments; the Directory remodelled the Institute; and Condorcet might have carried out his schemes of education had not his colleagues of the Convention driven him into suicide to escape the guillotine. But when Bonaparte arrived in France in 1799 from the camp and the battlefield, he found that the result of the Revolution, for ten years in the hands of jurists, rhetoricians and theorists, was chaos. It was illumined with a few streaks of light which displayed the fragmentary beginnings of well-conceived designs. It was none the less a chaos, needing the inspiration of a creator to evolve order from it, and the authority of a master of men to utilise the misapplied intellects of that erratic epoch.

"The institutions of the Napoleonic establishment survive, not as historical monuments, but as the working machinery which has regulated the existence of a great people throughout the nineteenth century. Their minute examination shows that they operate satisfactorily. M. Taine and other critics of the Napoleonic reorganisation say it was imperfect, and ascribe to it many of the ills from which France has suffered. It was not perfect; no human work is. Yet admirably suited to the French temperament is the organisation which, created in less than a decade amid the alarms of war, has not only performed its functions for three generations, but stands erect as the framework to keep French society together amid the fever of insurrection or the more lingering disorder of parliamentary anarchy, just as though it owed its stability to the growth of ages."1

Here, then, is something directly relevant to our subject an efficient government established by a master mind. on the ruins of an ancient system which had been destroyed by revolution. We may as well pause on the threshold and ask how it was that Napoleon secured the opportunity of

"France," by J. E. C. Bodley, pp. 88-9.

accomplishing this work. No series of events in modern history is more deserving of close study in the present age. We have been living while great revolutions have been in progress in Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. The causes of them are well known. Somehow, in some form, order must emerge out of the turmoil in those countries, for man cannot do his work in the world without order. Unless order can be maintained by democratic means, dictatorial methods will certainly be applied; for a people who retain their sanity will be convinced that firm government by a dictator is preferable to continual disturbance. History does not repeat itself, and historical analogies are apt to be misleading; but still it is true that like conditions. will produce like results.

It is a very striking fact that years before Napoleon emerged out of obscurity the advent of some such man'was accurately foretold by Edmund Burke. There surely is not in political literature a more prescient passage than that wherein this searching student of public affairs-whose style keeps his writings fresh when the events about which they were written are more than a century oldprophesied that some such man would arise in France and do precisely what Napoleon did. These words were written in 1790, almost at the beginning of the French Revolution, Burke observed the decay of stable government, and pointed to what he believed would be the inevitable outcome:

"In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic."1

Every word of that passage came true, though France had to endure much suffering in the process of realising

1 Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," original edit.,

P. 317.

it. But ten years after Burke's book was published, the last of the successive revolutionary governments was overthrown, and Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul of the First Republic (December, 1799). The whole of the evidence we have shows that France welcomed the change and was prepared to trust this brilliant young soldier to the fullest degree. Pitt might declaim against "this last adventurer in the lottery of revolutions," and describe the final outcome of Jacobinism as "at once the child and the champion of all its atrocities and horrors;" but observers on the spot were quick to discern that the country looked to Bonaparte to restore the order, tranquillity and security which had so long been absent from the life of France. "All previous revolutions," the Prussian ambassador wrote to Berlin, "inspired distrust and fear. This one, on the contrary, I myself can testify, has refreshed the people's spirits and kindled the brightest hopes."

Bona

What Bonaparte gave to France during the Consulate was what she needed most-good, firm, efficient government. There are times when people need to have it impressed upon them that that is the first requirement of civilisation, and that everything else is secondary to it. Hence it is that a nation which has thrown everything into the melting pot and failed to construct a theoretically perfect system, will prefer a despotism to disorder. parte had grown up amidst talk about the rights of man, popular government, liberal constitutions, and freedom all round. He observed none of these things when he had the power. He shackled the press, censored the theatre, and cunningly provided for the construction of a constitution which left complete control in his own hands. When the Consular constitution was first proclaimed, a woman who heard it read out confessed to a man next to her that she had not understood a word of it. He replied that he understood it perfectly. "What does it mean then?" "It means-Bonaparte," answered the man. True, it meant Bonaparte; nothing less and very little more. But France, having experienced Bonaparte's rule, and comparing its efficiency with the confusion of ten years of revolution, voted by enormous majorities at plebiscites for making him, first, Consul for life (1800), and next, Emperor (1804).

France made a mistake in surrendering herself so completely, and Napoleon allowed his ambition to carry him too