An Interventionist State

Unlike what happened in the United States, where the Constitution of 1787 adopted a series of mechanisms aimed at impeding the federal government from acquiring excessive power (the separation of powers and their independence, the Bill of Rights, the limitation of the duration and number of presidential terms, the frequency of legislative elections) in France the Revolution, by obliterating the institutions of the Old Regime, gave rise to an all-powerful state.

In this Napoleon’s actions reflected the sentiments shared by most “republicans of order” of his era, for whom the dual threats posed by counterrevolution and democracy required a strengthening of the state, considered as the depository and guardian of the Revolution (Bergeron 1990, 5). This is why, from Napoleon’s perspective, the state had a role to play in regulating all areas of society and people’s lives.

15.3.1 Religious Reform

Firstly, Napoleon intervened in the religious sphere. Through the Concordat of 1801, he was able to regain favor among French Catholics and control the French Catholic Church, in the purest Gallican tradition, not only because the government named the bishops who, in turn, named the priests, with both required to swear allegiance to the regime, but because the Church of France, which lacked assets, came to depend on state subsidies. The Concordat was fiercely opposed by intellectuals educated in the school of the “philosophes;” by the country’s civil servants, including some members of the State Council; and, above all, by the army. In order not to alienate anti-Catholic factions, Napoleon also acted to legalize Protestant worship (for Lutherans and Calvinists) at the same time he tightened the state’s grip on the Catholic clergy. To this end in 1802, he published a decree regulating religious worship: the Organic Articles, of clearly Gallican inspiration, which defended the autonomy of the French Church vis-a-vis Rome.^{^[792]} The audacious terms of Napoleon’s religious policy reached their peak with the publication in 1806 of the Imperial Catechism, which placed civic obligations on a par with religious ones, as if the emperor was seated at the right hand of God.^{^[793]}

15.3.2 Economic Reform

When discussing Napoleon’s interventionist agenda mention must also be made of the measures that he took to stabilize the French economy and pull the nation out of bankruptcy.

He first reestablished the state’s tax collecting role and burnished its prestige in this regard through the creation of a General Fiscal Administration, the appointment of “fiscal controllers”, and the creation of another body of civil servants also named by the central power: “receivers” and “collectors”, whose efforts led to significant improvements in the efficiency of the system, assuring the government a constant source of revenue through tax collection (Bergeron 1990, 37-51).

To stabilize the economy Bonaparte created the Bank of France (February of 1800), an authority charged with administrating the government’s monetary policies. The measure was so effective that in 1803, the first consul ordered that it was to enjoy a monopoly on the emission of bank-issued checks made out to beneficiaries, which could be presented in exchange for cash at any time. As of 1806, the administration of the Bank of France was totally controlled by the government (Conner 2004, 80-82).

France’s solid tax base and financial stability made it possible for Napoleon to promulgate, on March 28, 1803 (7 Germinal Year XI), a measure which had been devised by the Thermidorian Convention: the creation of a silver currency that came to be called the franc germinal, which would remain stable for more than a century, until the outbreak of World War I.^{^[794]} Thanks to all these measures Napoleon was able, after decades of massive public deficits, to balance the 1802 budget.

After shoring up his personal power, in 1802 being named Consul for Life, Napoleon was able to take additional steps to lay down the social foundations of his new state. These policies included the attempt to create a new privileged social class recognized and sustained by the state; educational reform to train the top officials serving the new regime; and laying down the underpinnings of a new legal system, its first phase being the approval of the Civil Code.

15.3.3 A Failed Attempt at Social Reform: The “Legion of Honor”

In May of 1802, the first consul created the Legion of Honor.

Napoleon’s intention was to institute an “intermediate body” between the common people and the government, a kind of “patrician class” made up of leading figures selected by the government.^{^[795]} The patently “monarchical” character of the institution, however, rankled the State Council and the assemblies so badly that Napoleon was compelled to abandon the initiative (Bessiere 2008, 12-13). The Legion of Honor would never come to constitute a new noble class. After the proclamation of the Empire, however, it did end up evolving into the state’s most prestigious award (la “legion d’honneur”), a distinction which it retains even today.

15.3.4 Educational Reform: Grammar Schools, Special

Schools of Higher Education, and Universities

If Napoleon was not able to impose—initially—the idea of a new elite between the common people and the state, he did manage to undertake a vital and historic reform of the French educational system, aimed at turning out future generations of well-educated Frenchmen which, according to the Napoleonic ideal, the new state required. It is significant that when presenting his plans for education reform before the Tribunate, Bonaparte explained that the institution in question was not only to be morally instructive one, but to feature a political mission as well: its objective was to unite with the government both the rising and the declining generations, to link parents to the government through their children, and children through their parents, thus establishing a kind of public paternity.^{^[796]}

With this intention, by virtue of the decree of 11 Floreal, Year X (May 1, 1802), the Central Schools created by the Revolution were replaced by lycees, institutions in which Napoleon wished for educational effectiveness to prevail over all other considerations to train the nation’s elite.^{^[797]} A return to the principles of Classical Antiquity (Neoclassicism),^{^[798]} already having gained momentum during the time of Louis XIV, was one of the cultural pillars upon which Napoleonic reform was based (Bergeron 1990, 34). This return, of course, was duly tailored to the era.

Students in the lycees were organized in a military fashion (Vaughan and Archer 2010, 185) and studied the same curriculum taught at Jesuit schools, which Napoleon considered the most effective.^{^[799]} In fact, the administrators and professors of the lycees formed a kind of secular congregation totally and zealously dedicated to the education of the young people placed in their charge by the state, to the point that they were prohibited from marrying and were required to remain celibate.^{^[800]}

Napoleon’s educational reform would be rounded out during the imperial stage, in 1808, when he organized the French university as a centralized institution dependent on the state, and established a government monopoly over all levels of education. ^{^[801]}

The first consul also radically transformed the Special Higher Education Schools (Grandes Ecoles) with the same intention of assigning priority to usefulness and educational effectiveness, which in some cases led to their militarization, as occurred, for example, at the Polytechnic School, whose graduates even today wear uniforms and are ranked as “officers” of the French Army. Napoleon’s educational reforms were one of the pillars of his reformist agenda. Ever since France’s governing class has continued to study at the schools and elite institutions which he created.^{^[802]}

In 1808, the Order of Academic Palms was also founded to recognize outstanding university students and professors (Klinge 2004, 159).

15.3.5 Legal Reform and the Unification of Private Law:

Le Code Civil (March 21,1804)

When the Revolution began, France lacked a unified system of law. Reference has already been made to Voltaire’s famous observation in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) that one travelling across the France of his time saw the laws shift every time he had to change horses.^{^[803]} Thus, in 1789 the architects of the new constitution viewed legal reform as one of the most urgent tasks facing the government, which was determined to do away with the legal disarray inherited from the Ancien Regime by means of a single code of laws to be valid throughout France.

This undertaking, however, involved great technical difficulties which prevented the successive revolutionary assemblies (the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, the Convention, the Directory) from carrying out the proposed reform, despite repeated attempts to do so.

The challenge was to integrate and unify the multiple extant legal bodies, which included the Ancien Regime’s various systems of customary law from northern France, the traditional written-law system based on the Roman model in place in the south, and, finally, the mass of legislation passed helter-skelter by the National Assembly, the National Convention, and the directorial legislatures (Woloch 2001, 75). This monumental task required a titanic effort by Napoleon, who personally helped to draft and advance the new code, benefitting from the inestimable aid of Jean Jacques Regis de Cambaceres (Chatel de Brancion 2009), the author of several of the preceding plans, as well as other notorious jurists, such as Tronchet, Portalis,^{^[804]} Preameneu, Maleville and Treilhard (Reich 2004, 455). Thanks to them and Napoleon’s utmost commitment to the project, the Civil Code was approved on March 21,1804. To win support for it the first consul had to exert all of his authority and bring to bear all his influence in the legislative chambers (Jordan 2012, 105107), where opponents of the regime had grown strong.^{^[805]} Napoleon ultimately considered passage of his Civil Code his greatest achievement (Lyons 1994, 94).

From the point of view of its content, the Civil Code was a product of the spirit of “national reconciliation” which had informed the first consul’s political actions.^{^[806]} In fact, the authors of the French Civil Code drew upon the entire western legal tradition: Roman law, common law, royal legislation and, of course, revolutionary legislation (Arnaud 1969). The result was a Code that was more pragmatic but less liberal than the Convention’s previous drafts, mainly because Bonaparte imposed the principles of “social conservation” and of “authority”.

Thus, the Code of 1804 not only firmly guaranteed the right to property in its article 544, as the “right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner provided that one does not make a use of them that is prohibited by laws (lois) or regulations (reglements)” (Gordley 2013, 224)—including provisions which protected the ownership of “national assets” expropriated from the Church, legalizing a de facto situation (Lewy 1998, 169)—but also reestablished the institution of the traditional family in which the father’s authority prevailed over his wife and children.^{^[807]} The authors of the legislation, at the same time, did not fail to incorporate a good number of revolutionary legislative reforms, such as those upholding individual freedom, equality between citizens, secularism, divorce, the egalitarian distribution of inheritances between children, and the abolition of feudal practices. Its mixed and

balanced character ensured the success of the Civil Code, which became the sole body of private law in force in France, superseding all that preceding it.^{^[808]}

15.4

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Source: Aguilera-Barchet Bruno. A History of Western Public Law. Between Nation and State. Springer,2015. — 788 p.. 2015

An Interventionist State

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