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in steep decline thanks to the military successes of the Second Coalition, in June 1799 the Directory had imposed a forced loan that echoed the most radical measures of the Convention and greatly shook the confidence of the notables. This situation was now put right. As early as 24 November 1799 a new law reorganized the machinery of tax collection so as to increase the control of the Ministry of Finance over the network of tax-farmers who operated the system at municipal and departmental level and tighten up the system of inspection and accounting. From 1802 onwards, immense labour was expended on a new survey of property whose aim was to ensure that nothing escaped the scrutiny of the state. Thanks also, of course, to the greater police powers now available, the net result was that the French state acquired a new measure of financial stability: in 1801, indeed, there was a small surplus of income over expenditure.

Thanks to the regime’s greater ability to resort to repression, the inhabitants of Napoleonic France knew that open opposition would have unpleasant consequences. However, the political settlement that followed 18 Brumaire was characterized as much by the carrot as it was by the stick. While Napoleon was certainly concerned above all to boost the power of the state - whose interests, of course, he had come to identify with his own person - he was well aware that his rule could not be consolidated unless, as he put it, ‘we can plant on the soil of France some masses of granite’.20 In real terms, this meant that the new regime would have to conciliate key elements of society. The peasantry, for example, were bought off by the abandonment of revolutionary dechristianization, the Concordat of 1801 restoring freedom of worship to the Catholic Church, and the nobility by the welcome given to any emigré who chose to return to France. Also helpful was a reduction in conscription: between 1800 and 1805 the number of men taken by the army amounted to a mere 78,000 per annum. As for the urban poor, they got employment and cheap bread: faced with a real threat of famine, in 1802 the government introduced a series of special measures designed to ensure the flow of grain to Paris and prop up manufacturers affected by the current slump in trade. And humbler folk of all sorts were cheered by the restoration of the traditional calendar with its seven-day week and profusion of religious holidays. Most importantly, however, the propertied classes in general received especially favourable treatment. Thus the notables were guaranteed possession of the land they had obtained from the Church and the nobility since the Revolution, while both nobles and bourgeois were given a very high degree of representation in the political and administrative structures created by the regime (and with it generous salaries and other emoluments), a monopoly of higher education, protection from the worst rigours of conscription and de facto domination of the officer corps. They were also favoured by Napoleon’s fiscal policy, which relied ever more heavily on indirect taxation, and they could rely on the regime to protect their economic interests through such measures as restrictive labour legislation and the Civil Code. Of particular note here was the First Consul’s determination not to repeat the mistakes of the 1790s with respect to the printing of paper money. Thus, the thoroughly discredited assignats did not reappear while tight controls were imposed on government borrowing and financial speculation, and the currency stabilized by the creation of a Bank of France. And, finally, to repeat a key point just made in another context, brigandage was no longer the all-consuming nightmare it had threatened to become under the Directory. Under Napoleon, in short, property and person were secure.

So often has the Civil Code been cited as an example of the First Consul’s beneficence that it needs to be discussed here in some detail. What is most striking to the modern observer is, first, its profound social injustice, and second, the extent to which this