nt assembly had solemnly decreed it and applied
it on a grand scale,[2321] and successive assemblies had applied it on
a still grander scale;[2322] it was a faith with the Jacobins, and,
besides, in conformity with the spirit of Roman imperial right and with
the leading maxim of French monarchical right. On this point the three
known jurisprudential systems were in accord, while their convergence
brought together around the same table the jurists of the three
doctrines in a common task, ex-parliamentarians and ex-members of the
Committee of Public Safety, former pro-scribers and the proscribed, the
purveyors of Sinamari with Treilhard and Merlin de Douai, returned from
Guiana, alongside of Simeon, Portalis, and Barbe-Marbois. There was
nobody in this conclave to maintain the rights of spontaneous bodies;
the theory, on all three sides, no matter from whom it proceeded,
refused to recognize them for what they are originally and essentially,
that is to say, distinct organisms equally natural with the State,
equally indispensable in their way, and, therefore, as legitimate as
itself; it allowed them only a life on trust, derived from above and
from the center. But, since the State created them, it might and ought
to treat them as its creatures, keep them indefinitely under its thumb,
use them for its purposes, act through them as through other agencies,
and transform their chiefs into functionaries of the central power.

III. Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.

The Organizer.--Influence of Napoleon's character and mind
on his internal and French system.--Exigencies of his
external and European role.--Suppression of all centers of
combination and concord.--Extension of the public domain and
what it embraces.--Reasons for maintaining the private
domain.--The part of the individual.--His reserved
enclosure.--Outlets for him beyond that.--His talents are
enlisted in the service of public power.--Special aptitude
and temporary vigor, lack of balance, and doubtful future of
the social body thus formed.

A new France, not the chimerical, communistic, equalized, and Spartan
France of Robespierre and Saint-Just, but a possible real, durable, and
yet leveled and uniform France, logically struck out at one blow, all
of a piece, according to one general principle, a France, centralized,
administrative, and, save the petty egoistic play of individuals,
managed in one entire