Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [78]
131,000 of the first 400,000 men called up ever reaching their units. When Napoleon came to power, then, France essentially had the makings of a large-scale war effort, but not the ability to capitalize upon them. Within a very short space of time, however, the First Consul had changed all that, initially by reinforcing the structures of government. A council of state was established to help draft legislation and provide Napoleon with expert advice. The ministries were reorganized and various measures introduced to coordinate their work; the bureaucracy, the fiscal system, the judiciary and the very law itself (through the promulgation of the famous Civil Code of 1804) were rationalized and reordered; and in February 1800 the whole system of local government was transformed. Whereas the ideal since the Revolution had been that the law should be implemented by elected local councils, authority was now placed in the hands of officials appointed by Paris, the administration of each department now being headed by an all-powerful prefect, who was also given many responsibilities that had hitherto been handled at the level of the town hall. In theory highly efficient, the system ensured that the men in charge of local affairs were now entirely dependent upon Paris for their survival. Highly paid and very often hailing from other parts of France than the areas in which they served, the prefects, in theory at least, were also immune to bribery and the pressures of local interests. And finally, as a further means of subordinating the administration to the regime, Napoleon systematically packed it with men who were in the end likely to be loyal to him, including his brothers, Lucien and Joseph; Generals Berthier, Masséna, Brune, Marmont, Lefebvre and Sérurier, all of whom had served under Napoleon in Italy or Egypt; and such representatives of the savants who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt as Gaspard Monge and Claude Berthollet.
One appointment was particularly vital. Placed under Lucien Bonaparte, the Ministry of the Interior became the very heart of the Napoleonic regime. Armed with a purview that covered almost every aspect of French society, including agriculture, commerce and education, this gave Paris powers of intervention that were all but unprecedented, while at the same time providing Napoleon with a mass of information that was simply unavailable to previous regimes. If conscription could be imposed, for example, it was in part because the Ministry of the Interior conducted no fewer than three general censuses in the period 1803 to 1811. Nor was it just a matter of knowing what resources were available. From the endless reports submitted to Paris by the authorities, the regime was also able to respond to local conditions in a remarkably sophisticated manner. Also of interest here is the Ministry of Police, whose agents spied on the populace certainly, but not so much to lock them up - there were comparatively few political prisoners under Napoleon - as to keep Paris informed of what they were thinking. Far from being imposed in a universal manner, then, conscription was, so far as possible, tailored to what the population was likely to bear. If the eastern provinces that bordered on Germany (where there was a long tradition of military service) were therefore hit disproportionately hard, memories of the Vendée got Brittany off much more lightly, while the Pyrenees were eventually let off scot-free in exchange for the formation of special local militia known as the Chasseurs des Montagnes. Far from seeing a regime whose watchword was terror, we rather see one that in many respects sought to negotiate with its population and to impose pragmatic boundaries on the action of the state. ‘I was far’, wrote Fouché, ‘from limiting my duties to espionage . . . As I was informed of all, it became my duty to . . . make known to the head of government