for his power depends entirely on his credit with the army, then the
sovereign force; at this date the army is still republican, at least in
feeling if not intelligently, imbued with Jacobin prejudices, attached
to revolutionary interests, and hence blindly hostile to aristocrats,
kings, and priests.[2117] At the first threat of a monarchical
and Catholic restoration it will demand of him an eighteenth
Fructidor[2118]; otherwise, some Jacobin general, Jourdan, Bernadotte,
or Augereau, will make one without him, against him, and they fall back
into the rut from which they wished to escape, into the fatal circle of
revolutions and coups d'etat.

VII. Establishment of a new Dictatorship.

The electoral and legislative combinations of Sieyes.
--Bonaparte's use of them.--Paralysis and submission of the
three legislative bodies.--The Senate as the ruler's tool.
--Senatus-consultes and Plebiscites.--Final establishment of
the Dictatorship.--Its dangers and necessity.--Public power
now able to do its work.

Sieyes comprehended this: he detects on the horizon the two specters
which, for ten years, have haunted all the governments of France, legal
anarchy and unstable despotism; he has found a magic formula with which
to exorcise these two phantoms; henceforth "power is to come from above
and confidence from below."[2119]--Consequently, the new constitutional
act withdraws from the nation the right to elect its deputies; it will
simply elect candidates to the deputation and through three degrees of
election, one above the other; thus, it is to take part in the choice
of its candidates only through "an illusory and metaphysical
participation."[2120] The right of the electors of the first degree is
wholly reduced to designating one-tenth among themselves; the right
of those of the second degree is also reduced to designating one-tenth
among themselves; the right of those of the third degree is finally
reduced to designating one-tenth of their number, about six thousand
candidates. On this list, the government itself, by right and by way of
increasing the number, inscribes its own high functionaries; evidently,
on such a long list, it will have no difficulty in finding men who,
as simple tools, will be devoted to it. Through another excess of
precaution, the government, on its sole authority, in the absence of any
list, alone names the first legislature. Last of all, it is careful to
attach han