body from top to bottom,--in short, the France
which Richelieu and Louis XIV. had longed for, which Mirabeau after 1790
had foreseen,[2323] is now the work which the theories of the monarchy
and of the Revolution had prepared, and toward which the final
concurrence of events, that is to say, "the alliance of philosophy and
the saber," led the sovereign hands of the First Consul.

Accordingly, considering his well-known character, the promptitude, the
activity, the reach, the universality, and the cast of his intellect, he
could not have proposed to himself a different work nor reduced himself
to a lower standard. His need of governing and of administrating was too
great; his capacity for governing and administrating was too great:
his was an exacting genius.--Moreover, for the outward task that he
undertook he required internally, not only undisputed possession of all
executive and legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all
legal authorities, but, again, the annihilation of all moral authority
but his own, that is to say, the silence of public opinion and the
isolation of each individual, and therefore the abolition, preventive
and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic, pedagogic, charitable,
literary, departmental, or communal initiative that might, now or in the
future gather men against him or alongside of him. Like a good general
he secures his rear. At strife with all Europe, he so arranges it as
not to allow in the France he drags along after him refractory souls or
bodies which might form platoons in his rear. Consequently, and through
precaution, he suppresses in advance all eventual rallying points or
centers of combination Henceforth, every wire which can stir up and
bring a company of men together for the same object terminates in his
hands; he holds in his firm grasp all these combined wires, guards them
with jealous care, in order to strain them to the utmost. Let no one
attempt to loosen them, and, above all, let no one entertain a thought
of getting hold of them; they belong to him and to him alone, and
compose the public domain, which is his domain proper.

But, alongside of his proper domain, he recognizes another in which he
himself assigns a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his
own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public
power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice,
should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[23