书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
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第1012章

Besides all this, myriads of ministerial and notarial officials lawyers, ushers, auctioneers, and by way of surplus, or as a natural result, the members of every great private association since no collective enterprise, from the Bank of France and the press to stage lines and tontines, may be established without his permission, nor exist without his tolerance. Not counting the latter, and after deducting likewise the military or active duty and the functionaries who draw pay, the prefect from the earliest years report that, since 1789, the number of people "employed or under government pay" has more than doubled: In Doubs, in the year IX, instead of 916 there are 1820;in Meurthe in the year XIII, instead of 1828 there are 3091; in Ain, in 1806 instead of 955 there are 1771[36]. As to the army, it has tripled, and according to the First Consul's own calculations, instead of 9,000 or 10,000 officers as in 1789, there are more than 20,000. -These figures go on increasing on the old territory through the very development of the new organization, through the enormous increase of the army, through the re-establishment of religious worship, through the installation of droits réunis, through the institution of the University, owing to the increasing number of officials, curés and assistant-priests, of professors and school-teachers, and of retired and pensioned invalids.[37]

And these figures, which already swell of themselves, are to swell an additional half through the extension of the ancient territory.

Instead of 86 departments with a population of 26 millions, France ends in comprising 130 departments with 42 million inhabitants -Belgium and Piedmont, then Hanover, Tuscany, Central Italy, Illyria, Holland and the Hanseatic provinces, that is to say 44 departments and 16 millions of annexed Frenchmen;[38] affording another large outlet for little and big ambitions. - Add still another, as a surplus and not less extensive outlet, outside of France: for the subject princes and the vassal kings, Eugène, Louis, Jerome, Murat, and Joseph, each with their governments, import into their realms a more or less numerous body of French officials, familiars, court dignitaries, generals, ministers, administrators, even clerks and other indispensable subalterns, if for no other purpose than to bring the natives within the military and civil compartments of the new Régime and teach them on the spot the conscription, the administration, the civil code, and systems of accounts like those of Paris. Even in the independent or allied States, in Prussia, in Poland, in the confederation of the Rhine, there are, at intervals or permanently, Frenchmen in position and in authority to command contingent forces, to garrison fortresses, to receive supplies and secure the payment of war contributions. Even with the corporal and custom-house inspector on duty on coast at Dantzig and at Reggio, the sentiment of victorious priority equals the possession of rank; in their eyes the natives of the country are semi-barbarians or semi-savages, a backward or prejudiced lot, not even knowing how to speak their language; they feel themselves superior, as formerly the se?or soldado of the sixteenth century, or the civis romanus. Never since the great Spanish monarchy and the Old Roman empire has a conquering State and propagator of a new régime afforded its subjects such gratifications of self-esteem, nor opened so vast a career to their ambitions.

For, having once adopted their career, they know better than the Spaniards under Charles V. or the Romans under Augustus, how far they can go and how fast they can get ahead. No obstacle impedes them;nobody feels himself confined his post; each considers the one he occupies as provisional, each takes it only to await a better one, anticipating another at a very early date; he dashes onward, springs aloft and occupies in advance the superior post which he means to secure on the first vacancy, and, under this Régime, the vacancies are numerous. - These vacancies, in the military service and in the grade of officers, may be estimated at nearly four thousand per annum;[39]

after 1808 and 1809, but especially after the disaster of 1812 and 1813, places are no longer lacking but subjects fill them; Napoleon is obliged to accept youths for officers as beardless as his conscripts, eighteen-year-old apprentices who, after a year or six months in the military academy, might finish their apprenticeship on the battle-field, pupils taken from the philosophy or rhetoric classes, willing children (de bonne volonté): On the 13th of December 1808, he draws 50from his lycées, who don the gold-lace of under-officers at once; in 1809, he calls out 250, to serve in the depot battalions; in 1810, he calls out 150 of the age of nineteen who "know the drill," and who are to be sent on distant expeditions with the commission of second-lieutenant; in 1811, 400 for the school of noncommissioned officers at Fontainebleau, 20 for the Ile-de-Ré and 84 who are to be quartermasters; and, in 1812, 112 more and so on. Naturally, thanks to annually increasing gaps made by cannon and bayonet, the survivors in this body of youth mount the faster; in 1813 and 1814, there are colonels and lieutenant-colonels of the age of twenty-five.

In the civil service, if fewer are killed everybody is almost equally over tasked. Under this reign one is soon used up, physically and morally, even in pacific employments, and this also supplies vacancies. Besides, in default of deaths, wounds and violent elimination, there is another elimination, not less efficacious, operating in this direction, and for a long time, in favor of men of ability, preparing places for them and accelerating their advancement.