The greatest reforms of the Consulate were carried out between July 1800 and May 1803, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), when Napoleon was in Paris in regular conclave with his Conseil d’État (Council of State), “which was mainly made up of moderate republicans and former royalists, although there were occasions when some councillors had to sit next to others who had sent their fathers or brothers to the guillotine”:
‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil État, ‘we must now commence its history.’
Napoleon gave the Conseil direction, purpose and the general lines of policy, which have been accurately summed up as ‘a love of authority, realism, contempt for privilege and abstract rights, scrupulous attention to detail and respect for an orderly social hierarchy’.
He was the youngest member of the Conseil and, as Chaptal recalled,
He was not at all embarrassed by the little knowledge he had about the details of general administration. He asked many questions, asked for the definition and meaning of the most common words; he provoked discussion and kept it going until his opinion was formed. In one debate this man, who is so often portrayed as a raging egomaniac, admitted to the aged and respected jurist François Tronchet ‘Sometimes in these discussions I have said things which a quarter of an hour later I have found were all wrong. I have no wish to pass for being worth more than I really am.’
[…]
When members were tired during all-night sessions he would say: ‘Come, sirs, we haven’t earned our salaries yet!’
(After they ended, sometimes at 5 a.m., he would take a bath, in the belief that ‘One hour in the bath is worth four hours of sleep to me.’)
Other than on the battlefield itself, it was here that Napoleon was at his most impressive. His councillors bear uniform witness — whether they later supported or abandoned him, whether they were writing contemporaneously or long after his fall — to his deliberative powers, his dynamism, the speed with which he grasped a subject, and the tenacity never to let it go until he had mastered its essentials and taken the necessary decision.
‘Still young and rather untutored in the different areas of administration,’ recalled one of them of the early days of the Consulate, ‘he brought to the discussions a clarity, a precision, a strength of reason and range of views that astonished us. A tireless worker with inexhaustible resources, he linked and co-ordinated the facts and opinions scattered throughout a large administration system with unparalleled wisdom.’
He quickly taught himself to ask short questions that demanded direct answers. Thus Conseil member Emmanuel Crétet, the minister of public works, would be asked ‘Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?’ and ‘Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?’
[…]
Ambitious men preferred to take junior positions as auditeurs in the Conseil to grander ones elsewhere in the civil service, because it was a good place to catch Napoleon’s eye.
[…]
Many people rightly saw a place in the Conseil as being a faster route to promotion than a seat in the Senate.
[…]
‘Do you know why I allow so much discussion at the Conseil?’ he once boasted to Roederer. ‘It is because I am the strongest debater in the whole Conseil. I let myself be attacked, because I know how to defend myself.’
[…]
Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’
After reading that, I need a nap.
Maxim 63: The brass knows HOW to do it by knowing WHO can do it.
“After reading that, I need a nap.”
And I need a long bath.