There was nobody in this conclave to maintain the rights of spontaneous bodies; the theory, on all three sides, no matter from whom it proceeded, refused to recognize them for what they are originally and essentially, that is to say, distinct organisms equally natural with the State, equally indispensable in their way, and, therefore, as legitimate as itself; it allowed them only a life on trust, derived from above and from the center.

But, since the State created them, it might and ought to treat them as its creatures, keep them indefinitely under its thumb, use them for its purposes, act through them as through other agencies, and transform their chiefs into functionaries of the central power.
III.

Brilliant Statesman and Administrator.
The Organizer .-- Influence of Napoleon's character and mind on his internal and French system .-- Exigencies of his external and European role .-- Suppression of all centers of combination and concord .-- Extension of the public domain and what it embraces .-- Reasons for maintaining the private domain .-- The part of the individual .-- His reserved enclosure .-- Outlets for him beyond that .-- His talents are enlisted in the service of public power .-- Special aptitude and temporary vigor, lack of balance, and doubtful future of the social body thus formed.
A new France, not the chimerical, communistic, equalized, and Spartan France of Robespierre and Saint-Just, but a possible real, durable, and yet leveled and uniform France, logically struck out at one blow, all of a piece, according to one general principle, a France, centralized, administrative, and, save the petty egoistic play of individuals, managed in one entire body from top to bottom,--in short, the France which Richelieu and Louis XIV.

had longed for, which Mirabeau after 1790 had foreseen,[2323] is now the work which the theories of the monarchy and of the Revolution had prepared, and toward which the final concurrence of events, that is to say, "the alliance of philosophy and the saber," led the sovereign hands of the First Consul.
Accordingly, considering his well-known character, the promptitude, the activity, the reach, the universality, and the cast of his intellect, he could not have proposed to himself a different work nor reduced himself to a lower standard.

His need of governing and of administrating was too great; his capacity for governing and administrating was too great: his was an exacting genius .-- Moreover, for the outward task that he undertook he required internally, not only undisputed possession of all executive and legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all legal authorities, but, again, the annihilation of all moral authority but his own, that is to say, the silence of public opinion and the isolation of each individual, and therefore the abolition, preventive and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic, pedagogic, charitable, literary, departmental, or communal initiative that might, now or in the future gather men against him or alongside of him.