Reading through the Napoleon Bonaparte biography by Vincent Cronin four our rhetoric homeschool studies has been fascinating.
If you only read one chapter in the book, I highly recommend chapter 13, Rebuilding France, which analyzes how Napoleon flipped around a new government that failed under several previous leaders.
FINANCE
Looking into the account books of France after becoming First Consul, Napoleon saw an excessive debt of 474 million francs.
With civil servants unpaid for months, Napoleon queried about the army, obtaining no information.
Napoleon: pay rolls?
Senior official: we don’t pay them.
Napoleon: ration list?
Senior official: we don’t feed them.
Napoleon: clothing lists?
Senior official: we don’t clothe them.
From lack of funds, hundreds of babies died in foundling homes.
Raising money, Napoleon bought time as he worked to create a body of employees to collect the taxes from each of the departments (or counties).
As an incentive, Napoleon promised to name the prettiest park after the first department that pays its taxes in full.
Hence, the Place de Vosges.
Thus, Napoleon kept a balanced budget throughout his political career.
Napoleon never had to devalue his currency, and the cost of living remained stable from the year he took office. – Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, p196
LAW AND JUSTICE
Wanting to combine the rights of man with the best of customary law in the north and Roman law in the south, Napoleon asked a team of lawyers to devise a civil code.
Napoleon found himself at one with the lawyers on most essentials: equality of all before the law, an end to feudal rights and duties, inviolability of property, marriage a civil not a religious act, freedom of conscience, freedom to choose one’s work, and these principles were codified. But sometimes Napoleon took issue with the lawyers, notably over the importance of the family. The Revolution had increased the power of the State at the expense of the family. Napoleon wished to right the balance by strengthening the family, particularly its head, and this because he considered the family the best safeguard of the weak and underprivileged…One these and several other important points, Napoleon failed to get his way. -Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, p197
On March 21, 1804, Code Napoleon was published.
…Napoleon himself played a very important part. It was he who provided order in France – the indispensable background to law-making; he who got the Code drafted so quickly; he who got it written, not in the usual legal jargon, but in a clear style intelligible to the man in the street. – Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, p200
MULTIPLE IMPROVEMENTS
For the military Napoleon created several medals and built roads and canals.
With the flourishment of farming, France became an exporter of goods instead of needing imports to feed hungry citizens.
Napoleon imported thousands of merino sheep from Spain to improve French sheep, and he improved horse-breeding.
Industry of silk and cotton improved to the point of France becoming a major exporter.
SUMMARY OF BENEFITS
Gold in the treasury and a balanced budget – for the first time since 1738; a new code of laws administered on the whole fairly; schooling that opened every career to talent; honour for those who displayed exceptional effort; public works that were really useful – these were the ‘granite masses’, to use Napoleon’s phrase, on which he built a new and prosperous France…unknown for 130 years. This prosperity is possible to evaluate because Napoleon the mathematician founded in 1801 France’s bureau of statistics, and this bureau issued annual reports. -Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, p207-8
…benefits Napoleon brought to France: full employment, stable prices and an improved balance of trade: exports rose from 365 million in 1788 to 383 million in 1812; imports fell from 290 million to 257 million. Meanwhile, also, France’s population rose: in Seine Inferieure, for example, from 609,743 in the year VIII to 630,000 five years later. – Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, 208
More important, a change had occurred which escapes statistics. Of the Seine Inferieure a Government official had written on the eve of Brumaire: ‘Crime with impunity, desertion encouraged, republicanism debased, laws an empty letter, banditry protected’, and went on to describe how the Le Havre-Rouen stage-coach was regularly halted and pillaged. In 1805 the prefect Beugnot, a level-headed man, was able to paint quite another picture. People paid their taxes; the law was enforced, children attended school, highway robbery was unheard of, farmers were applying new methods, people had real money to spend. ‘Fifteen years ago there was only one theatre in Rouen open three times a week, now there are two, open daily…A play by Moliere draws bigger crowds in Rouen than in Paris.’ – Napoleon Bonaparte, Cronin, p208-9
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