Alexander the Great was on his mind in more ways than one, for he now sought to emulate the

great
Macedonian conqueror by creating a new nobility, partly by fusion of the notables and the returned
emigres, partly by intermarriage between his family and other European potentates; Alexander had
famously ordered the mass wedding of Macedonian soldiers and Persian brides. To an extent the
reestablishment of monarchical forms of power in France entailed the formation of a concomitant
nobility. A decree of March 1 8o6 gave the title 'Prince' to members of the imperial family, and in March
1808 the former ranks of the nobility were restored, except for viscounts and marquises. Senators,
Councillors of State, presidents of the legislature and archbishops automatically became counts;
presidents of electoral colleges, the supreme court of appeal, audit officers and some mayors received
the title 'baron'. By 1814 there were 31 dukes, 450 counts, I,soo barons and a similar number of knights.
The new imperial nobility was recruited from the Army, from officialdom and from the notables, with
the military most heavily represented. The titles were rewards for military or civil service but the 311
perquisites attaching to them varied widely. An imperial nobleman had no feudal privileges, had to pay
tax and was not exempt from the general law of the land. Some of the titles had no income or property
appended to them, but in any case the perks of office depended on the financial health of the Empire, as
they were paid out of a general imperial coffer. It was therefore in the interests of the nobility that the
Empire should fare well. Titles were personal, but some had a benefice or majorat attached and in that
case both title and majorat were transferable. The size of the benefice depended on the particular title
and might be in the form of unmortgaged real estate, shares in the Bank of France or government stock.
The life interest in landed property granted to senators (the so-called senatoreries), however,
immediately raised fears of a return to a feudalism in all but name and was not as popular as it should
have been even with the beneficiaries, as some were disappointed to find that their income came from
widely dispersed lands and was thus difficult to collect. Napoleon was determined that all power and
wealth in France should either emanate from the imperial government or be in its gift. Fearful that left
to their own devices the notables might form a powerful de facto aristocracy behind his back, he hoped
to distract them with a new nobility, a kind of bribe which they were supposed to accept in return for
loss of political liberty. He declared rousingly: 'The institution of a national nobility is not contrary to the
idea of equality, and is necessary to the maintenance of social order.' His idea that the hereditary
transmission of privilege did not work against social equality and meritocracy serves only to show how
bastardized revolutionary principles had become. He claimed to have asked a number of ex-Jacobins
whether a hereditary nobility was in conflict with the Revolutionary ideology of equality and they said
no. One can only assume that these Jacobins were of the kidney of Bernadotte, who while still spouting
radical Republican principles had by this time got his snout firmly into the trough. Napoleon's aims in
creating a new nobility were flawed at the outset. His intention to destroy feudalism by introducing a
meritocratic elite would have been more convincing if he had granted no hereditary benefices and
forbade bequests from the nobility to the next generation; but in that case he would have been a
Jacobin and not Napoleon. In any case, the creation of the nobility made the peasantry fear that
feudalism was about to be reintroduced. The attempt to close the ideological gap between France and
the rest of Europe was also a dismal failure. Intermarriage between his family and ancien regime
dynasties might be accepted by Europe's royal families under duress, but fundamentally they hated and
despised Bonaparte. As Stendhal said of the Emperor: 'He had 312 the defect of all parvenus, that of
having too great an opinion of the class into which he had risen.' Napoleon's third aim - reconciling the
beneficiaries of the Revolution with the nobility of the ancien regime - rested on too optimistic a
conception of human nature - a surprising blind spot for someone usually so cynical and sceptical. The
two aristocracies looked at each other with a contempt that could not be assuaged even by
intermarriage; because of the issue of national property the two groups were divided by irreconcilable
differences. The notables and the Brumairian bourgeoisie resented the reintroduction of the aristocratic
principle as it were by the back door. Banking and financial elites prided themselves on their
meritocratic achievements and felt degraded by the new nobility; while the shopkeepers and petit
-bourgeoisie, who had been deprived of political liberty, received nothing whatever in compensation.
Until 1 807 the notables still feared a royalist restoration if Napoleon were defeated in battle so they
clung to him; they needed time to consolidate their gains from the Empire and to be sure they would
retain them under a new regime before they could even contemplate abandoning Napoleon. But there
was no deep love between Emperor and notables. There was even less between Bonaparte and the
returned royalists who, even as they accepted the titles, were simply ,biding their time, waiting for the
Emperor to destroy himself. Finally, those who had genuinely risen from the ranks to ennoblement were
the worst ingrates of all. Far from acknowledging the favour of their benefactor, they were forever on
the look-out for fresh sources of money and loot. There is a clear correlation between Napoleon's
looting marshals and humble social origin: Augereau, Duke of Castiglione, was an ex-footman; Massena,
Duke of Rivoli was an ex-pedlar; Lannes, Duke of Montebello, was a onetime dyer's assistant; Ney, Duke
of Danzig, was the son of a miller and a washerwoman. Napoleon never grasped that there was a
fundamental contradiction between raising men from the gutter to the aristocracy even as he hankered
after the titles of the ancien regime. Yet one undoubted consequence of the way Napoleon bound the
notables to his imperial system through the nexus of his new nobility was that it enabled him
progressively to dispense with the constitutional accretions from the Consulate that still clogged his
power. In effect he reduced the government machine to an appendage: ministers were reduced to the
role of simple executives, and henceforth all their correspondence passed across the Emperor's desk.
The assemblies, a counterbalance to the executive during the Consulate, were whittled down; the
troublesome Tribunate was abolished in 1807; the Senate 313 rubber-stamped the Emperor's decisions.
The Assembly of Deputies quickly declined to the level of farce, with a high level of absenteeism in the
electoral college responsible for presenting candidates; the reality was that the electors were sulking
about elections whose results were a foregone conclusion. The Council of State, important under the
Consulate, lost much of its influence: Napoleon attended it irregularly and imposed decisions without
listening to the Councillors; sometimes he would throw them a sop by bowing to their will on trivial
matters. Always a devotee of divide and rule, Napoleon complicated the administration of France by
dividing it up into more and more units, appearing to devolve power even while he centralized it more
rigidly. Local assemblies were phased out in favour of 'general directorships' based on arrondissements.
But the heart of his centralizing policy was the administrative council. This was a kind of cabinet, which
met for lengthy sessions (sometimes from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.) on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, to
examine one particular matter - be it the state of the Navy, the military budget or the situation of French
roads and bridges. To this council were summoned Councillors of State, departmental chiefs and
functional experts; all were invited to give an opinion but only the Emperor decided. The notables
disliked the administrative councils, for they made a mockery of local government: the budget for the
city of Paris, for example, would be set by the council before it had even been seen by the Parisian
municipal council where the notables held sway. All other bodies were even more empty of real power
and influence. The Council of Ministers, meeting on Wednesdays, quickly became a mere talking shop. If
Napoleon ever sought the advice of experts it was for the Machiavellian purpose of modifying the draft
of a senatus consultum, never to discuss matters of real substance, even when he was theoretically and
constitutionally obliged to consult other opinions. Napoleon found it impossible to delegate and insisted
on making decisions even on minor and trivial matters. His insistence on having his finger in every pie
led to near breakdown in the machinery of government: the reductio ad absurdum came at the Battle of
Leipzig in 1813 when, fighting for his life, he was asked as a matter of urgency to approve the expenses
of the Commissioner of St-Malo. For a time the underlying discontent with the imperial system of
nobility did not manifest itself in opposition from the notables. The initial problem was that, as
Napoleon moved to put favourite sons and daughters in positions of influence or dynastic marriages,
other jealous members of the Bonaparte clan would clamour for more privileges for 314 themselves.
The scale of this madness became apparent during Napoleon's triumphal procession through Italy in the
fourteen weeks between the beginning of April and mid-July r 8os. Departing from Fontainebleau,
Napoleon made his way south through Troyes, Macon and Bourg to Lyons, on the first stage of his
project to have himself crowned King-Emperor of ltaly. After pausing for a week in Lyons, he proceeded
via Chambery and Modane to Turin, where he remained for two weeks before making a triumphal entry
into Milan on 8 May. A second coronation ceremony followed, after which Napoleon appointed his
twenty-three-year-old stepson Eugene de Beauharnais as his viceroy in Italy. This particularly infuriated
the Murats, who had set their sights on being overlords of Italy. The rapacity of this grasping couple is
hard to come to terms with. On New Year's Day r 8os Napoleon gave Caroline a present of 20o,ooo
francs, and when her second daughter was born he gave her the Elysee palace, together with a further
million francs with which to buy out all existing tenants there. In addition Caroline had an annual
allowance of 240,000 francs from the Civil List and Murat himself had an official income of 70o,ooo
francs. Together with their estates and investments the Murats were able to command a total income of
one and a half million francs in the first year of Empire. Yet they were still dissatisfied, so the dangerous
and indefatigable intriguer Caroline set her mind to increasing her influence over the Emperor.