Worlds Best Histories - France, vol 7 | Page 2

conqueror of Zurich; he was sent to the army of Italy, always devoted to Bonaparte. Berthier remained at Paris in the capacity of minister of war. Fouch�� was placed at the police, and Talleyrand undertook foreign affairs. By a bent of theoretical fancy, which was not borne out by experience in government, the illustrious mathematician Laplace was called to the ministry of the interior. Gaudin became minister of finances; he replaced immediately the forced loans with an increase of direct taxes, and introduced into the collection of the public revenues some important improvements, which paved the way for our great financial organization.
At the same time, without provocation and without necessity, as if simply in compliance with the mournful traditions of past violence, a list of proscriptions, published on the 23rd Brumaire, exiled to Guiana or the ?le de R�� nine persons--a mixture of honest republicans opposed to the new state of things, and of wretches still charged with the crimes of the Reign of Terror. Only the name of General Jourdan excited universal reprobation, and it was immediately struck out. The measure itself was soon mitigated, and the decree was never executed.
Through the revolutionary storms and the murderous epochs which had successively seen all the great actors in the political struggles disappear from the scene, the Abb�� Siey��s emerged as a veteran associated with the first free impulses of the nation. In 1789, his pamphlet, "What is the Third Estate?" had arrested the attention of all serious minds. He had several times, and in decisive circumstances, played an important part in the Constituent Assembly. Since his vote of the 20th January, and until the 9th Thermidor, he remained in voluntary obscurity; mingling since then in all great theoretical discussions, he had exercised a preponderating influence in recent events. From revolution to revolution, popular or military, he came out in the part of legislator, his spirit escaping from the influence of pure democracy. He had formerly proposed the banishment en masse of all the nobility, and he still nursed in the depths of his soul a horror for all traditional superiority. He had said, "Whoever is not of my species is not my fellow-creature; the nobles are not of my species; they are wolves, and I fire upon them." He had, however, been brought, by his reflections and the course of events, to construct eccentric theories, of a factitious aristocracy, the wielders of power to the exclusion of the nation, recruited from a limited circle--a disfigured survival of the Italian republics of the middle ages, without the free and salutary action of representative government.
"Confidence ought to proceed from below, and power to act from above," declared the appointed legislator of the 18th Brumaire. He himself compared his political system to a pyramid, resting on the entire mass of the nation, terminating at the top in a single man, whom he called the Great Elector. He had not the courage to pronounce the word king.
Five millions of electors, constituted into primary assemblies, were to prepare a municipal list of 500,000 elected who in their turn were entrusted with the formation of a departmental list of 50,000 names. To these twice sifted delegates was confided the care of electing 5000 as a national list, alone capable of becoming the agents of executive power in the whole of France. The municipal and departmental administrations were to be chosen by authority from their respective lists. The Conservative Senate, composed of eighty members, self-elective, had the right of appointing the members of the Corps L��gislatif, the Tribuneship, and the Court of Cassation. It was besides destined to the honor of choosing the Great Elector. The senators, richly endowed, might exercise no other function. The Corps L��gislatif was dumb, and limited to voting the laws prepared by the Council of State, and discussed by the Tribunate. The Great Elector, without actively interfering in the government, furnished with a civil list of six millions, and magnificently housed by the state, appointed the two councils of peace and war, upon whom depended the ministers and all the administrative personnel of prefects and sub- prefects entrusted with the government of the departments. In case the magistrate, so highly placed in his sumptuous indolence, should seem to menace the safety of the State, the Senate was authorized to absorb him by admitting him into its ranks. The same action might be exercised with respect to any of the civil or military functionaries.
So many complicated wheels calculated to hinder rather than to sustain each other, so much pomp in words and so little efficacy in action, could never suit the intentions or the character of General Bonaparte. He claimed at once the position of Great Elector, which Siey��s had perhaps secretly thought to reserve for himself.
"What!" said he, "would you want to