Evidently, the Revolution must now trust to the clinging of the peasant proprietors to the recently confiscated lands of the Church and of the emigrant nobles.

If all else was vain and transitory, here surely was a solid basis of material interests to which the best part of the manhood of France would tenaciously adhere, defying alike the plots of reactionaries and the forces of monarchical Europe.

Of these interests Buonaparte was to be the determined guarantor.

Amidst much that was visionary in his later policy he never wavered in his championship of the new peasant proprietors.

He was ever the peasants' General, the peasants' Consul, the peasants' Emperor.
The transition of the Revolution to an ordinary form of polity was also being furthered by its unparalleled series of military triumphs.
When Buonaparte's name was as yet unknown, except in Corsica and Provence, France practically gained her "natural boundaries," the Rhine and the Alps.