who in their turn controlled 30,000 mayors and municipal councils. The
prefects ran the country rather in the manner of the Intendants under the
ancien regime. According to a decree of 18oz every departement had to
have a secondary school and every commune a primary school; in large
cities grammar schools or lydes were opened. The curriculum was rigidly
controlled, and showed the bias against humanities typical of all
dictatorships. Mathematics and science were emphasized but the liberal
arts were banned or restricted. No modern history was taught, and the
muse of Clio was placated instead with an intensive study of the reign of
Charlemagne. In its exact reversal of 'democracy from the grass-roots up'
the Napoleonic system could scarcely have been more authoritarian,
though it was a good forerunner of Lenin's 'democratic centralism'.
The area where Napoleon experienced most difficulty in his path to
supreme power was in his relations with the legislature. The sixty-strong
Senate was loyal, but the 300 Deputies of the Legislative Corps were a
thorn in his side, and especially troublesome was the 100-strong
Tribunate, which opposed both the Concordat and the later Code
Napoleon. But Napoleon had many powerful weapons of counter
offensive. He hit back by increasing the size of the Senate to one hundred
in 1803 and halving the Tribunate and Legislative Corps. He used three
other main devices for bypassing legislative obstruction: the use of senatus
consultum or decrees which bypassed the Tribunate and Legislative
Corps; arrets or orders in council, promulgated by the Council of State;
and, as the ultimate deterrent, the plebiscite.
Other measures for neutralizing opposition included playing Ministers
off against each other or against the Council of State, or diminishing their
powers by subdividing and duplicating the Ministries; another obvious
ploy was to appoint second-raters to the Ministries. Later, he liked to
appoint younger men bound to him by loyalty rather than the older
generation. And, since one-fifth of Tribunes and Legislators were
renewed annually, Napoleon used Cambaceres, the Second Consul, to get
rid of opponents. Instead of drawing lots, which was the normal
procedure, the Senate named the three hundred who were to keep their
seats, and simply nominated twenty-four new members, even though the
Constitution did not permit this. In the Legislative Body those who were
removed were the friends of Sieyes and Madame Stael the so-called
ideologues who had made the egregious mistake of thinking that their
intellectual preeminence alone exempted them from the task of building a
proper political power base.
Napoleon was ruthless towards individual opponents or potential
enemies. He kept Sieyes under surveillance at his country estate. When
marcin
(Marcin)
#1