Napoleon himself, never one to undervalue his contribution to France’s well-being, told his biographer Las Cases much the same thing. He had bequeathed to the nation, he said, ‘the glory and splendour … of truly national institutions’. Only a true French technocrat could ever think that a country’s bureaucracies were glorious and splendid, and far from being the belligerent little Corsican that many British people imagine, Napoleon was in fact a passionate administrator obsessed with every detail of political and public life, from the titles of his ministers to the colour of his soldiers’ trousers.
Even his fiercest critics would have to admit that modern France is a Napoleonic nation.
French law today is still founded upon the Code Napoléon of 1804 (later renamed the Code Civil), which set out all the rights and responsibilities of a French citizen. It was followed by the Code du Commerce of 1807 (designed to promote ‘free commerce that favours all classes and excites all imaginations’) and the Code Pénal of 1810, which among other things created the very French juge d’instruction, the examining magistrate who even today conducts criminal investigations, interrogating suspects and witnesses, overriding the police whenever he or she feels like it, and often taking years to decide whether a case should come to court.
However, these laws weren’t merely the whims of a dictator. Napoleon summoned four legal specialists from different regions of France, aiming to combine the best elements of all the country’s 360 regional legal systems. Each of the specialists’ proposals was examined by teams of advisers, and then voted on by an assembly. For a man renowned as a tyrant, it was as democratic as anything France had ever seen, including during the Revolution.
The laws themselves generally favoured individual freedom. Any ordinary citizen could own property, a ruling that ended the semi-feudal system still reigning in the French countryside. The only excuse for withdrawing this inalienable right to property was l’utilité publique, which today explains how French railways and motorways get built so fast – a Frenchman’s home is no longer his château if the state decides to demolish it ‘for the public good’.
The Code Napoléon also established the very French concept of the co-propriété, a group of individuals who own apartments in the same building. The system is still very much alive today, which is why anyone who owns an apartment in France is summoned every year by registered letter to attend a co-propriété meeting, chaired by an elected president, at which everyone spends hours debating what colour to paint front doors within the building (they all have to be the same colour), who is responsible for repairing which walls, and how much money to set aside for the following year’s expenses, as if preparing for a Napoleonic campaign. Two people even have to be conscripted Napoleon-style to serve as the president and secretary of the co-propriété.
The Code Napoléon also made marriage a state rather than a religious institution, freeing it from moralistic overtones, and declared everyone free to work without belonging to a guild – a right that France’s trade unions have been trying to undo ever since. In short, Napoleon was trying to give each of his citizens – including those throughout his European empire – the right to control their own lives.
Not that he believed in equal rights. This was democracy drafted by men for men. In the Code Napoléon, women were described as ‘minors’, incapable of managing their own affairs. A wife could only work if she had her husband’s permission, and her wages would be paid to him. Women were not allowed to vote or sign contracts, and apparently did not need education beyond primary school. They were free to be prostitutes and sleep with married men, whose wives couldn’t sue for divorce unless the man actually invited his other sexual partner to live in the family home. Just sleeping around was no grounds for divorce – unless you were a woman, of course: your husband could get rid of you for the slightest infidelity.
Most of this sexism has been taken out of the Code since then, though some of its more obscure clauses are still being modernised today. In fifteen places, the text of laws still in force in France in early 2014 referred to a citizen’s obligation to manage life ‘like a good family father’, a phrase borrowed from the pater familias in ancient Roman law. Only now have these been changed to read ‘in a reasonable way’. But then France has always been slightly slow in giving equal rights to women – universal suffrage for twenty-one-year-old female voters was not granted until 1945.
Overall, though, Napoleon’s laws have such universal appeal that they form the basis of the legal systems in modern Belgium, Quebec, Mauritius, Senegal, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, former French colonies in North Africa, some Latin American republics, and the American state of Louisiana (which was a French possession until Napoleon sold it in 1803).
As Napoleon himself said: ‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles; Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. That which nothing will erase, and that will live forever, is my Code Civil.’
He wasn’t wrong. Except that, in the eyes of his French fans, Waterloo has erased none of his glory either.
VI
It is a huge cliché to call any dictatorial Frenchman a Napoleon, especially if he is below average height; but like many clichés, it is based on truth. Whatever their height, all modern French presidents are fairly Napoleonic in their annoyance at being forced to dilute their power by working with a prime minister and a parliament. Nicolas Sarkozy famously ignored his and ruled alone. And whoever the president, the role of premier ministre is a fragile one. He (it is virtually always a he) can be replaced at the drop of a hat (or a drop in the polls) by the autocratic president, who, of course, lives and works in Napoleon’s old palace, l’Elysée, amid an imperial decor of gilded chairs and chandeliers, waited upon by servants and surrounded by a court of Napoleonic technocrats. In effect, l’Empereur is still in power.
And if Napoleon were to rise from his sarcophagus – and no doubt win the next presidential election by a landslide given the current state of French politics – he would also get a glow of satisfaction when touring the country and giving his young citizens a pinch on the cheek (one of his favourite occupations while he was alive).
Because France’s education system is almost exactly as he outlined it more than two centuries ago. Admittedly, French children can now learn things that didn’t exist at the time, like computer science and rugby; and – shock, horror – girls are allowed to attend educational establishments for just as long as boys. But the structure of the system is entirely Napoleonic.
In 1806, after drafting his bill of citizens’ rights, Napoleon set about reforming education, declaring that he wanted ‘the son of a farmer to be able to say: one day I will be a cardinal, a marshal or a minister’. Even given the fact that he obviously preferred farmers’ daughters to have no ambitions higher than becoming a farmer’s wife, it was a strong statement of social mobility that was true to the purest principles of the Revolution.
His new system included the primary school, the collège (for the first four years of secondary education), the lycée (for the final three years), and a range of university-like schools that still exist today.
Napoleon had already founded lycées in 1802, saying that they were designed ‘to educate the elite of the nation’ (that is to say, boys), and he had centralised matters so that the same lessons were given at the same time in each lycée in the country. The head of each lycée was, as he or she is today, an imperiously aloof, non-teaching administrator called a proviseur. The only real change to the lycée regime is that nowadays, the beginning and end of each lesson is no longer marked by a military drum roll, a system that lasted for more than 100 years.
Napoleon also created the diploma that most French children aim for at the end of their secondary education – the baccalauréat, a name taken from baccalaureus, the medieval French for a young man training to become either a scholar or a knight.fn4 Napoleon divided the qualification into two parts – the baccalauréat de lettres and the baccalauréat de sciences, a basic d
ivision that still exists in the twenty-first century.
In 1808, there were only twenty-one candidates – all male, of course. And things took a long time to change. The first woman who was actually allowed to take the baccalauréat was Julie-Victoire Daublé, who passed the exam in 1861. It wasn’t until 1924 that all girls were allowed to study as far as the baccalauréat as a matter of course.
It wasn’t only the lycée that was meant to turn out an educated French elite. Napoleon also founded further education schools designed to forge a nation of technocrats.
The Ecole Polytechnique, for example, already existed as a science academy when he decided in 1804 to give it military status and a new motto: ‘Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire’ (‘For the Nation, Sciences and Glory’). In 1814, its uniformed students earned their epaulettes by mounting barricades in the east of Paris against the advancing Prussians. They still have to do army service today, and can regularly be seen on 14 July, a herd of nerds marching awkwardly down the Champs-Elysées in their Napoleonic uniforms, their swords swinging by their sides in case any Prussians decide to disrupt the Bastille Day celebrations.
It is a similar story for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, still France’s top teacher-training academy. Now, as in Napoleon’s day, the school turns out 100 graduates per year, all of whom are selected via a hellishly difficult entrance exam that requires two years of cramming after the baccalauréat. The ENS was originally set up in 1795, then abandoned. Napoleon revived the idea in 1808, adapting it to be more rigid and military. The system was considered so Napoleonic that the school was shut down by the royalists in 1822, only to be reopened in 1826, presumably because pupils were getting out of hand and needed Napoleonic discipline.
Bad discipline in class is a danger that modern France does not want to face. Not all of its teachers go through the ENS – many are recruited from university – but most French kids would testify that they are taught in a style that owes plenty to l’Empereur. If he sat in on lessons in almost any French school today, from primary up to the second or third year of tertiary education, he would almost certainly recognise his teaching method – the notion that I, the marshal/educator, am here to order you, the humble squaddie/pupil, to learn the universally recognised truth. So shut up and listen. Just as in an army, the lower ranks (the students) in the French education system are not encouraged to have opinions – after all, battles are lost if subordinates start questioning orders. Waterloo was lost (well, only partially won, anyway) because a few footsoldiers decided, in spite of the assurances of their officers, that the Garde were retreating and that it wasn’t wise to hang around. Opinions and other signs of unruliness therefore have to be banned at the very least until the third or fourth year of university, at which point a committee of marshals (or professors) will decide whether they are valid or not.
What it boils down to – and French schoolchildren can confirm this – is that students are lined up like Napoleon’s infantry and have knowledge fired at them as if from a cannon. If some fall, it doesn’t matter, because enough will be left standing until the baccalauréat or beyond to ensure that the nation as a whole is educated and survives. It’s brutal, but it’s efficient.
Napoleon would be proud to see his system in action today, turning out French minds that are as rigidly trained as those of the men he used to send walking unquestioningly towards the opposing side’s artillery.
VII
Napoleon’s image as the founder of the modern French nation is so strongly defended by his admirers that he also gets credit for plenty of things he didn’t do.
It is often alleged that he invented France’s favourite loaf, the baguette. This is an historic falsehood that even gets repeated on the websites of French flour companies, keen to sell their patriotic products.
The most common version of the story is that Napoleon wanted a straight loaf that his soldiers could carry in a pocket in their trousers. No one seems to question why anyone would actually want to stick a bread stick down their trousers, but it is a legend that is often repeated.
In fact, of course, it would be absurd to give a man on the march the kind of bread that goes stale after about three hours, and starts to disintegrate within a day. No soldier wanted to march across the Russian steppes with his breeches full of breadcrumbs. What Napoleon’s troops needed was a thick-crusted, moist loaf that would stay fresh for days: definitely not a baguette.
As I pointed out in my book 1000 Years of Annoying the French, the baguette was introduced into France by one of Napoleon’s conquerors, Austria, where, in the mid-nineteenth century, an oven was developed that could produce bread with a thin crust, a light, fluffy dough and a short shelf life. A tough campaigning general like Napoleon would never have approved of anything so frivolous and impractical – except, perhaps, for his own table.
It is also often said that Napoleon got his scientists to invent the process of turning beetroot into sugar. The (highly credible) argument is that, faced with a British blockade of his ports and a self-imposed ban on importing British sugar – his Blocus Continental – Napoleon looked to home-grown solutions for sweetening his coffee and crème brûlée.fn5
In fact, the extraction of sugar from vegetables dates back to 1747, when the process was developed by a German scientist called Andreas Sigismund Marggraf. One of his students, a man called Franz Karl Achard, began selectively breeding sugar beets, and opened a sugar refinery in 1801, sponsored by one of Napoleon’s enemies, Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. When the Blocus Continental took effect, and sugar supplies were further depleted by a revolt of France’s slaves in Haiti, Napoleon offered a one million franc grant for the development of sugar-beet technology in France, and in 1812 issued a decree ordering farmers to plant beets, a dictatorial move that has earned him an unwarranted place in the heart of every Frenchman with a sweet tooth.
It was a case of wartime necessity accelerating existing technology – a much less destructive equivalent of World War Two pushing nuclear scientists to make atom bombs. (Although dentists might not agree.)
We can be sure that if Napoleon really had invented the baguette and sugar beet, he would have dictated a chapter about it to Las Cases, and his underground tomb in Paris would include a fresco of a semi-naked Bonaparte spreading jam on to a long slice of French bread, surrounded on one side by an angel caressing a pair of sugar beets, and on the other by an infantryman with a baguette protruding from his trousers.
VIII
Today there are plenty of occasions when it is still possible to hear French shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
First there are the auctions of Napoleonic memorabilia, which always attract crowds and generate high prices. I have met surviving members of the Bonaparte family (of which there are many, because anyone with a milligram of Napoleonic DNA is very keen for it to be known) who admitted that ‘every time we need some money to refurbish the chateau, we take a sword down off the wall’. And just one sword could pay for quite a few rolls of wallpaper – in 2007, the sabre that Napoleon carried at the Battle of Marengo in 1800 sold for 4.8 million euros.
In March 2008, when former French Prime Minister (and Bonapartist historian) Dominique de Villepin sold his collection of Napoleonic books and documents, huge prices were paid for anything that had belonged to the Emperor himself. An autograph went for 28,000 euros, and when a French museum snapped up a British anti-Bonaparte pamphlet, spectators shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ A battle against les Anglais had been won.
In November 2013, a mere copy of Napoleon’s will – a document that had not been signed by the Emperor himself – created huge excitement when it came up for public auction at the Drouot salesroom (Paris’s biggest auction house, coincidentally named after the Napoleonic marshal). Several TV news crews came along to witness the great historical event. As the auction began, a man moved through the crowd whispering ‘I am the Emperor reborn’. Sadly, no one believed him.
Before the will itself came up, biddi
ng for lesser Napoleonic items was brisk. An engraving of a battle got two men at the back of the room arguing about whether it was a victory or not – ‘a victory, surely, most of them were’, they concluded. When the will – or, let’s not forget, an anonymous copy of it – was announced, the cameras clicked on, and necks began swivelling to see who was bidding. The numbers rose rapidly, spurred on by telephone and internet bids, until a Frenchman in the room clinched the deal for an amazing 180,000 euros. His only comment as he left the room was that he was ‘bidding on behalf of a collector’.
In November 2014, a huge sale of Napoleonic memorabilia was held in Fontainebleau, the self-declared ‘imperial town’ just south of Paris. Admittedly the auction was happening for a less-than-flattering reason – Prince Albert of Monaco was emptying his Musée des Souvenirs Napoléoniens to make way for a museum dedicated to his mother, Princess Grace – but that didn’t bother the Napoleonic collectors because it meant that hundreds of rare items were coming up for grabs. There was such a frenzy of bidding that almost every lot at least doubled its estimate, with some going ten times over the expected price. Pairs of stockings actually worn by Napoleon sold for more than 15,000 euros. Clippings of his hair fetched the same price, and one of the black bicorn hats that Napoleon wore himself, and then gifted to his vet, went for a dizzying 1.8 million euros.
As the hat came up for sale, the auctioneer quoted a few lines of poetry written in its honour by Edmond Rostand in his play L’Aiglon (‘the eagle chick’ was the nickname of Napoleon’s son, also called Napoleon), first performed in 1900. The lines describing the Emperor’s trademark headgear can be loosely translated as follows: