* * * * *

Such are the chief laws and customs which are imperishably associated
with the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. In some respects they may be
described as making for progress. Their establishment gave to the
Revolution that solidity which it had previously lacked. Among so
"inflammable" a people as the French--the epithet is Ste. Beuve's--it
was quite possible that some of the chief civil conquests of the last
decade might have been lost, had not the First Consul, to use his own
expressive phrase, "thrown in some blocks of granite." We may
intensify his metaphor and assert that out of the shifting shingle of
French life he constructed a concrete breakwater, in which his own
will acted as the binding cement, defying the storms of revolutionary
or royalist passion which had swept the incoherent atoms to and fro,
and had carried desolation far inland. Thenceforth France was able to
work out her future under the shelter of institutions which
unquestionably possess one supreme merit, that of durability. But
while the chief civic and material gains of the Revolution were thus
perpetuated, the very spirit and life of that great movement were
benumbed by the personality and action of Napoleon. The burning
enthusiasm for the Rights of Man was quenched, the passion for civic
equality survived only as the gibbering ghost of what it had been in
1790, and the consolidation of revolutionary France was effected by a
process nearly akin to petrifaction.

And yet this time of political and intellectual reaction in France was
marked by the rise of the greatest of her modern institutions. There
is the chief paradox of that age. While barren of literary activity
and of truly civic developments, yet it was unequalled in the growth