revolves round a single man. For fifteen years, victorious or vanquished,
at the summit of glory, or in the depths of abasement, France and Europe,
overmastered by an indomitable will and unbridled passion for power, were
compelled to squander their blood and their treasure upon that page of
universal history which General Bonaparte claims for his own, and which he
has succeeded in covering with glory and crime.

On the day following the 18th Brumaire, in the uncertainty of parties, in
face of a constitution audaciously violated, and a government mainly
provisional, the nation was more excited than apprehensive or disquieted.
It had caught a glimpse of that natural power and that free ascendancy of
genius to which men willingly abandon themselves, with a confidence which
the most bitter deceptions have never been able to extinguish. Ardent and
sincere republicans, less and less numerous, felt themselves conquered
beforehand, by a sure instinct that was not misled by the protest of their
adversaries. They bent before a new power, to which their old hatreds did
not attach, which they believed to be in some sort created by their own
hands, and of which they had not yet measured the audacity. The mass of
the population, the true France, hailed with joy the hope of order and of
a regular and strong administration. They were not prejudiced in favor of
the philosophic constitution so long propounded by Sieyes. In the eyes of
the nation, the government was already concentrated in the hands of
General Bonaparte; it was in him that all were trusting, for repose at
home and glory and peace abroad.

In fact, he was governing already, disregarding the prolonged discussions
of the two legislative commissions, and the profound developments of the
projects of Sieyes, expounded by M. Boulay. Before the Constitution of the
year VIII, received the sanction of his dominant will, he had repealed the
Law of Hostages, recalled the proscribed priests from the Isle of Oleron,