Napoleon: A Biography

perquisites attaching to them varied widely. An imperial nobleman had
no feudal privileges, had to pay tax and was not exempt from the general
law of the land. Some of the titles had no income or property appended to
them, but in any case the perks of office depended on the financial health
of the Empire, as they were paid out of a general imperial coffer. It was
therefore in the interests of the nobility that the Empire should fare well.
Titles were personal, but some had a benefice or majorat attached and in
that case both title and majorat were transferable. The size of the benefice
depended on the particular title and might be in the form of unmortgaged
real estate, shares in the Bank of France or government stock. The life
interest in landed property granted to senators (the so-called senatoreries),
however, immediately raised fears of a return to a feudalism in all but
name and was not as popular as it should have been even with the
beneficiaries, as some were disappointed to find that their income came
from widely dispersed lands and was thus difficult to collect.
Napoleon was determined that all power and wealth in France should
either emanate from the imperial government or be in its gift. Fearful
that left to their own devices the notables might form a powerful de facto
aristocracy behind his back, he hoped to distract them with a new
nobility, a kind of bribe which they were supposed to accept in return for
loss of political liberty. He declared rousingly: 'The institution of a
national nobility is not contrary to the idea of equality, and is necessary to
the maintenance of social order.' His idea that the hereditary transmission
of privilege did not work against social equality and meritocracy serves
only to show how bastardized revolutionary principles had become. He
claimed to have asked a number of ex-Jacobins whether a hereditary
nobility was in conflict with the Revolutionary ideology of equality and
they said no. One can only assume that these Jacobins were of the kidney
of Bernadotte, who while still spouting radical Republican principles had
by this time got his snout firmly into the trough.
Napoleon's aims in creating a new nobility were flawed at the outset.
His intention to destroy feudalism by introducing a meritocratic elite
would have been more convincing if he had granted no hereditary
benefices and forbade bequests from the nobility to the next generation;
but in that case he would have been a Jacobin and not Napoleon. In any
case, the creation of the nobility made the peasantry fear that feudalism
was about to be reintroduced. The attempt to close the ideological gap
between France and the rest of Europe was also a dismal failure.
Intermarriage between his family and ancien regime dynasties might be
accepted by Europe's royal families under duress, but fu ndamentally they
hated and despised Bonaparte. As Stendhal said of the Emperor: 'He had