“We have done with the romance of the Revolution:  we must now commence its history.  We must have eyes only for what is real and practicable in the application of principles, and not for the speculative and hypothetical.”  Such were the memorable words of Bonaparte to his Council of State at one of its early meetings.  They strike the keynote of the era of the Consulate.  It was a period of intensely practical activity that absorbed all the energies of France and caused the earlier events of the Revolution to fade away into a seemingly remote past.  The failures of the civilian rulers and the military triumphs of Bonaparte had exerted a curious influence on the French character, which was in a mood of expectant receptivity.  In 1800 everything was in the transitional state that favours the efforts of a master builder; and one was now at hand whose constructive ability in civil affairs equalled his transcendent genius for war.

I propose here briefly to review the most important works of reconstruction which render the Consulate and the early part of the Empire for ever famous.  So vast and complex were Bonaparte’s efforts in this field that they will be described, not chronologically, but subject by subject.  The reader will, however, remember that for the most part they went on side by side, even amidst the distractions caused by war, diplomacy, colonial enterprises, and the myriad details of a vast administration.  What here appears as a series of canals was in reality a mighty river of enterprise rolling in undivided volume and fed by the superhuman vitality of the First Consul.  It was his inexhaustible curiosity which compelled functionaries to reveal the secrets of their office:  it was his intelligence that seized on the salient points of every problem and saw the solution:  it was his ardour and mental tenacity which kept his Ministers and committees hard at work, and by toil of sometimes twenty hours a day supervised the results:  it was, in fine, his passion for thoroughness, his ambition for France, that nerved every official with something of his own contempt of difficulties, until, as one of them said, “the gigantic entered into our very habits of thought."[149]

The first question of political reconstruction which urgently claimed attention was that of local government.  On the very day when it was certain that the nation had accepted the new constitution, the First Consul presented to the Legislature a draft of a law for regulating the affairs of the Departments.  It must be admitted that local self-government, as instituted by the men of 1789 in their Departmental System, had proved a failure.  In that time of buoyant hope, when every difficulty and abuse seemed about to be charmed away by the magic of universal suffrage, local self-government of a most advanced type had been intrusted to an inexperienced populace.  There were elections for the commune or parish, elections for the canton, elections for the district, elections for the Department, and elections