Having dared and achieved the exploit of organizing religion in a half-infidel society, the First Consul was ready to undertake the almost equally hazardous task of establishing an order of social distinction, and that too in the very land where less than eight years previously every title qualified its holder for the guillotine.  For his new experiment, the Legion of Honour, he could adduce only one precedent in the acts of the last twelve years.

The whole tendency had been towards levelling all inequalities.  In 1790 all titles of nobility were swept away; and though the Convention decreed “arms of honour” to brave soldiers, yet its generosity to the deserving proved to be less remarkable than its activity in guillotining the unsuccessful.  Bonaparte, however, adduced its custom of granting occasional modest rewards as a precedent for his own design, which was to be far more extended and ambitious.

In May, 1802, he proposed the formation of a Legion of Honour, organized in fifteen cohorts, with grand officers, commanders, officers, and legionaries.  Its affairs were to be regulated by a council presided over by Bonaparte himself.  Each cohort received “national domains” with 200,000 francs annual rental, and these funds were disbursed to the members on a scale proportionate to their rank.  The men who had received “arms of honour” were, ipso facto to be legionaries; soldiers “who had rendered considerable services to the State in the war of liberty,” and civilians “who by their learning, talents, and virtues contributed to establish or to defend the principles of the Republic,” might hope for the honour and reward now held out.  The idea of rewarding merit in a civilian, as well as among the military caste which had hitherto almost entirely absorbed such honours, was certainly enlightened; and the names of the famous savants Laplace, Monge, Berthollet, Lagrange, Chaptal, and of jurists such as Treilhard and Tronchet, imparted lustre to what would otherwise have been a very commonplace institution.  Bonaparte desired to call out all the faculties of the nation; and when Dumas proposed that the order should be limited to soldiers, the First Consul replied in a brilliant and convincing harangue: 

“To do great things nowadays it is not enough to be a man of five feet ten inches.  If strength and bravery made the general, every soldier might claim the command.  The general who does great things is he who also possesses civil qualities.  The soldier knows no law but force, sees nothing but it, and measures everything by it.  The civilian, on the other hand, only looks to the general welfare.  The characteristic of the soldier is to wish to do everything despotically:  that of the civilian is to submit everything to discussion, truth, and reason.  The superiority thus unquestionably belongs to the civilian.”

In these noble words we can discern the secret of Bonaparte’s supremacy both in politics and in warfare.  Uniting in his own person the ablest qualities of the statesman and the warrior, he naturally desired that his new order of merit should quicken the vitality of France in every direction, knowing full well that the results would speedily be felt in the army itself.  When admitted to its ranks, the new member swore: