erary forms of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, the superb oratorical prose and correct,
eloquent poetry, especially epics and tragedies, including those still
manufactured according to rule about the year 1810. It corresponds
to these and forms their pendant in the political and social order
of things, because it emanates from the same deliberate purpose. Four
constitutions, in the same style, preceded it; but these were good only
on paper, while this one stands firm on the ground. For the first time
in modern history we see a society due to ratiocination and, at the
same time, substantial; the new France, under these two heads, is the
masterpiece of the classic spirit.

V. Modeled after Rome.

Its analogue in the antique world.--The Roman State from
Diocletian to Constantine.--Causes and bearing of this
analogy.--Survival of the Roman idea in Napoleon's mind.
--The new Empire of the West.

Nevertheless, if we go back in time, beyond modern times, beyond the
Middle Ages, as far as the antique world, we encounter during the Roman
emperors Diocletian's and Constantine's era another monument whose
architecture, equally regular, is developed on a still grander scale:
back then we are in the natal atmosphere and stand on the natal soil of
the classic spirit.--At this time, the human material, more reduced
and better prepared than in France, existed similarly in the requisite
condition. At this date, we likewise see at work the prearranging
reasoning-faculty

* which simplifies in order to deduce,

* which leaves out historic customs and local diversities,

* which considers the basic human being,

* which treats individuals as units and the people as totals,

* which forcibly applies its general outlines to all special lives, and

* which glories in constituting, legislating, and administering by rule
according to the measurements of square and compass.

At this date, in effect, the turn of mind, the talent, the ways of the
Roman architect, his object, his resources and his means of execution,
are already those of his French successor; the conditions around him
in the Roman world are equivalent; behind him in Roman history the
precedents, ancient and recent, are almost the same.

In the first place,[2330] there is, since emperor Augustus, the absolute
monarchy, and, since the Antonines, administrative centralization the
result of which is that

* all the old national and mun