Worlds Best Histories - France, vol 7 | Page 2

d'état, he was
placed at the head of the army of the Rhine joined to the army of
Helvetia, taken from Massena on the morrow of his most brilliant
victories. Distrust and ill-will struggled with his admiration of
Bonaparte in the mind of the conqueror of Zurich; he was sent to the
army of Italy, always devoted to Bonaparte. Berthier remained at Paris
in the capacity of minister of war. Fouché was placed at the police, and
Talleyrand undertook foreign affairs. By a bent of theoretical fancy,
which was not borne out by experience in government, the illustrious
mathematician Laplace was called to the ministry of the interior.
Gaudin became minister of finances; he replaced immediately the
forced loans with an increase of direct taxes, and introduced into the
collection of the public revenues some important improvements, which
paved the way for our great financial organization.
At the same time, without provocation and without necessity, as if
simply in compliance with the mournful traditions of past violence, a
list of proscriptions, published on the 23rd Brumaire, exiled to Guiana
or the Île de Ré nine persons--a mixture of honest republicans opposed
to the new state of things, and of wretches still charged with the crimes
of the Reign of Terror. Only the name of General Jourdan excited
universal reprobation, and it was immediately struck out. The measure
itself was soon mitigated, and the decree was never executed.
Through the revolutionary storms and the murderous epochs which had
successively seen all the great actors in the political struggles disappear
from the scene, the Abbé Sieyès emerged as a veteran associated with
the first free impulses of the nation. In 1789, his pamphlet, "What is the
Third Estate?" had arrested the attention of all serious minds. He had
several times, and in decisive circumstances, played an important part
in the Constituent Assembly. Since his vote of the 20th January, and
until the 9th Thermidor, he remained in voluntary obscurity; mingling
since then in all great theoretical discussions, he had exercised a
preponderating influence in recent events. From revolution to
revolution, popular or military, he came out in the part of legislator, his
spirit escaping from the influence of pure democracy. He had formerly

proposed the banishment en masse of all the nobility, and he still
nursed in the depths of his soul a horror for all traditional superiority.
He had said, "Whoever is not of my species is not my fellow-creature;
the nobles are not of my species; they are wolves, and I fire upon
them." He had, however, been brought, by his reflections and the
course of events, to construct eccentric theories, of a factitious
aristocracy, the wielders of power to the exclusion of the nation,
recruited from a limited circle--a disfigured survival of the Italian
republics of the middle ages, without the free and salutary action of
representative government.
"Confidence ought to proceed from below, and power to act from
above," declared the appointed legislator of the 18th Brumaire. He
himself compared his political system to a pyramid, resting on the
entire mass of the nation, terminating at the top in a single man, whom
he called the Great Elector. He had not the courage to pronounce the
word king.
Five millions of electors, constituted into primary assemblies, were to
prepare a municipal list of 500,000 elected who in their turn were
entrusted with the formation of a departmental list of 50,000 names. To
these twice sifted delegates was confided the care of electing 5000 as a
national list, alone capable of becoming the agents of executive power
in the whole of France. The municipal and departmental
administrations were to be chosen by authority from their respective
lists. The Conservative Senate, composed of eighty members,
self-elective, had the right of appointing the members of the Corps
Législatif, the Tribuneship, and the Court of Cassation. It was besides
destined to the honor of choosing the Great Elector. The senators,
richly endowed, might exercise no other function. The Corps Législatif
was dumb, and limited to voting the laws prepared by the Council of
State, and discussed by the Tribunate. The Great Elector, without
actively interfering in the government, furnished with a civil list of six
millions, and magnificently housed by the state, appointed the two
councils of peace and war, upon whom depended the ministers and all
the administrative personnel of prefects and sub- prefects entrusted
with the government of the departments. In case the magistrate, so

highly placed in his sumptuous indolence, should seem to menace the
safety of the State, the Senate was authorized to absorb him by
admitting him into its ranks. The same action might be exercised with
respect to any of the civil or military functionaries.
So many complicated wheels calculated to hinder rather than to sustain
each other,