trangers."[161]

After so frank an exposition of motives to his own Council of State,
little more need be said. We need not credit Bonaparte or the orators
of the Tribunate with any superhuman sagacity when he and they foresaw
that such an order would prepare the way for more resplendent titles.
The Legion of Honour, at least in its highest grades, was the
chrysalis stage of the Imperial _noblesse_. After all, the new
Charlemagne might plead that his new creation satisfied an innate
craving of the race, and that its durability was the best answer to
hostile critics. Even when, in 1814, his Senators were offering the
crown of France to the heir of the Bourbons, they expressly stipulated
that the Legion of Honour should not be abolished: it has survived all
the shocks of French history, even the vulgarizing associations of
the Second Empire.

* * * * *

The same quality of almost pyramidal solidity characterizes another
great enterprise of the Napoleonic period, the codification of French
law.

The difficulties of this undertaking consisted mainly in the enormous
mass of decrees emanating from the National Assemblies, relative to
political, civil, and criminal affairs. Many of those decrees, the
offspring of a momentary enthusiasm, had found a place in the codes of
laws which were then compiled; and yet sagacious observers knew that
several of them warred against the instincts of the Gallic race. This
conviction was summed up in the trenchant statement of the compilers
of the new code, in which they appealed from the ideas of Rousseau to
the customs of the past: "New theories are but the maxims of certain
individuals: the old maxims represent the sense of centuries." There
was much force in this dictum. The overthrow of Feudalism and the old
monarchy had not permanently altered the French nature. They were
still the same joyous, artistic, clan-loving people whom the Latin
historians described: and pride in the nation or the family was as
closely linked with respect for a doughty champion of national and
family interests as in the days of Caesar. Of this Roman or
quasi-Gallic reaction Napoleon was to be the regulator; and no sphere
of his activities bespeaks his unerring political sagacity more than
his sifting of the old and the new in the great code which was
afterwards to bear his name.

Old French law had been an inextricable labyrinth of laws and customs,
mainly Roman and Frankish