NAPOLEON: Philosopher Prince

By GEOFFREY BRUUN

Geoffrey Bruun (1898- ) is probably most widely known for his text-books, including the much-used A Survey of European Civilization, which he wrote in collaboration with Wallace K. Ferguson and which has gone through several editions since its publication in 1936. Formerly Professor of History at New York University, he has s.ince 1949 devoted himself almost exclusively to research and writing. His publications include biographies of Saint-Just and Clemenceau, a small volume on the enlightened despots, and Europe and the French Imperium, 1799-1814, to which this selection is the introduction.

ON DECEMBER 25, 1799, when Napo-leon Bonaparte assumed his official duties as First Consul of the French Re-public, the officer of the day reported to inquire the new password for the consular guard. "Frederic II," was the brief response, "et Dugommier." Observers curious to fore: cast the guiding principles of the new regime might have found something to ponder in this phrase, which linked the name of the great Frederick, most famous enlightened despot of the eighteenth cen-tury, with that of Dugommier, an obscure but valiant general of the French revolu-tionary armies. The spirit of enlightened autocracy, combined with the spirit of revo-lutionary zeal, were to be the twin arbiters of a new France. With the histrionic touch characteristic of him, General Bonaparte had coined the watchword, not of a day, but of an epoch.

The major misconception which has dis-torted the epic of Napoleon is the impression that his advent to power was essentially a dramatic reversal, which turned back the tide of democracy and diverted the pre-destined course of the revolutionary torrent. That this Corsican liberticide could destroy a republic and substitute an empire, seem-ingly at will, has been seized upon by pos-terity as the outstanding proof of his arro-gant genius. To reduce his career to logical dimensions, to appreciate how largely it was a fulfillment rather than a miscarriage of the reform program, it is necessary to forget the eighteenth century as the seedtime of political democracy and remember it as the golden era of the princely despots, to recall how persistently the thinkers, of that age concerned themselves with the idea of en-lightened autocracy and how conscien-tiously they laid down the intellectual foundations of Cresarism. Napoleon was, to a degree perhaps undreamed of in their philosophy, the son of the philosophes, and it is difficult to read far in the political writings of the time without feeling how clearly the century prefigured him, how in-eluctably in Vandal's phrase l'idee a precede l'homme.

AIl the reforming despots of the eigh-teenth century pursued, behind a facade of humanitarian pretexts, the same basic pro-gram of administrative consolidation. The success achieved by Frederick the Great in raising the military prestige and stimulating the economic development of Prussia pro-vided the most notable illustration of this policy, but the same ideals' inspired the precipitate decrees of Joseph II in Austria, the cautious innovations of Charles III of Spain, the paper projects of Catherine the Great of Russia and the complex program pursued by Gustavus III in Sweden. Mili-tary preparedness and economic self-suffi-ciency were the cardinal principles guiding the royal reformers, but they also shared a common desire to substitute a unified sys-tem of law for the juristic chaos inherited from earlier centuries, to eliminate the re-sistance and confusion offered by guilds, corporations, provincial estates and relics of feudatory institutions, and to transform their inchoate possessions into centralized states dominated by despotic governments of unparalleled efficiency and vigor. In crowning the work of the Revolution by organizing a government of this type in France, Napoleon obeyed the most power-ful political tradition of the age, a mandate more general, more widely endorsed, and more pressing than the demand for social equality or democratic institutions. Read in this light, the significance of his career is seen to lie, not in the ten years of revolu-tionary turmoil from which he sprang, but in the whole century which produced him. If Europe in the revolutionary age may be thought of as dominated by one nearly uni-versal mood, that mood was an intense aspiration for order. The privileged and the unprivileged classes, philosophers, peas-ants, democrats, and despots all paid hom-age to this ideal. Napoleon lent his name to an epoch because he symbolized reason enthroned, because he was the philosopher--prince who gave to the dominant aspiration of the age its most typical, most resolute, and most triumphant expression.

To the student accustomed to think of the eighteenth-century philosophes as heralds of the French Revolution, it must al-ways prove a disappointment to realize how ambiguously they announced it. These knights of the pen, from Montesquieu to Turgot, whose criticism helped to dissolve the foundations of the old regime, were themselves no friends of revolution or of democracy. The ideal at which they aimed was a more rational order of society; but their remedy for the evils of despotism was, in. general, more despotism, and their solu-tion for the problems of an increasingly dynamic age was to make social institutions more stable and more static. A violent up-heaval, factious assemblies, and mob rule had no part in their program, for they were more inclined to put their trust in the wis-dom of princes than in the deliberations of parliaments. Because their agitation has-tened a revolution which few of them fore-saw and fewer would have applauded, they have been extravagantly honored by liberal historians. But these historians have not always felt it necessary to point out that the most logical fulfillment of the philosophes' ideals was not the republicanism of the Jacobin commonwealth, but the despotism of the First Empire.

The central clue to the reform program of the philosophers was their faith in natural law. Mankind, they agreed, stood on tI1ethreshold of a new and glorious era. All that was needed to unlock the millen-nium was a supreme legislator, a Euclid of the social sciences, who would discover and formulate the natural principles of social harmony. The mathematical generalizations which formed the ground plan of physics and astronomy had been propounded by a few bold thinkers, and it seemed a reason-able surmise that the fundamental laws of human society would likewise be discovered by some inspired genius rather than by a parliamentary assembly. This optimistic faith that a rational constitution for society might shortly be comprehended and codi-fied was not confined to philosophical circles in France, it was the common prop-erty of almost all eighteenth-century thinkers. Even Immanuel Kant gave to the sanguine quest the imprimatur of his cau-tious approval as early as 1784 in his Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan:

We will see if we can succeed in finding the cipher [to such a universal ground-plan for society] and then leave it to Nature to produce the man who can solve it. So, once, she brought forth a Kepler, who reduced the excentric orbits of the planets to an orderly formula in unexpected fashion, and a Newton who clarified the universal principles govern-ing the natural order.

Once a legislator of outstanding genius had rationalized human institutions, it followed that each man would respect them because they would be in harmony with his reason and his instincts. In yielding obe-dience he would achieve complete liberty, for he would be responding to a categorical imperative, or, as Rousseau had expressed it, he would be identifying his individual volition with the general will. This concept of perfect liberty as the product of perfect laws was one of the finest flowers of eigh-teenth-century rationalism, but it is impor-tant to note that such laws could be intro-duced quite as easily by a despot as by a democratic assembly. The prayer attributed to Turgot in 1774, "Give me five years of despotism and France shall be free," ex-pressed a hope which at the time few people considered paradoxical. The demand for liberty in the age of enlightenment did not necessarily imply a demand for popular gov-ernment, however frequently later writers may have chosen to ignore the distinction.

A second possible misconception against which it is well to guard when considering the arguments of the philosophes concerns their use of the term republic. It is the modern habit to classify governments by their external form, but the political thinkers of the age of reason were interested in the functions of the ideal state rather than in its structure. A republic, to them, meant nothing much more specific than a well-governed commonwealth, and their use of such phrases as "republican mon-archy" and "monarchical democracy" sug-gests the fluidity of their political termi-nology. "I give the name Republic to every state that is governed by laws," affirmed Rousseau, "no matter what its form of ad-ministration may be. . . ." The distinguish-ing characteristic of a republican society was then considered to be a certain health and good condition of the body politic, not the existence of any specific electoral ma-chinery for assuring the primacy of the popular will. How such imprecision in the use of terms might facilitate the transition to a dictatorship is evident enough. Napo-leon was able to insist, without inviting serious contradiction, that with the estab-lishment of the consular regime "the Revo-lution was grounded upon the principles which had inspired it." Even the constitu-tion of the Empire opened with the propi-tiatory phrase, "The government of the Republic is confided to an emperor," and the imperial coinage bore for several years the ambiguous superscription Republique Fran-caise: Napoleon Empereur.

The heritage of eighteenth-century phi-losophy thus aided in two respects the real-ization of Napoleon's projects for personal rule. By stressing the benents which a genius on a throne might introduce, the political writers had popularized the idea of enlightened despotism. By leaving the ideal form of government undefined they made it possible for Napoleon to unite the repub-lican and monarchical traditions in a work-able formula of democratic despotism. It is easy, however, to overemphasize the ide-ological element in revolutionary politics. Fundamentally and practically Napoleon's popularity rested upon the fact that he rescued France from social demoralization and foreign threats. To the generation which welcomed his advent to power his regime represented the close of a dangerous experiment, a return to order and stability after a decade of perilous opportunism and incertitude.