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With every day that passed, Napoleon was being confirmed in his belief in his own infallibility. At the same time, the state that he was ruling was becoming ever more powerful as a vehicle of his ambition. To understand this we must return to the beginning of the Consulate in 1800. One of the most enduring elements of the Napoleonic legend is that Brumaire rescued France from irremediable chaos, that Napoleon, in fact, was the saviour not so much of the Revolution but of France herself. This is an exaggeration: up-to-date work on the Directory shows that it had not only arrested the slide to military disaster prior to the future First Consul’s return from Egypt, but that it also introduced a number of important internal reforms that helped pave the way for Napoleon’s success. Yet in the long term the military picture was very bleak. Given her population of 29 million, it might be thought that all that France had to do to acquire a mass army was to introduce universal military service. Needless to say, however, matters were not nearly so straightforward, an effective system of conscription being contingent upon an equally effective process of political and administrative reform.

France had in fact possessed a system of universal conscription since 1798, the so-called Loi Jourdan introduced in that year decreeing that all unmarried men other than sole breadwinners, government officials, priests and students, and the physically unfit, would become liable for military service at the age of twenty in accordance with a quota system filled by ballot. However, although it was to be the basis for conscription to the French army throughout the Napoleonic period, at the time of its introduction the Loi Jourdan was little more than a dead letter. From the time of the first appearance of compulsory service on an ad hoc basis in the emergency of 1793, this had been hated by the peasantry who constituted the bulk of the population: service in the army meant loss of home, family and the security of familiar surroundings, and brought with it privation, danger and death; soldiers were notoriously brutal and licentious; and finally conscription deprived peasant communities of much-needed labour, while being rightly perceived as socially unjust (for, in general, the towns and the bourgeoisie suffered less than the countryside and the peasantry). Nor did large sections of the peasantry think the Revolution was worth fighting for: in many parts of the country the financial burdens under which they had laboured had actually worsened since 1789; they had benefited little from the sale of the lands of the Church and the emigrés; and they had periodically been subject to ruthless requisitioning by the representatives of the hated bourgs. Added to this was the question of religion. We should not overgeneralize here as many peasants hated the Church. However, in Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, Poitou and many other areas, the Catholic Church was still a strong focus of rural life, and yet it had been subjected to the most virulent anti-clericalism. Across large parts of France, peasant unrest in consequence reached massive proportions, the problem of public order being worsened still further by the growing incidence of desertion, and by extension, brigandage. By 1798, so serious had the problem become that the Directory was quite incapable of enforcing its authority over local government and with it both taxation and conscription. With its difficulties augmented by the military disasters of 1799, the Directory turned in desperation to a revival of the Jacobinism of

1793 , but in doing so it only deepened the crisis: much alarmed by what they saw as a further threat to property and order, and financially very badly hit by economic depression and the Directory’s attempts to stabilize the financial situation by slashing payments on the national debt and reorganizing the fiscal system, the notables - the men of property, much of it obtained in the course of the Revolution, who formed the bedrock of French local