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Setting aside the connection that could be made between continued military victory and the restoration of order, the effect of Napoleon’s reorganization of France was in a number of ways simply to increase his ambition. The debates that surrounded the Civil Code and the rest are a case in point. At the very beginning, notes Chaptal, the First Consul had on occasion been prepared to defer to men of greater knowledge and experience. However, as time went on, so matters began to change:

From the moment that Bonaparte acquired ideas, whether true or false, concerning all the objects of administration, then he . . . no longer consulted anyone . . . with any intention of embracing their advice. He constantly followed his own ideas; his opinion was his only rule of conduct; and he tartly mocked all those who uttered ideas that were different from his own. Seeking ways to ridicule these last, he would often strike his head and say, ‘This instrument is more use to me than the counsels of men of supposed instruction and experience.’14

After enduring a sharp learning-curve - one disconcerting habit of Napoleon’s, for example, was initially to argue a course of action opposite to the one that he actually intended to follow to flush out his opponents and give the impression that he was yielding to argument - the First Consul’s entourage discovered what was expected of them. Not, indeed, that much could be expected of them. As Gohier observes, his councillors of state mostly consisted of ‘men who were committed to the pursuit of power for its own sake and had only marched in the ranks of the Republicans so as to avail themselves of the spoil of the republic’.15 This, perhaps, is unfair. Not all the men who surrounded Napoleon were devoid of critical judgement and a spirit of independence. Self-serving and egotistic par excellence, Talleyrand had negotiated the twists and turns of the 1790s with consummate skill, went on to serve the Bourbons in 1814, and within a few years had effectively broken with his master over the issue of foreign policy. But the fact is that the welcome that Napoleon was prepared to extend to anyone who would rally to his rule, be they constitutional monarchists, Jacobin extremists, Thermidorian conservatives or royalist emigrés, was an open invitation to set aside all principle and play the role of echo to the First Consul.

The result, needless to say, was a reinforcement of both Napoleon’s habit of command and of his sense of infallibility. In the absence of the First Consul, the Council of State was utterly ineffectual. ‘I should say of the Council of State and the members of that assembly,’ wrote Molé, ‘what has been said with so much truth of our great armies and the generals that commanded them. When Napoleon was at their head they became irresistible and the generals under his orders all seemed great captains. When he was absent those armies had difficulty holding their own, and the lieutenants of Napoleon quarrelled, were jealous of each other and could do nothing . . . One might often compare them to the figure “ ” which owes all its importance to the number preceding it.’16 Napoleon, then, reigned supreme. To quote Molé again:

As soon as his thought took shape, he let it fall from his lips, indifferent to the form in which it was clothed. Little he cared for the matter in debate. Contemptuous of all set rules, placing himself above the conventions, he regarded as the privilege of his superiority over other men the right of thinking aloud and letting his brain conceive and his mouth utter, relying on the attention and respect with which his slightest word was received by his hearers, the most eminent of which felt themselves a long way inferior to him. He had no fear of finding himself contradicting himself. With his ingenuity in discovering subtle and plausible reasons in support of all opinions, he attached less importance to selecting them well than to proving that his mind revolved every aspect of every question, and that there was not a single idea they could suggest