His methods in this immense work deserve attention:  they were very different from those of the revolutionary parties after the best days of 1789 were past.  The followers of Rousseau worked on rigorous a priori methods.  If institutions and sentiments did not square with the principles of their master, they were swept away or were forced into conformity with the new evangel.  A correct knowledge of the “Contrat Social” and keen critical powers were the prime requisites of Jacobinical statesmanship.  Knowledge of the history of France, the faculty of gauging the real strength of popular feelings, tact in conciliating important interests, all were alike despised.  Institutions and class interests were as nothing in comparison with that imposing abstraction, the general will.  For this alone could philosophers legislate and factions conspire.

From these lofty aims and exasperating methods Bonaparte was speedily weaned.  If victorious analysis led to this; if it could only pull down, not reconstruct; if, while legislating for the general will, Jacobins harassed one class after another and produced civil war, then away with their pedantries in favour of the practical statecraft which attempted one task at a time and aimed at winning back in turn the alienated classes.  Then, and then alone, after civic peace had been re-established, would he attempt the reconstruction of the civil order in the same tentative manner, taking up only this or that frayed end at once, trusting to time, skill, and patience to transform the tangle into a symmetrical pattern.  And thus, where Feuillants, Girondins, and Jacobins had produced chaos, the practical man and his able helpers succeeded in weaving ineffaceable outlines.  As to the time when the change took place in Bonaparte’s brain from Jacobinism to aims and methods that may be called conservative, we are strangely ignorant.  But the results of this mental change will stand forth clear and solid for many a generation in the customs, laws, and institutions of his adopted country.  If the Revolution, intellectually considered, began and ended with analysis, Napoleon’s faculties supplied the needed synthesis.  Together they made modern France.

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CHAPTER XIII

THE CONSULATE FOR LIFE

With the view of presenting in clear outlines the chief institutions of Napoleonic France, they have been described in the preceding chapter, detached from their political setting.  We now return to consider the events which favoured the consolidation of Bonaparte’s power.