NAPOLEON: First Modern Dictator

By ALFRED COBBAN

From Alfred Cobban. Dictatorship: Its History and Theory (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), pp. 79-95.

Alfred Cobban (1901-1968) was successively Reader in French History and Professor of French History at University College, University of London. His writing and teaching carried his influence far beyond the limits of his uni-versity, and he became one of the world's leading authorities on eighteenth -and nineteenth-century French history. His publications include a history of France since 1715 and many monographs, most of them concerning the French Revolution and its origins. In the 1960's he was in the eye of a scholarly storm over the interpretation of the French Revolution, a position he achieved by the publication in 1964 of his provocative Social Interpretation of the French Revo-lution. He was interested in political science as well as in history, and the combination of the two disciplines gave him a special qualification to judge the nature of Napoleon's rule in his book on dictatorship, from which this selection is taken.

ONE NEED not belittle Napoleon to hold that some form or other of dictatorship was, as Burke had prophesied, the inevitable outcome of the Revolution. The Republic, ruled after the fall of Robespierre by an increasingly narrow oligarchy of politicians, could not survive. Had the prisoner of the Temple, the little son of Marie Antoinette, lived, a monarchy might easily have been set up in his name. Had the brothers of Louis XVI shown any will-ingness to accept its basic social achieve-ments, there might have been a Restoration at any time after 1795; but even moderate revolutionaries feared the return of a king tied to the emigres and bent on revenge.

Although historians, wishing to draw a picture of Napoleon as the saviour of France, have exaggerated the defects of the Directory, at best it could not be regarded as a government likely to inspire popular enthusiasm. Too many of the politicians ruling France were corrupt, too many of their plans, both domestic and foreign, ended in disaster. The jeunesse doree was parading the boulevards. Madame R6-camier and Madame de Stael had stepped into the shoes of the great salonnieres and were educating the revolutionary leaders in the ways of smart society. The bourgeois Puritanism of Robespierre had perished with him on the scaffold, sacrificed to the "triumphant nudities" of the future Ma-dame Tallien, notre dame de thermidor and reigning deity of the Directory. The demi-monde had been restored, if not the monde. Indulgence was replacing terrorism as the order of the day, and revolutionary ardour was a thing of the past.

In central and local government, in the law, the Church, the land, foreign relations -in none of these fields had stability been achieved. Local administration was a chaos, the national elections a fraud, the currency worthless and the Treasury bankrupt. The government, living from hand to mouth, survived only with the aid of the loot sent home by its generals from conquered cities and provinces, though if the revolutionaries made war pay for itself they were certainly cleverer or luckier than most modern gov-ernments. Idealism was dead. War profi-teers flaunted their riches, while the comrades of Robespierre and Saint-Just lurked in obscure hiding places or rotted in exile. The last futile flicker of Jacobinism died when the conspiracy of Baboeuf was crushed, yet the country had no confidence in the groups of intriguers who had taken the place of the Jacobins - the Barras and Talliens, Reubells and Revellieres. Only the army seemed a relatively stable point.

The emergence of the army as a leading factor in the political situation justified a fear which had possessed men as diverse as Robespierre and Burke. The armies of the ancien regime - small in size compared with the whole population, but possessing a monopoly of military power, attached by long service and tradition to the monarchy, officered by an hereditary aristocracy, and having in their corps d' elite an efficient and generally reliable force for use in any civil emergency - were a strong bulwark of the status quo. The Revolution could not have succeeded in France if the discipline of these troop~ had not cracked. Under the menace of foreign invasion the revolution-aries set about building up new armies by the system of universal compulsory military service. They were well aware that a small professional army was normally an instru-ment of the Crown and the nobles: a citizen army, it was thought, would be the defence of the people. Only a nation in arms, they believed, could be a free nation.

The belief that conscription naturally went with democracy has ever since been held on the continent, and it is indeed on the surface plausible enough. Further con-sideration might have been suggested by the fact that the system was first used by Frederick the Great, no great lover of lib-erty. To put the manhood of a nation through a course of military discipline, always to have in the ranks and under arms a large body of young men, forming a na-tion apart, officered necessarily by professional soldiers, and putting loyalty to its generals above any respect it might be sup-posed to have for civilian leaders, is a great source of strength to a state, but not neces-sarily to the Parliamentary form of govern-ment, especially if to this is added a smaller body of seasoned veterans, a potential prae-torian guard for any would-be Emperor. Armies are not usually politically minded, the doings of parliaments do not interest them, loyalty is their strongest emotion, and if they look for anything in politics it is for a leader.

So it was with the French revolutionary armies. They had developed a passionate attachment to their more successful gen-erals, and especially had fallen under the sway of the irresistible Bonaparte. More-over, the professional interest had largely replaced the political, and their hostility could easily be aroused against the politi-cians who left them starved of supplies and pay. It must not be thought that the armies were anti-revolutionary in spirit. Among both men and officers probably more genuine republican patriotism lingered than in any other section of the French people. But they were easily capable of identifying republican government with the rule of a great general, so long as the name of king was not breathed and royalists were not openly brought back into favour. Thus, if one general had not led them to overthrow the civil government, another would. Napoleon saw this, and at the critical moment used his hold over the army to strike a decisive blow.

The first effective intervention of the army in politics was in September 1797, when Augereau dispersed the Jacobin mob with the famous whiff of grape-shot: the echoes of his cannon were to sound through modern history. Two years later Bonaparte concerted his plans with a group of politi-cians, who, with the short-sighted astute-ness of their kind, thought they could use him as their instrument. When he ordered his grenadiers to disperse the Five Hundred in 1799, the Revolution was over. The prestige of government, which had col-lapsed with the downfall of Bourbon divine right, could now, it was hoped, be rebuilt on the victories of French arms. The reign of reason had come to a premature end, and government in France was to venture on the fakir-like experiment of sitting on bayonets.

It must be granted that the support of the army was not enough by itself to set up and maintain a new government; but along with the army went military glory, conquest and the growing spirit of im-perialist aggression. Not Brumaire but Marengo gave France to Napoleon. True, military conquest ran counter to the basic principles of the Revolution, but from the pacifism of the early Robespierre, to the crusading fervour of the Brissotins, and from the struggle of Carnot and Reubell for "natural frontiers" to the imperialist wars of Napoleon, the transition was easy. Bonaparte himself had taken the decisive step in this process, when he forced the preliminaries of peace with Austria, signed at Leoben in April 1797, on the Directory, in spite of the opposition of Reubell. From the system of limited annexations and natural frontiers France now passed to a policy of imperialist expansion, from the possible to the impossible, and it was the ambition of Bonaparte that largely dictated the development.

French imperialism still wrapped itself in the tattered robes of revolutionary propa-ganda. Bonaparte was still to idealists like Revelliere-lepeaux a "Mahomet of Liberty," in success the armed prophet of the new dispensation, in defeat the valiant defender of French independence. To the end the motive of defence was probably stronger in the French people than the lust of aggres-sion, but that was not a fact of great political importance. It was later to be found almost a sine qua non of an imperialist war of self-defence. That a statement is ridicu-lous is no barrier to popular credence, as Napoleon rapidly discovered; for he was able to keep up the legend of the defence of France throughout his career. He re-turned from Elba in 1815, as he came back to France from Egypt in 1799, to save the country, and he went on saving it from conquest to conquest. Every battle was to be the final victory that would bring peace. France and Bonaparte were hardly to be expected to realize that only defeat could bring that to a power claiming the hege-mony of Europe.

This search for peace was, it must be admitted, a necessary pretence, for when Bonaparte came to power after Brumaire it was above all because France believed that he could give her peace, internal and ex-ternal. Among all the articles, manifestos, pamphlets, rhymes, music-hall sketches, which celebrated the coup d'etat, says Van-dal, there is not a single one in which is not to be found expressed the universal desire for peace, and to it Bonaparte re-sponded, swearing in vibrant proclamations to bring back peace to France and Europe.

If the combination of military glory with the desire for peace formed the foundation of Bonaparte's authority, they were not the only elements contributing to it. France, which had not felt the hand of a master since the fall of the great Committee of Public Safety, urgently wanted a govern-ment. The demand was not yet for a leader, a chief of the state. Nowhere does one find the cry, says Vandal, "A man, we need a man." Modern Caesarism, he adds, is a legacy of Bonaparte. One would be tempted to modify his statement. In the situation in which France found herself the demand for a leader, a saviour of society, was almost inevitable. That this desire was not con-sciously formulated is doubtless true; it was hardly to be expected that it should be, for it was the first time that such a situation had appeared in modern history. But after ten years of revolution uncertainty had lasted too long: authoritarian government was needed to end the strain, and to restore a feeling of stability. This was the real meaning behind the meaningless maxim of Sieyes-- 'Authority must come from above and confidence must come from below.' Although the internecine struggles of the earlier revolutionary period had died down, their memory was fresh, and the fear re-mained that they might at any time break out again.

Bonaparte came to power because his name provided a new source of authority, but at the same time the principle of the sovereignty of the people had established too firm a hold over men's minds to be abandoned. Some means of reconciling this principle with the rule of one man had to be found. Emotionally this was easy: the sovereignty of the people had become fused with nationalism, and Napoleon through his victories had come to be a living symbol of the national greatness. But to add the appearance of free choice he adopt<'O.qthe method used by the Jacobins in presenting their Constitution of 1793 to the country--the plebiscite. Sieyes and the men of Brum-aire had themselves presented this device to Bonaparte, when they incorporated in the Constitution of the year VIII the name of the First Consul, Citizen Bonaparte; so that when it was submitted to the popular vote, it was as much a plebiscite on Bona-parte as a vote for a constitution. The votes on the life consulate in 1802 and on the establishment of the Empire in 1804 are mere sequels. By these popular votes de-mocracy, or at least the principle that all authority is derived from the people, was to be triumphantly vindicated by the elec-tion of Napoleon to the post of supreme power in the state. In this way arose, in the modern world, the idea that one man might himself represent the will of the people, and be invested with all the au-thority of the most despotic ruler in the name of democracy. The idea of sover-eignty, freed from all restraints, and trans-ferred to the people, had at last given birth to the first modern dictatorship.

The Jacobin attempt at dictatorship from the left had failed. Napoleon came to power as a dictator from the right - not, of course, as a leader of the old reactionary party, but as a dictator supported by the propertied classes, the financiers and commercial men, the upper bourgeoisie, and speculators, who had made large fortunes out of the revolution and had bought up church or crown lands or the property of emigres, with worthless assignats. The fi-nancial blunders and economic incompe-tence of the revolutionaries had at least allowed these men to make large fortunes; but as a final bankruptcy loomed nearer and nearer, the Directory was driven to ever more desperate expedients. It even pro-posed to suspend the assignments on the taxes allocated to the government contrac-tors, to deprive them of the right of collect-ing payment themselves, and to introduce a progressive tax. The contractors and speculators, in the words of Vandal, threw themselves into the arms of Bonaparte to defend them from this blow. He returned from Egypt penniless, to face the mounting debts of Josephine; a group of bankers formed a syndicate to come to his aid, and they provided the financial resources with-out which the coup d'etat of Brumaire would have been impossible. Direct bene-fits to its financial backers followed, for the measures proposed against the contractors were dropped at once, and ten days later the progressive tax was abolished.

While Bonaparte needed the solid ad-vantages that the support of the financiers and bankers could give, he also had to pre-serve the confidence of the masses. Mili-tary glory and the hope of peace went a long way towards this, but economic bene-fits were also required. The peasantry was fairly easily contented: the reassertion of law and order and therefore the revival of prosperity, a conservative social policy, a gradual return to Catholicism, along with a guarantee that the alienated lands and feudal dues of the Church and the noblesse would never be returned - and the peasantry were satisfied. The populace in the towns required more management. For this reason Bonaparte's relations with the mon-ied men were a carefully guarded secret. Indeed, in public he declared himself the enemy of the financiers and the government contractors, and after he had become First Consul he did not hesitate to fling one of them to the wolves as evidence of his own high principles; though when the arrest and examination of this scapegoat for a whole class had received sufficient publicity, he was secretly rescued, at a price. This reputation as an enemy of the speculators was an important element in the popularity which Bonaparte was winning in the poorer quarters of Paris. From General to Consul and from Consul to Emperor, he managed to keep the devotion of the Parisian work-ing-classes; they loved and admired him, says Aulard, far more than they had ever admired and loved Robespierre or Marat.

Bonaparte's genius lay in his capacity for combining with this popular adulation a conservative and authoritarian system of government. France as a whole demanded a government which would guarantee the country against a revival of terrorism with-out handing it back to the ancien regime. The fear of a Jacobin revival was still strong in France and it was a force which Bonaparte used to the fullest degree. It played the part which fear of Communism has played in modern Germany. With its aid he took the critical step of ordering the Grenadiers to disperse the legislative body. At the very root of his authority was the magnificent, incredible lie of the dagger attack upon him by Jacobins in the meeting of the Five Hundred. Incredible as it might be, the country believed it.

It is not true to say that Bonaparte res-cued France from the rule of the extreme revolutionaries, for the Directory had al-ready suppressed the Jacobins and the mob of Paris, and the First Consul merely in-herited their success. But he certainly car-ried on, and even exaggerated the trend to the right, welcoming in particular any moderates or even royalists who would ac-cept his authority. Although he won over more than a few of the leading Jacobins and incorporated them in his bureaucracy, to those who would not sacrifice their prin-ciples he remained implacably hostile. The royalists who, in December 1800, attempted to blow up Napoleon when he was driving to the Opera, were never discovered; but their conspiracy was used by the First Con-sul, not as a reason for taking action against the many known royalists, but as a pretext for police measures against the republicans, ending in the exile to the Seychelles or French Guiana of nearly one hundred Jacobins, well over half of whom perished. The murder of the duc d'Enghien in 1804 was merely a warning to the royal family that Napoleon would stop at nothing in the defence of his regime. A carefully calcu-lated act of terrorism against the Bourbons, it did not imply any hostility to royalists who were ready to abandon their king.

As well as ex-royalists, Bonaparte sum-moned the clericals to his banner. He made the most energetic efforts to win over the Church, suppressed anti-ecclesiastical so-cieties, such as the Theo-philanthropes, withdrew the support of the government from the Constitutional Church, and as soon as he dared bought the alliance of Rome by the Concordat; subsequently, when it was too late for the Church to withdraw, passing the Ordinances, which achieved what the kings of France had struggled to gain for centuries, and made the Church in France for all effective pur-poses a department of the state. The Pope thought he had won a powerful supporter, but found that he had merely submitted to a master.

Taking into account all these diverse sources of support, it is comparatively easy to understand how Napoleon was able to make himself the leader of France. But if it was to be permanent his power had to have a more concrete basis. A political system capable of sustaining his authority had to be erected. This meant, first, the creation of a governmental machine dependent on his will alone, and then the occupation of all the key positions in the state by an army of personal supporters. Here, the centraliz-ing trend, which had struggled with the elective principle throughout the Revolu-tion, finally triumphed in the creation of the prefectoral system with its hierarchy of officials. In the Napoleonic bureaucracy revolutionary sentiments received their due with the application of the principle of equality, interpreted as la carriere ouverte aux talents. Ten years of revolutionary tur-moil had thrown up plenty of talent from all ranks of French society, and Napoleon -had no difficulty in filling his administra-tion and officering his army with men of ability, and men who, owing everything to him, would be his devoted followers.

Supported thus by a powerful political machine, his rule sanctioned by the will of the people, his person idolized by the army, trusted by the men of property and the peasants, and backed by the Church, Napo-leon was in a position to gather the whole of France into his hand. Terrorism he used comparatively little as an instrument of gov-ernment: it was hardly necessary. Marat, Robespierre and the Directory had already removed most of those who were not ame-nable to influence. Moreover it is only fair to credit Napoleon with an appreciation of the fact that terrorist methods are a sign of weakness rather than of strength.

Although he had risen to power by the Army, Napoleon never made the mistake of over-estimating the power of force in gov-erning a country or of under-estimating the power of opinion, as hosts of typically Na-poleonic obiter dicta bear witness. All the factors capable of influencing public opinion were mobilized for the mainte-nance of his regime - the Church incul-cated obedience; the Press suffered a rigid censorship and its news was dispensed through official journals; the stage and the arts were set to the task of glorifying the Emperor; literature, rather unwillingly, was to be harnessed to his chariot; education was organized, with lycees and one central university, to enforce discipline in the aca-demic world; finally, Napoleon's dispatches, comparable indeed with Caesar's, were a series of masterpieces of propaganda. The ancien regime, because it had neglected the people, had seldom condescended to tell them lies. Napoleon "erected mendacity on a hitherto unparalleled scale into an art of Empire."

We have been attempting to analyse the real reasons why Napoleon was able to gain and keep power, but though these would have been effective by themselves, it must not be supposed that he did not perform any services to France other than the rather doubtful one of winning battles and ex-tending his sway over the greater part of Europe. The codification of the laws, even though this was only the completion of years of work by the revolutionary lawyers - the establishment of a sound financial system, presided over by the new Bank of France - the restoration of stability to land ownership, the economic activity of the prefets, devoted to building up the pros-perity of their departements - all these and much more must go on the credit side of

the balance. Mostly, it is true, they repre-sent the work of the First Consul. As Em-peror Napoleon took far more than he gave to France, and in the end the sum total perhaps hardly represents a great return for fifteen years of despotic rule.

More important than what Napoleon did was what he was. Of his colossal executive capacity and power of decision there can be no question. Lacking the higher forms of creative genius, he was still intellectually the superior of all his experts. It was not this side of his personality, however, which was most valuable to him as a leader of men. His intellect would never have made him an emperor without his appeal to the non-intellectual elements which are the driving forces in men and nations, - his capacity for catching and communicating emotion, his handsome appearance in youth, his charm of manner, his eloquence, and his knack of coining effective phrases. His life was a series of dramatic gestures and he was his own press agent. From the beginning of his career - take, for instance, the words with which he was supposed to have stopped a Marseillais about to butcher one of his victims - "Man of the South, let, us save this unfortunate" - to the end, when defeated and flying, he could still turn an elegant phrase, "I come, like The-mistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people" - his career is punctuated with memorable, if sometimes apocryphal, sayings.

Wellington and Castlereagh remained unmoved even at the last of these, but the theatrical disposition, the proneness to pic-turesque attitudes of the Corsican, was well fitted to catch the fancy of a Romantic generation, to win the admiration of the youthful Goethe, to inspire a Beethoven, or to make him the idol of a Byron, even if the melodramatic scenes which comprise his career are only the pseudo-heroics of an Ossianic hero. This association between Napoleon and the great Romantics is no mere accident: it deserves to be empha-sized, because it establishes a connection at the beginning of the nineteenth century between Romantic ideas and dictatorship, which will emerge with greater effect when we come to study the origins of contempo-rary dictatorship.

Napoleon appealed to the Romantic imagination in part because he was a su-preme individualist, a complete representa-tive of the emancipation of the ego. If ordinary moral laws did not exist for him, that was one of his principal sources of strength. The politician who is completely emancipated from moral prejudices will naturally have an advantage over those who are liable to have their freedom of action occasionally hindered by moral considera-tions; whilst the people will admire a ruler in whom the absence of inhibitions gives them vicarious pleasure. Only an adven-turer could have risen to fame as Napoleon did, and he remained an adventurer until the day when the Bellerophon carried him to an island where there was no room for more adventures. His very wars were a brigand's campaigns for loot, and diamonds, it is said, were found sewn in the uphol-stery of his carriage after Waterloo. He always cheated at cards. He was a worthy peer of the Renaissance Italian tyrants and the twentieth-century dictators.

Napoleon was the architect of his, own greatness, and his ability alone held him on his throne. He knew it himself. "My posi-tion," he said, "is entirely different from that of the old sovereigns. They can live a life of indolence in their castles. . . . No-body contests their legitimacy, nobody thinks of replacing them. . . . Everything is different in my case. . . . Within and without my dominion is founded on fear. If I abandoned the system I should be immediately dethroned." A regime cannot escape from its origins: and here at least Napoleon frankly recognized that war was a necessity for him. He had come bearing pledges of peace, but that was precisely what he could never give France. War made him necessary to France, and at the same time created the psychological atmo-sphere in which the continuance of his rule was possible. It is arguable, of course, that the practically continuous war while Napo-leon ruled France was the result of the hostility of Europe, but whichever way one looks at it, the association between Napo-leon's dictatorial system of government and his continual wars is certainly no mere coincidence.

What Napoleon had won by the sword it seemed he would have to keep by the sword. Gradually he became aware that if his power was to endure and to be handed on to a successor it would have to be put on a different basis. Dictatorship, aping the ancien regime, would have been more than a little ridiculous, were it not for the power that Napoleon represented. All the panoply of Empire which Napoleon created, his court, with its ancient pomp and ceremony, and its new Napoleonic nobility, was di-rected to one end: it was an attempt to wrap his new absolutism in the old mantle of divine right, and to legitimatize himself in the eyes of Europe. Hence his increasing reliance on former royalists. They alone knew how to obey, he said. Hence too his marriage with the Austrian Archduchess. All was in vain. Not that there was yet any fear of revolution. The army remained loyal, and the Prefects held the country firmly in their grasp. Enthusiasm had waned, but there was little sign of active opposition inside France. Foreign armies were needed to overthrow the Napoleonic system.

The country as a whole seems to have accepted with extraordinary passivity his fall, the return of the Bourbons, the Hun-dred Days and the final defeat. Political life in France, so hectic for a few years after 1789, was dead. During the brief interlude in Paris between Elba and Waterloo Na-poleon tacitly admitted the failure of his dictatorship, and attempted by re-erecting his power on constitutional bases to con-nect it again with its revolutionary origins. In vain: the Napoleonic essay in constitu-tional monarchy never had time to come to life, nor is there any evidence that it could ever have lived. The greatest dictator in modern history fell, as he had risen, by war, and dragged out his remaining years in the midst of petty squabbles on a miserable tropical island. Meanwhile Europe set about reconstituting the reign of divine right, or putting Humpty Dumpty together again.