Editor’s note: This is the first of six lectures given by H.A.L. Fisher at the University of London in June, 1907. They were published in book form under the title, Bonapartism (London, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1908).
.
There is no mystery about the origins of Bonapartism. It is the child of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution, deriving its force and vitality not only from the genius of the greatest soldier and administrator of history, but also from the passions and achievements of the most tempestuous decade of French annals. Bonaparte came, as he said, to close the ‘Romance of the Revolution’, to heal the wounds, to correct the extravagances, to secure the conquests. It was his boast that he did not belong to the race of the ‘ideologues’, that he saw facts through plain glass, and that he came to substitute an age of work for an age of talk. The Revolution had ended in the violent and irregular tyranny of a faction; he would create a methodical government based upon popular consent, and conceived in the interests not of any particular faction but of France as a whole. He would restore peace and confidence, build up commercial credit, retrieve military prestige, and mend the educational machine which had been broken in the torment.
The forces which he directed and the conditions under which he worked were determined by the Revolution. That great movement, beginning as a protest against privilege, aristocracy, and obscurantism, had with many crimes and much devotion refashioned France. Its inspiring ideas had been liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, and the general conception that there were certain natural and indestructible rights of man which it was the mission of France not only to fix and secure in her own institutions, but also to spread throughout Europe. It had, in other words, not only been a revolt against the old order in France, the feudal system, the monarchy, the corporations, but it had also assumed the character of a war of propaganda, a war for the acquisition of natural frontiers, for the propagation of natural rights. Almost from the very first French democracy, in spite of pacific professions, was associated with war. Mirabeau, who wished for peace, saw clearly that the rosy prospects of ’89 idealism were unlikely to be realized, and informed a deputation of Quakers that it was a civic duty to bear arms in defence of one’s country. The armies of the Revolution were animated by ambitions old and new, ambitions for the Rhine frontier, ambitions for the destruction of monarchy and feudalism. The tree of liberty was the symbol of their progress. Free promotion, limitless horizons of plunder and advancement, the sense that a great epoch in the world’s history had been reached, gave exhilaration to their spirits. From countless memoirs and private letters we can see with the eye of faith these armies of the Revolution as they rollick along singing the Marseillaise, lighting their pipes at the altar candles, looting the homes of the vanquished peoples, and making manifest in their victorious progress the sentiments and principles of the first republic in Europe. All through the nineteenth century there has been a military side to the French democratic tradition.
It is one of the commonplaces of history that the passion for equality is stronger in France than the love of liberty. Liberty involves taking trouble; and any large delegation of political liberties imposes a burden which in default of tradition, training, or the spirit of self-sacrifice, individuals or communities may be unwilling to bear. Equality, on the other hand, is so closely connected both with the democratic passion of envy and with the philosophic notion of distributive justice, and the principles of equality were so glaringly violated by the social contrivances of the Ancien Régime, that it became at once and has ever since remained the cardinal axiom of the Revolution. Wherever the principle of liberty conflicts with that of equality, it is the principle of liberty which has to yield. Nevertheless it is well to recognize that, whatever may have been the revolutionary practice, a considerable space was given to civil and political liberty in revolutionary theory. Arbitrary imprisonment was abolished; public trial was decreed; the jury of accusation and the jury of judgement were introduced for the first time to a nation which had been habituated to a secret and tyrannical procedure copied from the Inquisition. A law passed in 1790 declared la liberté de travail, a measure as fatal to the revival of the tyranny of the mediaeval guild as it is to that of the modern trade union; and the abolition of caste in the realm of economics was accompanied by an equal measure of liberty in the sphere of conscience. To the Roman doctrine of authority and persecution the Revolution replied that man was free to believe what he chose about God and the universe.
Political freedom, if it is to be real, depends upon the capacity and inclination to exert political rights. The Constitution of 1791, the first Constitution of the French Revolution, made profuse grants of political freedom. The whole government of the country was placed in the control of popularly-elected bodies. Even the bishops and the judges were to be elected. The framers of this constitution asked too much of the French citizen, who was unversed in politics, often illiterate, and in any case unable to spare the time required for the adequate discharge of the functions imposed upon him. The management of local and general politics soon fell into the hands of the professional politicians of the clubs; and as the violence and bitterness of the Revolution increased, the number of men who cared to take part in public affairs steadily diminished. Freedom and terrorism are antagonistic terms; and at no period of French history has civil courage been at a lower ebb than during the ten years in which the mouths of professional politicians were full of the large word of Liberty. There were other causes at work hostile to the growth of freedom. Of these perhaps the two most important were the absence of a wholesome spirit of local autonomy in the Ancien Régime, and the hostility of the Revolution to all forms of corporate life.
De Tocqueville has explained in his famous book that the centralization of modern France dates back to the Ancien Régime. Then indeed the centralization was unscientific, impeded by the privileges of the Church, the nobility, and the Parliaments; but nevertheless, despite all its many technical imperfections, destructive of local effort, save in those few provinces which by reason of their historic assemblies or estates were known as pays d’États. The evils attendant upon such a system were visible to discerning eyes, and in the reign of Louis XVI some attempt was made to devolve responsibility upon local bodies. It is open to argument that if in 1776 the King had accepted Turgot’s plan of devolution, France might have been spared the great catastrophe. But the opportunity was not seized, or rather it was seized too late. The Revolution overtook the country before the provincial assemblies had got into full working order, and when once the revolutionary passions had been unloosed local government became impossible. The aristocracy was driven from France, and it is difficult to work a system of local government without the governing classes. The prestige of Paris, the long habit of deference to the agents of a centralized administration, combined with the pressure of foreign war, but hastened a reversion to the tradition which had been temporarily snapped, and in the Députés en mission and the Committee of Public Safety we can trace the process by which the central authority of the State recovered its tyranny. Nothing is more remarkable than the passive acquiescence with which the provinces received the dictates of Paris. The Girondins had filled France with their eloquence, had made the war, and shaken down the throne; when they felt power slipping from them in Paris they appealed to the provinces, and what was the response? There was hardly an echo in answer to their call. Every year of disturbance made it clearer that the policy of devolution recommended by Turgot and carried out with modifications by Necker and Brienne was impracticable in the altered condition of France. There was scarcely a village in the country-save perhaps in the royalist districts of the west-in which society had not been torn to pieces by angry faction. Those rents were slow to heal. The reports which flowed in to Napoleon from the provinces in 1800 showed clearly that the machinery of local government had broken down, and that there was no class sufficiently impartial, instructed, and public-spirited to restore its efficiency.
The hostility of the Revolution to corporate life is to be explained partly on theoretical and partly on historical grounds. Theoretically a corporation is not a person; and it was part of the revolutionary creed to substitute natural for artificial relations. Then there was a feeling that corporations limited individual liberty. The guilds limited the liberty of an individual to take up a craft suited to his capacity; the Church limited the liberty of the priest or nun to marry; and the lands which passed into the dead hand of the Church were withdrawn from free commercial circulation. Further, the existence of industrial or religious corporations circumscribed the liberty of the State, and therefore the liberty of the individuals, whose collective will was embodied in the resolutions of the central government. ‘It ought no doubt’ (so runs a passage from a law passed in June, 1791) ‘to be permitted to all citizens to assemble, but citizens of certain professions ought not to be allowed to assemble for their pretended common interests. There is no longer any corporation in the State. There is only the particular interest of each individual and the general interest. No one is permitted to inspire into citizens an intermediary interest, to separate them from the public interest by a corporate spirit.’ The State, that is to say, was conceived as a mass of isolated, free, homogeneous units, each unit a citizen, each citizen an ultimate source of sovereign authority, the exercise of which would be fatally impeded by artificial groups. But whatever strength may be attached to these theoretical conceptions, we can hardly doubt that the most important influence was of a practical nature. The advocates of revolutionary reform rightly saw that the great corporations, the Parliament, the Church, the guilds, represented vested interests which were at variance with the general scheme of revolutionary policy. In particular the position of the Church challenged attack. It possessed vast wealth, in return for which it made an altogether inadequate contribution to the State. Not only had it failed to contrive an equitable distribution of its resources among its own members, but it had inverted the most elementary rules of distributive justice. The hard work of the parish was done at a starvation wage, while the cities were crowded with fashionable idlers drawing handsome salaries from ecclesiastical sinecures. Then there were the charges for which Voltaire’s incessant and brilliant raillery had secured a general credence, charges of privilege, intolerance, and obscurantism. There were memories of the murdered Calas, of the opposition to the grants of civil rights to Protestants, of great books burned under clerical influence by the Parliament of Paris. It was determined to bridle a power the hostility of which was clearly apprehended; and the attack on the corporations was quickened by financial need. The Revolutionary State, which desired to govern all things on its new plan, was on the verge of bankruptcy; and it was essential to discover fresh and elastic sources of revenue. The lands of the Church presented the first and most obvious expedient to the embarrassed financiers of the Constituent Assembly; then followed the property of charitable corporations, hospitals and the like. The State undertook to pay the clergy and to subsidize the hospitals from its own funds. By so doing it would extend its control and diminish the chances of an insidious clerical attack upon the principles of democracy.
The attack upon the corporations produced somewhat unexpected results in the industrial sphere. It was decreed in March, 1791, that any workman could enter any trade and work either at home or in workshops either for himself or for an employer. This law for the first time introduced into France the principle of free industrial competition, without, however, the accompaniment of any of the safeguards which free competition necessitates. The feeling of the Revolution was adverse both to the right of public meeting and to the right of workmen’s combinations for the purpose of raising wages, and this aversion to the free grouping of men in industrial unions was intensified by the excesses of the revolutionary societies. The Jacobin Club was a warning which neither Napoleon nor the governments which succeeded him have ever felt themselves strong enough to neglect. It was held in France that the right of association must be closely controlled by the State, and even so strong a socialist as Proudhon was a systematic opponent of the legalization of collective bargaining. The right of public meeting was deemed to be inconsistent with order, the right of using collective pressure upon individual workmen was deemed to be inconsistent with liberty.
The principle of equality was realized by the destruction of feudal rights and privileges, the abolition of tithes, the submission of all members of the State to a common scheme of justice and taxation. Primogeniture and entails went the way of tithes and feudal dues, and the liberty of bequest was almost abolished with a view to securing an equal partition of the inheritance. All the picturesque inequalities of the Ancien Régime were swept away, speedily, ruthlessly, effectually; so effectually that even now an orator addressing a political meeting may find himself forced to apologize for an inadvertent use of the word Messieurs. But to this rule there was one significant exception. By a law passed in August, 1790, the Courts were forbidden ‘to interfere in any manner with the operations of administrative bodies’, or ‘to take cognizance of any manner of administrative acts’. The agents of the government were protected by a peculiar kind of privilege. They could not be sued in a law court for any action relating to their official duties; nor could any matter affecting the administration be made the subject of a public inquiry. The government was thus both judge and party in any case which might arise out of the wrongful action of one of its agents. An official could only be called to account with the authorization of his official superior and before a tribunal which sat in secret and was itself composed of government officials.
The causes which led the revolutionary assemblies to adopt a rule, apparently so repugnant to the most elementary conceptions of liberty and equality, were grounded partly on inherited tradition, partly on considerations of acute practical need, and partly on a fashionable theory of government. The belief that political salvation was to be found in a clear distinction between executive, legislative, and judicial functions was common to all the men of the Revolution, and it seemed to be a corollary of the sacred principle that the law courts should not meddle with political machinery. But here, as in so many other quarters, the theory of the Revolution was efficacious because it represented not only the urgent needs of the present, but a mass of accumulated instinct, the inheritance of centuries of secretive and centralized despotism. It was an ancient maxim of the monarchy that the servants of the Crown should be shielded from the intrusive criticism of the law courts, because the King was above the common law, because his accounts must not be divulged, because he was specially interested in the doings of his own agents. The point had been debated hotly in the seventeenth century, and the exemption of the administration from judicial control was one of the constant points in the various and versatile programmes of the Fronde. But though in 1648 the Parliament of Paris won a victory for Justice, the effects were speedily obliterated by the recovery of the Crown. From the days of Richelieu to the outbreak of the Revolution it was an unquestioned principle of French government that administrative causes were reserved to the judgement of the royal intendant and the royal council. Even the Parliament of Paris, which during the eighteenth century called in question so many points of the royal prerogative, never protested against this most dangerous immunity of the servants of the Crown. To this longstanding tradition of government there was added during the Revolution a passionate sense of the omnipotence of the State. It was felt that the public service must always override private interest, that if a question arose with regard to a government contract, or a tax, or liability to military service, or the administration of roads, canals, and other public works, it was a matter upon which the administration itself should have the deciding voice; and this feeling was intensified by the stress of war. The anxieties of national defence made it seem supremely important to obviate any friction which might impede the swift propulsion of the government works. If we think of the long train of waggons, of the canteens and tents, and all the million details which go to the equipment of an army in the field; if we remember that a whole nation was up in arms, that the frontier of France from Bayonne to Dunkirk was in defence; and if we then reflect that all the gigantic economic supply needed for the support of these armies was based upon a series of contracts any one of which might be the subject of litigation; we shall be able to appreciate the position taken up by the French government—that all questions arising out of army contracts should be referred to army officials. The individual citizen might suffer injustice; but the great machine of the Republic moved on.
The principle of popular sovereignty, of government founded on the general will, was the cardinal point in Rousseau’s philosophy of the State, and was unquestioned by the men who drafted the Constitutions of the Revolution. From the first moment, however, the principle received an application which led to a profound divergence between the parliamentary history of England and France. Influenced partly by a distrust of the Crown, partly by the analogy of America, and partly by the great reputation of Montesquieu, who in a famous passage declared that the secret of English liberty consisted in the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial functions, the Constituent Assembly determined that the ministers of the Crown were to be excluded from the Legislature. The protests of Mirabeau, one of the few men who understood the workings of the English system, were overborne, and the separation of the executive and legislative functions has remained a governing political conception in the mind of France. The head of the executive was deemed to be a representative of the general will, no less than the assembly which was elected to pass the laws; and by a curious revenge of history an immense power was conferred upon him by the very forces which began by dislocating the whole administrative machine. It cannot be too frequently remembered that the power of generalization in politics is a source both of weakness and of strength to those who make the generalizations. The men who move the world must think in large categories; but to think in large categories does not of itself move anything. The men of imagination who frame laws in general terms must be assisted by the men of routine whose experience enables them to translate the law into a working regulation. In England the two functions are combined. In France, ever since the Revolution, they have been kept apart. An English law is full of concrete detail, and may not even contain any explicit statement of the principle upon which it is based. A French law is abstract in form, a declaration of general principles rather than of particular precepts, and this tradition, springing from that peculiar constitution of revolutionary statesmanship which made it so destructive of existing institutions, that is to say, its belief in the infinite capacity of homogeneous human nature to be ameliorated by abstract ideas, has immensely strengthened the executive at the expense of the legislature. The reason is obvious. It is the function of the executive to fill in by decrees and regulations the sketchy outlines of the law. A large sphere of action, which under the English system belongs to Parliament, under the French system belongs to the bureaucracy. Besides the body of law derived from the parliamentary source, there is another body of law equally important which is derived from the administration, enforced by the administration, interpreted by the administration. In theory the doctrine of popular sovereignty is upheld; but the control of the legislature is necessarily diminished. No one who examines the history of the relations between the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety, and those between the Legislature and the Directory, can fail to be impressed by the fact, that during the last six years of the Revolution there was a steady tendency to strengthen the independence and enlarge the sphere of the executive.
A less surprising but even more important feature of the Revolution is its attitude towards private property. The Revolution was strongly and consistently individualistic. Socialist theory had played no part in its preparation, and socialist theories played no part in its scheme of reconstruction. All the statesmen of the Revolution thought it necessary to emphasize their adhesion to that article in the Declaration of Rights which declares that property is an inviolable and sacred right, and when in 1796 a socialist movement made itself apparent in Paris, it was promptly and ruthlessly crushed. The reasons which gave to the Revolution this conservative and reassuring quality were three in number. In the first place, the holders of property in France were numerous. Whereas the agrarian history of England during the eighteenth century may be summed up in the phrase ‘elimination of the yeomanry’, the course of events in France had been exactly the opposite. Here there was a large and a steadily increasing body of free peasant proprietors; while side by side with this free peasantry there was a great mass of peasant holdings, burdened by feudal dues and tithes, but otherwise similar to the free properties. There was in fact in the country a large peasant proprietary, whose interests were passionately bound up with the ownership of the soil. Nor were the conditions so favourable to the growth of socialistic ideas in the towns as they afterwards became. Socialism is the remedy which suggests itself when other remedies have failed; when there is a marked divorce between capital and labour; when the economic pressure upon the workmen becomes too severe to be borne, and when the relation between the efforts put out and the rewards received seems to be the product of a wicked and envious caprice. The French industrial system had not in 1789 been developed to the point at which the common ownership of the means of production appears as a natural and hopeful expedient. The factory system was, in its origin, the organization of industry trammelled by mediaeval restrictions; the banking system was in a rudimentary stage of development; while the communication of ideas was restricted by the absence of a cheap press, and by a singular lack of mobility. A third reason for the individualistic tendency of the revolution is the fact that the men who wielded political power belonged to the property-holding classes. M. Jaurès, the eloquent leader of the socialistic wing in the present Chamber of Deputies, attacks the Convention as a bourgeois assembly, and a study of the composition of the assemblies of the Revolution reveals the fact that they were composed for the most part of professional men, lawyers, doctors, teachers, men of the middle class consumed with envy of the nobility, but filled with a prosaic passion for rents and dividends. But even had this been otherwise, it would have been clear that the institution of private property had not yet received the improvements of which it was capable. The amendment of the law of succession, the abolition of feudal rights and entails, and the destruction of the old industrial fetters, were changes sufficiently sweeping for one generation to accomplish; and while respectable men found in such reforms as these the promise of a golden age, the collapse of the administration opened golden prospects of irregular plunder to the predatory class. Men are not at pains to reconstruct the basis of society if they think that they can get justice without it; and if there were no punishment for burglary, what thief would clamour for ‘common goods’? All this, however, was consistent with a steady growth of what is now called State Socialism. In the stress of war the free-trade theories of the physiocrats, which had resulted in the liberal tariff of 1791, were abandoned, and the State reverted to the old doctrine of protection which has continued, save for a spell of thirty-two years, to dominate the French fiscal system. The price of articles of consumption was fixed by law, and the functions of education were taken over by the State. A comparison of the Constitution of 1791, with its large concessions to local liberty, its rage for popular election, its suspicion of executive strength, with the practice and doctrine which prevailed under Robespierre and under the Directory, is an illuminating commentary upon the way in which the logic of history or the wickedness of man perverted an ideal of individual liberty into a cowed and spiritless acceptance of collective control.
The effervescence of all these new ideas and principles in a society which retained many mediaeval characteristics caused the great French civil war. The old France believed in the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Church; the new France believed in equality and Voltaire. The old France was composed of men belonging to every rank and station in life, from the frivolous noble who loitered in the corridors of Versailles, to the busy husbandman who drove his plough across the stiff clays of Poitou or the sandy wastes of Brittany. It contained staunch, heroic, uncompromising loyalists like La Roche Jacquelin, wise moderates of the middle class like Malouet, and innumerable simple and pious souls, who, rather than take the sacrament from a priest who had compounded with the enemy, would follow their proscribed shepherd into the woods and wastes and brave the anger of a government which rarely practised the virtue of clemency. The new France numbered some devout Catholics, but saw in the priests who refused to accept the Civil Constitution of the clergy the friends of the foreigner and the enemies of the State. By the end of the Revolution the list of émigrés amounted to 145,000; and to these must be added some 300,000 relatives and friends, who by reason of their aristocratic connexions were deprived of all political rights, and subjected to police supervision. When we consider that in addition half the priesthood of France were in rebellion against the ecclesiastical regulations of the State, and that among the number who had been driven across the frontier were politicians like Lafayette and Mallet du Pan, writers like Chateaubriand, generals like Dumouriez, we can calculate the loss which France would have sustained had she been unable to recover the loyal service of any part of this great Conservative connexion. The loss cannot be measured by an estimate of the quality displayed by the émigrés of Coblentz. Those émigrés were a body of which the country was well quit; but they constituted a small fraction of the great mass of men whose leaning was rather towards a monarchy than a republic.
It was Napoleon’s function in history to fuse the old France with the new. In the miraculous Italian campaigns, which first brought him reputation, he learned to vanquish armies, to carve and fashion states, to draw up constitutions, to treat with foreign powers, to study the psychology of nations. The very clearness of his conception of the chasm which divided the old world from the new saved him from the phantasms of the doctrinaires. He saw in Italy a people indolent, gifted, unwarlike, devoid of the serious spirit in affairs, debased by centuries of servitude, and he judged her to be unfit for liberty. The illusion of Republican optimism, if he ever possessed it, was dissipated by the contact with reality. He reported the Venetians to be unprincipled, cowardly, untrained for freedom. ‘You little know these people,’ he wrote to Talleyrand of the Italians, ‘They do not deserve to have forty thousand French killed for them. I see by your letters that you are always starting from a false hypothesis. You imagine that a superstitious, cowardly, pantaloon people can be made to do great things by Liberty. In four or five years Italy may have some passable troops, especially if they employ the Swiss, for it would want a very able legislator to give them the taste for arms. It is a very enervated and a very cowardly nation. Since I have been in Italy I have not been helped by the love of the people for liberty and equality, or at least it has been a very feeble auxiliary; but the good discipline of our army, the respect we have always had for religion, which has carried me even to the point of cajoling its ministers, justice, and a great activity and promptitude in repressing malcontents and punishing declared opponents, such have been the real auxiliaries of the Army of Italy. These are the facts. What has been said in proclamations and printed speeches is romance.’ A great opportunist, Napoleon was not the man to shape his course by the compass of revolutionary dogmatism. He found it convenient to spare the Piedmontese Monarchy, though the Directory had sworn enmity to crowned heads, to partition the Venetian Republic, to treat with Naples and with the Pope. For sentimental philosophies, for the policy of unselfish propaganda, he showed virile and cynical contempt. ‘Never,’ he wrote to the Directors, ‘has the French Republic adopted the principle of making war in the interests of other people. I should like to know on what principle of philosophy or morals 40,000 Frenchmen ought to be sacrificed against the clear wish of the nation and the obvious interests of the Republic. I know that it costs nothing to a handful of talkers to wish for a universal republic. I should like those gentlemen to come and make a winter campaign’; and again, ‘It is the soldier who founds a republic and it is the soldier who maintains it.’ If then he establishes republics in Northern Italy it is to be clearly understood not only that the republican constitutions are to be shaped and controlled by France, but that the republics are not to be exploited in the interests of an intolerant radical faction. The union of all classes appeared to him to be one of the aims of wise statesmanship, and a result only likely to be obtained where liberty was strictly curbed. ‘To exclude all the nobles from public functions,’ he wrote to the Provisional Government of the Ligurian Republic, ‘would be a revolting injustice’, and the comprehensive policy which he prescribed to Genoa was destined to govern his career in France. Indeed his contempt for the constitutions of Republican France grew with his experience and his appetite for command. ‘In spite of our pride,’ he wrote to Talleyrand, ‘our thousand and one brochures, our blind, loquacious harangues, we are very ignorant in the science of political morality. The government ought to be considered as the true representative of the nation. It should rule according to a constitutional charter and organic laws. If the legislative power were charged not with action but with supervision, were impassive, without rank in the Republic, without eyes or ears for what is going on around, it would have no ambition and would not inundate us with thousands of haphazard, absurd, self-annulling laws, with the result that we are a lawless nation in spite of three hundred folios of statute.’ He had begun dimly to adumbrate the doctrine of the strong executive founded upon the plébiscite which was to be the pillar of Bonapartism; and had come to the conclusion that legislative assemblies should be merely supervisory, that they should have no power to change the constitution or to interfere with the executive. His thought too had developed in the matter of religion. He discerned it to be a force which it was politic to harness and drive. ‘It is not enough,’ he wrote to the Republican Government of Genoa, ‘to refrain from attacking religion, you must go further and provide no reason for disquietude to the most timorous conscience.’ On another occasion he said that superstition was more powerful than liberty, and that the sovereignty of the people and freedom was the political code of the Gospel. On August 3, 1797, he wrote a letter to the Pope asking for a bull which should instruct the priests to preach obedience to the Government, and suggested that measures might be taken which should reconcile the constitutional priests in France, and recall the majority of the French people to the principles of religion. Two grand features in his administration, the Constitution and the Concordat, were already taking shape in his mind.
But his eye was not fixed on France alone. He learned all the pieces on the diplomatic chessboard, discovered the weakness of Imperial Austria and the brittle fabric of the Italian states. The treaty which he concluded at the end of the war at Campo-Formio, secured for France the Rhine frontier and the control of the Cisalpine Republic, and prepared the way for a reconstruction of Germany. Ancona and the Ionian Islands, stepping-stones to the magical East, whose appeal had already begun to work on Bonaparte’s imagination, were left in French hands. ‘The isles of Corfu, Zante, and Cephalonia,’ he wrote August 16, 1797, ‘interest us more nearly than the whole of Italy… The Empire of the Turks is crumbling: the possession of these isles will enable us to support it, as long as support will be possible, or to take our share in the spoil.’ ‘With Malta,’ which as he points out might easily be seized, ‘and Corfu, France would be mistress of the Mediterranean.’ Then it would be necessary to take Egypt, ‘a country which has never belonged to a European nation.’ ‘With armies like ours,’ he proceeds, ‘for whom all religions are equal, Mahomedans, Copts, Arabs, idolaters, &c., all that is quite indifferent to us. We shall respect them all alike.’ Endless possibilities of romantic conquest revealed themselves to this young general who in a breathless succession of triumphs had brought the stiff, old-fashioned Hapsburg Empire to its knees. He was no longer content with the old frame on which Fleury and Chauvelin had embroidered their political designs. From Paris, in whose cynical atmosphere great reputations withered, his mind turned to the spacious East. As he had emulated Charlemagne in Italy, so he would rival the exploits of Alexander in Egypt. Here was the key which would unlock the dominion of India; the starting point from which Syria might be invaded, and the Ottoman Empire brought down about its tottering foundations; here too was the vulnerable spot in England’s armour. His mind was filled with dreams and realities. Yet the Egyptian expedition, doomed as it was to fail owing to the lack of naval control, did not prove disastrous to his fortunes. France, condemned by reason of the absence of her supreme general to experience a succession of stunning reverses, followed with eager eyes the romantic course of the army of Egypt. She learned of the Mamelukes vanquished in a brilliant charge by the Pyramids, of a French government established in Cairo, of Bible readings under the stars in the holy places of Palestine; of a Turkish army routed at Aboukir. The battle of the Nile, the repulse from Acre, cast no shadow on the romance of this wonderful Odyssey. When Bonaparte landed at Fréjus, having escaped the vigilance of English cruisers, a thrill of delight and relief passed through France. He had been long expected. Fiévée, who was living a retired life in a remote corner of the Bourbonnais, records the following fact in his memoirs: ‘Every peasant I met in the fields, the vineyards, and woods, stopped and asked me if there was news of General Bonaparte, and why he did not come back to France. No one inquired after the Directory.’
(Continued in Part 2)
