1Two recent publications in English have approached a definition of the Napoleonic regime of social order. Building on Godechot’s conclusions of 1951 that the French Empire was “perhaps the precursor of the modern police states”, [1] Michael Sibalis in his 2001 article “The Napoleonic Police State” takes out the ‘perhaps’ categorically making the First Empire a police state. [2] Howard G. Brown, in Ending the French Revolution, (2006), [3] has come up with the softer term of ‘security state’, adducing the Consulate’s intensification of criminal justice. His treatment goes up to 1802. Thierry Lentz in the third volume of his Nouvelle Histoire du Premier Empire (2007), [4] takes a more circumspect view, arguing forcefully against Godechot’s conclusions regarding the definition of the empire as a military dictatorship, taxing the many attempts to class the period as a police state as biased (as if the Revolution had not also attempted to perfect her policing and as if the police during the Consulate and Empire was only employed with doing away with political opponents), and emphasising the peripheral nature of the political policing up until the Russian campaign and the Malet affair. Jacques-Olivier Boudon, writing in French, has taken a more broad-ranging view of order and disorder (placing particular emphasis upon how the Napoleonic regime itself contributed to the creation of disorder, notably through the imposition of conscription), though he avoids the terms “État sécuritaire” or “État policier”. [5] Brown furthermore notes that “the authoritarian regime constructed under [Napoleon’s] aegis was the product of widespread consensus among Frenchmen”. “Liberty was sacrificed”, he continues, “not to glory but to security”. Boudon however emphasises the fact that not all adhered to the new ‘order’. But that throughout the Napoleonic period methods of ‘law and order’ intensified, with the enforcing of deserters, the publication of the Code Pénal in 1810 and the reinforcement of police control over the country.

2This paper is a reflection upon this situation, an essai, if you will. The first part is a discussion of the early Consulate and its political relationship to the period immediately before the Revolution. The second considers an example of pre-Revolutionary social control, police in the widest sense, namely the Polizeistaat, and my last will be a consideration of the specific example of the State Prison, introduced by decree on 3 March 1810, much discussed, then as now.

3Napoleon famously declared the Revolution perfected and ended in the coup d’État of Brumaire. This was in fact statement of programme rather a statement of fact, as the novelties of the Consulate, stemming from the Constitution of An VIII were to show. It seems to me that the definition of the Napoleonic regime as a police state is a criticism, and that this criticism is in fact because Napoleon’s authoritarian regime seems to back away from the liberty enshrined in the declaration of the rights of man. It is as if Napoleon is being criticised for not being committed enough to the Revolution. But this criticism is of course also a truism. Napoleon himself claims that he ended the Revolution, and we must take him at his word. His regime is something else.

4In symbolic terms, the changes after the Brumaire coup were largely in the direction of regimes preceding the Revolution. Second Consul Cambaceres noted in his memoirs that Napoleon, at this very beginning of office, was obsessed with “the idea of giving his government the ancient character which it lacked. He would have preferred to have drawn a veil over the authorities which had preceded him post 1792 and to have made the consular power the heir of the monarchy. For this reason, much later on, he tried to place no intermediary between Charlemagne and the proclamation of Empire.” [6] It was also no accident that Napoleon chose not only the Tuileries Palace as the seat of government, but also selected for his apartments in it what had been the rooms of Louis XVI. Appearances were not deceptive. Napoleon was there as monarch. [7] Indeed, the architect Fontaine later noted in his Journal that Napoleon regarded the Tuileries Palace as “the sanctuary of monarchy”. [8]

5And in terms of law and order, we can see in the establishment of effective gendarmes and in police structures strongly linked to the figure of the prefect a return to certain Ancien Régime features. To take the gendarmerie first. Despite suffering from ‘political’ appointments during the Revolutionary period, the gendarmerie corps (which numbered 10,564 men arranged in 24 territorial divisions, at the end of the Directorial period) was nevertheless a force to be reckoned with. It was in all but name the Ancien Régime Maréchaussée royale. It was the front line in the battle against ‘insecurity’. One of Napoleon’s first gestures was to make the body more effective, increasing numbers, sacking the inefficient. Only three months after Brumaire, 200 new brigades had been established in the west of France. In July 1801 the gendarmerie numbered 15,689 (approximately two-thirds mounted to one third on foot). As for the specifically Napoleonic figure of the prefect, his role was specifically linked to territorial re-structuring as enshrined in the law of 28 Pluviôse, An VIII (17 February, 1800). To the original 83 departments created in 1790, the Consulate was to add twenty in 1800 including 9 Belgic departments, 4 Rhenish departments and the Léman department. The Consulate however rejected the Revolutionary district as a subdivision of the department, replacing it with the arrondissement (varying from 2 to 6 per department), and the arrondissements contained Revolutionary municipalities. A single administrative figure ‘ruled’ at each territorial level, namely, the prefect, the sub-prefect and the mayor. But the prefect’s role in the keeping of order was key. As the Prefect of the department of Basses-Pyrénées, Boniface Castellane-Novejean, once remarked to Napoleon at the Château de Marracq in 1808 “prefects make sure that the taxes are paid, that the conscription is enacted and that law and order is preserved at home”. [9] Whilst this re-centralisation of power in one man was in one way a return to the “despotism” of the Ancien Régime Intendant, that man was nevertheless answerable to Napoleon (and the penalties for failure were draconian). Chaptal speaking to the Corps législatif on the day the law instituting prefects was promulgated famously described the emperor/prefect connection as being as swift as electric current. This intense centralisation (in effect a return to the pre-Revolutionary order after the chaos of the Revolution) was vaunted by Napoleon himself (cited by Las Cases [10]): ‘The organisation of the prefects, their actions, and their results were admirable and prodigious. A single impetus could move more than 40 million men as one man; and, with the help of these centres of activity, the movement was as rapid at the extremities as it was at the centre. […] The prefects, with all their authority and local resources were themselves miniature emperors “empereurs au petit pied’; and since their power was derived from the impetus of which they were only agent, all their influence came from their occupation of that moment, which was not in any way personal, and none of their power was derived from the region which they administrated; they had all the advantages of the great, absolute agents of yesteryear but without any of their inconveniences’.

6Now this admission by Napoleon that Prefects were new-improved Intendants is a clue. Napoléon was a man of the 18^th century. He formed his political opinions in a period which was dominated by debate on political theory. He had read Voltaire and Rousseau and seems to have been particularly influenced by the encylopédiste point of view, indeed he was closely friendly with one of it major exponents, the Abbé Raynal. [11] The encyclopedists saw the Church as naturally linked to the state, and they maintained the sacred nature of property (for them it was the first of man’s natural rights). For them the monarchy was of social utility, privileges were to be abolished, careers were to be open to all talents, justice was to be reformed and the tax system was to be corrected so that all would be equal in the face of taxation. [12] As for Rousseau, Napoleon was explicit in his adulation in his early years. The seventeen-year-old opened his Refutation of Roustan with the ecstatic envoi, “Rousseau”! and continued with a paean to the author and his book On the Social Contract. Rousseau was “a profound and penetrating man,” enthused the teenager”, who spent his life studying mankind and who so excellently revealed to us the minute causes of great actions”. [13] Now for Rousseau, the state should organise the citizen’s life right down to the last degree, it had the right of life and death over the citizens, it should prohibit luxury since this was effeminate and not useful, it could even censor stage performances. Most of all the state should regulate religion. If we consider Napoleon’s own attitude to religion, law and order, we can see that his models are those of before the Revolution. We too in searching for definitions of the Napoleonic state ought rather to look to the thinkers of the enlightenment.

7One particularly curious similarity between the Napoleonic Consulate and Empire and the Enlightenment is the idea of the Polizeistaat or Well-ordered state beloved of the Enlightenment. As Marc Raeff has argued: “During the proto-modern era, a strong independent government and a powerful ruler were believed to be the pre-conditions of the spiritual and material welfare of the subjects, and the latter’s happiness was implicitly equated with the maximising of the creative potential of the state in a God-pleasing manner”. [14] Now this German concern found its resonance in two French texts, one early in the 18^th century, namely, Nicolas de LaMare’s Traité de Police and one in the second half of the century, a report on the Paris police ordered by Monsieur de Sartine in the 1770s, derived from de LaMare’s treatise. [15]. The former text was widely read during the 18^th century and the latter one is in a way a synthesis of it, as a definition of the well-ordered Police state, police meaning not only the body of men but also the rational, policy-based structuring of society. Monsieur de Sartine’s report is particularly interesting: “Police […] includes the universality of concerns related to the administration of public welfare, the choice and the use of suitable means for achieving it, increasing it and perfecting it. It is, you could say, the science of governing men and providing for their wellbeing, the way to make them, as much as is possible, what they ought to be for the general interest of society.” This leads directly to the structuring of society through legal codification, itself umbilically linked to the Code Napoléon. In this way 18^th-century cameralism and ideas regarding the Polizeistaat are the precursors of the Napoleonic state. [16] We can thus agree with Marc Reiff that the Napoleonic experience born from the Revolutionary convulsions of the last quarter of the 18^th century was only an after-effect of the process, rather than that the Revolution was its antecedent stimulus. The Revolution from this point of view becomes in effect the birth pangs of the most effective absolutist state, the empire of Napoleon.
For my third and final theme, I intend to discuss one of the key features stressed by those who argue that the Napoleonic regime was a police state, namely the decision to create ”Prisons d’État“ or State prisons. [17] These were created by a decree dated 3 March, 1810, and in it certain prisons were designated for extraordinary prisoners deemed to be under the jurisdiction of the “haute police d’État”, and only the emperor was empowered to apply such a definition. Up to this time, political prisoners (for such they were) could be arrested by prefects, commissioners general of police, the police minister general and Councillors of state with portfolio for a police arrondissement. The decree detailed potential prisoners, namely: those it deemed “unsuitable either to be brought before a public court or to be set free”; or those who had committed crimes against the state (for example, gang leaders from the civil war during the early Consulate caught once again ‘in the act’, “thieves and criminals which the courts have not wished to condemn”, etc. The documents presented to the ‘privy council’ designate five categories of prisoner: state prisoners held for political crimes; priests held for ecclesiastical misdeeds; men who, after having been brought before the court, were acquitted “despite presumptions of guilt such that the interest of society would demand that their detention be upheld as a measure of ‘high police’ (haute police)”; men of vice (hommes vicieux) suspected of crimes for which they had not been brought before a court; vagabonds and travellers. This somewhat arbitrary decree did however have some checks and balances. State prisoners could only be detained once a decision had been taken by the Privy Council based a report made by a Grand Judge. Such prisons were to be inspected every year by a Councillor of State, and a report was to be written. As Thierry Lentz has argued in his recently published dictionary of political institutions, [18] the change of responsibility to the emperor alone was, a change “from a greater abuse to a lesser abuse” of power. Indeed, some prisoners were set free after consideration in Privy Council. In the application of the decree, 145 excarcerations were made in 1811 and 29 in 1812. The decree designated the following state prisons: the Temple, Bicêtre and Vincennes in Paris, the forts or châteaux in Saumur, Ham, If, Pierre-Châtel, Bouillon, Joux, Landkronn, Campiano, Fenestrelle and Mont-Saint-Michel.
Cambaceres in his memoirs noted that the institution was created by Napoleon having “learned by experience” [19], here thinking not only about the Cadoudal plot but also the first Malet conspiracy of 1808. And Cambaceres led the special commission selected in the Conseil d’État to draw up the decree, although Napoleon himself (Cambaceres tells us) had provided the bare bones. [20] The arch-chancellor however did however confess some doubts about the decree. “It would perhaps be better”, he wrote, “not to employ such measures, but when the state of the social body makes them absolutely necessary, we must thankful for sovereign who concerns himself with the lot of those who liberty has been taken away from them and who attempt to surround himself with all the precautions designed to prevent surprises.” A prefect who was to put in practice the measures was less mealy-mouthed.
Councillor of state Antoine-Clair Thibaudeau, in his memoirs, saw the state prisons as a shot in the foot. “[The creation of the state prisons]”, he noted, “was the expression of great disregard for liberty and public opinion in a country where one of the first acts of the Revolution had been the destruction of the Bastille and the abolition of the “lettres de cachet”. It was a massive contradiction with respect to the Imperial Constitution, a constitution which had set up a permanent senate commission for individual liberty.” [21] It should be remembered that Ancien Régime prisons were a place of containment rather than punishment, sometimes for the subject’s health. Thibaudeau, however, as prefect of Marseilles, found himself in charge of the state prison in the island fortress of If. On visiting his prison he found the inmates were “peasants suspected of brigandage and Corsicans accused of counter-revolutionary plotting”. During his charge members of the Pichegru plot were brought there. “They were not state prisoners; the emperor had commuted their sentences. They were the basic composition of the prison. Usually there were no more than two dozen prisoners, sometimes fewer. All Napoleon had done was cheaply and with no good results tarred himself with the opprobrium of despotism. The public was convinced that the state prisons were overflowing and that they consumed many victims.” [22]
Napoleon however was proud of this institution, which (he wrote on St Helena) ‘brought the French the most complete individual liberty, better safe-guarded than in any other European country.” He wanted to “make such imprisonment legal, detach it from the capricious and the arbitrary, from animus and vengeance. By my law, no longer could anyone be imprisoned and held as a prisoner of state without the decision of my privy council.” Even Isser Woloch, no friend of Napoleon’s, has recently written that “thanks to the existence of the […] annual conseil privé – in contrast to the methods of modern totalitarian regimes – persons imprisoned arbitrarily under the Empire did not simply fall into a black hole and disappear”. [23]

Conclusion

8The purpose of the preceding remarks is to try to put Napoleonic government in context, to measure the regime by the standards of the time. Unless carefully placed in the context of the well-ordered police state of the 18^th century, I think that the term police state could almost be seen as an anachronism. It is too tainted with the totalitarianism of the twentieth-century to be used for structures of the early nineteenth. It is an unhelpful and could be seen as politically loaded. I also think that we should search the 18^th century for the models for Napoleonic state organisation of law and order. Simply scratching the surface, as here, we can see that the intensive use of two quintessentially Napoleonic structures associated with law and order, namely the gendarmerie and the prefects, are not Napoleon’s inventions but Napoleon’s Ancien Régime repackagings. We can also see in Napoleon’s approach to law and order a clear filiation to 18^th-century definitions of the well-ordered police state, notably with a broader definition of the word police in its original sense of a policy for the structuring of the state for the good of society, but one in which the ruler has the final word. For it was in the 18^th century that Napoleon took his political apprenticeship. I shall give the final words to Thibaudeau. “People have slandered the imperial police. It was arbitrary, by its very nature; this is why in free countries a so-called ‘general’ police is condemned. People thought that the imperial police had a secret code (like the inquisition) and that its agents had mysterious instructions. For my part, I can state categorically that, in all my ministerial correspondence, I have never seen anything repugnant to the conscience of an honest man, and that I have often found in it liberal principles which would have raised up, if that were possible, an institution much descried by public opinion. I say this in defence of ministers Fouché and Savary. I saw them censure pointless irritations, despise fuss and recommend moderation and justice. If you consider the obstacles and dangers constantly put in the path of the emperor and the empire, I am sure that the arbitrary action of the imperial police was well below that of the police in solidly established states.” [24]