ABSTRACT
In 1789 Mirabeau had described France as ‘an agglomeration of disunited peoples’,1 observing different customs, subjected to differing laws, using different weights and measures, separated from one another by customs barriers, obedient to local rather than national loyalties. Within a few years the Revolution had swept away many cobwebs and the strong hand of Napoleon had seized upon the central institutions of the country and had reinforced, remoulded, and where necessary supplemented them, with the result that France had emerged as the pattern of a nation state, endowed with a highly centralized administration, subject to uniform laws, using common weights and measures, divided equally into departments centrally administered, her people enrolled in a national army and her élite drilled in a national system of education. Three-quarters of a century after Napoleon’s fall an English historian could write that ‘the Civil Code, the Penal Code, the Conseil d’État, the Judicial System, the Fiscal System-in fact every institution which a law-abiding Frenchman respects from the Legion of Honour to the Bank of France and the Comédie Française was either formed or reorganized by Napoleon.’2 Thus when the Bourbons came into power in 1814 they found already in being an efficient civil service; they had ready to hand a working machine of government which immensely facilitated their task of retrenchment and reconstruction. Parts of it might require to be adjusted but in spite of much talk of the need for decentralization neither they nor their successors were ever anxious to weaken so efficient an instrument of social control.
