administrative tutelage of the communes, exemption of civil servants from the jurisdiction of the courts); he found only one important innovation—the coexistence, which was established in the year VIII., of isolated civil servants and deliberative councils. The principles of the Old Régime reappeared in 1800, and the old customs were received back into favour.[1] Turgot seemed to him to be an excellent type of the Napoleonic administrator, who had "the ideal of a civil servant, in a democratic society subject to an absolute government."[2] He was of the opinion that the partition of the land, which it is customary to place to the credit of the Revolution, had begun long before, and had not gone on at an exceptionally rapid pace under its influence.[3]
It is certain that Napoleon did not have to make any extraordinary effort to put the country once more on a monarchical footing. He found France quite ready, and had only a few corrections of detail to make in order to profit by the experience acquired since 1789. The administrative and fiscal laws had been drawn up during the Revolution by people who had applied the methods of the Old Régime; they remain in force to-day, still almost intact. The men he employed had served their apprenticeship under the Old Régime and under the Revolution; they all resemble one another; in their governmental practices they are all men of the preceding period; they all work with an equal ardour for the greatness of His Majesty.[4] The real merit of Napoleon lay in his not trusting too much to his own genius, in not giving himself up to the dreams which had so often deluded men of the eighteenth century, and had led them
- ↑ Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (édition des œuvres complètes), livre ii. chapitres i., iii., iv. pp. 89, 91, 94, 288.
- ↑ Tocqueville, Mélanges. pp. 155–156.
- ↑ Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, pp. 35–37.
- ↑ L. Madelin also comes to this conclusion in an article in the Débats of July 6, 1907, on the prefects of Napoleon I.
